2:00PM Water Cooler 3/4/15

By Lambert Strether of Corrente.

2016

Clinton email

White House throws Clinton under the bus: “[Clinton] appears to have operated in violation of what the White House said Tuesday was ‘very specific guidance’ that members of the Obama administration use government e-mail accounts to carry out official business” [WaPo]. Oooooh, I bet Obama’s been waiting for this moment a long, long time.

Clinton email server ran in her house (!): “The computer server that transmitted and received Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails — on a private account she used exclusively for official business when she was secretary of state — traced back to an Internet service registered to her family’s home in Chappaqua, New York, according to Internet records reviewed by The Associated Press” [AP].

This is exactly what the Bush administration did with when it conducted official business on the RNC’s gwb43.com account run on servers in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Big scandal then. But what could the problem be?

In theory but not in practice, Clinton’s official emails would be accessible to anyone who requested copies under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. Under the law, citizens and foreigners can compel the government to turn over copies of federal records for zero or little cost. Since Clinton effectively retained control over emails in her private account even after she resigned in 2013, the government would have to negotiate with Clinton to turn over messages it can’t already retrieve from the inboxes of federal employees she emailed.

If you’re a Democratic tribalist, IOKIYAD. If you want your government to have even a modicum of accountability, this matters. In the gwb43.com scandal, the Republicans destroyed millions of messages. Clinton could do just the same. This just isn’t a hard call. Since when do “Mrs. Clinton’s advisers” get to “review her account and decide which emails to turn over to the State Department” now that she’s a private citizen? This is just wrong. And it’s not a hard call.

Shorter Digby: This “scandal” is the Clinton-hating Village recycling narratives. Anyhow, Michael Tomasky says it could be legal [Digby’s Blog]. Neither of which makes the narrative wrong, or the actions right.

Shorter Media Matters: It’s not illegal. Anyhow, it’s old news [Media Matters].

Shorter anonymous Clintonistas: Everybody who got mail from Clinton knew she wasn’t using her official address [Business Insider].

“[H]ow this situation is handled will go a long way in determining how our government handles its records, and whether our accountability laws apply evenly to everyone” [Sunlight Foundation].

Emily’s List president Stephanie Schriock: Clinton has “shown us how to shake off the setbacks, ignore the haters and keep focused…” [Bloomberg]. This is true; one of the reasons I’m not a Clinton hater is that I admire her resiliency and persistence. But still.

Clown Car

Ben Carson: Homosexuality is a choice because many people “go into prison straight — and when they come out, they’re gay” [CNN].

The Hill

If Petraeus had been a whistleblower, Obama would jail him. Since he only give classified information to his mistress, he gets a wrist slap [New York Times]. Priorities! Petraeus is a “hero.” His country “needs his advice.” Besides, he has “a lucrative second career.”

Stats Watch

ADP Employment Report, February 2015: Continued slowing, “private payrolls rose 212,000 which is 8,000 below consensus” [Bloomberg].

Gallup U.S. Job Creation Index, February 2015: 41% of employees say their employer is hiring workers, 12% saying their employer is letting workers go. Forty-two percent say no change [Bloomberg].

PMI Services Index, February 2015: “Service sector growth picked up noticeably” [Bloomberg].

MBA purchase applications, week of February 27, 2015: “A dip in mortgage rates failed to give much lift to the purchase index which slipped” [Bloomberg].

Herd on the Street

Driverless cars included as “risk factors” in corporate filings by three insurance suppliers [Wall Street Journal].

“The Fall of the Hipster Brand: Inside the Decline of American Apparel and Urban Outfitters” [Racked]. Here is a context in which “millenial” actually makes sense: Consumerism.

“Why Target lost its aim” [The Economist]. Multiple debacles.

Payment expert: “[I]t’s not ‘an anomaly’ to see fraud accounting for about 6% of Apple Pay transactions, compared to about 0.1% of transactions using a plastic card to swipe [Wall Street Journal]. Here is the very geeky blog (!) post behind the WSJ story.

Emmanueldämmerung

“[City] records reveal just days before Emanuel awarded a lucrative red-light camera contract to Xerox State and Municipal Solutions, his former top congressional aide, John Borovicka, became a lobbyist for a government relations firm representing Xerox” [International Business Times]. Shocked, shocked.

“[A]dvisory measures calling for the school board to be elected instead of appointed by the mayor won overwhelming support from Chicagoans on ballots last week” [New York Times]. That’s “the neighborhoods” voting against Rahm’s key policy.

Chuy on the appointed school board: “[You get problems like] Mayor Emanuel appointing people ….with conflicts of interest. People like Dave Vitale who come from the banking industry engaging in exotic financing deals that can jeopardize the assets of the Chicago Public Schools” [Salon].

Gitmo at Homan Square: “The Chicago police department, in its only official statement on the swirling allegations, denied the Guardian’s reporting [here] on Tuesday, without giving specifics. … [T]he Chicago Tribune characterized local attorneys’ perception of the statement as ‘laughable'” [Guardian].

Gitmo at Homan Square: 10 questions the press should be asking Chicago police [Crains Business Review]. Very good. Oddly, the majors haven’t picked this up.

Gitmo at Homan Square: “Emanuel felt he could dodge the story only because major news organizations have been disappointingly slow to report on the topic” [Harvard Crimson].

Death of Blogging Greatly Exaggerated

History of the food blog, Eater, and how it scaled up [Lucky Peach].

“Lumber Liquidators Holdings Inc.’s stock plunge over the past week, fueled by allegations of excessive formaldehyde in its flooring, can be traced back to a blog post from an obscure 25-year-old short seller” [Bloomberg].

“Saudi blogger Raif Badawi, sentenced to 1,000 lashes over accusations he insulted Islam, could now be facing the death penalty” [Channel 4].

Medium’s new product (called, internally, “Bloggy Medium” during development) bets that there’s some juice left in the old [author’s-]voice-driven web [Atlantic]. But is it Tumblr for rich people?

“[O]ur core discomfort with Medium—with most of online publishing—is we can’t quite see how the money works no matter how hard we squint” [A Working Library].

Class Warfare

Larry Summers: “The core problem is that there aren’t enough jobs” [Dean Baker, Al Jazeera]. Seven years after the crash, they admit education as not the solution (and at the Hamilton Project no less). But who knows what they’ll do to solve the problem. Can they “right size” the population quickly enough, for example? Kidding!

“If you have eaten buffalo mozzarella in this country, there is a very good chance you have eaten the product of inmate labor” [Pacific Standard].

News of the Wired

  • “The Web’s Grain” [Frank Chimero]. This is the best article I have ever read on web design. A must read if you’re in that field, or have ever been frustrated by a design-heavy site that works you, instead of you working it.
  • In the 90s, NSA made sure that the early “SSL protocol itself was deliberately designed to be broken.” 15 years later, implementations of that protocol are still running on servers, which can be cracked in just a few hours [ZD Net]. “Among the millions of sites that were, or still are, vulnerable … are American Express, Whitehouse.gov, FBI.gov, and — oh the irony! — the NSA Website.”
  • “Photos for OS X obfuscates the file system even more than iPhoto or Aperture do — once you import photos from your camera, it seems to be impossible to locate the original file in the Finder, even if you have Photos set to store the original, full-size images on your computer” [The Verge]. It’s fun to see Apple crapify OS X.
  • “This Chair Folds Down To The Size Of A Beer Can” [Fast Company]. Like a 21st Century shooting stick!
  • “Everything that God made is good, even marijuana,” says Texas lawmaker, as he introduces bill to legalize marijunana [Houston Chonicle].
  • “Shooting While Shopping” [Pinterest (!)]. Well, a few accidental deaths in shopping malls and parking lots are a small price to pay for liberty.
  • “Indian cuisine tended to mix ingredients whose flavors don’t overlap at all” [WaPo].
  • “Six UC Santa Cruz students … chained themselves to bins filled with concrete and blocked three lanes of traffic for the better part of Tuesday…. to protest UC tuition hikes, police brutality and racism, according to student organizers” [Santa Cruz Sentinel]. Watch this. Actions of this scope and using such techniques don’t just happen. (Not sure about highway blockage as a tactic, though; we’ll have to see how it plays out. It didn’t damage #BlackLivesMatter AFAIK.)

* * *

Readers, feel free to contact me with (a) links, and even better (b) sources I should curate regularly, and (c) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi are deemed to be honorary plants! See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. And here’s today’s plant, the third of Plants in Snow Week (Morak):

daffys

Can’t wait…

Readers! How about sending me some plants under snow and/or ice? Seems appropriate? And if that doesn’t sound like a good idea, how about some humorous vegetables?

If you enjoy Water Cooler, please consider tipping and click the hat. It’s the heating season!

Yes, I’ve got to fix the hat! Thank you all for your generous help in the mini-fundraiser!

Talk amongst yourselves!

Print Friendly, PDF & Email
This entry was posted in Guest Post, Water Cooler on by .

About Lambert Strether

Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered. To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess “deaths from despair,” as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton’s wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let’s call such voices “the left.” Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn’t allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I’ve been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.

76 comments

  1. diptherio

    There’s an interesting new financial institution that is getting ready to open its doors in Croatia this year. It’s set up much like a credit union but with an essential difference:

    For business customers, EBank will provide the cheapest possible financing without any aim to make interest rate profits. Instead, EBank will participate in the profit of its financed projects, and reinvest this profit into the expansion and improvement of it services.

    They are also planning on integrating such things as crowdfunding, p2p lending, alt. currencies and barter networks into their institution. It will be interesting to see how it plays out, for sure.

    An Ethical Bank for Croatia: A New Model of Banking for the Solidarity Economy
    ~Grassroots Economic Organizing

  2. ChrisFromGeorgia

    Hillary’s decision in setting up her emails to run through her own personal equipment (well, at least someone associated with her who is tech savvy set it up) makes perfect sense if you look at it in the light of the Snowden revelations.

    We know that all the major “cloud” email providers like Google and Microsoft are in bed with the NSA.

    Given the sensitive nature of her communications while working at State, would you have wanted her exposing herself to the NSA’s snooping and intercepting?

    If anything this makes me grudgingly respect her. This is coming from a libertarian who is no fan of the Clintons.

        1. Llewelyn Moss

          Email servers are one of the first things hackers probe for when attempting to enter a computer system. And they are notoriously tough to configure securely and to keep patched for security holes. Something tells me Hellery’s tech savvy uncle was prolly not up to the task. Nice treasure trove for the hacker community if they wormed into it. Oh heck, the worst that could happen is hackers might get alerted to troop movements — so what’s the biggie. ;-)

          1. Jim Haygood

            His real name is Hothem:

            An aide to then-first lady Clinton was identified in a 2002 congressional report as Eric Hothem, whose name is spelled differently than in the Internet records. Hothem was not available to take a phone call when reached at his office Wednesday.

            A wise move on Mr. Hothem’s part. Loose lips sink ships.

            1. Llewelyn Moss

              Hahaha. So this Eric Hothem registered the clintonemail.com domain name under a fake name. The plot thickens.

              Recall that Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother Roger Clinton. A congressional investigation into Clinton’s clemency decisions found that as Roger Clinton refused to testify to the committee in March 2001, he received a $15,000 wire transfer from a Citibank account in the care of Hothem.

              Like a mafia family tree.

            2. optimader

              A wise move on Mr. Hothem’s part. Loose lips sink ships.
              Anything worth saying is worth waiting for a subpoena and having your attorney(ies) present,

          2. hunkerdown

            In other words, it is because a short course in postal logistics, inspection and metal stamping still takes a lot more time and effort than posting a mailbox on the street or porch. Fair enough. Having done this work no few times, most of the difficulty in configuring an email service arises not due to outside factors, but due to the lack of a simple, standard interface for transport agents to ask delivery agents whether they will accept email to thus-and-such address for delivery. We instead have a proliferation of MTAs and MDAs that need to know way too much about one another’s secrets in order to perform their mission, and are thus complex so as to accommodate.

            Consider instead the “Mail in a Box” (github), a semi-finalist in the Knight Foundation’s 2014 News Challenge, which seems to me to hit the sweet spot: low-frills webmail and workgroup services, a one-size-fits-most configuration, low-touch setup, chooses its battles. The same shipped as an SD card or Docker image for Pi computers would solve much of the problem from the technical end — it’s just a matter of getting the default state of inbound port 25 on residential-class Internet pipes to unblocked and letting the world know how to find you.

    1. Jim Haygood

      A rogue NSA needs to brought within the law. But an out-of-control NSA is no excuse for public property (official correspondence) to be held offsite in a private server. The mission is to confront the problem head on, not resort to personal, unauthorized workarounds.

      Meanwhile, as I suggested yesterday:

      ‘A House investigative committee is preparing to send out subpoenas later Wednesday to gather a deeper look into former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton’s nearly exclusive use of personal e-mails to do her official business as the government’s top diplomat, according to people familiar with the probe.’

      http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/house-committee-to-subpoena-clintons-private-emails/2015/03/04/b4cec61c-c29b-11e4-9ec2-b418f57a4a99_story.html

      Sounds good, until you read the fine print. The subpoena covers only emails related to Benghazi. No committee has issued a subpoena for the entire contents of the server, so that someone other than Hillary can decide what is official correspondence and what isn’t.

      Despite the WWF-style partisan rhetoric, this limited subpoena represents ‘professional courtesy.’ There is only one Depublicrat party.

      1. MyLessThanPrimeBeef

        A somewhat related question.

        If each of us has a file at the NSA, why can we all have individual holy accounts at the omnipotent Fed, so we too can borrow directly from the creator (of money), at ‘the preferred believer-rate of nearly, ghostly zero?’

        If I can get that rate, I will convert and become a believer…sorry, no unconditional love (for the deity)…must have, uh, rewards, spiritual – heavenly maidens – or material – money.

        1. OpenThePodBayDoorsHAL

          As we speak Ecuador is rolling out a mobile phone payment scheme where every user has an account directly with the central bank. Acceptance will be mandatory, required by law.

        2. Llewelyn Moss

          First things first. We will need to implant a geo-location tracking device in your PrimeBeef gluteus maximus. :-)

          1. MyLessThanPrimeBeef

            That’s the price you pay when they merge the Fed with the NSA.

            We are all Ecuadorians now, in a ‘safer’ way, of course, thanks to the monitoring implant.

    2. Mel

      I’m trying to imagine a spy novel where an official from the Sicherheitsdienst or the NKVD is saying something like:
      “Oh, it’s been going on forever. Months and months. Some fool in the suburbs is sending morse code at midnight. Nothing to worry about. We listened to some — it was total gibberish! Didn’t mean a thing!”

    3. jrs

      Well respect her if you respect hypocritical sociopaths I guess, respected like a fox, as meanwhile Shillary was collecting credit card numbers and biometric data from foreign heads of states (the Manning leaks).

    4. bruno marr

      I seriously doubt that Hillary’s personal email account is on her own private equipment. More likely is that she has a personal website (with email capability) that is maintained by someone (internet company) else. It can be done by anyone paying for website hosting. The email (trail across the internet) routing may indicate that her account is “registered” to her Chappaqua address, but my guess is that the server is elsewhere. (I have this arrangement for my business website.)

      1. Lambert Strether Post author

        You’re right; that’s what “everybody is saying” and I could have over-stated; I’ll return to this later in the day. (I’m not familiar with the regulations on server registration/location. My impression — and it would be great if somebody who knows what they’re talking about can confirm or correct — is that the actual physical location where the “tube” from the server connects to the Intertubes must be given. E.g., if the server is at your lawyer’s, your lawyer’s address.)

        The key point, though, is that public records are on a private server under private control.

    1. Ronald Pires

      I remember when all the educational problems in the world were solved by putting an apple on the teacher’s desk.

  3. jgordon

    Emily’s List et al isn’t concerned about the Clinton email scandal? That’s moderately sickening, but expected. At least who have very clear litmus test here to determine who on the Democrat side is a venal hypocrite though. Honestly I have just been assuming all Democrats were venal, mendacious hypocrites, but any who care to castigate Clinton will have redeemed themselves a bit.

    1. Jim Haygood

      Edward G. Rendell, a former Pennsylvania governor and chairman of the Democratic National Committee during the 2000 election, said Mrs. Clinton needed a more robust political organization to defend her. “I assume when there’s a campaign, there will be a better effort,” he said. “I assume this will get rectified.”

      http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/05/us/politics/hillary-clinton-emails-catches-democrats-off-guards.html

      Translation: the beatings will continue until the polls improve. UFB.

  4. craazyboy

    Clown Car
    Ben Carson: Homosexuality is a choice because many people “go into prison straight — and when they come out, they’re gay” [CNN].
    =============================

    I do appreciate how politicians are such a great source of really, really cheap humor – and you can’t get arrested for enjoying it like you can if you download a book or movie by torrent.

    But this one is getting too close to that linguistic virus in Snow Crash that freezes up a computer programmer’s brain.

      1. craazyboy

        shit. dilduino? I’ll pass. But I gotta neat idea. Turn it into an Internet Of Things device. Might work as a electronic counter measures device and jam NSA spying. Dunno what’ll happen to your Google profile, tho.

    1. Clive

      It sounds to me like Ben Carson has been watching too many of those movies of rather dubious origin and, erm, somewhat clichéd plotting “Buck is sent to solitary confinement for misbehaving in the shower and is given hard time by the warden…”

      Or maybe do the prisons in the U.S. show too many Judy Garland films on movie night ? Talk about cruel and unusual punishment.

  5. hunkerdown

    Lambert, yet Chimero’s article is working the same godawful “design-heavy”, “content-light” 20-words-per-column-inch “mobile-first” awfulness as everyone else, yet filling up 200% of my window height with a six-word bro-ism is not “working me” somehow.

    There’s a plugin idea: reformat these crapified “mobile first” designs into pure, natural text. Hmmmmm.

      1. Morak

        Actually, Firefox on Android has that feature built in. I use it all the time. Don’t know what it’s called; there’s just a little icon in the search bar that looks like a book. Click on it and it renders the page as a readable, well-formatted text. Works great,e.g. on Salon, with their horrible layout.

        1. hunkerdown

          Just tried it… nice! Sadly, it’s not landing on desktop for a few more versions, at least.

    1. guest

      Given that this single Chimero page, requiring plenty of useless scrolling, heavy plugins and probably some atrocious CSS and Javascript, sent my laptop into a furious CPU-heating processing loop, I doubt it would ever work properly on a mobile browser.

      Shoemakers’ children are the worst shod.

      1. Lambert Strether Post author

        Yes, on the shoemaker’s children, but I did look at the source code. The color gradients are done, properly, with CSS; nothing fancy there at all. Not sure what you mean by “plug-ins”; plug-ins are for the browser, not a site. If you mean the videos, there’s no way to demonstrate pages changing without it, so it’s editorially necessary. Not sure what you mean by useless scrolling; most long-form articles require you to scroll as you read them.

        1. guest

          Then we might have a different experience because of different browsers — which then is not a good point for the portability of Chimero’s design.

          Anyway:

          Not sure what you mean by useless scrolling

          I have to scroll two full screens on my laptop to get through each of the intermediate titles (such as “HOW TO SEE A MOMENT”. Sorry, a title should take ONE line.

          nothing fancy there at all

          I suspect something troublesome might be hiding in those jquery libraries specified at the beginning of the page — as soon as Javascript is activated, my Firefox 31 goes crazy. And there is an unmatched tag left behind in the HTML markup.

            1. guest

              No issue at all, what Chimero does is not your fault.

              Actually, this is something I like with NC: it works perfectly without Javascript (which I have kept disabled by default in various ways ever since the late 1990s). One only really needs Javascript for commenting.

              Curiously, in the past couple of years, I have increasingly started disabling CSS as well — main text in difficult-to-read low-contrast grey? obnoxious headers or footers that just muck up scrolling with page-up/down? deficient formatting that prevents text from reflowing nicely when I increase the font size and requires me to scroll left and right?

              Crapification galore — and that is without talking about those supremely irritating pop-ups (“you might also be interested by this article:…”) that obscure the main text, or those buggy bespoke selection lists (why, oh why can’t they just use the built-in HTML element?) that are squashed by disabling Javascript.

              So, please keep NC plain and unadorned as it is now. It works well, do not break it.

    2. Lambert Strether Post author

      “This site is an interpretation of my talk from Webstock, 2015” so I assume it brings over the slides from that source. Not sure where “bro-ism” is coming from, and if you think that’s heavy OR “mobile first,” have you seen Bloomberg? Anyhow, it’s a big Internet. Nobody said you had to read it all.

  6. Benedict@Large

    “The core problem is that there aren’t enough jobs”

    The “lever” that adjusts the unemployment rate is deficit spending, especially if it is through direct employment by the government. (Direct employment avoids the siphoning off caused by bidding, oversight, and profit-taking.)

    1. craazyboy

      If we cut taxes enough, increasing the deficit spending, we will eventually reach full employment in China.

      1. MyLessThanPrimeBeef

        They will not have full employment in China, unless we continue to import their laminated flooring.

        Key to longevity? Exercise and low caloric intake. Translated to economics: Manufacturing and low consumption.

        Key to beauty: Sleep when tired, along with eating right of course. Translation: When the economy slows down, let it slow down (but the economy is not the workers as we can see in that last few years – GDP growth and more inequality).

        So, if there is a recession, there is a recession.

        With People’s Monetary Policy, we can survive recession without quack medicine like QE or ZIRP.

      2. paulmeli

        Bingo. The main impediment to full employment, all else equal. The trade deficit removes ~$500B worth of spending from the domestic economy annually. That could employ a few of us.

    2. neo-realist

      “Government doesn’t create jobs”
      President Barack Obama

      Straight from Jerry Mahoney’s mouth.

      1. MyLessThanPrimeBeef

        No one really creates jobs.

        “I accept this award of one-job creation humbly. But really, I couldn’t have done it without my family, my friends and my team.”

  7. NOTaREALmerican

    I donno, the links this week seem to indicate that society is an increasingly rapid downward spiral to the pit of eternal stupidity. I fear what next week might reveal.

    It might just be my cold medicaid tho.

    1. Bill Frank

      Indeed, the spiral into who knows what the hell the future will bring just keeps whirlin round and round. Not sure as to whether I’d classify it as stupidity or insanity. Either way, a whole lot of ugly is sittin around the corner.

  8. different clue

    Maybe Clinton can pull Obama under the bus after her. Or at least drag one of his feet under the bus’s wheels. With all her ( and Slicky Bill’s) contacts in the world of Big Money, maybe she can convince some of them to give Obama just a little less money than they were going to give him otherwise. Maybe the Clintons can quietly tell Rahm just how much damage they can do to his future earnings and social circling if he doesn’t force the Obama library to re-locate. Perhaps the Clintons can at least get Obama blackballed from all the best parties and see to it that Sasha and Malia don’t get to marry a Wall Street bond shark the way Chelsea did.
    Dhere are vays for the Clintons to get even, if they really want to.

    1. different clue

      Or maybe the Clintons could cause it to be made known to Rahm Emmanuel that unless the Obama library’s present location is cancelled, the Clintons will campaign hard and effectively for his opponent in the mayoral election. There are always things a Clinton can do . . .

  9. Jim Haygood

    Obamacare kaching!

    LOS ANGELES (MarketWatch) — Shares of hospital operators jumped late Wednesday after the U.S. Supreme Court entertained arguments on a case that questioned whether subsidies for health insurance offered under the Affordable Care Act should be given in the 34 states that don’t have their own exchanges.

    Shares of HCA Inc. HCA, +4.66% Tenet Healthcare Corp. THC, +4.63% and Community Health Systems Inc. CYH, +4.78% all were up more than 4% after the court’s swing vote, Justice Anthony Kennedy, questioned whether withholding subsidies in those states was constitutional. Also up were LifePoint Hospitals Inc. LPNT, +2.84% and Universal Health Services Inc. UHS, +2.00% up 3% and 2%, respectively.

    The market has spoken. The decision is just an afterthought.

    1. MyLessThanPrimeBeef

      I was just thinking – if the hospitals kill all of us, can they still make money?

      Is that why they have a plan B – keep bringing new babies to replace the outgoing geezers?

        1. MyLessThanPrimeBeef

          Only non-believers in alternative medicine.

          ‘I only use acupuncture.’

          ‘You are not allowed to enter.’

          ‘I am a strict voodoo magic medicine man.’

          ‘You too, can go home.’

          ‘Only ayurvedic here. And yoga and navel gazing.’

          ‘We never want to see your face again.’

    2. different clue

      The “markets” must be expecting Roberts to save and preserve subsidies in ALL states.

  10. MikeW_CA

    “Everybody who got mail from Clinton knew she wasn’t using her official address” And shame on each and every one of them in the US Government who didn’t raise the issue.

    The trouble with this is simple. The world in general, and the USA in particular already have a “rule of law” problem with elites who think they’re above the law and the rules don’t apply to them. Do we really need another one of them as our next President? How could we expect a lick of empathy or understanding from her for those of us not powerful enough to be entitled to those kinds of privileges?

    1. MyLessThanPrimeBeef

      Just because one is smart does not mean he/she is not wise.

      She is very smart.

      1. hunkerdown

        And she is also very wise, at least insofar as regards her personal interests. And I don’t think anyone would argue with the label “aristocrat”.

        What she is not is a public-minded person.

        1. optimader

          don’t mistake persistence and low threshold for personal dignity as wise. I am not impressed when I hear her speak. Nothing very illuminating IMHO.
          Ironically she apparently has no real personal interests, unless being a professional political dilettante constitutes one?

  11. Hacker

    What ZD Net fails to realize is that it is not ironic for the NSA and the other .gov sites to have the Freak vulnerability; it is strategic. It doesn’t put those sites at any real risk since they are public data anyway and it encourages other sites to do the same.

    I’m just glad the we have a security vulnerability with a cool name that comes with its own theme song. ‘Le Freak’ by Chic.

    Freak out.

  12. OpenThePodBayDoorsHAL

    Blah blah ApplePay blah blah. Mobile money is just an app, not an overcomplicated dino-scheme that requires some specific merchant point of sale dino-hardware and some marketing company’s specific phone version. Alipay did $642 million in 24 hours over New Year’s, use any device (AAPL or GOOG or Xiaomei or whatever), just get the app, link to any bank. The U.S. is still in the dark ages.

  13. YY

    Petraeus is clearly getting a huge pass. It would appear his “mistress”/biographer who apparently had use of information as source for publication and promotion of the book via the media, who, unlike Assange can be labled as traitor, is free to a not fugitive life. Or is there some secret grand jury in Northern Virginia pursuing this criminal event? Pointing out inconsistencies and hypocrisy would seem trite, if only those who (with social consciences) are victimized by the unfair prosecutions weren’t so seriously pursued and punished.

    1. hunkerdown

      The takeaway is that the rule of law is a sham and the rule of men is fully online.

  14. ian

    My first thought on the Hillary email mess was “here we go again” – like a little trip back to the ’90s.

    1. MyLessThanPrimeBeef

      You think it’s still the vast right wing conspiracy pouring over her cattle futures?

      1. Lambert Strether Post author

        The thing is, there really was a VRWC, funded mostly by Richard Mellon Scaife, the Koch Brothers of the day. But (Hillary) Clinton backed off it, instead of confronting it.

    1. dkloke

      Well I don’t care too
      Much for money
      Money can’t buy Jihad …

      (well… maybe if you’re Saudi Arabia…)

  15. optimader

    http://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/english/news/20150304_34.html
    US federal agents raid ‘birth tour’ facilities

    World
    Mar. 4, 2015 – Updated 10:09 UTC

    US federal agents have raided dozens of sites in California where pregnant women mainly from China are staying to give birth on US soil so their babies will obtain US citizenship.

    Immigration officials and police on Tuesday searched about 40 locations, including homes where women taking part in such maternity tours were staying
    The officials say tour operators who arranged travel, lodging and obstetric care are suspected of falsely reporting why the women were visiting the US.

    The officials say maternity tours are increasingly popular among wealthy Chinese. By US law, babies born in the United States are granted citizenship regardless of their parents’ nationalities.

    Officials say the women are believed to have paid 15,000 to 50,000 dollars each for a short stay in California to give birth.

    Local media say such a large-scale raid is the first of its kind. Immigration officials plan to investigate the legality of the tours.

    Birth tours are being organized to the West Coast of the US, Saipan and elsewhere. Many operators are apparently involved, and the tours are coming under increasing criticism.

    In some cases, a large number of Chinese women stay in ordinary homes, leading to trouble with neighbors. Critics also say the program is tantamount to buying citizenship even if no laws are infringed.

    One operator under investigation said it has arranged tours to the US for 4,000 pregnant women from China since 1999.

    CNN television said figures provided by Chinese state-run media show the number of women on such birth tours from China more than doubled from 4,200 in 2008 to 10,000 in 2012.

    CNN said the parents apparently hope US citizenship will help their children receive a better education and improve their opportunities.

    It also said parents may hope their children’s US citizenship will be their ticket out of China. When the children turn 21, they can get green cards for their parents.

    1. different clue

      Perhaps we should feel grateful and relieved. If they want their children to have an option to live here, perhaps they want to leave this country in better shape than they plan to leave Tibet.

      1. ambrit

        The Chinese never plan on leaving Tibet. They were the regional hegemon once, and they want to be it again. These wealthy Chinese have read their history and are preparing for a possible return of the Years of Chaos.

        1. different clue

          By “leave Tibet” I mean “leave Tibet such an eco-shatttered bombed-out moonscape that the Tibetans will never rise again because they will have no ecological basis from which to rise from”.
          I meant “leave Tibet” in ruins.

  16. different clue

    So Urban Outfitters is loosing speed and altitude, eh? People may start watching their outlets for Liquidation Sales.

Comments are closed.