So Hillary’s Super Secret Secure Server was actually hosted on the same server as the not secret and not particularly secure Clinton Foundation email system.
Which means any hacker that could pwn the Clinton Foundation server (and why wouldn’t they?) could almost certainly pwn Hillary’s private e-mail server, chock full of illegal classified national security information, through any number of exploits or privilege escalation attacks.
And evidently she was running her emails off an Exchange 2010 Server, which meant it was running on top of Windows, which means there were no end of exploits by which a dedicated hacker could gain control.
“Oh hey! I’m hosting this list of ISIS secret agents on my Doom III deathmatch server! I’m sure there’s no way that could possibly backfire on me!”
Or to put it in non-computer terms, she was storing classified information in an unlocked tin box under her bed that everyone in her neighborhood also knew contained bundles of unmarked $100 bills, and she was just hoping no one broke in.
She’s a major security risk that should never, ever be in the oval office…
Latest Iran deal revelation: Iran gets to self-inspect their own nuclear site. But Kerry did get them to agree to pinky swear they’re telling the truth…
Obama and his party. “No president in modern times has presided over so disastrous a stretch for his party, at almost every level of politics.” Caveat the first: Although I think the phrase “there’s neither a Great Depression nor a criminal conspiracy in the White House to explain what has happened” is probably false on both counts. Caveat the second: Notice how the article carefully omits any mention of the specific Obama policies that have made his party so unpopular…
I really want to believe this Atlantic piece on how Russia is losing in Ukraine, but I just don’t. This one sentence has so much wrong with it I have trouble trusting the rest of the article: “Shale, liquefied natural gas (LNG), and renewables—three areas where Russia is extremely weak—are ascendant and are dramatically altering the market.” Shale’s a solid play if you’ve already tapped out more easily-extracted hydrocarbons (I doubt Russia has), LNG is a profitable byproduct if you’re already extracting oil, but at today’s market prices (which have sucked since 2009) it’s not worth pursuing on its own, and renewables? Hippie, please…
Muslim beats wife in front of police, saying they can’t arrest him because she’s his property.
Slovakia to the EU: Screw you, we’re not taking any Muslim refugees. (Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)
Movement in Spain tries to erase Salvador Dali from history. You’ll get my Salvador Dali from me when you pry the melting clocks out of my burning hands!
I missed this when it went up last week, but Larry Correia put up interesting post predicting the 2016 Presidential nominees:
“My prediction is that the republican nominee will be Ted Cruz.”
“Barring the highly unlikely event that Hillary gets arrested by the FBI for one of her multitude of scandals between now and the primaries, Hillary is it.”
But the glory is in the details:
“Bernie is nuts, but he’s honest. He skips right over all the typical democrat feel good, heart string tugging reasons why they think the government should control everything, and gets right to the government controlling everything. He is economically illiterate. Those Occupy Democrat memes going around Facebook where they are quoting Bernie fucking up some basic economic principle are literally painful. Every time you share one of those, an accountant dies.”
“A lot of people are thinking it would be a good match up because Fiorina is a woman and Hillary is a sort of woman shaped carbon based life form.”
“Once people get tired of the Trump show, that hunger for bucking the establishment and telling the media to bugger off will still be there. And this is why I think Ted Cruz will move into the lead. He’s been a pain in the establishment’s ass. The left wing media hates him. ”
“Lindsey Graham… Holy shit, just shoot me now.”
Jeb!?
Ain’t gonna happen. He was the media’s initial pick, and it was even more painfully obvious than when all the democrats showed up in our open primaries to “cross the aisle” to nominate McCain, and then promptly ditched him for Obama on election day. But Jeb’s got zilch. Actual conservatives don’t like him, the Tea Party hates him. On the issues, he’s mumble mumble amnesty and mumble mumble that’s not what Common Core was supposed to mumble. Seriously, do you know any actual voter who likes Jeb? Can you think of one? I can’t. Jeb has all the suck of the old, dying, big government GOP, so the conservative base will be even less enthusiastic for him than they were for Romney and McCain, with the added benefit that his last name is Bush, so automatically half the country hates him.
Is he right? I want to believe him on Cruz, and that’s always a dangerous reason to believe something. But as he notes “At this early point in the campaigns I got Dole, Bush, and Romney right. McCain surprised me, but I think I was just blinded by my dislike for him. I predicted Obama as soon as he got done with that first original DNC speech, and sadly got that one right…”
Austin had a very, very wet spring, but August is shaping up in normal fashion: Bone dry and hot as hell. Try to keep cool and enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:
Politicized or not, the DOJ will be increasingly boxed in by the FBI and intelligence community investigations. Normally, when the intelligence community finds classified materials in unauthorized locations, it seeks felony prosecutions. Gen. David Petraeus was sunk for keeping his own personal calendars in an unlocked drawer at home. The calendars were deemed classified, even if they lacked an official stamp. President Clinton’s CIA Director, John Deutsch, lost his job and security clearance for using his portable computer at home. It had classified material on it. Those violations are trifling compared to Hillary Clinton’s exposure.
Someone spilled millions of gallons of toxic waste into a river! Call the EPA! Oh wait, it was the EPA.
Islamic State executes 300 electoral civil servants in Iraq. Good thing we’ve got Nobel Prize winner Barack Obama sowing peace and stability to the Middle East rather than that warmongering bungler Bush… (Hat tip: Jihad Watch.)
China devalues the Yuan. This is Big Freaking News, but hard to conceptualize, since China’s economic statistics are have not even a nodding acquaintance with reality, and haven’t for at least a decade. So is China’s current bubble bad, or super mega world-shatterling bad?
Cop-killing inmate dies in prison riot. Alas, my electron microscope is being recalibrated, so I won’t be able to find the proper sized violin to commemorate this sad occasion… (Hat tip: Dwight.)
Social Justice Warriors continue their war on comedy on campus.
Man arrested for shooting at police in Ferguson was completely unarmed. Except for his guns.
This doesn’t sound like good news for Team Inevitable:
Many Democrats have long hoped that Hillary Clinton might expand Barack Obama‘s electoral coalition by drawing in more white women voters.
A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll suggests she may have a tough time pulling it off. Mrs. Clinton is losing ground with white women and many other important slices of the electorate, the poll shows, amid a spate of reports about her email practices, speaking fees and foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation.
In June, 44% of white women had a favorable view of Mrs. Clinton, compared to 43% who didn’t. In July, those numbers moved in the wrong direction for Mrs. Clinton: Only 34% of white women saw her in a positive light, compared to 53% who had a negative impression of her, the poll found.
Gee, turns out women voters aren’t wild about an inept politicians with anger and entitlement issues who consistently breaks both ethics guidelines and the law for personal gain. Who knew?
Good thing for Hillary that white women aren’t an important part of her voting coalition…
And here’s the third part of that Camille Paglia interview. Here she takes on the 2016 Presidential field. As you might expect from someone who voted for the Green Party in 2012 and who profeses herself a fan of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, her critiques of the Democratic side are a lot more interesting than those of the GOP.
Democrats
There are plenty of women Democratic politicians who are too scared to put themselves forward as candidates because of the Clinton machine. There’s something seriously wrong here with Democratic thinking…Given the problems facing the nation, this passive waiting for your turn is simply unacceptable. The Democrats have plenty of solid, capable women politicians who are just too timid to challenge the party establishment. Well, excuse me, that proves they don’t deserve to be president! You sure won’t be able to deal with ISIS if you can’t deal with Debbie Wasserman Schultz!
More on Hillary:
Hillary has accomplished nothing substantial in her life. She’s been pushed along, coasting on her husband’s coattails, and every job she’s been given fizzled out into time-serving or overt disaster. Hillary constantly strikes attitudes and claims she’s “passionate” about this or that, but there’s never any sustained follow-through. She’s just a classic, corporate exec or bureaucrat type who would prefer to be at her desk behind closed doors, imposing her power schemes on the proletariat. She has no discernible political skills of any kind, which is why she needs a big, shifting army of consultants, advisors, and toadies to whisper in her ear and write her policy statements.
Republicans
She’s not a fan of Ted Cruz: “Ted Cruz–oh, lord! Cruz gives me the willies. The guy is a fanatic! He’s very smart, clever and strategic, and he has a fine education from Princeton, so people have to watch out for him. But I think he is self-absorbed and narcissistic to a maniacal degree.” Paglia also says that “In the primary debates, Cruz will benefit from having a tall and commanding physique.” Commanding presence, yes, but Cruz is around my height (5’10”-ish), which is not generally considered tall for a Presidential contender.
She’s high on Scott Walker:
I think that liberals are dangerously complacent about Scott Walker. They’ve tried to portray him as a madman, an uneducated rube, a tool of the Koch brothers. Right now, Walker seems to be the true GOP frontrunner, but I also feel he lacks gravitas. He’s not ready for his close-up. What is this oddity about so many of the GOP candidates–their excessive boyishness, as if their maturation stalled? But Walker is a very talented and combative politician, with far more substance than liberals are allowing for.
The union issue is huge–because as governor of Wisconsin, Walker went to war with unions and won. Liberals are caught in the past right now in their rosy view of unions, which were heroically established during the progressive era that reformed the abuses of the industrial revolution. But the union battle in Wisconsin had nothing to do with exploited working-class miners or factory workers. In his push to balance the state budget, Walker took action against the middle-class public sector unions, whose negotiations with municipal and state governments outside the arena of private competition have become an enormous drain on local budgets as the economy has worsened. There has been a history of rampant corruption in the public sector unions, coming from their cozy quid pro quo relationships with politicians. Liberals need to wake up about this! All they have to do is read the obituaries of the smaller newspapers in metropolitan New York to see how the early retirement and lavish pensions of the public sector unions have grotesquely drained taxpayer dollars. Obituary after obituary–so-and-so, aged 75, worked for fifteen or twenty years as a policeman or city sanitation worker, retired in his late 40s, and spent the rest of his life on the taxpayer’s dime, pursuing his hobbies of fishing, boating, and golfing. Great work if you can get it!
And then the teachers’ unions! What a colossal tactical error American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten (a longtime Clinton friend and donor) made several weeks ago in unilaterally declaring her union’s endorsement of Hillary Clinton right in the middle of the Bernie Sanders surge. Probably for the first time ever, American liberals woke up to the corrupt practices that have become way too common in the political maneuverings of the big unions. The point here is that Scott Walker, in his defeat of the public sector unions, drew the roadmap for struggling municipal and state governments everywhere to balance their budgets, as he did in Wisconsin. Because who ends up suffering the most? It’s the kids. All that money outrageously pouring into inflated pension plans has been gutting public education and community arts programs.
Good to see at least one liberal wake up to the destructive nature of bloated public sector unions. But it’s rather naive of Paglia to express surprise over part of the corrupt wing of the Democratic Party (unions) endorsing the designated candidate of that wing (Hillary) over the candidate of the Party’s insane wing (Bernie Sanders).
“I thought that Mitt Romney was an excellent choice by the GOP four years ago.” Can’t really say we in the GOP are happy with the way that turned out…
Pension payments to Chicago public union employees have become so high that today all the property taxes paid by the households of Chicago go exclusively to pensions.
Adultery website Ashley Madison hacked, and “37 million clients” could be blackmailed. (I’m guessing that’s more like 15 million male clients and 22 million fake female profiles.) Golly, who could have possibly seen that coming? Except, of course, everyone who’s ever worked in the computer industry…
Last week, the New York Timesseemed as determined to keep Ted Cruz’s new book A Time For Truth off their bestseller list as the BBC was to keep the Sex Pistol’s “God Save the Queen” out of the #1 spot on the singles chart during the Queen’s Silver Jubilee.
They claimed Cruz’s book was only eligible for the list due to “bulk sales.” There was just one tiny little problem with that theory: It wasn’t true.
“HarperCollins Publishers has investigated the sales pattern for Ted Cruz’s book A Time For Truth and has found no evidence of bulk orders or sales through any retailer or organization,” the publisher said in a statement [last] Friday.”
Also this:
“The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, Publisher’s Weekly, and Barnes & Noble all included A Time For Truth on their bestseller lists, with most placing it at #4 for nonfiction.”
Not only was Cruz in the right, he stood to benefit just by picking the fight. “For a conservative presidential candidate, the New York Times—an emblem of liberal elitism, right up there alongside arugula, the Toyota Prius and San Francisco—is a perfect foil.” (Also: “As it happens, A Time For Truth is a good read—especially by the dismal standards of the genre.”)
Yesterday, Ted Cruz was able to declare victory: “Five days after accusing The New York Times of bias, secrecy and foul play, Ted Cruz is finally getting what he wanted: a highly coveted spot on the paper’s bestseller list. Cruz’s memoir, A Time For Truth, will appear at No. 7 on the Times‘ list for hardcover nonfiction, reflecting its second-week sales, a Times spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday.”
Two more nuggets:
“Both HarperCollins, the book’s publisher, and Amazon, the largest Internet retailer in the country, said last week that they had found ‘no evidence’ that bulk purchases drove the book’s sales numbers. On Friday, Cruz campaign spokesperson Rick Tyler accused the Times of ‘obvious partisan bias,’ and called on the paper to reveal its methodology or else publicly apologize.”
“A Time For Truth was published on June 30 and sold 11,854 copies in its first week, according to Nielsen Bookscan’s hardcover sale numbers — more than 18 of the 20 titles that appeared on the bestseller list for the week ending July 4.”
