Houston PD tracks your cellphone without a warrant, and that's okay by the DA

I don't know why these things shock me any more, but they do.  Maybe it's because they keep saying, "Don't worry; trust us".

Back in September, HPD officer James Taylor lamented how the Edward Snowden leaks had spooked the public into thinking that even local law enforcement agencies were part of a broad, indiscriminate surveillance dragnet that gathers data on unsuspecting Americans.

"We are not the NSA nor the federal government," the HPD officer told members of a Senate State Affairs Committee. A PowerPoint slide he'd prepared for the occasion flashed up on the screen: "STATE AND LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT DO NOT 'SNOOP!'"

Maybe, maybe not. The problem, privacy advocates say, is we don't know. What we do know -- actually, what we've known for quite some time -- is that HPD has the technology to sweep up cell phone data in real time, deploying a device that essentially mimics a cellphone tower and tricks your phone into communicating with it. And, according to local prosecutors -- who, it should be noted, admit they don't know how local cops are using the technology, either -- HPD doesn't need a warrant to use it.

So Stingray.  Which has been mentioned here and by others a few times in the recent past.

Careful going forward; this gets a little complicated.  Michael Barajas at the Houston Press has done an excellent job breaking it down, though, so I'm going to roll out a heavy excerpt from his piece.

In September, HPD officer Taylor and Bill Exley, an assistant prosecutor with the Harris County DA's office who works with local cops to help solve (in his words) "blood and guts cases," warned state lawmakers that, under their interpretation of state law, local cops do need a warrant to gather sensitive cell phone data from a phone company (not messages or call contents, but data showing where you've been and logs of your incoming and outgoing calls). This is despite virtually everyone else saying a state appeals court ruling from last summer called Ford v. State cemented the fact that cops don't need a warrant to get your metadata from a phone company.

It's unclear why the Harris County District Attorney's Office would take this rather unique stance -- the state prosecutors association, for instance, has said that, in light of the Ford case, metadata held by a phone company is most certainly not protected by the Fourth Amendment. Exley basically told lawmakers that the current law is complex and that no matter how they read it, cops always come away needing a warrant to get metadata from a phone company. Perhaps. The more skeptical among us might think Exley and Taylor were trying to scare legislators away from passing stricter privacy rules this session that would explicitly add a warrant-for-metadata protection to state law. (Taylor, for instance, told the committee that securing warrants for phone data "results in us not being able to investigate cases, which results in people dying.")

But if HPD wants to gather that data directly from the source, i.e. directly from your phone, no warrant is necessary, Exley says.

There's a whole lot more that you should read there, but let's finish here with this part.

As MuckRock first uncovered last year, police departments buying Stingray devices from Harris Corp. (the manufacturer of Stingray technology, no relation except as vendor to Harris County) must first sign a nondisclosure agreement with the FBI. And as the Houston Chronicle reiterated last week, that nondisclosure agreement means even local prosecutors don't know the specifics of how HPD is using its fake-cell-phone-tower devices.

That doesn't seem to bother Exley much. In emails last week, he told us that police using "historical data" gleaned from cell phone companies is a completely different issue than police tracking someone with "live data" sucked up by a Stingray. Exley says that, according to his understanding (again, this is all relatively speculative since HPD won't talk at all about how they use the devices), HPD only deploys Stingrays in a pretty narrow set of circumstances -- for instance, when police are trying to track down a fugitive with an arrest warrant.

I don't see much point in having a smartphone any longer, unless you just don't mind having NSA and CIA and HPD listen in as you take a dump.  You can probably guess that the nerdy kid down the block has also figured all this out and has mail-ordered the technology from Amazon, had it delivered via their drone, hacked into that and has it hovering outside your bedroom window.

AI ain't got nothin' on any of these.  Yet.

With the news earlier this week that CIA has been working on cracking the security for Apple phones and tablets for years now, you can forget about that alleged security blanket as some protection of your privacy (let's note that this fellow calls bullshit on Jeremy Scahill, Josh Begley, and the Intercept, the first link in this graf).  In reference to the toon above... at the rate we're going, of what serviceable use will drones actually be?  Everybody already knows everything there is to know about you as it is.

Stupid Republicans, Vol. 47

It's only Tuesday but several inmates have escaped the asylum and I need to start getting 'em rounded up.  Let's begin here in H-Town, with a little problem that actually originated in Austin.

The official who oversees more vehicle registrations than anyone else in the state gave the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles a failing grade Monday after another error surfaced in its new inspection and registration system.

"It is having an adverse effect on my ability to do the work of the taxpayers," Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector Mike Sullivan said of the state's administration of the new single-sticker system, which took effect March 1.

The latest error, discovered Friday, involved incorrect bills sent to 321,927 motorists with April registrations coming due. Of those, 83,541 were in the eight-county Houston area, including 56,965 in Harris County.

The confusion led to long lines at local tax offices, frustrated motorists and haggard county staffers.

"I've got people demanding to see me and calling my office," Sullivan said. "This is a state issue, but the county tax assessors are the face of this... (Motorists) are angry and frustrated, saying they'll never vote for Mike Sullivan again. I'm a big boy, I can take it, but I feel bad for the people coming in."

This is not the Republican county tax-assessor's fault, but the people complaining about "never voting for Mike Sullivan again" are the same people who think they can solve the problem by voting for another Republican.  In other words, the definition of insanity.

There are some who want to blame Sen. Royce West (D-Dallas) for introducing the legislation that made this happen.  That's well and good, but unless Republicans in the legislature all abstained from voting for the bill, then they stamped it with their bicameral majority approval.  This is called, in Republican phraseology, 'taking personal responsibility', which Republicans instruct others to do but avoid doing themselves.

While the DMV screws everybody up and over, the DPS is warning state senators about glitterbombs.

The first rule about glitter bombs, if you work in the Texas Department of Public Safety, is you do not talk about glitter bombs. "DPS does not discuss security-related matters or investigations," the agency vaguely told us in an email statement. (Subject line:"Inquiry about Glitter Bombs.")

But there appears to have been a minor, glitter-sized leak in the department. On Friday, The Texas Tribune said it obtained an email that a Department of Public Safety official sent to state senators. The email contained an unsigned attachment warning of a glitter-bombing threat among our society's most dangerous groups: the gays and women. "Glitter Bombing: Weapon of Choice for Gay Rights, Pro Choice Advocates," the Tribune said the unsigned attachment was titled. 

Couldn't the legislators just use their newly-installed panic buttons in case they get assaulted with arts and crafts by women and gay people?  And whatever happened to the terrorist threats of jars of poop and pee?

Now I know what you're thinking: the DMV and DPS bureaucrats personnel behind these clusterfucks and conspiracies are not ALL Republicans.  I'm certain that's just as correct as saying that Republicans are not all racists, either.

Let's move on to DC, where 47 Republican senators -- where have we heard that 47% number before? -- have decided that they will not be bound by any nuclear agreement Obama negotiates with Iran, and sent Iran's leaders a letter to that effect.  That's called 'trolling the Logan Act'.

It wasn't enough for a Republican Congress to invite a foreign leader to speak to them -- an appalling violation of diplomatic protocol at best -- over the objections of the executive branch just a week ago.  They had to go a little bit further this week to disrespect and de-legitimize the office of the executive.  They may think they're just dissing Obama, but if a Republican ever manages to get elected president again, there's going to be some payback.  There's going to be payback in some form or fashion no matter what.

When Republicans are saying publicly you have lost, you have probably disgraced yourself.

There has never been an instance in which an organized partisan bloc in the legislative branch disregarded the separation of powers in order to publicly and intentionally undermine US foreign policy. Disagreements over foreign policy have often been bitter, but they have been tempered by an understanding that they can be resolved by elections. I may not like a president, but undermining the office itself will haunt me when my party finally wins.

It seems clear that many Republicans have lost their belief that the party can compete for the Presidency. No other logic explains their willingness to burn down the office itself. The demographic realities are brutal and the Blue Wall looms large. This kind of behavior will only get worse, and more dangerous, in 2017.

The best response, however, came from the Iranian foreign minster, who sees right through the GOP's game.  He was, after all, educated in the United States, and appears to understand US constitutional and international law better than most of these Republican senators.  And just think: Republicans might nominate someone for president in 2016 who does not have a college degree.

Finally, and speaking of Republicans who really don't understand anything at all, why is someone who has never sent an e-mail in his entire life sitting on the Senate technology subcommittee?

You already know the answer: because he's a dumb fucking Republican who got elected by some of the dumbest fucking Republican voters in the nation, that's why.

Cannabis speeds up, passes gay marriage

Kirsten Gillibrand, Rand Paul, and Cory Booker will introduce a Senate bill to legalize medical marijuana under federal law (today), various outlets are reporting. This bill would mark an unprecedented push to legalize medical use drug on a federal level. We've seen a handful of states (and the nation's capital) legalize recreational marijuana over the last two years, and about half the states have a medical marijuana program, but the proposal — called the "Compassionate Access, Research Expansion and Respect States (CARERS) Act" — would be the widest attempt at legalization yet.

You know what's been happening in Texas and other states, but obviously federal law -- which ceased being enforced at the end of last year -- would trump efforts to slam on the brakes.  As with Obamacare and gay marriage, regressive conservatives would have to shift their focus from prohibition to repeal.  From the WaPo, linked above:

The proposal will be unveiled at a 12:30 p.m. (Eastern) press conference on Tuesday, which will be streamed live here. Patients, their families and advocates will join the senators at the press conference.

We'll see how fast the bill moves, but I never thought I'd see the day.  Without the organized Christianist objection movement that marriage equality has spawned, I would expect to see passage and then few if any court challenges after the fact.  To be resolved in the (perhaps hastening) future would be decriminalizing possession by those without medical conditions, and at some point, something that comes close to unfettered legalization.

That would be real progress, but today counts as a big step in the right direction.

The Weekly Wrangle

The Texas Progressive Alliance is all about springing forward as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff sadly reminds a fifth-generation Republican who doesn't want to lose her Obamacare insurance subsidies that Greg Abbott doesn't care about her at all.

Libby Shaw, writing for Texas Kaos and contributing to Daily Kos, heard the president give one of the most memorable and moving speeches of our lifetimes.

From WCNews at Eye on Williamson: Dan Patrick wants to bust the spending cap without having to pay politically for busting the spending cap, in GOP Wants To Change The Rules In The Middle Of The Game.

"What the BLEEP happened to hip-hop?" asked PDiddie at Brains and Eggs.

Texas ranks 43rd in the US as a place to live for children. That's what happens when Republicans run the place. CouldBeTrue of South Texas Chisme says pro-life is just another way to say 'I've got mine, who gives a rat's behind about you!"

Texpatriate shared some thoughts on the Israeli-Iranian question following Netanyahu's speech to Congress.

Egberto Willies quoted T-Dubb-O asking you to see the world through his eyes.

Bluedaze and Dos Centavos have the Texas legislative alerts posted for this week: HB 540 on March 11, and SB 185 this morning.

Texas Vox features the citizen lobbyists who went to the Lege to advocate for local control.

Texas Leftist observes that while the state's coffers are flush, Texas cities are having to go into debt to provide necessary public resources.

 Uber is just payday lending on wheels, according to John Coby at Bay Area Houston.

And Neil at All People Have Value -- who has spent a lot of time looking up at the sky lately -- catches a picture of a plane flying between overhead utility wires.  APHV is part of NeilAquino.com.

=====================

And here are some posts of interest from other Texas blogs.

Grits for Breakfast applauds Ted Cruz's flop-flop on marijuana, and Trail Blazers wonders if Greg Abbott could be the Texas version of former CA Gov. Pete Wilson.

The Rivard Report documents the crowded ballot that awaits San Antonio voters in May, while Randy Bear does the same for the charter amendments, and worries about trying to make changes in a low-turnout context.

Texas Clean Air Matters echoes the US military's call to diversify our energy options and shift more toward a clean energy economy.

Socratic Gadfly translated Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson's take on future oil prices.

To commemorate March as Women's History Month (and yesterday as International Women's Day), Free Press Houston asks Houston to make a few things happen.  And in that vein, nonsequiteuse asks Free Press Houston to cancel the Summer Fest appearance of R Kelly.

The Lunch Tray would be happy to have celebrities market vegetables to kids.

Paradise In Hell declares that the real threat to marriage in Texas is serial heterosexuals.

BOR highlights the 2014 Texas League of Conservation Voters National Environmental Scorecard.

Better Texas Blog puts Texas' Medicaid spending in context.

Fascist Dyke Motors published her enemies list.

Hair Balls points to Texas Monthly, which says all the things we've been thinking about those terrible Chron.com slideshows.

And Chris Hooks at the Texas Observer would like to remind you that Open Carry Texas -- Tarrant County or otherwise -- are not your father's gun nuts.

Sunday Funnies

Fifty years after

That's Cong. John Lewis, in the right foreground above, getting beaten. And below, in 2010.

The Edmund Pettus Bridge -- which the protestors crossed and where they were greeted by the Alabama state police with billy clubs and tear gas -- was named after a Confederate general and a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.  He was also a United States Senator, serving two terms at the turn of the last century.  He was a Democrat, of course, before all the racists and bigots moved over to the GOP, a trend which took root in the 1954 Supreme Court decision known as Brown v. Board of Education, and began in earnest after LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act in 1965.  The Southern Strategy was employed by Barry Goldwater in 1964, but weaponized by Richard Nixon and George Wallace in 1968, and accelerated further during Ronald Reagan's terms, helped along by his political strategist, Lee Atwater.

And now you at least understand why there will be no Republican leaders -- well, one current leader, it seems, and a few other members of Congress, and W and Laura Bush --  in Selma today.

There will likely be hundreds, perhaps thousands, who will commemorate and recreate the march across the bridge -- but not the televised police assault at the bottom of it, which shocked a nation into action.  And just an hour to the north of Selma, in Shelby County, they aren't really celebrating.  There isn't much to celebrate in Ferguson, Missouri either -- yet -- nor in Madison, Wisconsin, where another unarmed black teenager was shot and killed by police.  On #BlackOutDay.

How long?  How long must we sing this song?

TransGriot with more.

Not no but hell no on TX Medicaid expansion

Yeah, you too, Schwertner.

Leading Texas Republicans on Monday asked the Obama administration for greater flexibility to administer Medicaid — a move that has gotten little traction in the past — while reiterating that they would not participate in an expansion of the program under the Affordable Care Act.

“Any expansion of Medicaid in Texas is simply not worth discussing,” state Sen. Charles Schwertner, R-Georgetown, chairman of the Senate Committee on Health and Human Services, said at a press conference.

Let those nasty poor folks die.  Face down, in a ditch, by the side of the road for all he cares.

Lisa Falkenberg kicks him right where he deserves it.

It's one thing to turn a blind eye to nearly 6 million uninsured Texas adults and children, to ignore the highest uninsured rate in the nation, to leave 1 million low-income Texans languishing in a health insurance no-man's land where they can't even get coverage through the Affordable Care Act because Texas refuses to expand Medicaid eligibility.

It's another thing to laugh in their faces.

[...]

"This trajectory is clearly unsustainable," the letter says, and then accuses the Medicaid program of continuing to "crowd out" funding for other needs such as education, transportation and water. Last time I checked, it wasn't poor people or the federal government proposing billions in tax cuts over the adequate funding of education, transportation and water.

[...]

What's worse about this latest effort is that it follows a growing chorus - a bipartisan chorus - of local, business and medical leaders calling for the state to expand Medicaid eligibility requirements.

That group includes the Texas Association of Business, the Texas Hospital Association and even a board approved by Perry himself - the Texas Institute of Health Care Quality and Efficiency.

These groups aren't taking these positions because of their love for President Obama. They realize it makes good business sense for Texans, and especially our children, to have health care. They realize that the costs of caring for the uninsured are being passed on by insurers and hospitals to those of us who do have insurance. They realize it makes no sense for Texas to pass up $100 billion in federal funds that we could draw down over a decade if we invest in expanding Medicaid services. They realize other conservative states have found a way to expand Medicaid, along with measures to promote personal responsibility, such as premium sharing and co-pays.

As an update to my January post "Kansas-sippi Here We Come", it develops that even KS Gov. Sam Bareback Brokeback Brownback is reconsidering Medicaid expansion in the Jayhawk State because of the austerity trainwreck he's caused.

To be sure, the governor isn’t officially on board, at least not yet. But Brownback was willing to say yesterday, “I haven’t said we’ll take it. I haven’t said we wouldn’t.” In this case, “it” is Medicaid expansion through the ACA.

And as you’d probably guess, the Kansas Republican has never said anything close to this before.

Texas Leftist finishes the takedown.

As Falkenberg outlines, this letter is far from a request to the Obama Administration.  It’s a ransom note.  Anyone who is hopeful that the Texas legislature is looking to do the right thing by our state would be wrong.  Instead, this week makes clear that Republican lawmakers wish nothing more than to endanger not only our poorest citizens, but state hospitals, and our whole healthcare system.

These morons that got elected last November in the lowest electoral turnout since the Great Depression want to take us back to the 1930s as fast as they can.  The saddest part to me is that this is what it is going to take to get them voted out of office: full, complete, unadulterated disaster and ruin.

Like bad medicine, maybe we can get it washed down quick.  Before too many people die from their poor decisions, their bigotry, and their hate, that is.

Schleifer's 'Horseshoe'

If you're not on it, get on it.

-- The very latest and biggest: "Mayor, firefighter pension trustees reach agreement".

Mayor Annise Parker and Houston's firefighter pension trustees have reached a deal that would lower the city's payments for three years, a move that would mark an abrupt reversal for the mayor.

The announcement came late Thursday from the fire pension board, whose leaders for years have fought any mention of changes to benefits as Houston's enormous pension burden has continued to grow. The pension fund estimates the city would pay $77 million less over the next three years. 

As Teddy has speculated on Twitter, how will this affect the signature issues of people like Bill King?  Stephen Costello has already jumped up and called it "a bad, bad, deal", so you know he's not going after the city employees' union endorsement.

-- The latest: Marty McVey is in.

Private equity executive Marty McVey said Thursday he would reinvigorate Houston's international business ties if voters elected him mayor this fall.

McVey said at the formal launch of his campaign he would usher in a new era of international investment in Houston, which he pledged to make a "visionary city."

"We have to take Houston to the world. The world has always come to Houston," McVey said at Mr. Peeples, a restaurant in Midtown. "It is now time that we take our place on the international stage."

The White House in 2011 appointed McVey, who has donated to many Democratic political campaigns, to an advisory board for the United States Agency for International Development.

McVey said that economic development stimulated by international trade would bring in the dollars to allow the city to address its most pressing problems.

"We don't have the ability to fix the potholes and fix the pensions because the city doesn't have the revenue to do so," McVey said.

McVey said he would bolster the city's economic development office and recruit international businesses to Houston, adding that he drew policy inspiration from former Gov. Rick Perry.

Potholes and pensions.  I believe the man who would be King has already staked out that acreage.

Now previously I had said that McVey might be the most liberal guy in the race so far, with Melissa Noriega in his corner (Navid Zanjani has already quit, however).  He spoke on 97.9 The Box about the tragic events of Ferguson, Missouri in December, while everyone else was taking an emotional breather as the DOJ worked on its investigation.  You may have heard something about that report this week.

But if McVey is inspired by Rick Perry's business initiatives, then I just threw up in my mouth.  And not a little.  Because even Greg Abbott has decided to go in a different direction than that.  A quick perusal of McVey's Twitter feed shows a lot -- and I mean a lot -- of business "initiatives", including oil (not striking USW workers) and immigration (from the Silicon Valley perspective, and not the border children one).  Heavy sigh.  Forget this guy; pro-corporate free-trading neoliberals are NOT on the menu even if there are a handful of them in the mayor's race.  Third tier is where McVey was, is and remains.

The best:  The fundraising invitations on display from King, Oliver Pennington, and Costello, who is now going by 'Steve' (more manly I suppose, like McQueen or Stone Cold Austin).  See if you can spot the dupes on those lists.  I mean, the duplicates.

Second best: "Eric Dick, who is trolling us on Facebook."

I'm going to have to up my snark game.  In that regard, see Stace's post, which elbows me in the ribs about the source of last week's rumor concerning Sheriff Garcia; i.e. "a self-proclaimed mayoral campaign staffer of the republatino who’s rumored to become a perennial candidate if he runs a third time", and the comment from someone posted at the OP who loves Abel Davila a little too much.

March is roaring in like a lion.  How am I ever going to find the time to rank MLB players for my rotisserie baseball drafts, and research college basketball teams for picking an NCAA bracket?

Clinton e-mail fallout (with 3 updates)

-- This Nation article by Michelle Goldberg, paraphrasingly entitled "Mess Shows Democrats Need a Primary, Not a Coronation" is the most even-handed and on-point.

Yet at a certain point it stops mattering whether coverage of Clinton is as unfair as her defenders say it is. If she‘s going to be the Democratic candidate, part of her job is not to leave herself open to this sort of thing. If she wasn’t actively skirting the law by not using a State Department e-mail address, she was being sloppy. By not keeping her official e-mails separate from her private ones, she gives Republicans a pretext to subpoena them all. At the very least, there’s going to be a drawn-out fight over access to them. Should she be forced to turn them over, her genuinely private e-mails as well as her public ones will be used against her. Imagine what Republicans would be able to do with a trove of private correspondence that Clinton never thought they’d get to see.

The whole mess underscores the immense danger for the Democrats of holding a coronation rather than a primary. Even if the front-runner were as low-drama as Obama, the party, the country and even the candidate would benefit from a genuine debate about everything from foreign policy to the financial industry. And Clinton is not low-drama. She and her husband live at the center of a constantly unfolding political soap opera with endlessly proliferating subplots. Even if they’re not always treated fairly, they also seem to pathologically court trouble. See, for example, recent stories about foreign governments making donations to the Clinton Foundation during Clinton’s State Department tenure. One of those, The Washington Post reported, “violated [the foundation’s] ethics agreement with the Obama administration.”

Maybe there’s nothing more there, or anywhere, waiting to come out. But without other credible Democrats building the infrastructures they’d need to run, there’s no plan B if something explodes. Democrats are betting the future of the country on the Clintons’ ability to avoid crippling scandal. Maybe that wager will ultimately make sense, but there’s no reason to go all in so soon.

This development fans the embers of hope belonging to both the Warrenistas and Sandersites. That's not a bad thing, IMHO.

-- Andy Borowitz also nails it.

A new poll indicates that the American people are deeply disappointed in Hillary Clinton’s State Department e-mail flap because it does not live up to the high standards of sordidness set by Clinton scandals of the past.

Davis Logsdon, who supervised the poll for the University of Minnesota’s Opinion Research Institute, said that those surveyed were “receptive and even intrigued” by the idea of a new Clinton scandal, but then were deflated when they learned what the scandal actually involved.

“When people hear the words ‘Clinton scandal,’ they expect a certain amount of sex and sleaze,” Logsdon said. “But once they find out that this one is about State Department e-mail regulations which may or may not have been disobeyed, they feel very let down.”

“In a sense, the Clintons have created this problem for themselves,” Logsdon added. “They set an extremely high bar with some very memorable scandals in the past, and for a lot of people, this one just doesn’t live up to the hype.”

The current scandal could be salvaged in the public’s eye if some of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails turn out to have sexual content, but Logsdon called that “a long shot.”

“The poll results show that there’s a genuine appetite out there for a juicy Clinton scandal,” he said. “But, sadly, there’s also a sense that maybe they did their best work in the nineties.”

That stinging bit of satire reinforces the odd truth that MSNBC has reported more heavily on the development than did CNN or even Fox.

-- Jon Stewart also cracked everybody up.

“It seems like less of a scandal and more of like a nerd snap like, ‘She’s so old, she doesn’t have an official email account.”

“I think the concern there is that the aides are the ones that get to decide which emails are appropriate to be shared as opposed to an independent arbiter,” Stewart explained. “That is why Doritos doesn’t get to decide which ingredients consumers need to know about, or why you don’t get to tell the cops which pocket to search.”

Jeebus Christmas, I'm going to miss that guy when he retires.

-- But seriously, folks... Joe Biden.

"There’s always another shoe to drop with Hillary," (Biden backer and former SC Democratic Party chair, Dick) Harpootlian said in an interview Wednesday. "Do we nominate her not knowing what’s in those e-mails?... If the e-mails were just her and her family and friends canoodling about fashion and what they’re going to do next week, that’s one thing. But the fact that she’s already turned e-mails to the Benghazi committee because she was doing official business on it means she’s going to die by 1,000 cuts on this one."

Forget for a moment that the South Carolina Democrats are about as stout as their Texas counterparts.  And all kidding aside, Dick Harpootlian has it right.

Seriously.  Joe Biden.

Cumulatively, though, these latest headlines about Clinton, along with other stories sure to come, reinforce her vulnerabilities as a candidate. Democratic primary voters are about to be reminded on a semiweekly basis of what left a lot of them so ambivalent about Hillary in 2008 — namely, the perception that the Clintons are like an unregulated industry within the party, impervious to scrutiny and contemptuous of anyone who would get in their way.

And this is why, if I were Joe Biden, and if I still harbored designs on the Oval Office down the hall, I’d be inclined to ignore what the insiders were saying. I’d run, and I’d run now.

[...]

Biden is a better candidate than most pundits have ever given him credit for. Yeah, he’s sloppy and meandering and says some nutty stuff. But that’s all part of being genuine and three-dimensional, which may be the most valuable trait in modern politics and not a bad contrast to Clinton’s robotic discipline.

Not incidentally, Biden is especially popular in Iowa, where he first campaigned for president in 1988, and where he retains unusually strong ties. (The Clintons, you may recall, have never met with great affection there.) I remember being struck, in 2008, by the regularity with which Iowa Democrats told me that Biden was their second choice and would have been first if they thought he could actually win.

Biden’s a middle-class champion who makes the case for economic fairness with more conviction than Clinton and less vitriol than Warren. He’s a serious thinker on foreign policy who opposes rampant interventionism without sounding like a pacifist. He more than holds his own as a debater.

A blood-letting primary is, really and truly, precisely what the Democratic Party needs.  Mostly because if it doesn't get that, it is officially in danger of handing the White House to the Republicans.  And consequently becoming as irrelevant nationally as they are in Texas, and South Carolina, and far too many other states.

Joe Biden sure ain't no progressive.  Since I live in the good old red-ass Lone Star State, I'll probably still vote for Jill Stein.  But Biden brings the demographic necessary for Democrats to win in 2016: blue collar white males.  Everybody might laugh at his malaprops, verbal and physical, but nobody can discount his sincerity.  He hasn't made himself wealthy in public office, and he doesn't have any dirty laundry or skeletons in the closet.  If he did, somebody would have found something other than that plagiarism thing a couple of dozen years ago by now.

So whatever happens going forward, things just got hella more interesting for Democrats.  And bloggers.

Updates (3/6): From the comments, Socratic Gadfly tells us who Eric Hothem is, and why we'll probaly be hearing his name mentioned more often in the future.  From James Rosen at a source I wish I did not have to link, the e-mail address for "hdr" on her private server appears to have had at least ten different iterations.

The application of The Harvester to clintonemail.com revealed additional email addresses besides the one that Clinton aides have insisted publicly that she used, and have said was the only one that she used, when she served as Secretary of State: namely, hdr22@clintonemail.com.

A screen grab of The Harvester’s findings provided to Fox News by the source in the hacker community – whose professional resume also boasts extensive experience in the U.S. intelligence community – lists rather similar, but nonetheless different, email addresses, including hdr@clintonemail.com, hdr18@clintonemail.com, hdr19@clintonemail.com, hdr20@clintonemail.com, and hdr21@clintonemail.com.

Also unearthed by the hacking tool were email addresses of a slightly varied structure, including h.clinton@clintonemail.com, Hillary@clintonemail.com, contact@clintonemail.com, and mau_suit@clintonemail.com.

It’s not known how many of these multiple addresses the secretary herself may have used, nor whether some may have been assigned to close aides entrusted to communicate with her on the clintonemail.com domain.

 And from The Atlantic, an e-mail that State could not find.

This is exactly why Clinton's behavior was unacceptable: It enabled her to conceal at least some official correspondence that the press and the public had a right to see, or at least to have acknowledged with an explanation, challengeable in court, of why the correspondence was exempt from the Freedom of Information Act.

Has she now turned over the Blumenthal correspondence to the State Department? Or is it still exclusively on the privately owned server that she controls? The answer may offer clues as to whether she really turned over all correspondence related to her government job, as her defenders have maintained. Either way, the private server will have helped her to evade at least one FOIA request. And we only know that much because a hacker stumbled on her emails. What, if anything, she deleted from her server may remain forever unknowable.

What the BLEEP happened to Hip Hop?

“They mine metals for the phones killing trees for the loose leaf
I write raps on both to tell you what it do, g”

-- Mike Wird, Soul Pros, Regenerative Lifestyles and Hip Hop Congress

Do you know what the 1996 Telecommunications Act and how has it influenced culture in the United States?

Have you ever heard of Lyric Committees, and the story of how record labels try to control artists money?

Why haven't artists truly been successful in organizing as a labor force when so many of them are working in our schools, youth centers, prisons and organizations?

And most importantly, what the (bleep) happened to Hip Hop?

Hip Hop Congress and Move to Amend and are partnering to present “What the Bleep Happened to Hip Hop?”, a public education campaign seeking to raise awareness of the dangerous power corporations currently wield over the hip hop industry specifically, and over our society in general.

We invite you to join us on March 14 and 15, 2015 when this unique collaboration arrives in Houston. On Saturday, we will have educational panels and participatory conversations, with an artists showcase that evening. We will close with a People's Movement Assembly on Sunday afternoon that connects to the United States Social Forum.

The cultural terrain of society is a crucial battlefront in the struggle for social justice. Culture retains its dynamism by reflecting and creating consciousness. Exploitation and oppression have always been synonymous with popular culture, from D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation to the struggle of the media justice movement in the late 90's. The United States of America, long heralded as a melting pot, has also been acknowledged as virtual factory for the commodification of culture and the production of a facsimile of culture that greatly resembles the McDonald's of thought, art, music, and humanity.

Hip Hop Congress is an international grassroots organization dedicated to evolving hip hop culture by inspiring social action and creativity within the community. Move to Amend is a national campaign to amend the US Constitution to abolish the court-created legal doctrines of corporate constitutional rights and the legal premise that money equals speech. Both organizations are explicitly committed to anti-racist and feminist organizing principles, and challenge us to organize, create and assert our humanity.

For more information on the agenda, locations, times, or to RSVP for the Educational Forum or the PMA, go to the Facebook event page and register via e-mail contacts there.

Musical artists include Don Claude, Mic Crenshaw, Shamako Noble, Faithful Five, and others.  Open Mic and Cypher.

#WhatTheBleep Happened to Hip Hop? is brought to you by Hip Hop Congress, Move to Amend, Global Fam.org, Houston Peace & Justice Center, Healthy Habitz, S.H.A.P.E. Community Center, Multi-Media Center, Harris County Green Party, For Our House at Project Row Houses, Civil Rights Law Society, Thurgood Marshall School of Law and The US Social Forum.