Not a trace of irony

"No one wants their private e-mails made public, and I think most people understand that and respect that privacy." -- Hillary Clinton, quoted in the New York Times, March 10, 2015

Ted Rall, a couple of days later (just before the NSA was forced by court order to stop reading everybody's e-mail, or so we believed):

Update: More on Clinton's laughable hypocrisy on the sanctity of the protection of classified emails.

It turns out that at least two of the emails which traversed Hillary Clinton’s personal email account and server were “top secret,” according to the inspector general for the Intelligence Community as reported by McClatchy. To describe that as reckless is an understatement given that, as AP notes, “There is no evidence she used encryption to shield the emails or her personal server from foreign intelligence services or other potentially prying eyes.” The FBI has now taken possession of that server.

When it comes to low-level government employees with no power, the Obama administration has purposely prosecuted them as harshly as possible to the point of vindictiveness: It has notoriously prosecuted more individuals under the Espionage Act of 1917 for improperly handling classified information than all previous administrations combined. 

It's not just Julian Assange or Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden.  Next...

“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m president, we will attack Iran. In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.” -- Clinton, at the 2008 AIPAC convention

Just days before Obama's nuclear agreement with Iran...

“I so hope we are able to get a deal next week that puts the lid on Iran’s nuclear weapons program,” she said. “Even if we do get such a deal, we will still have major problems from Iran. They are the world’s chief sponsor of terrorism. They use proxies like Hezbollah to sow discord and create insurgencies to destabilize governments. They are taking more and more control of a number of nations in the region, and they pose an existential threat to Israel.” -- Clinton, from Politico on July 3, 2015

Ted Rall again:

Peter Beinart:

In his book "Unthinkable", the Brookings Institution’s Kenneth Pollack notes that although Iran likely has biological weapons, it has not given them to Hezbollah. In 1982, when Lebanese Shia leaders asked Iran to send troops to repel Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, the then-supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, refused. In 1996, Iran pressured Hezbollah to agree to a ceasefire with Israel. And as Trita Parsi notes in his indispensable book on Iranian-Israeli relations, "Treacherous Alliance", Israel’s then-defense minister, Yitzhak Mordechai, even praised Tehran for its efforts to return Israeli soldiers that Hezbollah had captured. In 2001, according to Parsi, leaders of Hamas and Islamic Jihad vented frustration that Iran was not offering them greater assistance during the Second Intifada. And in 2003, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Iran offered the United States a grand bargain that included an offer to cut ties to Hamas and Islamic Jihad and pressure Hezbollah to shut down its military wing if the United States ended sanctions and restored diplomatic ties.

More recent history of the vastly exaggerated claims of Iran's military threat to Israel or the US or anybody else at that link.  Last...

In a video of a private Clinton speech posted to YouTube (in June of 2013), Clinton told a Canadian audience that she hoped the U.S. would elect a woman to the White House because it would send "exactly the right historical signal" to men, women and children. She said women in politics need to "dare to compete" and the nation needs to "take that leap of faith."

"Let me say this, hypothetically speaking, I really do hope that we have a woman president in my lifetime," Clinton said at a women's conference in Toronto on Thursday night. "And whether it's next time or the next time after that, it really depends on women stepping up and subjecting themselves to the political process, which is very difficult."

The former secretary of state told the cheering audience that she would "certainly vote for the right woman to be president."

Rall:

Hillary Clinton news

She gets some bad and some good.  Good news first.

-- jobsanger is cautioning everybody not to read too much into the numerous and massive public crowds Bernie Sanders is drawing, and read more into early polling.  Here's a poll we'll have to wait to see if Ted makes a bar graph of.

Sanders has eclipsed Clinton by a 44 to 37 percent margin, according to a new Franklin Pierce University/Boston Herald poll that was first reported by the Boston newspaper Tuesday evening.

The previous FPU/Herald poll taken in March had Sanders trailing Clinton 44 to 8.

Ted puts great emphasis on these six-months-out polling figures, blogging the latest one every single night and illustrating them with a bar graph tool.  He's smart enough to understand this is folly, but that doesn't stop him from spinning it out there every 24 hours.  Ted is your confidence man if you're a nervous Hillary supporter.

-- More on the bright side (and the most legitimate reason for not being concerned about Clinton's nomination prospects).

Black Americans view Hillary Clinton far more favorably than they do any other presidential contender, according to a Gallup survey released Monday.

Eighty percent of black adults have a favorable impression of the Democratic front-runner and former secretary of state. Even when taking into account the percentage who view Clinton unfavorably, she still has a 68 percent net favorability rating among black Americans, a group that analysts at the Cook Political Report have called the "overlooked key to 2016."

Charlie Cook is, of course, correct.

Clinton's favorability rating among black Americans eclipses those of the other Democratic hopefuls. The next highest rating belongs to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who is running for president as a Democrat and has a net 23 percent favorability rating among black adults. Sanders' relationship with the black community has come under heightened scrutiny since the start of his presidential campaign. Black Lives Matters activists recently shut down a Seattle rally where the senator was scheduled to speak.

For her part, Clinton is attempting to stave off the circumstances Sanders is being forced to endure.  With her campaign appearances devoted to meeting with large donors behind closed doors and no media allowed, and with her Secret Service protection, she isn't likely to be interrupted anyway.  For his part, Sanders has moved quickly and effectively to address this most glaring shortcoming in his appeal to Democratic primary voters.  It just isn't -- won't be -- enough.

As long as BLM is stalking his rallies to disrupt, carried out by false flag operatives, improperly focused, and which they simply could not get away with at any other candidate's rallies, it's going to keep being a problem for him.  And without digressing too far into the whole BLM/Bernie issue, a lot of good analysis can be found here.  The executive summary: BLM says that Sanders and white progressives aren't progressive enough on black social justice.  White progressives taking offense to this (very accurate) criticism are telling BLM protesters and their sympathizers "you're doing it wrong", which pushes the whitesplaining button, and around we go again.

If you would prefer less abstract and more concrete, like an electoral math strategy for Bernie's uphill slog, here you go.  Everything there is too valuable to excerpt; read it all.

Now for the bad news for Clinton.

-- She capitulated to the screamers in Congress and gave up her e-mail server yesterday.  Conservatives are already yelling fire.

Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign casts her decision to turn over her personal email server to the Justice Department as cooperating with investigators. Her Republican critics suggest that the move and new revelations about classified information points to her malfeasance as secretary of state.

Two emails that traversed Clinton's personal system were subsequently given one of the government's highest classification ratings, a Republican lawmaker said.

Federal investigators have begun looking into the security of Clintons' email setup amid concerns from the inspector general for the intelligence community that classified information may have passed through the system. There is no evidence she used encryption to prevent prying eyes from accessing the emails or her personal server.

[...]

On Tuesday, Clinton attorney David Kendall gave to the Justice Department three thumb drives containing copies of work-related emails sent to and from her personal email addresses via her private server.

Kendall gave the thumb drives, containing copies of roughly 30,000 emails, to the FBI after the agency determined he could not remain in possession of the classified information contained in some of the emails, according to a U.S. official briefed on the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly. The State Department previously had said it was comfortable with Kendall keeping the emails at his Washington law office.

Also Tuesday, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa said two emails that traversed Clinton's personal system were deemed "Top Secret, Sensitive Compartmented Information" — a rating that is among the government's highest classifications. Grassley said the inspector general of the nation's intelligence community had reported the new details about the higher classification to Congress on Tuesday.

This e-mail server thing is going to be a boil on her ass for some time to come.  Hope she's using the right ointment to get rid of it.

Rick Perry's army goes from mercenary to volunteer overnight

This is my favorite fundraising story of the 2016 campaign (and maybe ever).  The lawyers, guns, and money have all moved on.

Updated at 10:32 p.m.: The Rick Perry presidential campaign has stopped paying his staff at the national headquarters in Austin as well as in the early caucus and primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, The Washington Post and The Texas Tribune reported late Monday. The report cited a Republican familiar with the Perry campaign who demanded anonymity because of the sensitivity of the situation.

Original post: In a clear sign of financial woes, the Rick Perry presidential campaign is no longer issuing pay checks to his staff in South Carolina.

The development was first reported by the National Journal.

South Carolina state director Katon Dawson told the Journal, “Pay is only one reason people do this. We’ll be able to live off the land for a while.”

The last pay checks were issued two weeks ago, Dawson said.

Once again, our glorious-haired, shaded-by-indictment former governor will be among the early exits in the presidential primary.  He had a good run for a long time, but karma is catching up its ledger with him now.

Update: This piece from the CSM suggests he's going to be abe to hold out a while longer.

In Perry’s case, two wealthy Texans – retired data company founder Darwin Deason and pipeline company executive Kelcy L. Warren – are largely responsible for backing his two super PACs, Opportunity and Freedom and Opportunity and Freedom I, Politico reports. Between them, Mr. Deason and Mr. Warren contributed $11 million of the $12.8 million the two groups raised in the first half of the year.

A third super PAC, created in July, collected another $4 million from a single donor, according to CNN.

“Here are the facts: We have plenty of money to put him in position to finish in the top three or even win Iowa,” (the senior adviser to Perry's super PACs, Mr. Austin) Barbour told the Times.  

So if we indeed have him to kick around some more, that's not all bad, either.