This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: “The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves”

  • “Follow the Money.”

    We’ve all heard about the latest Clintoon email revelations.  Everyone’s probably also heard by now that the FBI has reopened their Clintoon email investigation due to a Weiner-related discovery.  (smile)

    But for Clintoon, that’s likely not her only potential major legal issue.  You see, it seems that the FBI has also been quietly pursuing its investigation of the Clintoon Foundation’s finances over the past year also – even though there appears to have been substantial pressure from the Department of Justice to either “slow-roll” or squash it.

    Indeed, the FBI’s investigation of the Clintoon Foundation is reportedly now “high priority”.  One media outlet has gone so far to cite FBI internal sources as saying that a pay-for-pay indictment regarding the Clintoon Foundation is now “likely”, “barring obstruction in some way” by the Justice Department.

    The FBI apparently isn’t the only agency investigating the Clintoon Foundation, either.  Turns out the IRS also is investigating the Clintoon Foundation – with focus on its tax status.

    Follow the money, indeed.

    Oh, and FBI sources also say with high confidence that Clintoon’s email server appears to have been hacked by at least five (!) Foreign Intelligence Services.  So it’s a virtual certainty that anything that was stored on that server is now in the possession of multiple foreign nations.  Nice.

    And while we’re discussing Clintoon email issues: it also seems as if both Justice Department and State Department officials were in contact with Clintoon campaign officials concerning the matter. State department officials appear to have coordinated with the Clintoon campaign concerning the department’s position on her use of “private” email before the matter was revealed to the public.

    Specifically, it appears as if the Clintoon campaign was provided an advance copy of a State department statement or press release on the matter – and both requested and got at least one change to the draft release before it was made public. It also appears that at least one senior Justice department official later tipped John Podesta, her campaign manager, that another senior Justice department official would be testifying before Congress shortly and was “(l)ikely to get questions on State Department emails.”

    Stay tuned.  The next few days – along with the weeks afterwards – could end up being one helluva bumpy ride.

  • “No Significant Voter Fraud”, Eh?

    Well, riddle me this,      Socialists      Progressives       Leftists      my liberal “brethren” – what would you call this little “escapade”?  (Emphasis added)

    Jerry Mosna was gardening outside his San Pedro, Calif., home Saturday when he noticed something odd: Two stacks of 2016 ballots on his mailbox.

    The 83 ballots, each unused, were addressed to different people, all supposedly living in his elderly neighbor’s two-bedroom apartment.

    “I think this is spooky,” Mosna said. “All the different names, none we recognize, all at one address.”

    To add insult to injury:  Mosna and his wife initially got the “run around” when they tried to report the matter to proper authorities.  They first contacted the LAPD, who referred them to the Post Office – who in turn referred them to the LA County Registrar’s office.  To their credit, the LA County Registrar’s office apparently took the matter seriously.

    Fox News has a story on the matter.  It’s worth reading.

    “No significant voter fraud” in America?  Yeah, right.  “No significant voter fraud” my ass.

    We seriously need positive voter ID laws nationwide.

  • A Quick Rundown on the Current Clintoon Investigations

    No, I’m not going to list the details – because it seems the UK’s Daily Mail has already done that.  You can read their rundown here.  It’s pretty decent.

    However, as a rundown concerning Clintoon sleaze it’s unfortunately quite incomplete.  It doesn’t even mention Bill “Have a Cigar” Clintoon and his adventures on the “Lolita Express” – or his past sexual “misadventures”.  Or the Whitewater matter.  Or on the White House travel office persecution.  Or apparent DNC dirty dealing connected to the current campaign.  Or a host of other questionable conduct by one or both Clintoons.

    Still, what’s there is quite . . . interesting – and hugely damning for those not wearing ideological blinders.

    Sheesh.  You or I would be in jail by now.  And we’d have been there for months if not years.

  • Yer 2017 ObamaCare Enrollment Period Update

    The 2017 premiums for that      Pathetically Puerile Abominable Collection of Asininity
    “wonderful” law called the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act – AKA “ObamaCare” – have been released.

    The numbers for next year?  Well, as they might have said where I was raised:  “Them numbers ain’t lookin’ so good.”

    Nationwide, for the 39 states using the Federal healthcare exchange the average premium increase is about 25%.  But if your premium “only” goes up 25% next year when you purchase healthcare through the Federal insurance exchange – count your blessings.  In many states premiums increase by far more than that.

    In 10 states, a “Silver” plan (2nd lowest before tax credit) purchased through an insurance exchange has a premium increase of 40% or more.  And in Arizona, that Silver plan rate increase puts the emphasis on “more” – as in, next year it will cost a whopping 145% more.

    Hey, they’ve got the proverbial “captive audience” – coverage is legally mandatory, remember?  So yeah, they can do that and get away with it.

    Choices are much more limited next year as well.  In 11 states, only one or two insurers are offering insurance through an insurance exchange.  So much for “robust competition” happening simply because “the government said so”, eh?

    Seriously:  anyone with common sense could have seen this coming.  Insurers don’t exist as public services; they exist to make money – and they can’t do that at anything approaching a reasonable cost to consumers under the conditions mandated by ObamaCare.  (Not being able to exclude preexisting conditions essentially guarantees that.)  The result was predictable:  many insurers opted to leave the marketplace, and those which remained raised prices through the roof.

    Result:  few or no choices, and they’re all expensive as hell.  Ain’t legalized monopoly grand?

    Oh, and since all this utter idiocy is subsidized by the US taxpayer . . . wanna guess who’s paying a sh!tload of the cost?  Yeah, you’re right:  US taxpayers.  You and me.

    But never fear, fellow citizens!  The current       phalanx of fools fecklessly fornicating things up by-the-numbers in DC       Administration still predicts an increase in ObamaCare enrollment of 9% this coming year!  All is simply wonderful, right?

    Yeah, right.  Just like I’m the Emperor of Japan.

    Oh, and remember that “Medicaid expansion” that was thrown in as a “sweetener” to drum up support for this      imbecilic squandering of Federal tax money      soup-sandwich of a Federal program?  Well, it looks like that “sweetener” means Medicaid is going to cost the Federal government somewhere around $550+ billion annually 7 years from now – with states ponying up another $160 billion on top of that.

    Doesn’t exactly sound so sweet when the bills finally come due, eh?

    Here are a couple of graphics from the 2nd article linked above.  They’re quite illustrative of the very predicable problems we’re seeing with Obama’s Abomination.  They are linked here for your convenience.  The first shows the premium increases by state for a “Silver” plan; the second, the drop-off in participation by insurers in the Federal exchange in various states.

    The second link above explains the death spiral in which ObamaCare finds itself today in detail.  Yeah, that’s a death-rattle cough you’re hearing.

    Whether that death-rattle cough is from ObamaCare or the US economy remains to be seen.  Remember:  it’s the latter which ultimately is funding this Socialist travesty.  And it’s being funded with money forcibly confiscated by the Federal government that would otherwise be put to  productive use in the private sector.

    Socialism works great until you run out of other people’s money.

  • Yeah, Looks Like the POTUS Lied. Again. Surprised?

    Last March, the POTUS was asked when he learned about the Clintoon “private” email server.

    His response?  “The same time everybody else learned it through news reports.”

    Well, it looks like the man either is monumentally dense – or he       shamelessly lied through his teeth       “misspoke” here.  Because here’s a quote from an email written by Cheryl Mills, a close Clintoon confident, late that night.  The email was written after Mills had learned of the POTUS’s statement.

    “We need to clean this up – he has emails from her – they do not say state.gov.”

    Oopsie.

    Yeah, it certainly seems the POTUS lied.  Again.

    So . . . what else is new?

    . . .

    Let’s recap the Clintoon email matter.  Here are my “Top 10 Hits” from the whole matter.

    1. While SECSTATE, Clintoon used an unauthorized, “private” and abysmally-badly secured email server to conduct government business.  This is against US government policy, and arguably violates Federal law.

    2.  As the second link above also shows, Clintoon had the State department change IT policy so she could use her “private” Blackberry and that unauthorized “private” email account from within secure DoS areas.

    3.  The POTUS received email from Clintoon originating at her “private”, unauthorized email address.  Given Mills’ concern, obviously at least some of that email to the POTUS from Clintoon’s unauthorized “private” email server was both official business and was sent while Clintoon was SECSTATE.

    4.  The POTUS thus knew that Clintoon was using a private email address for official government business prior to 7 March 2015.  (Well, either that or he’s a totally clueless fool – take your pick.  A “.com” email address isn’t one provided by the US government.)  But when asked point-blank when and how he learned Clintoon was using an unauthorized private address for government business, he publicly lied about when he learned that fact.

    5.  Multiple instances of highly classified material were later found to have been stored on Clintoon’s unauthorized, poorly-secured “private” server – including both SCI and Special Access Program material.  Some of it was marked properly; much of the more sensitive material should have been blindingly obvious as classified to someone with Clintoon’s experience and security indoctrinations, whether marked or not.

    6.  None of those classified spills were reported by Clintoon (or anyone else) when discovered, as is required by Federal law.  Intentional failure to report such unauthorized storage of classified information is a Federal felony.

    7.  Once the matter became public, Clintoon’s unauthorized, unsecured “private” email server was wiped.  It appears to have been wiped well after the Federal government had begun investigating the matter.  Sophisticated tools were used to wipe it. The administrator of Clintoon’s unauthorized “private” email server apparently also sought advice on how to sanitize “VIP identities” from email archives on Reddit – also after the Federal government had begun investigating the matter.

    8.  It’s a shoe-in that Clintoon’s p!ss-poorly secured server was penetrated by foreign intelligence services.  It likely was penetrated by more than one such foreign intelligence service.

    9.  Material contained on that unsecured, unauthorized email server was sufficient to identify at least one US intelligence source.  That source was later taken into custody and executed by the nation about which he was providing information to the US.

    10.  The FBI whitewashed the whole matter, and refused to prosecute clear and obvious violations of Federal law.

    Those are just the national security-related “hits”.  I haven’t even touched on the evidence of possible “pay-for-play” corruption, abuse of government resources, and unethical DNC-press collusion the Clintoon emails recovered or made public to date seem to show.

    You or I would be in jail by now.

    I guess it’s good to have serious “top cover”.

  • Yet More Falsehoods

    Remember those claims by Clintoon supporters that you couldn’t believe the Wikileaks emails?  You know, especially those claims by DNC chief Donna Brazile that the Wikileaks emails had been “doctored”?

    Well, looks like it’s indeed time to raise the “bullsh!t” flag.  But the reason is not because the emails have been “doctored”.

    You see, the Clintoon email server “hillaryclinton.com” that processed the email Brazille was specifically questioned about – the email where she stated that she’d been slipped debate questions in advance and was passing one of them on to Clintoon – uses a verification process for outgoing email.  The process it uses is an accepted industry standard called DomainKeys Identified Mail, or DKIM.

    DKIM verifies a given email’s source using a digital signature, ensuring that it actually came from the host that purports to have sent it and isn’t a fake from a spammer.  A side benefit of such a digital signature is that the message’s content is also verified – and any later alterations to that content can be readily detected.

    As noted in this article, the Brazile email in question checks out.  Its DKIM signature validates correctly; that means the email in fact came from the domain in question and has not been altered.

    Oopsie.

    Further:  per this publicly-available tool, the Clintoon email server “hillaryclinton.com” which sent the Brazile email in question uses a 1024-bit RSA key.  (To check that yourself, enter “google” in the selector field and “hillaryclinton.com” for the domain.)  That in turn means it’s not vulnerable to known feasible attacks on shorter RSA keys which might allow alteration without detection.

    Finally, Google hosts the “hillaryclinton.com” email domain.  They know a thing or two about security and key management.  So a “lost private key” claim (which might also allow alteration without detection) is likewise specious.

    In short:  yeah, they’re lying.  Through their teeth.  Yet again.  And the press is aiding and abetting their lies.

    Surprised?

  • Border Security “Overemphasized”? Hardly.

    Many people claim that the US is wasting money on border security operations.  In fact, some go so far as to say that we should have open borders, advocating an utterly ridiculous and nonexistent “right to migrate” – and thus don’t need to control our border at all.

    Others say the threat from terrorism is “overemphasized”.  In fact, some people openly proclaim both of these (no need for border security and the threat from terrorism being overemphasized) to be true.

    Well, “Riddle me this, Batman”:  just how many encounters were there in the US with known and suspected terrorists during the one-year period ending 20 July 2016?

    If you guessed more than 7,700  – or an average of more than 21 every day  – give yourself a gold star.

    I’m not joking. 

    I’m normally a bit hesitant to use Breitbart as a primary source.  But here, the author at Breitbart seems to have gotten access to bona fide documentation of his claims – documentation, as in an official briefing prepared by the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center.  The 7,700+ figure comes from the FBI briefing.

    No, all of those known/suspected terrorists weren’t radical Islamists.  And yes, some of the reports were doubtless false alarms.

    But in the one state for which the FBI gave detailed figures, over half were assessed to be Islamic radicals.  And even if only 10% of the reports nationwide are accurate, that still means we have somewhere over 700 terrorists running around loose.  Recent news (the San Bernardino massacre, the Pulse nightclub shooting, the NYC bombings, and possibly the WA mall shooting) certainly proves the number isn’t zero.

    And if you’re wondering how this ties to border security:  from looking over the sketchy data available, it certainly appears that a helluva lot of the foreign terrorists currently in the US likely came into the country by crossing the US border illegally.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that preventing such illegal crossings makes getting terrorists into the US significantly more difficult.

    The biggest issue with US border security is not that it’s a waste of time.  Rather, the biggest problem is that we’re still in denial.  We’re still not taking it seriously enough.

    And I’m wondering how many more attacks – and dead US citizens – it will take until we do.

  • “Thoroughly vetting” refugees? Hardly.

    From an internal DHS memo concerning issues with processing applications for refugee status:

    “Refugee fraud is easy to commit, yet not easy to investigate,” the undated memo says.

    The memo said there are clear instances where “bad actors … have exploited this program,” gaining a foothold in the U.S. through bogus refugee claims.

    Gee – thanks, Captain Obvious.  No one would ever have guessed that might be the case!

    But that’s not even the “money quote”.  That would be this one (emphasis added):

    The U.S. has relaxed requirements for refugees to prove they are who they say they are, and at times may rely solely on testimony. That makes it easier for bogus applicants to conspire to get approved, according to the department memo, which was obtained by the House Judiciary and Oversight committees.

    Yeah, you’re reading that correctly.  Sometimes DHS simply takes people’s word for who they are and why they’re trying to get into the US if they’re claiming to be “refugees”.

    The memo’s warnings were, of course, ignored by senior DHS officials – or perhaps never made it to them.  One DHS senior official has claimed “never to have seen it”.

    The Washington Times has a good article today discussing the subject.  It’s IMO worth a read, even if it will p!ss you off.