Friday, August 14, 2015

Our Watcher's Council Results

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The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week's Watcher's Council match up.

"Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, Oh, Oh!" - Lady Macbeth in Shakespeare's Macbeth , Act V, Scene 1

"Character is destiny." - Attributed to Greek philosopher Hereclitus, 500 BC


"There's hostility to lying, and there should be." -Bob Woodward


""Painful as the task is to describe the dark side of our affairs, it sometimes becomes a matter of indispensable necessity." -George Washington


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This week's winning essay,Joshuapundit's -#Hillary Lied About Her E-Mails, Broke The Law And What It Really Means is my take on the scandal concerning Hillary Clinton's private server during her tenure as Secretary of State, the serious issues actually involved and ultimately, what's behind the curtain. Here's a slice:


Once again, Mrs. Clinton has revealed to us that if she tells you the sun is shining, you'd better make sure you have an umbrella handy.

Most polls show that the majority of Americans, for some odd reason consider her untrustworthy and an out and out liar.CNN’s national poll shows that 57% of Americans see her that way, and ABC News and the Wall Street Journal put that number at 52%.

She's continued to sing the old Right Wing Conspiracy song, and to claim, as she did in an interview with CNN's servile Diane Keillor, “When I mailed anybody in the government, it would go into the government system,” she said. “Now I didn’t have to turn over anything. I chose to turn over 55,000 pages because I wanted to go above and beyond what was expected of me because I knew the vast majority of everything that was official already was in the State Department system.”

There are enough outright lies in that small paragraph to warrant a serious trial.

Even storing Federal records on a private server is a serious violation of the Federal Records Act for reasons that should be obvious, and a violation of the agreement Mrs. Clinton signed when she started at the State Department. Mrs. Clinton was likewise required to turn over any and all records in her possession to government, which she quite obviously did not do.

Not only did Mrs. Clinton fail to turn over work-related emails, but she and her staff also edited some of those emails before submitting them, as the Examiner's Sarah Westwood reported.

In legalese, this shows intent. Mrs, Clinton intended to deceive congress.Not only that, but the committee obtained a number of e-mails that were work related and were either edited or somehow missing from the 55,000 Mrs. Clinton turned in:

The missing materials, which the State Department says it does not have, came to Congress by other means. They include writings about the jockeying for oil contracts in Libya after President Obama engaging in a war without congressional approval to overthrow Moammar Gaddafi. This comes among her back-and-forth emails with Sidney Blumenthal, a former staffer who had been barred from employment in the Obama administration, to continue offering his insight and advice on Libya. [...]

But the proof of intent to deceive comes in the fact that Clinton or her staff actually edited some of the emails and turned over censored versions to State before destroying her copy of the originals.

I think we can reasonably be certain that cash donations to the Clinton Foundation in exchange for an inside track on oil deals or for Federal contracts involving Libya and other areas were the subject of some of these communications, but what's already known is damaging enough.

Another, much more serious problem than the usual lies and corruption is the fact that Mrs. Clinton's private server was almost certainly hacked by foreign agents. Her server lacked the normal security given to classified information within the government's official system. Professionals who have examined the security of Hillary private e-mail account have said that the question is not whether the account was hacked, but to what degree.

Not only were classified communications almost certainly compromised, but there's not telling what kind of personal, perhaps even indictable messages might have been scooped up. Imagine a president in the midst of negotiations with a foreign power like China, Russia or Iran suddenly confronted discretely with an ultimatum that unless she made certain far reaching concessions, certain information she desperately didn't want revealed would be made public.

Federal Law(36 CFR 1234.24) requires agencies to collect all records from “external electronic mail systems” so that they can be stored inside government archives. There's also a federal law (44 USC 3106) that authorizes legal action through the Attorney General and the Justice Department “for the recovery of records” that are threatened by destruction, deletion or erasure. Willfully destroying a federal record is a felony, punishable by fine and imprisonment. Mrs. Clinton is already guilty of that crime as well by admitting she destroyed her server.

Like I said, a lot of lies in one paragraph.

Mrs. Clinton felt free to destroy her private server and laugh at the subpoenas from congress because she knew that President Obama's Attorney General and the DOJ were not going to take any action against her, again for obvious reasons. Among them is that there's no longer a requirement to do so.


To find out why,and what's really behind this go to the link.

In our non-Council category, the winner was Rueben Navarette Jr. with a moving piece, I Don’t Know if I’m Pro-Choice After Planned Parenthood Videos submitted by The Watcher.

This took courage and some obvious soul searching to write. It's always a threshold moment when person realizes that a belief they've held for some time might be a grave error.

Recommended.

Here are this week’s full results. Great Satan's Girlfriend, Ask Marion and Rhymes With Right were unable to vote this week, but none were affected by the normal 2/3 vote penalty for not voting:

Council Winners


Non-Council Winners


See you next week!

Make sure to tune in every Monday for the Watcher’s Forum. and every  Tuesday morning, when we reveal the weeks' nominees for Weasel of the Week!

And remember, every Wednesday, the Council has its weekly contest with the members nominating two posts each, one written by themselves and one written by someone from outside the group for consideration by the whole Council. The votes are cast by the Council, and the results are posted on Friday morning.

 It’s a weekly magazine of some of the best stuff written in the blogosphere, and you won’t want to miss it...or any of the other fantabulous Watcher's Council content.

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