There was a hoopla a couple years ago about officials using “secret e-mail addresses” that weren’t publicly known. I understand why they would do it: they want to be sure that e-mails coming from the president aren’t drowned in a sea of rants from Joe the conspiracy theorist, but at the end of the day, e-mails related to official government business should be subject to open record keeping.
Presidential records are by law requestable under the Freedom of Information Act 5 years after the president leaves office (provided they aren’t classified). I don’t know how it shakes down for other positions in the executive, but it seems like similar rules ought to hold.
I don’t necessarily think Clinton was trying to be nefarious, she probably really did do it because she thought it would be easier and didn’t consider the implications. But it definitely wasn’t OK, and yeah, at this point the Archives and Records Administration should get her whole account to go through.
No. No one is claiming she couldn’t have a personal email in addition to a business one. And she could use her personal one to do campaign-related communications.
In fact, not having a business email makes her personal account all the more vulnerable to being rummaged through by people she doesn’t want to have access. If she did normal business though normal channels, the chances of forcing disclosure of her personal accounts are much lower. Presumably there would have to be some specific evidence that she was communicating business outside of normal channels. But as it is now, that fact is indisputable.
Where were the State Department career employees? Where were the lawyers? Unbelievably stupid. Unfortunately now we going to have to listen to all of the right wing conspiracy theories. I’m sure there will be endless congressional hearings. :smack:
BTW, isn’t the NYT part of that horrible liberal media we’re always hearing about.?
If the possibility of misrepresentation by Republicans and Fox News is considered a reasonable excuse for violating transparency requirements, we might as well eliminate all open records and freedom of information laws right now.
The email address thing seems like a typical old-fogie response: “It took me years to figure out how to use email… now I have to switch to another email system and learn all over again? No thank YOU. And since I’m the boss, we’ll be sticking with this one, thank you very much…”
While 40,000 jobs aren’t nothing, the fact is that that many jobs, even if they appeared all at once, are the difference between a kinda disappointing month with respect to job creation (say 210,000 new jobs) and a decent, respectable month (250K new jobs). So while I regard that as a factor on the plus side of the ledger, it’s not a huge factor.
One thing I’ve wondered in all this is, why is the U.S. involved at all? Why don’t the Canadians run a pipeline to Lake Superior and transfer it to tankers there?
I’m sure there must be a reason, but damned if I’ve ever heard an explanation.
Because Keystone Phases I, II and III already supply +500,000 barrels of oil to mid-west and gulf refineries. XL is simply a new link with a bigger pipe that will also link oil from Montana and other US states to the gulf.
In Canada there is currently talk of moving the oil east to refineries in the Maritimes using more or less refitted, existing pipelines.
I am a California State employee. I have an official university email account. I knew, when I started, that I was supposed to use this account for my official business. And I knew that, from the point of view of accountability and professionalism, even before i knew that there are actual laws and regulations requiring that my official business be conducted using my official email address.
Hundreds of thousands of government employees at every level understand this. The idea that the Secretary of State—a woman who has also spent eight years in the White House and also eight years as a United States Senator—doesn’t know how this works, and/or doesn’t have people who know how this works, in fucking laughable, and tends to the conclusion that her motivations were nefarious, whether for reasons of selfishness (they’re MY emails, and I want them for my memoirs!) or lack of transparency.
I find it a little difficult to believe that the Secretary of State would legitimately be communicating directly with foreign leaders by e-mail without going through an underling. More importantly, if the other party retained such mail, they could possibly reveal embarrassing content in order to undermine the former Secretary’s credibility, meaning that Clinton has placed herself in a dangerous position. Headers can be faked, and if she had admin control of the mail server (including its logs), they could just say that she must have deleted that mail from it.
If she knew what she was doing, she knew she was hiding email from government archives. IMO that in and of itself is a nefarious reason. It is a dereliction of duty.
And specifically, Lake Erie is connected to Lake Ontario for shipping by the Welland Canal.
To what extent does this matter? It sounds as if once the oil gets to the other end of the pipeline, it could go pretty much anywhere to be refined. Might go to U.S. to be refined, or it might go to South America, and there’s no reason to think we’d get the bulk of it. Am I wrong about that?
I fully agree. I hate it when it turns out that the rules are just for the ‘little people.’ Fuck that shit with a backhoe.
This is why we need a genuine primary contest on the Dem side. Because the GOP is so far off the deep end, Hillary can get away with stuff like this without having to worry about criticism from the left; all she has to do is say, “Suck it up - do you want President Scott Walker?” And she’s right: barring a credible primary challenge, we’re stuck with her.
I don’t know the answer, but it raises the question of how big a ship can fit through these locks? At a wild guess, and oceangoing supertanker wouldn’t.
From Wikipedia, per the earlier link: " The maximum permissible length of a ship in this canal is 225.5 metres (740 feet)." (Damn, that’s big, but I guess that’s how big they make oceangoing vessels these days.) Also says the locks are 766 feet long, 80 feet wide, and 25 feet deep, but it didn’t say what the maximum ship width and depth were; I assume that they include some buffer space, just like the length does.
Another Wiki cite: “… While a typical T2 tanker of the World War II era was 532 feet (162 m) long and had a capacity of 16,500 DWT, the ultra-large crude carriers (ULCC) built in the 1970s were over 1,300 feet (400 m) long and had a capacity of 500,000 DWT. …”
There’s some more comments suggesting they’ve been getting bigger since.