davidm
March 9, 2015, 9:27pm
19782
Lindsey Graham has never sent an email.
After this interview he hitched up his horse and buggy and went home to split some firewood for his stove.
davidm
March 9, 2015, 9:42pm
19783
And his handlers got on this quick. I guess this is the best they could come up with.https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-03-09/lindsey-graham-explains-why-he-doesn-t-use-e-mail
“What I do, basically, is that I’ve got iPads, and I play around,” Graham explained. “But I don’t e-mail. I’ve tried not to have a system where I can just say the first dumb thing that comes to my mind. I’ve always been concerned. I can get texts, and I call you back, if I want. I get a text, and I respond not by sending you a text, but calling you if I think what you asked is worthy enough for me calling you. I’m not being arrogant, but I’m trying to jealously guard myself in terms of being able to think through problems and not engage in chat all day. I’ve had a chance to kind of carve out some time for myself not responding to every 15-second crisis.”
So naturally, he’s one of the experts on the Senate subcommittee for technology and privacy.
Kind of like Inhofe, the snowball-wielding climate change denier kook, being chairman of the committee on the Environment.
It’s not working ('cause I really don’t want to contemplate a world where Lindsey Graham says things that are dumber than the things he does say)!
CMC fnord!
davidm
March 9, 2015, 10:00pm
19787
Graham seems to be saying that he doesn’t use email because he wants to take time to think through his answers.
How in hell does that make the least bit of sense? If you get a question in an email you can think about it as long as you want (within reason) and take time composing the answer and no one will think anything of it. If someone asks you a question in a phone conversation you either answer it immediately or appear as if you’re stalling.
So email meets his requirements better than talking on the phone!
**Rhythmdvl **is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life.
Whew! That’s a load off my mind. I’ll never again have to worry about my posts showing up in a Google search.
davidm
March 9, 2015, 11:29pm
19791
Yeah. Overall it should be crawling this place a lot less often.
Morgyn
March 10, 2015, 2:39am
19792
I preferred Hot Bot. I loved being able to set up boolean search strings.
Alltheweb was always the best search engine before they succumbed to our robot overlords.
How much of that is knowing how many people can’t?
Senator Tom Cotton, who organized that Logan Act violating letter to Iran, says he fully intends on disrupting the State Department’s talks with Iran.
Morgyn
March 10, 2015, 3:22am
19796
Actually, none. I know too many geeks who could set up FAR better searches than I could with it. However, I knew enough that I was able to get more targetted results than just typing in a bunch of words and hoping.
How I wish eBay would bring back the boolean lite searches you used to be able to use. “-Atari” is nothing like “Atari”.
This article brings up some interesting points
But there are a couple of problems with this constitutional lesson. The first hitch is that contrary to the letter’s premise, Iran’s leadership actually has access to a great deal of understanding about how the U.S. works: as The Economist noted last year and users reminded the Twitterverse last night, Iran’s presidential cabinet presently features more members with doctorates from U.S. universities than Obama’s cabinet does.
Bolding mine. I haven’t heard this on any news reports, including those about the Irani minister’s response to the Senate letter.
And the second issue, which is perhaps more alarming for a GOP only just becoming reacquainted with Senate control, is that a legal luminary from the senators’ own party now says they got the Constitution wrong.
Jack Goldsmith, a Harvard University law professor and former top legal official in the George W. Bush administration, offered the lawmakers their own lesson early Monday morning.
Writing for the blog Lawfare, Goldsmith noted that the senators mistakenly say in their message that the Senate “must ratify” any treaty. In fact, he points out, the Senate’s role is to give the president its consent for a treaty – and to recognize that ratifying it is the president’s choice.
“This is a technical point that does not detract from the letter’s message that any administration deal with Iran might not last beyond this presidency,” Goldsmith wrote. “But in a letter purporting to teach a constitutional lesson, the error is embarrassing.”
Again, my bolding.
There’s also this account of Irani Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif’s response to the letter:
Cotton needn’t have bothered with the translation. Zarif is more than capable of reading the Republicans’ letter in English. He attended prep school in San Francisco, San Francisco State University, Columbia University, and the University of Denver’s School of International Studies (where, Zarif told The New Yorker’s Robin Wright, a professor who had taught GOP foreign policy icon Condoleezza Rice once quipped to the young Iranian, “In Denver, we produce liberals like Javad Zarif, not conservatives like Condi Rice.”)
Zarif, leading his nation’s negotiations with the U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Russia and China, put that education to use in his response Monday to the Republican message, which suggested that Iran’s leaders “may not fully understand our constitutional system.”
Zarif answered that it was Cotton and the 46 other Republican senators who signed his letter who suffered from a lack of “understanding.”
“The authors may not fully understand that in international law, governments represent the entirety of their respective states, are responsible for the conduct of foreign affairs, are required to fulfil the obligations they undertake with other states and may not invoke their internal law as justification for failure to perform their international obligations,” Zarif said, according to Iran’s government-controlled Tasnim News Agency.
He suggested that the Republican warning that a successor to President Barack Obama could undo any agreement with Iran was baseless. Zarif said the “change of administration does not in any way relieve the next administration from international obligations undertaken by its predecessor.”
I wish Zarif was in charge of the GOP in the same way the GOP fawned over Putin as an example of a good leader
Did we cover this story? There is no climate change, you may not speak of it, it has not been proven. Because, our state’s highest elevation is 300’, so we need it to not be happening. If we do not mention it, we will all be ok.
(http://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article12983720.html )"]The state of Florida is the region most susceptible to the effects of global warming in this country, according to scientists… But you would not know that by talking to officials at the Florida Department of Environmental Protection … DEP officials have been ordered not to use the term “climate change” or “global warming” in any official communications …
The policy goes beyond semantics and has affected reports, educational efforts and public policy in a department with about 3,200 employees and $1.4 billion budget.
“We were told not to use the terms ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming’ or ‘sustainability,’” said Christopher Byrd, an attorney with the DEP’s Office of General Counsel in Tallahassee from 2008 to 2013. “That message was communicated to me and my colleagues by our superiors in the Office of General Counsel.”
Kristina Trotta, another former DEP employee who worked in Miami, said her supervisor told her not to use the terms “climate change” and “global warming” in a 2014 staff meeting. “We were told that we were not allowed to discuss anything that was not a true fact,” she said.