In other news, House Republicans want the EPA to keep science out of their science, because no one knows science like Lamar Smith.

Meanwhile, Justice Antonin Scalia is either a liar or delusional. Take your pick.

And finally, the Department of Justice has released the full report on the Ferguson Police Department and it paints a picture of virulent discrimination and vicious misconduct, to say the least. You can read the department's press release here and the full report here.

There are far too many examples to cite them all, but here's one (pg 77) that stuck out to me for character reasons.

Even as Ferguson City officials maintain the harmful stereotype that black individuals lack personal responsibility — and continue to cite this lack of personal responsibility as the cause of the disparate impact of Ferguson’s practices -- white City officials condone a striking lack of personal responsibility among themselves and their friends. Court records and emails show City officials, including the Municipal Judge, the Court Clerk, and FPD supervisors assisting friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and themselves in eliminating citations, fines, and fees.

The scoop, which was apparently fed to the New York Times by congressional sources associated with the Select Benghazi Committee, is now being used by the committee as an excuse to subpoena Clinton for emails the committee more than likely already has access to.

The House Select Committee on Benghazi, which first discovered Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail based on a home server in its inquiry into a fatal 2012 terrorist attack on a U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, is asking for all e-mails related to the attack from all Clintonemail.com accounts and any other staff members’ personal accounts.

The subpoenas are expected to go out to the State Department later Wednesday.

As Bob has already pointed out, over 55,000 pages of Hillary Clinton's emails have been handed over to the State Department.

Furthermore, most of those emails are duplicates of emails already stored by the federal government.

According to [State Department] officials, the printed emails Clinton's team turned over to the State Department in recent months were largely duplicative of what was already stored on government servers. They argued the need to turn over the pages was merely a response to outdated regulations requiring hard copies of messages the government has already preserved electronically.

This big honk of nothing is just the latest fake scandal in a long line of fake scandals used to carry on a witch hunt.

The New York Times should be embarrassed for diligently regurgitating a nothingburger handed to them by congressional trolls who had a specific, partisan goal in mind -- to put Benghazi back in the headlines.

The fact that the would-be scandal has been thoroughly debunked is immaterial. The mere suggestion that something scandalous has occurred is enough to get the ball rolling even if none of it is rooted in fact.

It's unlikely that the Select Solyndra IRS Committee to Investigate the Benghazi ACORN Birth Certificate will uncover new information in emails they've already examined over the course of several years, but a subpoena of Hillary Clinton does sound sexy and will almost certainly generate a lot of page clicks.

The idea that Hillary Clinton used a personal email account for the explicit purpose of avoiding FOIA requests is more or less a conspiracy theory and an improvable thesis. It's also a theory undercut by the fact that John Kerry is the first Secretary of State to use an official government email address. The only thing that distinguishes Clinton from her predecessors in this regard is the fact that she's probably running for president.

Representative Huelskamp (R-KS) joined hate radio host Steve Deace yesterday to voice his displeasure with Speaker of the House John Boehner for surrendering the Constitution by agreeing to fund the Department of Homeland Security.

“How can we trust them when on one hand they say they’re going to fight and on the other hand they always lose?” Huelskamp said. “I know some of my colleagues have been fond of saying, ‘Our leadership keeps fighting the same way and expecting different results.’ I don’t think that’s accurate. They keep fighting the same way and expecting the same result. Which is a lot: a loss of liberty, a loss to Obama and let Pelosi and Reid run the House and the Senate, they’re now the de factor leaders.” [...]

“We were double-crossed in the election,” he said. “This could be the day we look back and say, that was the time the Constitution was finally surrendered to the left. And where are our Republican friends? Voting with Nancy Pelosi, many of them.”

I don't know what it means to surrender the Constitution. As far as I'm aware, the Constitution is still intact and has not been physically harmed or amended. I'm also unaware of any attempts to abduct, steal or apprehend the Constitution. Ownership of the Constitution is not under contention.

Do words have meaning?

He may not be able to tell you what it means, but Huelskamp clearly believe John Boehner is responsible for it.

Why? Because he agreed to fund a federal agency.

I'm not a constitutional scholar but I'm fairly certain that agreeing to fund a federal agency does not violate it nor does "voting with Nancy Pelosi."

(via RightWingWatch)

Judging by comments made by a range of congressional Republicans, it seems unlikely that the Republican-controlled Congress would be willing to pass an easy fix to the law. But that is not to say that they aren't in favor of amending the law in other ways, such as gutting the entire thing.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has unveiled his "alternative" plan which isn't so much an alternative as it is a plan to destroy everything.

Cruz's bill, called the Health Care Choices Act, would allow people to buy health insurance across state lines, long a Republican health policy goal. It would also repeal Title I of ObamaCare, which would undo much of the law, including the mandate to buy insurance, the insurance marketplaces and subsidies to help people afford coverage.

If the Supreme Court eliminates subsides in states that did not establish their own exchange, Ted Cruz wants to respond by eliminating subsides in every state and all exchanges.

Burn it all down.

Before we continue, let's recap.

Bear in mind what the article said. Clinton "may have" violated regulations by not storing records from her private email account on government servers.

Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

Naturally, many of us stumbled onto the law that was cited by name in the article: the Federal Records Act of 1950, which was amended by Congress and the president in late 2014, nearly two years after Clinton stepped down.

After extensive research to discover a key fact that should've been in Schmidt's article, we learned that during Clinton's tenure, the Federal Records Act didn't outlaw the use of private accounts and, prior to the 2014 update of the law, didn't require the storage of private account email records on federal government servers. This State Department excerpt from the Foreign Affairs Manual (FAM pdf page 5) also outlines the proper use of email by department employees. While it defines emails as "federal records," the October 1995 guidance doesn't explicitly require the archiving emails on federal government servers, nor does it forbid the use of private email accounts. Clinton clearly retained an archive of her emails per the law and State's guidance, but she apparently didn't copy her emails onto the department's archive (until last year, that is).

Finally, after too many hours of guesswork about something that should've been in the article in the first place, Schmidt revealed to Politico the alleged violation, which turned out to be a line from the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations (CFR):

According to Section 1236.22 of the 2009 NARA requirements, which Schmidt provided in an email, "Agencies that allow employees to send and receive official electronic mail messages using a system not operated by the agency must ensure that Federal records sent or received on such systems are preserved in the appropriate agency recordkeeping system."

First of all, why wasn't this in the original article? Regardless, we checked it out and sure enough it was right there in the CFR... CONTINUE READING

Magenta - "Wonderous Stories"

In other news, former CIA director David Petraeus has plead guilty to leaking classified information to his mistress.

Meanwhile, Bobby Jindal is schedule to speak at a dinner hosted by the American Renewal Project in South Carolina but reporters won't be allowed to cover his appearance unless they agree to only report quotes approved by Jindal's staff.

I guess that's one way to avoid bad headlines.

The esteemed doctor and ISIS enthusiast has formed an exploratory committee.

Ben Carson was the fourth most popular choice for president at CPAC while Rand Paul was the first choice.

Among the report's findings was a racially tinged 2008 message in a municipal email account stating that President Barack Obama would not be president for very long because "what black man holds a steady job for four years."

Another email uncovered by investigators found police officers joking about black women and abortion according to local alderman Antonio French.

Reports from the Washington Post and Associated Press indicate that these are just two examples among many that will be revealed by the Department of Justice at some point this week.

I can't help but think you would find similarly terrible things if you investigated every police department.

(photo via NY Times)

Kristy Nichols, Jindal's top administrator, presented the $7.7 million cut as part of an overall $1.2 billion in proposed budget reductions before state legislators Friday (Feb. 27).

If the funding is eliminated, the effective impact would be to end the Greater New Orleans Community Health Connection, said Susan Todd, executive director of 504HealthNet, a coalition of organizations concerned with providing health care to uninsured in the Greater New Orleans area.

The cut proposed by the governor would result in the loss of federal matching funds that allow the clinics to remain open.

This would not be as great of a concern if Louisiana participated in the expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare. Jindal has repeatedly insisted that the state and local communities should take care of their own problems and not depend on the federal government, but the state's healthcare system has eroded during his tenure.

Residents of Louisiana could be doubly fucked in the near future if the Supreme Court does the unthinkable and eliminates Obamacare subsidies in states that did not establish their own healthcare exchange.

The state of Louisiana relies on the federal healthcare exchange and Governor Jindal, for his part, is adamant that the Republican-controlled Congress should not fix the law if the Supreme Court decides to throw the entire country into chaos.

Jindal penned an op-ed for the National Review today in which he spins the coming shitstorm as a tax cut for the masses.

If eliminating the subsidies represents a net tax cut, then restoring the subsidies — whether by states creating their own exchanges, Congress passing new legislation, or some combination of the two — would re-impose a sizable tax increase. Americans would pay billions more in higher taxes to fund the newly restored subsidies, making Obamacare that much more entrenched. What self-proclaimed conservative of sound mind would do such a thing?

Why does Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal want the people of Louisiana to get fucked so hard?

Why does he want his own constituents to go bankrupt or die?

That is exactly what could happen.