The Goat Pen

That's an obvious question about you as well...

Employees are notified via phone and/or email re: their status. Essential personnel are required to report to work, but will not get paid until an agreement is reached. Non-essential personnel basically get a paid vacation, as they are not required to report to work, yet will likely receive back pay once an agreement is reached.

Imagine being told your work is as essential as Prof’s. Tough to come back from that one.

I was “essential” because the all-wise Office of Personnel Management spake thus. They move in mysterious ways.

bluetick wrote:What Kind of Congressman Would Call for the Firing of Robert Mueller? Oh Yeah - This Kind. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/201 ... story.html

heh

So a congressman got a DUI back when he was 26?

What kind of 37 year old sitting US Senator drives his car off a bridge, leaves a female passenger to drown, doesn’t tell anyone for days, and soon after becomes Democrat Senate Majority Leader?

Professor Tiger wrote:

bluetick wrote:What Kind of Congressman Would Call for the Firing of Robert Mueller? Oh Yeah - This Kind. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/201 ... story.html

heh

So a congressman got a DUI back when he was 26?

What kind of 37 year old sitting US Senator drives his car off a bridge, leaves a female passenger to drown, doesn’t tell anyone for days, and soon after becomes Democrat Senate Majority Leader?

The point is not bad behavior in cars. The point is this particular jackass claiming moral authority over fellow republican and all-round good guy Robert Mueller. Nod if you understand.

all around good guy Mueller

wow

Professor Tiger wrote:

bluetick wrote:What Kind of Congressman Would Call for the Firing of Robert Mueller? Oh Yeah - This Kind. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/201 ... story.html

heh

So a congressman got a DUI back when he was 26?

What kind of 37 year old sitting US Senator drives his car off a bridge, leaves a female passenger to drown, doesn’t tell anyone for days, and soon after becomes Democrat Senate Majority Leader?

A rich one with powerful friends. Do you really need to have it explained to you how this country works?

Just saw this. Love it.

https://www.centristproject.org/principles

Saint wrote:Just saw this. Love it.

https://www.centristproject.org/principles

which party do you think that aligns with more?

The FBI “failed to preserve” five months worth of text messages exchanged between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the two FBI employees who made pro-Clinton and anti-Trump comments while working on the Clinton email and the Russia collusion investigations.

The disclosure was made Friday in a letter sent by the Justice Department to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC).

“The Department wants to bring to your attention that the FBI’s technical system for retaining text messages sent and received on FBI mobile devices failed to preserve text messages for Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page,” Stephen Boyd, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs at the Justice Department, wrote to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, the chairman of HSGAC.

He said that texts are missing for the period between Dec. 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017.

Boyd attributed the failure to “misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI’s collection capabilities.”

“The result was that data that should have been automatically collected and retained for long-term storage and retrieval was not collected,” Boyd wrote.

Strzok and Page were significant players in the Clinton and Trump investigations. As deputy chief of counterintelligence, Strzok oversaw the Trump investigation when it was opened in July 2016. Weeks earlier, he had wrapped up his work as one of the top investigators on the Clinton email probe.

Both worked on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation until July 2017.

But Strzok was removed after the Justice Department’s inspector general discovered text messages he exchanged with Page, with whom he was having an affair, in which both expressed strong criticism of Trump.

In one text, Strzok called Trump and “idiot.” In another, he said “F Trump.”

In another more cryptic exchange, Strzok spoke of an “insurance policy” that the FBI sought to take out in case Trump defeated Clinton in the election.

“I want to believe the path you threw out for consideration in Andy’s office — that there’s no way [Trump] gets elected — but I’m afraid we can’t take that risk,” Strzok wrote to Page on Aug. 15, 2016.

“Andy” was a reference to FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.

“It’s like an insurance policy in the unlikely event you die before you’re 40,” Strzok added. Republicans have questioned what Strzok meant by “insurance policy.”

Page left the Mueller team prior to the discovery of the texts.

Johnson expressed concern over the missing text messages, which were sent during a key period of the Russia investigation. During that time frame is when the Steele dossier was published by BuzzFeed News, when Strzok participated in a Jan. 24 interview with then-national security adviser Michael Flynn, and when James Comey was fired as FBI director.

eCat wrote:

Saint wrote:Just saw this. Love it.

https://www.centristproject.org/principles

which party do you think that aligns with more?

Of the major 2? Neither right now. It probably aligns more with Libertarian in many instances. I haven't seen any pols raise the centrist banner yet and probably won't. They're all too busy firing at each other right now.

I was all in on the libertarian but my hypocrisy got the best of me, plus the serious libertarians are really anarchists.

You can tell the difference because they just start their day thinking "if the government wants me to do it, it must be bad for me" - those anti vaccine people, those free state people, all that craziness.

There has to be a balance between fierce independence and the advantage of communal governance.

Federal land is a great example - In Nevada (I think) the federal government owns like some crazy amount of the state - more than 50%. There is no reason in the world the federal government should be land owners of that magnitude in any state , and you have this Clive Bundy guy whose family was there doing their thing long before the BLM came in and decided that some owl or sardine needed to be protected more than this guys livelihood. Not that I'm not sympathetic to the extinction of an animal but their approach to addressing his problem was callous and quite honestly tyrannical. Matter of fact the history was they were squeezing out all the ranchers in that area in a land grab of dubious value.

But at the same time, the anarchists/hard core libertarian doesn't want the federal government to run a park like Yosemite or Acadia. I can't imagine hiking in the Smokey mountains and seeing a billboard for a casino or an oil drilling rig - and that is exactly why the federal government needs to manage national parks.

So the one side - the big government folks are perfectly OK with the federal government owning more than 50% of the land in Nevada (even if most of it is worthless scrub) and the anti-government people wants a private owner for Old Faithful who can do whatever he sees fit with the land.

The problem is that no one is able to find a happy medium in 2018.

And I think a big part of that is 24/7 partisan talk radio and TV. They have to fill the day , every day with content and keep listeners and the most profitable way to do that is to create discontent, and that in turn keeps loyalty.

I agree. We've lost the middld because everyone has retreated to their corners and immerse themselves in their own ideology. While I have little trust in the government, I have no trust whatsoever in corporate interests in the world today. They don't even try to hide their intentions anymore

We need more women in politics. Studies show they are incapable of dicking us over.

Saint wrote:I agree. We've lost the middld because everyone has retreated to their corners and immerse themselves in their own ideology. While I have little trust in the government, I have no trust whatsoever in corporate interests in the world today. They don't even try to hide their intentions anymore

and that is because somewhere along the way (late 1960's/early 1970's to be more exact) corporations decided that shareholder value was more important than being a corporate citizen, and then in the 1980's they learned the most profitable, less creative way to increase shareholder value is globalization.

In order to fully utilize globalization you need a government complicit in your goals, hence the trade agreements, the mass influx of poverty via immigration and lax regulation on commerce, especially in the financial sector where stockholder value can be easily manipulated.

In 1950 a corporation's identity was centered around the community it located in - executives lived in the downtown area, blue collar guys lived in the suburbs and the corporation contributed to the tax base to support infrastructure, along with localized supply chain and small business development. The corporations were organically developed within the community - there wasn't this mercenary tax break to insolvency just to land jobs like we have now.

eCat wrote:The FBI “failed to preserve” five months worth of text messages exchanged between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the two FBI employees who made pro-Clinton and anti-Trump comments while working on the Clinton email and the Russia collusion investigations.

The disclosure was made Friday in a letter sent by the Justice Department to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC).

“The Department wants to bring to your attention that the FBI’s technical system for retaining text messages sent and received on FBI mobile devices failed to preserve text messages for Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page,” Stephen Boyd, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs at the Justice Department, wrote to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, the chairman of HSGAC.

He said that texts are missing for the period between Dec. 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017.

Boyd attributed the failure to “misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI’s collection capabilities.”

“The result was that data that should have been automatically collected and retained for long-term storage and retrieval was not collected,” Boyd wrote.

How convenient. I am disgusted, but not surprised.

When the IRS got caught harassing conservative political groups, and their records were subpeona'd, the files were "accidentally" destroyed. Nobody was held accountable.

When emails from Hillary's illegal email server got subpeona'd, she bleach bit'd them. Nobody was held accountable.

When Comey wrote Hillary's exoneration letter long before the investigation of her was complete, it was no big deal.

When it was discovered that the DNC computers may have hacked, and even though this event was Ground Zero for the Great American Red Scare of 2017, and supposedly the biggest presidential crisis since Watergate, the FBI never examined the servers involved. The Democrats got to pick their own people to look at the servers, and only showed the FBI what they wanted the FBI to see, and everybody was okay with that.

Welcome to the United States of Chicago, or any other third world Banana Republic.

just so you know

muellers probe started may 17

one wonders what strozak and page referred to when saying lynch knew before Clintons interview that clintonwould be not charged 5 days before comey annonunced it

yea I knew that but you'd have to be pretty fucking stupid to try to cover up a "wiping out of text by incompetence " scenario and time it to the exact day - the last day you texted damaging information.

I'm assume they aren't complete morons and would have enough sense to wipe out text beyond that just so people wouldn't make the obvious connection.

Maybe not, maybe it was just laziness on their part.

Nixon was forced to resign because 18 1/2 minutes of Oval Office recordings were erased. Based on the widespread destruction of evidence that went on under Obama’s watch, without any consequences, somebody owes Nixon a posthumous apology.

If I was Trump, I’d accept the resignations of the top 2 or 3 layers of leadership in the FBI. Period. By the end of the day. In the 5% chance the emails were accidentally lost, then they are, at the very least, too incompetent to be in those positions. In the %95 chance they are corrupt, they should be charged with obstruction of justice and face jail time. This out of control KGB-style FBI behavior has got to stop. And it won’t stop until former high ranking Deep State partisan hacks trade their Brooks Brothers suits for orange jump suits.