A. Barton Hinkle:
Few might remember it now, but there was a time when certain members of George W. Bush’s administration were denounced as traitors. Virginia’s current governor, Terry McAuliffe, was among the denouncers.
Back then—in 2004—McAuliffe headed up the Democratic National Committee. In an Oct. 15 interview on CNN, McAuliffe said Bush adviser Karl Rove had just spent “two and a half hours before a federal grand jury today answering questions about who in the White House committed treason by outing a CIA operative.”
McAuliffe was referring to a scandal known as Plamegate. The backstory is complicated, but it boils down to this: During the run-up to the Iraq War, a fellow named Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed in The New York Times undermining a key administration claim about Iraq’s quest for weapons of mass destruction. This made the administration most unhappy. Not long afterward, someone told columnist Robert Novak and a few other members of the media that Wilson was married to one Valerie Plame, a CIA employee.
Plame was supposed to be undercover; her role as a CIA operative was classified. True, she was working in Washington at the time, but you still don’t blab about these things. Outrage ensued, and suspicions coalesced around the theory that someone high up in the Bush administration had outed Plame to undermine Wilson’s story. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, became the chief suspect.
To say this intrigue consumed Washington would be putting it mildly. A special counsel was appointed. Reporters went to jail for not revealing sources. The thing dragged on for years. The news coverage alone bordered on obsessive, for obvious reasons. “Villainous War-Mongering President Violates Sacred Tenets of National Security to Slime Truth-Telling Critic of War” must have been auto-saved on a thousand newsroom computers for easy repetition.
Libby eventually was convicted of lying to the FBI and a couple of other things, but Bush commuted his sentence. Anyway, by then it had been learned that a State Department official, Richard Armitage, was the original source of the leak. He had “casually disclosed” Plame’s identity at the end of an interview with Novak.
Nevertheless, rage continued to simmer over the disclosure. It was—as The New York Times put it—”a serious offense, which could have put (Plame) and all those who had worked with her in danger.” Wilson and Plame called it treason.
When he was asked if Karl Rove “is guilty of treason,” Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) said, “Yes, I think so.” Rachel Maddow and others agreed. The word got tossed around so much Plamegate was sometimes referred to as “Treasongate.”
Which brings us to Hillary Clinton.
As the AP reported several days ago, “Clinton’s home (e-mail) server contained closely guarded government secrets,” including “material requiring one of the highest levels of classification.” That material involves “special access programs,” a “highly restricted subset of classified material that could point to confidential sources or clandestine programs.”
Some of the material is so closely guarded that the State Department has chosen to withhold 22 of the e-mails, on the grounds that releasing them would be too damaging. One unnamed government official alleges the e-mails contain “operational intelligence” that could jeopardize “sources, methods, and lives.”
But then, those e-mails might already have been released. The AP has reported that Clinton’s server “was connected to the Internet in ways that made it more vulnerable to hackers.” (In fact, the person who revealed Clinton’s private e-mail address was a Romanian hacker named Marcel Lazar Lehel.) Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has said “the odds are pretty high” that Russia, China, and other nations hacked into her server.
Clinton repeatedly has tried to bluff her way through all of this. First she claimed her e-mails contained no classified material. When that didn’t hold up, she insisted she never received or sent material that was “marked” classified at the time. But as countless others have noted, whether the material was marked as classified is irrelevant.
What, the left can’t meet their own “standards” they set for someone else? Imagine that.
A. Barton Hinkle is equating the deliberate exposure of a working CIA agent as an act of political retaliation with the unintentional mishandling of material which hadn’t been identified as classified at the time it was supposedly mishandled. It hasn’t even been established that any references made to such material weren’t taken from publicly available sources.
The comparison is idiotic.
Seems no matter how she praises the president, his appointees are determined to take her out. Its a soap opera
The Server
Classified materials
The foundation sopoenas
Where did 6 billion of State Dept dollars vanish?
(50 million Written by Hillary Clinton in 1 check for,”services rendered”, no record of what the services were.)
Could it all or any be linked?
Can papa Soros pull her out of this mess?
Tune in tomorrow for another episode of ” As your stomach turns.”
Maybe somebody should call this sort of thing treason. 2,100 jobs, gone to Mexico. The parent corporation, United Technologies, had sales of over $56 billion last year, resulting in gross corporate income of $15.67 billion. The corporation’s 2015 income tax total was $2.11 billion—around 13.4 percent. I don’t know where people get the idea that U.S. corporations are driven offshore by excessive taxation.
Central Indiana isn’t isn’t exactly a high-cost area. Of course it’s not as cheap as Mexico, where manufacturing workers’ pay averages under $3.00 per hour, and the minimum wage is around $5 per day. Benefits? Yeah, right.
I’ve got a relative that will lose his job owing to this. The announcement came today where he works, pretty much out of the blue, as they’ve been in the process of modernizing equipment. He said some of the older female employees were crying. There won’t be replacement jobs in the area for them. The guy who made the announcement had two armed guards on hand. No one knows yet what will happen with their pension plan.
This is the sort of thing that Bernie Sanders is talking about. It’s why what he says strikes a chord.
Bernies statement at the debate Free college is to free the kids from factories and farms, Some liberals think the only high expenses in a business is labor and benefits, labor who negotiate for Pension and not 401 are simply dumb on so many levels. Businesses are free to do what ever they wish with their businesses liberal government is just too lazy to figure out why they will move out. NAFTA was signed into law by Clinton 1994, he also had something to do with opening trade with China. While factories in US have tons of regulations to follow China and Mexico not so much.
A meaningless number.
Look at NET income VS carried debt.
http://2014ar.utc.com/assets/pdfs/UTCAR2014_FullReport.pdf
$6,220,000,000 for the year is NET income.
BUT
$19,794,000,000 in debt.
The only way to fix that is to cut expenses.
Too bad the corporate owners picked Mexico and their cheap labor as their solution.
But it is LEGAL at this time to do this.
Notice this video where the company told the workers they were moving:
One of the workers threatened to ruin all the machinery he could, others simply swore.
United Steelworkers is their union.
They would NOT negotiate a save for these workers in many attempts over a few years worth of trying by the company.
@Greg:
Gee and with Obamacare lowering health care costs by so much it’s just a mystery why any company would do this. Get a clue yet?
@Mully, #7:
A corporation hauling in $15.6 billion a year moves manufacturing facilities to Mexico to exploit dirt cheap labor. The CEO unexpectedly retires with a $195 million severance package, while hourly employees who have worked in the closing facilities for 10 or 20 or 30 years are told their jobs are all migrating south, thank you very much for your loyalty and service.
What I get is that you haven’t got frickin’ a clue what’s wrong with this picture, but that you’ll reflexively blame unions, or the EPA, or Obamacare, or corporate tax rates, or anyone who observes that something here is not quite right about the situation and that maybe something should be changed about it.
Hey, maybe it’s the fault of unemployment insurance. The lazy bums United Technologies is ridding itself of will probably expect somebody to help them out.
Carrier Corp. and UTEC are both units of Hartford, Connecticut-based United Technologies Corp., a Fortune 500 company with $65 billion in revenue.
UPDATE: Carrier plans to lay off 1,400 Indy workers in Mexico move
Where will the average American working person be if this trend continues? Where will all of the local businesses be that rely on well-paid American workers as customers? Maybe we can all get rich playing the stock market.
I wouldn’t bet getting rich on the stock market if Sanders has his way all those funds that pensions are put into will have a hefty tax to pay so he can save all those kids from factory and farm jobs. They can learn how to fill out government compliance forms. But the liberals will never learn the tighter the government fist is around other peoples money the more that slips through their greedy stupid fingers.
It is truly treasonous for the government to regulate and tax Americans out of a job. Even taking a 50% pay cut did not save the coal workers.
@Greg: Always changing the subject when they have no argument. Brother Bob wrote about this tactic.
Back on the subject Greg is trying to steer away from:
More Hillary Clinton Emails Released, Including 3 Now ‘Secret’
@Randy, #11:
I pointed out why A. Barton Hinkle’s comparison was moronic in post #2. No responses were forthcoming to that argument. I got bored waiting, and found myself thinking about what else might constitute a betrayal. Taking the jobs of loyal employees out of the country to increase profits seemed like a possibility. Those increased profits have an obvious cost.
Want to get back to the topic? Perhaps someone will explain why Hinkle’s comparison isn’t patently ridiculous.
@Greg: Because you can not prove a negative! Just like it makes nonsense to respond to your asinine posts