Wanted: More federal judges like Andrew Hanen

And fewer cabinet-level departments like Homeland Security.

Hanen says top DHS officials have some 'splainin' to do:

A federal judge in Texas has threatened to hold Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and other top immigration enforcement officials in contempt of court for not fixing problems that led to work permits being mistakenly awarded under President Barack Obama’s executive immigration action after the judge had put the plan on hold.

The Justice Department had said about 2,000 individuals had been sent three-year work authorizations after U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen in Brownsville, Texas, temporarily blocked the immigration action on Feb. 16.

In a court order Tuesday, Hanen said government officials have yet to fix the problem. The judge also requested Johnson and four other officials attend an Aug. 19 hearing to explain why the issue hasn’t been fixed and to “be prepared to show why he or she should not be held in contempt of court.”

“This court has expressed its willingness to believe that these actions were accidental and not done purposefully to violate this court’s order. Nevertheless, it is shocked and surprised at the cavalier attitude the government has taken with regard to its ‘efforts’ to rectify this situation,” Hanen wrote.

The other officials are: R. Gil Kerlikowske, commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection; Ronald Vitiello, deputy chief of the U.S. Border Patrol; Sarah Saldaña, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; and Leon Rodriguez, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

As I've said, going clear back t late 2001, when the nation quite understandably wanted to decisively respond to the attacks it had just experienced, I thought creating a Department of Homeland Security was an ill-advised move.  We already had a Defense Department, an FBI, a CIA and a DIA.  I saw lots of possibility for overlap, redundancy and mission creep. I think I made an accurate call.

You shovel lots of money into a big Washington bureaucracy and you get clowns and agenda-pushers like this bunch.

Why we call them freedom-haters - today's edition

Unelected bureaucrats from three federal agencies and / or departments conspiring to shut down pro-freedom discourse in post-America.

Here's proof:

Judicial Watch today released new Department of Justice (DOJ) and Internal Revenue Service (IRS) documents that include an official “DOJ Recap” report detailing an October 2010 meeting between Lois Lerner, DOJ officials and the FBI to plan for the possible criminal prosecution of targeted nonprofit organizations for alleged illegal political activity.

The newly obtained records also reveal that the Obama DOJ wanted IRS employees who were going to testify to Congress to turn over documents to the DOJ before giving them to Congress. Records also detail how the Obama IRS gave the FBI 21 computer disks, containing 1.25 million pages of confidential IRS returns from 113,000 nonprofit social 501(c)(4) welfare groups  – or nearly every 501(c)(4) in the United States – as part of its prosecution effort. According to a letter from then-House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) to IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, “This revelation likely means that the IRS – including possibly Lois Lerner – violated federal tax law by transmitting this information to the Justice Department.”

The documents were produced subsequent to court orders in two Judicial Watch Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits: Judicial Watch v. Internal Revenue Service (No. 1:14-cv-1956) and Judicial Watch v. Department of Justice (No. 1:14-cv-1239).

But the overlords have arranged things so that it is you who is more likely to go to jail for pointing this out than they who conspired to shut you up.

The Most Equal Comrade truly must want Western civilization to be conquered by jihadists

How many Syrian fighters has the MEC regime trained to fight ISIS?

60.

What the Most Equal Comrade is really saying: That icky jihad stuff doesn't interest me

Here's what the dictator of post-America said at a press conference yesterday.  Seriously.

This broader challenge of countering violent extremism is not simply a military effort. Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas and more attractive and more compelling vision. So the United States will continue to do our part by continuing to counter ISIL's hateful propaganda, especially online. We'll constantly reaffirm through words and deeds that we will never be at war with Islam. We are fighting terrorists who distort islam and its victims are mostly Muslims. 

We're also going to partner with Muslim communities as they seek the prosperity and dignity they observe. And we're going to expect those communities to step up in terms of pushing back as hard as they can in conjunction with other people of good will against these hateful ideologies, particularly when it comes to what we're teaching young people.

Allahpundit at Hot Air has it correct when he says that this is self-congratulation posing as serious policy:

It’s the foreign policy equivalent of another of Obama’s favorite sayings, the old leftist bromide about being on “the wrong side of history”: The enemy’s backwardness is plain and our moral superiority is obvious, so ultimate triumph is assured even in the teeth of immediate defeat. All I could think of while watching this was those photos you see online sometimes of Afghanistan or Iran circa 1960, with all the women in blouses and skirts, and photos of the same two countries today, with women in head coverings or even full burqas. Better ideas don’t always win. Especially if they’re defended by weak leadership.

However superior our ideas might be, O’s strategy, like it or not, is to run out the clock until 2017 and leave it to the next poor schmuck to figure something out with ISIS.

And by then, ISIS will have done a lot more metastasizing.

 

"Sicker than expected"

Even if you use some convoluted model to provide a service in this world rather than a straightforward, free-market, normal-people approach, the money is going to have to come from somewhere:

  Health insurancecompanies around the country are seeking rate increases of 20 percent to 40 percent or more, saying their new customers under the Affordable Care Act turned out to be sicker than expected. Federal officials say they are determined to see that the requests are scaled back.

Blue Cross and Blue Shield plans — market leaders in many states — are seeking rate increases that average 23 percent in Illinois, 25 percent in North Carolina, 31 percent in Oklahoma, 36 percent in Tennessee and 54 percent in Minnesota, according to documents posted online by the federal government and state insurance commissioners and interviews with insurance executives.

The Oregon insurance commissioner, Laura N. Cali, has just approved 2016 rate increases for companies that cover more than 220,000 people. Moda Health Plan, which has the largest enrollment in the state, received a 25 percent increase, and the second-largest plan, LifeWise, received a 33 percent increase.

Jesse Ellis O’Brien, a health advocate at the Oregon State Public Interest Research Group, said: “Rate increases will be bigger in 2016 than they have been for years and years and will have a profound effect on consumers here. Some may start wondering if insurance is affordable or if it’s worth the money.” 

Comandante Burwell says that subsidies will offset these increases. So it takes the point of the government's gun to shore up the difference between the closest we can come to the market value of a policy in this environment of distortion and something "affordable" for the cattle-masses.

Damn it, just let us keep the money in the first place and do what we want with it.

You have to ask why - today's edition

What is the point of patty-cake with a regime that says this?

A senior Iranian military official said Sunday that despite the emerging nuclear dealbetween Iran and the US-led P5+1 group of world powers, America will remain Tehran's enemy.

Iranian Ground Force Commander Brigadier General Ahmad Reza Pourdastan said that even if a nuclear deal comes to fruition in Vienna, where Iranian and western negotiators are currently trying to reach an agreement by a Tuesday deadline, Tehran and Washington will not become friends.

"The US might arrive at some agreements with us within the framework of the Group 5+1 (the US, Russia, China, Britain and France plus Germany), but we should never hold a positive view over the enemy,"  Iran's Fars News Agency quoted Pourdastan as saying.

"Our enmity with them is over the principles and is rooted because we are after the truth and nations' freedom, but they seek exploiting nations and putting them in chains," he explained further.

We know they're already cheating on what they're supposed to be doing, they are stockpiling fearsome long-range missiles, and they're still sponsoring terrorism.

Still, your tax dollars are going for the salaries, jet fuel and hotel bills for Secretary Global-Test and Wendy Sherman to persist in this madness.

Always love a good takedown of Sally Kohn

Once again, I saw a column by a prominent cultural jackboot and gave some thought to responding myself, but various other matters - issues about which to post here, other stuff in life - put it on the back burner.

Thankfully, once again, I have come across someone else's ringing smack down of the jackboot in question.

In this case, it's Jazz Shaw at Hot Air:

t wasn’t like we didn’t see this coming but it’s certainly arriving faster and harder than even some of the more conservative estimates would have predicted. Now that gay marriage (or just any old marriage if you prefer) is a “constitutionally assured right” in the United States, Left side proponents are taking their victory laps. But at the same time they’re going to stick to the established talking points of telling everyone not to worry… nothing bad is going to happen to anyone else. You’re just not adjusted to the New and Improved Post-Homophobic Christianity. (From the Daily Beast)

The world has changed. Christians and Christianity has changed, too. And again, I say, “Hallelujah!”

Will anti-gay Christians be politically and socially ostracized? I sure hope so. Just as those orthodox Christians who still believe in strict, traditional gender roles have been increasingly mocked as absurd. Once upon a time, marriage constituted property—the wife was the literal property of the husband, and could not legally let alone culturally own anything of her own. The governing cultural norm was that women should be barefoot, pregnant and subservient.

And you “old timey Christians” need to adjust to the new reality. But it’s not like we’re going to infringe on your religious freedom, haters.

There are, of course, still congregations that haven’t caught up with the times. But churches have always been able to use their discretion to decide whom to marry or turn away, and the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell specifically noted such First Amendment protections for religious institutions.

As for everyone else, including florists and county clerks, yes, you will now have to provide the same services to straight couples that you provide to gay couples. Don’t like it? Find a new job. The law also requires that clerks issue birth certificates to the children of single mothers and that florists provide flowers for interracial weddings, regardless of the religious beliefs that have definitely been cited now and throughout history to condemn these families as well. Still, that doesn’t mean the law is trouncing on religion. It means the law is prioritizing equal treatment for all, as it should.

Pretty much everything in those two paragraphs is already being proven wrong. I specify “pretty much” because, as with most political memes, there’s a pea of truth buried at the bottom of the stack of mendacity filled mattresses. First to the truth portion: when it comes to clerks issuing licenses, the government has a monopoly on that “business” and the law has to be followed. Whether or not there can be a religious objection exemption offered to individual workers without stopping the flow of legal documents is something that will be sorted out going forward, but licenses must be available.

Except for that, however, the rest seems to be pie in the sky. Florists (and bakers) are not in the same position as government workers and issuing a government document is not the same thing as being forced to participate in a ceremony which violates your religious convictions. Trying to tie the issues of single mothers and mixed race couples into this is disingenuous, as I don’t see anyone citing such things as being contrary to established religious convictions. 

Just about what I would have said.

Because they tried everything but the simplicity of the free market

Its ATMs are running out of cash, its banks are considering raiding customers' accounts to come up with some, any money, and its flamboyant leftist finance minister has been asked not to attend any more meetings of his EU counterparts.

Still, the Greek populace chose to use yesterday's referendum to give the middle finger to its creditors, as if it has some kind of inherent right to maintain a state of pseudo-normalcy financed by somebody else.

Not that the creditors are a model of sensible living.  Most of the rest of Europe is just Greece Lite:

A radical left-wing government in Greece is betting that more moderate European Socialists will meet their demands rather than risk opening a chasm that will expose the economic unsustainablity of the existing system. The Greek economy may be a fraud, but it’s a fraud built on a bigger Euro fraud.

And that’s a familiar pattern.

This is the way that public sector unions browbeat their Democratic allies in Chicago, New York and California to extract insane concessions from their unworkable budgets. The budgets are already bankrupting cities and states, so why not tear off free cosmetic surgery or $80k salaries from the mess?

Greece is just treating the European experiment the way that the California Teachers Association treats the state. It’s a giant corrupt piggy bank, so why not raid it? It’s going to go bankrupt, but it will anyway.

That’s the typical mindset in Socialist countries. The average Russian stole as much as he could under Communism because the entire system was built on theft. Much of Greece dodges taxes because they’re certainly that the money will just go to corrupt public officials. And they’re usually right.

When everyone is convinced that the system is corrupt, they take out as much as they can while putting back in as little as they can. That’s true in Greece, in the old USSR and in Obama’s America.

And the pattern manifests itself with utter predictability in the Caribbean as well:

A number of factors have contributed to this sorry state of affairs. Puerto Rico’s government spends too much relative to its income, and the commonwealth is plagued by familiar problems: dysfunctional tax and regulatory policies imposed by Congress, excessive pension and benefits promises offered to government employees as a cowardly way to keep compensation increases off the books; a political environment dominated by public-sector unions, which threw out Luis Fortuño, the last governor to make a halfway serious attempt at fiscal reform; an economy hampered by relatively low work-force participation, with the concomitant loss of private-sector production; an electorate susceptible to gimmicky non-solutions that promise real results without real reform; brain drain as its most skilled, energetic, and entrepreneurial residents leave as quickly as they can for better economic opportunities elsewhere in the United States.

And the debate about whether Puerto Rico's status should bring it further into the post-Ameroican orbit or move it closer to autonomy is complicated by a neediness that hobbles its ability to chart its own destiny:

Puerto Ricans are American citizens, and Puerto Rico’s bonds, reduced to junk status though they may be, are held mainly by American financial institutions ranging from pension funds to insurance companies. A bailout cannot be countenanced, but neither can Washington play the role of economic Pontius Pilate and wash its collective hands of this matter. It may be that Puerto Rico should be an independent commonwealth, but it isn’t one.

And China's model of a sort-of free market within a one-party Marxist state structure is showing its most serious cracks ever. 

The lessons for a post-America enamored with planned decline are fairly obvious.  It starts with talk of some kind of "right" to things to which it is definitionally impossible to have a right: health care, "affordable" housing, water, "clean" air.  The end of that road is the faucets of Detroit yielding at best a little squeaking noise when turned on, ACA co-ops and exchanges folding, bundles of bad mortgages causing bank failures, regulations, crafted with the explicit intent of bankrupting the organizations on which they're imposed, being inflicted by the unelected tyrants of an out-of-control executive-branch agency on the coal industry.

There is always some grandiose excuse for not trying the simplest model of them all: letting people keep what they earn and do what they want with it.

If that is ever tried anywhere in the world in its pure form, that place will astound the rest of humankind, and maybe prod it to grow up and consider freedom.

Your read-the-whole-thing /it's-a-link-to-an-indispensible-essay post for today

Not even gonna try to excerpt money lines or key paragraphs from this one.  Just read it. And then get a wastebasket handy, because you're going to hurl.

And now, Center of the American Experiment's Katherine Kersten's Minneapolis Star-Tribune column on what the "sustainability" movement has morphed into on post-American university campuses.

This may be a factor in why we're up to our eyeballs in threats to our security

Ridiculously and pathetically skewed priorities much?

The Central Intelligence Agency is once again mired in crisis. CIA Director John Brennan finds himself “deeply concerned.” The spy agency he runs suffers from an affliction that he says has “persisted despite repeated efforts by Agency leaders to address it.” 

What is ailing this vital guardian of national security? The CIA’s upper echelon, Mr. Brennan said on Tuesday, does “not reflect the diversity of the Agency workforce or of the nation.”

Mr. Brennan was commenting on the “Director’s Diversity in Leadership Study,” an unclassified report released that day. The study comes to the “unequivocal conclusion,” he said in a statement, that there has been a major failure at the agency in the “crucial” area of diversity and inclusiveness.

Yes, indeed, there is no more important qualification for being responsible for being on top of threats to post-America than having a physical handicap or an unconventional sex life:

The report is unsparing. Senior positions at the “highest levels of the CIA” are “consistently occupied by white male career officers.” While minority officers make up 23.9% of the CIA workforce, the higher echelons of the CIA don’t come close to that number. For example, the Senior Intelligence Service, the crème de la crème of the spy agency’s personnel, manages only a 10.8% minority composition. Spies with disabilities and LGBT spies, according to the report, are no better represented in the CIA’s upper leadership, though women are generally faring well.

What accounts for this state of inequity? Pulling no punches, and using words that must sting Mr. Brennan if not also President Obama, the report finds that “the senior leadership of the Agency is not committed to diversity.” The CIA has suffered from a “failure of leadership,” which has led to a “general lack of accountability in promoting diversity” and “the absence of an inclusive culture.”

And the nation's spies will get their minds right immediately:

Changing the CIA’s culture in this way may take some time, perhaps several years. Yet an urgent crisis demands urgent action: “Immediate steps” must therefore be taken to fill senior leadership positions with minority officers, the study says. The steps would include a “series of conspicuous appointments at the highest levels of the CIA.” The goal—both “necessary and achievable”—should be a quota of “at least 30% minority representation at the GS-13 level and above.” Such measures will make it clear that “the Agency has entered a new era and is committed to a leadership structure that truly ‘looks like America.’ ”

At a time when global terrorism is resurgent, when the Middle East is burning, when Russian boots are marching, when China is ramping up its military and Iran is on the verge of going nuclear, is it really a good idea to ask the CIA to concentrate on achieving a 30% minority quota in the agency’s leadership ranks? 

Mr. Brennan evidently thinks so. In his statement accompanying the study’s release, the CIA director said he has ordered that beginning Oct. 1 every member of his senior leadership team will be required “to attend diversity and inclusion training.” 

It is so very late in the day.

You have to ask why - today's edition

Seriously. With this coming to light, why are we still engaging in patty-cake?

Senior Obama administration officials are defending Iranian nuclear violations in the aftermath of a bombshell report published Wednesday by the United Nations indicating that Iran has failed to live up to its nuclear-related obligations, according to sources apprised of the situation.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) disclosed yesterday that Iran has failed to meet its commitments under the interim Joint Plan of Action to convert recently enriched uranium gas to powder.

While Iran has reduced the amount of enriched uranium gas in its stockpiles, it has failed to dispose of these materials in a way that satisfies the requirements of the nuclear accord struck with the United States and other powers in 2013.

Secretary of State John Kerry declared last summer that Iran would be forced to comply with such restrictions, and State Department officials were assuring reporters as recently as last month that the Iranians would meet their obligations.

Wednesday’s disclosure by the IAEA sent the State Department rushing to downplay the Iranian violation.

Obama administration officials insisted that despite Iran’s failure to meet its obligations, negotiations were still on track and that Tehran would face no repercussions.

And everybody sees post-America being played for a fool:

One Western source present in Vienna said the administration is scrambling to ensure that nothing interferes with a final deal.
“Once again, the White House will go to any length needed to preserve the Obama-Iran deal, even if it means covering up Iran’s failure to convert all of the nuclear material as promised,” said the source.
“If they had admitted Iran failed to live up to the letter of the JPOA—as is the case—this one-week extension period of the JPOA would be totally invalidated and the talks would be over,” the source added. “Like they have for months, the administration continues to hide violations and is acting more like Iran’s advocate than the honest broker the American people deserve. “

Madness.

 

You have to ask why - part 2

I don't often quote Thomas Freidman columns in order to bolster my points, but today I am because his message, coming from him, more effectively bolsters than if I were to enlist Frank Gaffney, John Bolton or Michael Ledeen.

He starts by pointing out the irony of the relative weakness and strength of Iran and post-America respectively as the two have engaged in patty-cake over the last several years. Sanctions have indeed crippled the Iranian economy, and the mulllahs know that the populace would overthrow them if it ever got a real chance.

Still, Iran has been able to play the P5+1, led by post-America's Secretary Global-Test and the singularly clueless Wendy Sherman, who did such a bang-up job during her participation in the Six-Way Talks with North Korea, for fools with utter consistency.

Freidman does not deny this:

  . . . for the past year every time there is a sticking point — like whether Iran should have to ship its enriched uranium out of the country or account for its previous nuclear bomb-making activities — it keeps feeling as if it’s always our side looking to accommodate Iran’s needs. I wish we had walked out just once. When you signal to the guy on the other side of the table that you’re not willing to either blow him up or blow him off — to get up and walk away — you reduce yourself to just an equal and get the best bad deal nonviolence can buy.
Diplomatic negotiations in the end always reflect the balance of power, notes the Johns Hopkins University foreign policy specialist Michael Mandelbaum, writing in The American Interest. “In the current negotiations … the United States is far stronger than Iran, yet it is the United States that has made major concessions. After beginning the negotiations by insisting that the Tehran regime relinquish all its suspect enrichment facilities and cease all its nuclear activities relevant to making a bomb, the Obama administration has ended by permitting Iran to keep virtually all of those facilities and continue some of those activities.”

How did this happen? “Part of the explanation may lie in Barack Obama’s personal faith in the transformative power of exposure to the global economy.” But, adds Mandelbaum, “Surely the main reason … is that, while there is a vast disparity in power between the two parties, the United States is not willing to use the ultimate form of power and the Iranian leaders know this.” 

He goes on to say that "[b]efore you denounce Obama as a wimp, remember that George W. Bush had eight years to address this problem — when it was smaller — with either military force or forceful diplomacy, and he blinked for eight years."

True enough, and there's good reason to say W's priorities with regard to his Axis of Evil were  misplaced.  But at least he spoke about the entire scenario with appropriate urgency and acted like a leader.

Freidman's conclusion in his closing paragraphs is the obvious conclusion to draw: We're almost certainly looking at hoping for the least bad deal.  But, and, again, he seems to have his head on his shoulders to a surprising degree here, he says that even such a deal will have seismic implications in a middle east more unstable than anyone living has ever seen.

You have to ask why

Why is post-America not taking the most effective course in fighting ISIS?

The United States has blocked attempts by its Middle East allies to fly heavy weapons directly to the Kurds fighting Islamic State jihadists in Iraq, The Telegraph has learnt. 

ADVERTISING

Some of America’s closest allies say President Barack Obama and other Western leaders, including David Cameron, are failing to show strategic leadership over the world’s gravest security crisis for decades. 

They now say they are willing to “go it alone” in supplying heavy weapons to the Kurds, even if means defying the Iraqi authorities and their American backers, who demand all weapons be channelled through Baghdad. 

High level officials from Gulf and other states have told this newspaper that all attempts to persuade Mr Obama of the need to arm the Kurds directly as part of more vigorous plans to take on Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant(Isil) have failed. The Senate voted down one attempt by supporters of the Kurdish cause last month. 

The officials say they are looking at new ways to take the fight to Isil without seeking US approval.

Not only is post-America taking inadequate measures on the supply-of-arms front, they're behaving likewise with regard to the air campaign.

The US has also infuriated its allies, particularly Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf states, by what they perceive to be a lack of clear purpose and vacillation in how they conduct the bombing campaign. Other members of the coalition say they have identified clear Isil targets but then been blocked by US veto from firing at them. 

“There is simply no strategic approach,” one senior Gulf official said. “There is a lack of coordination in selecting targets, and there is no overall plan for defeating Isil.” 

Something to think about in this week of the greatest homeland threat since September 2001.

Because the flow of money can be predicted as accurately as the flow of water

Great IBD editorial entitled "The Economic Illiteracy of Obama's Overtime Rule."

It basically reiterates the LITD First Law of Economics: The money has to come from somewhere.

You go employing the government's monopoly on the coercive use of force to make private organizations structure their pay arrangements for staff members a certain way and something will have to give:

With the flick of his magic pen, President Obama will soon grant millions of workers overtime play. At least, that's the fantasy being peddled by the White House and regurgitated by a credulous press.

Currently, businesses that pay salaried workers less than $455 a week have to pay overtime as well. Obama complains that this threshold has been raised only once since 1975. (He conveniently leaves out the fact that the last increase came during President Bush's "jobless recovery.")

As a result, he says, too many companies are "skirting basic overtime laws, calling somebody a manager when they're stocking groceries and getting paid $30,000 a year."

Obama plans to raise the threshold to $50,400, which he says will make 5 million more workers eligible for time-and-a-half pay.

That was enough for most journalists to declare that Obama was being "generous" because he is going to "bring overtime pay to millions."

But that assumes businesses employing these newly overtime-eligible salaried workers won't change anything, and will just start paying them time-and-a-half.

In a free market economy, these workers are already making the market wage. If they were being underpaid, given their skill levels and the work they're doing, they'd get another job.

So what are employers going to do? Since money doesn't grow on trees, some affected companies will tell these workers to put in less overtime, or ban it altogether. Or they'll bring in more part-time workers to avoid the wage hit. Or lay off some people.

The point is, far fewer than 5 million workers will benefit from this change, and many will lose out.

Of course, some companies might raise prices to pay for more overtime, thereby forcing consumers to bear the cost of Obama's "generosity."

There is very little in this world that requires deep, dense and intricate crystal-ball-gazing to discern.  Most of life's rules and lessons are quite simple, and the examples of their applications are all around us.

But our jackbooted, Freedom-Hating overlords work overtime - pun intended - to see that that is not obvious to you.

ISIS never sleeps

About those command centers the FBI has set up around the country to prepare for possible Independence Day weekend attacks?

ISIS has already published a map of where they are.

And two days after Egypt's prosecutor general Hesham Barakat was assassinated by a car bomb, ISIS stages a massive terror attack on military checkpoints in the Sinai peninsula.

Dozens killed.

Hillionaire, are you sure you want to list your State stint as a credential?

Ater all, it's now clear that Sid was ubiquitous during that time:

In her early months in office, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was in contact with unofficial adviser Sidney Blumenthal more often and on a wider range of topics than was previously known, a set of about 3,000 Clinton emails released Tuesday night by the State Department revealed.

While Blumenthal’s role as a provider of off-the-books intelligence reports on Libya has stirred controversy, the newly disclosed emails show he also acted as an intermediary with officials involved in the Northern Ireland peace process and shared advice with Clinton on issues from Iran to British politics to how to blame China for the breakdown of global climate talks.

And this business about his advice being unsolicited doesn't pass the smell test:

“Are you still awake?” she wrote in an email to Blumenthal sent on Oct. 8, 2009, at 10:35 P.M. that does not provide details on the issue prompting the message. “I will call if you are.”

And it took a while for her to get the hang of being in the loop:

Hillary Clinton struggled to fit into the government of President Barack Obama after being appointed Secretary of State in 2009, according to emails released by the State Department on Tuesday.

They showed Clinton turning up for meetings that had been canceled and worrying about how much time she had with her new boss, revealing growing pains in the relationship between her and former election rival Obama in the early months of her time as America's top diplomat.

In an email to two aides on June 8, 2009, Clinton was unsure if the White House had held a Cabinet meeting and whether she should attend.

"I heard on the radio that there is a Cabinet mtg this am. Is there? Can I go? If not, who are we sending?" Clinton wrote.

Although, even as she lacked info on regime goings-on, the regime knew something that's now very noteworthy about her:

New Hillary Clinton e-mails released late Tuesday night by the State Department reveal that, despite denials to the contrary, top Obama-administration officials were aware, within the first nine months of President Obama’s first term, of then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server to conduct government business. The White House has not said when President Obama and his lieutenants first learned of Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server, noting only that they became aware in August 2014, after Republican lawmakers got hold of the information, that it could become a political problem. But e-mails from 2009 show that chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and senior adviser David Axelrod understood at the time that Clinton used a private e-mail account and server for official business. Indeed, top officials were forced to explicitly ask Clinton aides for her e-mail address.

Fast forward to two weeks ago and watch David Axelrod blatantly lie about this to the hosts of MSNBC's Morning Joe.  And try to evade the whole subject with that tried and true weasel tactic "We should be focusing on what the people care about."

John Podesta and Rahm Emanuel knew, too.

This is some rotten stuff.