8 Replies to “Weird”

1. Bob Belvedere says:

   June 16, 2014 at 12:53 pm

   Hey, Jeff! You never told me Sam Adams knew ye [emphasis mine]:

   If the liberties of America are ever compleatly ruined, of which in my opinion there is now the utmost danger, it will in all probability be the consequence of a mistaken notion of prudence, which leads men to acquiesce in measures of the most destructive tendency for the sake of present ease. When designs are form’d to raze the very foundation of a free government, those few who are to erect their grandeur and fortunes upon the general ruin, will employ every art to sooth the devoted people into a state of indolence, inattention and security, which is forever the fore-runner of slavery – They are alarmed at nothing so much, as attempts to awaken the people to jealousy and watchfulness; and it has been an old game played over and over again, to hold up the men who would rouse their fellow citizens and countrymen to a sense of their real danger, and spirit them to the most zealous activity in the use of all proper means for the preservation of the public liberty, as “pretended patriots,” intemperate politicians,” rash, hot-headed men, Incendiaries, retched desperadoes, who, as was said of the best of men, would turn the world upside down, or have done it already. – But he must have a small share of fortitude indeed, who is put out of countenance by hard speeches without sense and meaning, or affrighted from the path of duty by the rude language of Billingsgate – For my own part, I smile contemptuously at such unmanly efforts: I would be glad to hear the reasoning of Chronus, if he has a capacity for it; but I disregard his railing as I would the barking of a “Cur dog”.

   -Samuel Adams, writing as CANDIDUS in the Boston Gazette, 09 December 1771

   You retched desperadoe, you.

2. Drumwaster says:

   June 16, 2014 at 1:11 pm

   Another good Sam Adams quote: “The Constitution shall never be construed …to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.”

   (Yeah, this should be in the other thread, so sue me.)

3. Libby says:

   June 16, 2014 at 1:47 pm

   Let me guess – Lerner conversed a lot with “Richard Windsor” and other imaginary cabinet/Obama admin members?

4. geoffb says:

   June 16, 2014 at 3:13 pm

   How the dog is supposed to have eaten the homework.

   Here’s what the IRS says happened. (A quick background on email before we begin. Email moves back and forth between servers. Email sent to IRS.gov goes to the IRS’ email server; emails sent from IRS.gov to, say, gmail.com, travel over the internet to Google’s email servers. You access your email using an email client, a tool that reads email from the server either directly or by downloading it first. As with everything tech-related, it is actually more complicated than this.)

   Prior to the eruption of the IRS controversy last spring, the IRS had a policy of backing up the data on its email server (which runs Microsoft Outlook) every day. It kept a backup of the records for six months on digital tape, according to a letter sent from the IRS to Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah). After six months, the IRS would reuse those tapes for newer backups. So when Congressional committees began requesting emails from the agency, its records only went back to late 2012.

   The IRS also had two other policies that complicated things. The first was a limit on how big its employees’ email inboxes could be. At the IRS, employees could keep 500 megabytes of data on the email server. If the mailbox got too big, email would need to be deleted or moved to a local folder on the user’s computer.

   Emails considered an “official record” of the IRS couldn’t be deleted and, in fact, needed to also have a hard copy filed. Those emails that constitute an official record are ones that are loosely defined under IRS policy as ones that were “[c]reated or received in the transaction of agency business,” “appropriate for preservation as evidence of the government’s function or activities,” or “valuable because of the information they contain”. The letter sent to the senators suggests that it was up to the user to determine what emails met those standards. It’s not clear if Lerner had any hard copies of important emails.

   Now if this is true it is a stupid policy but that’s just the “stupid defense” what it actually shows is that they had a policy on place that they knew would automatically frustrate any attempt to investigate the actions of any employee by leaving only a 6 month window for a crime to be discovered, and for subpenas to be issued for the emails. Emails that the employee would decide were not to be made hard copy but would be allowed to disappear after 6 months.

5. dicentra says:

   June 16, 2014 at 3:28 pm

   Yeah, well CANDIDUS also means “white,” and he’s a dead cismale, ERGO.

6. Drumwaster says:

   June 16, 2014 at 3:38 pm

   I read where someone called it not “Plausible Deniability”, but “Implausible Deniability”, where the excuse is so laughable on its face that when it is given with a straight face, as if to ask “yeah, we both know I’m lying, but what are you gonna do about it?”, it just causes the listening public to wonder what is being missed.

   I personally wonder why the people offering such explanation aren’t being arrested on the spot for obstruction and conspiracy.

   “Most Transparent” not in the sense of “we’re opening everything up for inspection”, but in the sense of “you all know it’s there, just like the air, but if you can’t see anything to hold onto, there’s nothing you can do but keep breathing it in”.

   “When in the Course of Human Events…”

7. Bob Belvedere says:

   June 16, 2014 at 6:32 pm

   Dicentra wrote: Yeah, well CANDIDUS also means “white,” and he’s a dead cismale, ERGO.

   I can’t beer the thought of you disparaging old Sam.

8. epador says:

   June 16, 2014 at 7:42 pm

   Was that prince’s name Beaucoup Harem?

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