What’s interesting in the news today?
UPDATED
More trouble in Ferguson overnight.
From MSN/TheGuardian “Two police officers have been shot in Ferguson, Missouri, as a small demonstration wound down in the city gripped by unrest since the fatal shooting of an unarmed black 18-year-old last year.
One officer from St Louis County and another from Webster Groves were struck soon after midnight on Wednesday as they stood outside the Ferguson police headquarters, St Louis County police chief Jon Belmar said at a press conference early on Thursday morning.
“These police officers were standing there and they were shot, just because they were police officers,” said Belmar, who added that the officers sustained serious gunshot wounds.
The Webster Groves officer, a 32-year-old who has worked in the department for five years, was shot in the face, according to Belmar. The St Louis County officer, who is 41 and a 17-year law-enforcement veteran, was shot in the shoulder, he said.
Sergeant Brian Schellman, a spokesman for St Louis County police, told the Guardian that both officers were being treated in hospital. “No update yet on condition,” said Schellman. The St Louis Post-Dispatch reported police sources saying both were expected to survive.
Belmar said the shots appeared to have been aimed at the police as they were fired “parallel with the ground” and did not appear to have ricocheted. “I would have to make an assumption that these shots were directed exactly at my police officers,” he said.”
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1. The State Dept. has been the target of the “worst ever” cyber attack. But don’t worry, I’m sure Hillary’s private email server is totally secure. 🙄
From HotAir “At one point in Hillary Clinton’s slightly less than marathon press conference on Tuesday, the former secretary of state insisted that there were no security breaches of her personal “homebrew” email server. How could she possibly know this? The secretary of state’s emails represent a high-value target for cyber hackers operating out of foreign intelligence agencies, and a breach is unlikely to leave a trace of any activity that the layman or even a cyber-intelligence professional would notice. Just ask the State Department.
“Overlooked in the controversy over Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server, is the fact that suspected Russian hackers have bedeviled State Department’s email system for much of the past year and continue to pose problems for technicians trying to eradicate the intrusion,” CNN reported on Tuesday.
As a matter of fact, the State Department is currently investigating what federal law enforcing officials are characterizing as the “worst ever” cyber-attack on America’s diplomatic establishment. “The attackers who breached State are also believed to be behind hacks on the White House’s email system, and against several other federal agencies, the officials say,” the CNN report continued.”
“This report noted that even the State Department’s .gov addresses are not entirely secure, and that attacks on unclassified email systems can expose sensitive information to foreign intelligence services. Capture enough sensitive information, and a competent espionage service can piece together classified material. This is not an inconsequential matter.
We know as a result of the infamous Romanian hacker “Guccifer” that Clinton received messages from her longtime private advisor Sydney Blumenthal via email. How do we know? Blumenthal’s emails were compromised, and that hack revealed that he had shared a variety of private intelligence assessments as well as personal communications with Clinton while she served as the nation’s chief diplomat. It’s possible that none of the emails Clinton provided to the State Department included her correspondence with Blumenthal, according to a FOIA request from Gawker.
“The Clinton camp’s claims about the email account being above-board is also contradicted by the State Department’s response to Gawker’s inquires two years ago,” Gawker’s J.K. Trotter observed. “[T]he State Department replied to our request by saying that, after an extensive search, it could find no records responsive to our request.””
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2. Maybe McConnell isn’t as clueless as he acts.
From NationalJournal “After weeks of Democrats questioning his unwillingness to schedule the nomination of Loretta Lynch to be attorney general, the Senate majority leader announced at a press conference Tuesday that the Senate will vote to confirm her next week. There’s just one catch: Members will have to get past legislation that includes a controversial abortion rider first. “This is bad,” Jessica Brady, a spokeswoman for Judiciary Committee Democrats, said Tuesday.”
“To get their vote on Lynch, Democrats will have to get off of the trafficking bill. And, so far, Republicans aren’t showing any willingness to remove the controversial abortion language.
Democrats are furious that McConnell’s top deputy, Republican Whip John Cornyn, snuck—in their telling—a provision into a bipartisan human-trafficking bill that would prevent any of the funds reserved for trafficking victims from being used on abortions or Plan B contracepton (known as the morning-after pill).
Cornyn argued Tuesday that the legislation including the abortion language was posted publicly on Jan. 13. It earned a dozen Democratic cosponsors and passed the Judiciary Committee unanimously without a single Democratic member or aide flagging the abortion language. It was on page four.
Democrats discovered the problem Monday night, sending staffers and members into a frenzy. The abortion language was not included in a list of changes made to last year’s trafficking bill sent to Democrats by Republican staffers, Sens. Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin said Tuesday. As a result, the language went unnoticed.”
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3. The Obama admin has some ‘splainin’ to do.
From Breitbart “The judge who blocked President Barack Obama’s executive action on immigration has ordered the Justice Department to answer allegations the government misled him about part of the plan.
U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen has ordered federal government lawyers to appear in his court March 19 in Brownsville. The hearing is in response to a filing last week in which the government acknowledged some deportation reprieves were granted before Hanen’s Feb. 16 injunction.”
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More here, from MSN/Reuters “On Monday, Hanen said in a one-page order that the court will not rule on any pending motions at least until a court hearing set for March 19, where government attorneys will have to explain a filing that said some 100,000 people had been given three-year periods of deferred action prior to the judge’s injunction.
Hanen, who has previously criticized U.S. immigration enforcement as too lax, based his Feb. 17 ruling on an administrative law question, faulting Obama’s administration for not giving public notice of his plans. He also cited ways that Texas would be harmed by the action but used no other states as examples.
The decision was an initial victory for 26 states that brought the case alleging Obama had exceeded his powers with executive orders that would let up to 4.7 million illegal immigrants stay without threat of deportation. Obama’s orders bypassed Congress, which has not been able to agree on immigration reform.”
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4. They’ve learned nothing.
From TheWashingtonTimes “Nearly seven years after it was bailed out from the housing market crash, mortgage giant.
Fannie Mae is still engaging in behavior that could precipitate future financial crises and taxpayer losses, a government watchdog warns in a report to be released Wednesday.
The Federal Housing Finance Agency inspector general said its latest concerns involve Fannie Mae’s “haphazard” decision to fill a critical auditor position with an employee who lacked proper qualifications and suffered from a conflict of interest.
Unless Fannie Mae’s leaders and the audit committee that allowed the hiring do their jobs better, there is a “substantial risk” the mortgage company “will operate in an unsafe and unsound manner, suffer losses and expose U.S. taxpayers to further financial risks,” the inspector general said.
The watchdog also had harsh words for the FHFA, the federal agency that oversees Fannie Mae, saying its own leadership failed to act on concerns about the hiring of the auditor position, choosing instead to stay silent.”
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5. A brief modern history of Congressional “treason.”
From HotAir “Over the last couple of days, media outlets and some Democrats have lost their minds over the letter signed by 47 Republican Senators, sent to Iran to warn them that President Obama does not have the authority to create a lasting agreement without the participation of Congress. The New York Daily News ran a headline calling them “traitors,” a charge that has been bandied about on social media without any sense of either its legal sense or the history of Congressional influence on foreign policy. A petition on the White House website to arrest the 47 Senators has gathered over 136,000 signatures, in an apparent attempt of the ignorant to publicly self-identify.
Obviously, this situation requires a little history and perspective, as well as a civics lesson on the nature of co-equal branches of government, and on how this latest “treason” stacks up. The US and the Soviet Union conducted a 44-year “cold war” that often turned hot in places like Korea and Vietnam, and yet as Noah pointed out yesterday, Senator Ted Kennedy encouraged the Soviets to interfere in the 1984 election. Noah also mentions Nancy Pelosi’s trip to visit Bashar Assad in 2007 against the Bush administration’s express desires. But there are even more instances that speak more directly to Congressional interference with executive branch efforts on foreign policy.
Joe Scarborough pointed out one example this morning on Twitter from the Reagan era. The Reagan administration wanted to block Soviet influence in the Western hemisphere by backing rebellions against Communist dictators, especially in Nicaragua. Reagan supported the contras against Daniel Ortega, a policy which Democrats opposed and for which they later passed the controversial Boland Amendment in an attempt to restrict Reagan’s options in foreign policy (and which led to the Iran-Contra scandal.) Before Boland, though, 10 Democrats in the House — including Edward Boland (D-MA) — wrote a letter to Ortega called the “Dear Commandante” letter pledging their support to his government. See if this sounds familiar:
The 10 authors include Jim Wright of Texas, the majority leader; Edward P. Boland of Massachusetts, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and other senior Democrats in the foreign policy field. The letter tells Mr. Ortega that it was written ”in a spirit of hopefulness and goodwill” and voices regret that relations between Nicaragua and Washington are not better.
The writers stress that they all oppose further money for rebel campaigns against the Sandinista Government. In a veiled reference to the Reagan Administration, the letter says that if the Sandinistas do hold genuine elections, those who are ”supporting violence” against the Nicaraguan leaders would have ”far greater difficulty winning support for their policies than they do today.””
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Wandering Views 