There were more Maya than previously thought

The New Neo Posted on by

This is pretty astounding news. A new technology called Lidar:

…unveils archaeological finds almost invisible to the naked eye, especially in the tropics.

It is a sophisticated remote sensing technology that uses laser light to densely sample the surface of the earth…

In Guatemala, the technology has revealed that the Maya civilization was far more widespread than archeologists had previously believed:

Maya civilisation, at its peak some 1,500 years ago, covered an area about twice the size of medieval England, with an estimated population of around five million.

“With this new data it’s no longer unreasonable to think that there were 10 to 15 million people there,” said Mr Estrada-Belli, “including many living in low-lying, swampy areas that many of us had thought uninhabitable.”

Most of the 60,000 newly identified structures are thought to be stone platforms that would have supported the average pole-and-thatch Maya home.

The archaeologists were struck by the “incredible defensive features”, which included walls, fortresses and moats…

One of the hidden finds is a seven-storey pyramid so covered in vegetation that it practically melts into the jungle.

Another discovery that surprised archaeologists was the complex network of causeways linking all the Maya cities in the area. The raised highways, allowing easy passage even during rainy seasons, were wide enough to suggest they were heavily trafficked and used for trade.

There’s a lot of surprise in archeology. In this case, the evidence was hidden in plain sight:

As soon as we saw this we all felt a little sheepish,” said Canuto said of the LiDAR images, “because these were things that we had been walking over all the time.”

The images revealed intensive cultivation of fields for agriculture, as well. As for what brought the Maya civilization down, scientists don’t know and so far Lidar hasn’t told them. There are some speculations about drought, but it’s more likely that it was war.

The articles I just linked is a review of a book on Latin American indigenous warfare written by two authors. Apparently this topic is a bone of contention in academia, an area in which revisionists try to claim that reports of warfare were just a white European plot to tarnish the Maya:

[The authors] seek to counter the increasing influence of “revisionist” groups who contend that references to Amerindian warfare and ritual violence in early colonial sources are a European fabrication intended to discredit indigenous peoples and justify their conquest. As the editors assert, scholars have tended to ignore revisionist “denial movements” on the grounds that they base their arguments on ideological considerations rather than on actual facts.

This lack of debate has benefited the revisionist movement, leading to the rapid diffusion and acceptance of denial perspectives in college campuses throughout the Americas and Europe. Through the publication of these two volumes, Chacon and Mendoza seek to redress this imbalance. Based on the latest archeological, linguistic, iconographic, ethnographic, and historical evidence, the eleven chapters that comprise the Latin American volume””the object of this review””provide a broad view of indigenous warfare in different times and geographical regions. In them, the notion that warfare and ritual violence, while not universal, was a central feature of Amerindian cultural traditions, receives significant support.

Does this sound familiar? It should—and speaking of war, it’s part of that Gramscian war that’s been so successful and borne particularly fertile fruit within the last twenty years or so. Few areas have been left untouched.

[NOTE: A related post can be found here.]

A classic: Kirkland and Barishnikov in Balanchine’s “Theme and Variations”

The New Neo Posted on by

I saw this Kirkland/Barishnikov performance live on TV in 1978 when it first aired; I’d also seen the two do the same ballet in person. They were a magical pair in the short time they were partners. They were a couple offstage too, but then they broke up and she became dependent on drugs for a while.

Kirkland and Barishnikov were a remarkable duo because, even though their temperaments were very different, they shared a number of important characteristics. They were both perfectionists about their dancing. I believe he was the more naturally gifted and she the more studied (that’s one of the reasons he lasted much longer than she did), but they both reached a physical near-perfection in the clarity of their movement. It doesn’t matter how fast the tempo got—and it gets very fast indeed here in the finale, which is the second clip I’ve cued up. There’s nothing blurry about them despite the frantic pace (and the relatively poor quality of the video). In the midst of all that speed, their positions and lines are impeccable.

It also helped that they were perfect partners in terms of size. They were both very diminutive. I can vouch for the fact that Barishnikov is barely 5’4″, because I once stood right next to him when we were both in ballet slippers. Kirkland is teeny-tiny, not just thin (she later became anorectic for a while) but short, too. Her feet are very big for her size, which I think gives her a strong platform on which to balance.

The only thing that bothers me about Kirkland is that she’s got what I call flappy wrists. I think her wrists and hands are where she puts her nervousness. But it’s a small price to pay.

Enjoy. I’ve cued up some short excerpts from the performance, but feel free to watch it in its entirety. This was originally aired on television, but I believe it’s now only available at the Lincoln Center Library (and in this blurry version which someone seems to have recorded off a TV), held hostage by the musician’s union.

This first one is the pas de deux, which is relatively slow. You can see that one of the “themes” of “Theme and Variations” is to circle around and around—not so much in the familiar pirouette (although of course we see those, too) but in arabesque or attitude with the help of the male dancer. The audience gets to see these turns in many variations on the theme. You will notice them in particular at 13:26 to 13:54, where Kirkland sustains them exceptionally beautifully (with Barishnikov’s assistance):

Here’s the stirring finale, danced at warp speed. I love love love the Tchaikovsky music, and the Balanchine choreography expresses it so very beautifully. Watching this in a theater, I think my favorite part (perhaps of the entire ballet) was when the women do those twirls during the march/processional, at 20:20-20:37. It may seem like a little thing in the video (and the dancers are somewhat hard to see). But in the theater, it was just plain thrilling:

The tactics du jour

The New Neo Posted on by

If you look at memeorandum’s roundup for today, you have to hand it to the Democrats as propagandists. They have their methods for deflecting the Nunes report and everything in it, and I have little doubt their methods will work with a great many people, and with virtually everyone on the left or liberal side.

It goes like this (summary version): the Nunes report is discredited because two unnamed officials have said that the FBI’s FISA request suggested that the Steele dossier was funded by a political entity. I already have discussed this issue in today’s previous post and I refer you to it. But for now, suffice to say that it’s a relatively minor point and doesn’t even begin to challenge the vast number of allegations in that report, not to mention the fact that we don’t even know if it’s true.

The other attempts to discredit the Nunes report go like this: the Republicans and Trump are attacking our sacred institution, the FBI! How dare they! It undermines the foundation of our entire system! The FBI’s actual behavior seems irrelevant to this argument (including those pillars of rectitude and objectivity, Strzok and Page, who are not the subject matter of the Nunes memo but whose communications certainly reflected negatively on the trustworthiness and objectivity of the FBI and the DOJ).

The MSM and the Democrats are good at what they do. They are united. They are relentless. And they reach a large number of people.

I don’t know which “narrative” will prevail among the majority of people, however. The days when institutions such as the FBI and the DOJ (and the IRS and the press, for that matter) were automatically trusted are long past. “Attacks” on those institutions may seem rather well-justified to an awful lot of people.

Me? My concern is whether the charges are justified, not whether an institution is being attacked or not. And it doesn’t matter which side is doing the attacking.

More thoughts on the Nunes memo and the reaction to it

The New Neo Posted on by

The constant drip of leaks prior to the Nunes memo’s release has had the twin functions of desensitizing the public to the news in it, thereby reducing its shock value, and of allowing those who want to minimize it to say there’s no there there. To a certain degree this approach has been very successful with liberals and the left. You can see the evidence all around the blogosphere as commenters fan out to spread the word that there’s nothing of import in the memo.

And this from the same people who said the memo was so full of leaks of classified information that its release would jeopardize national security. Since the memo actually contained nothing of the sort, that argument has dissipated as though it never happened. No one is forced to answer for the misrepresentation. Now we’re just on to the next thing.

Maybe my memory is playing tricks on me, but my recollection is that everyone except the most extreme wings of both parties used to be in agreement that, if allegations such as those in the Nunes memos were true, it would constitute a grave and dangerous misuse of the FISA court system by the FBI. Very few people would buy the idea that the offenses themselves were unimportant. But that seems to be at least part of the present-day atmosphere, a kind of blase shrug of the shoulders. The outrage is all on one side, and perhaps if the parties were reversed it would be all on the other side (although in Watergate days there was plenty of outrage on the part of Republicans, which is what actually propelled Nixon’s resignation).

It is indeed ironic, deeply ironic, that the FISA court system that was set up in the wake of Watergate has allegedly been abused by a political party seeking to harm a political rival:

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was introduced on May 18, 1977, by Senator Ted Kennedy and was signed into law by President Carter in 1978…

The FISA resulted from extensive investigations by Senate Committees into the legality of domestic intelligence activities. These investigations were led separately by Sam Ervin and Frank Church in 1978 as a response to President Richard Nixon’s usage of federal resources to spy on political and activist groups. The act was created to provide judicial and congressional oversight of the government’s covert surveillance activities of foreign entities and individuals in the United States, while maintaining the secrecy needed to protect national security.

But virtually any institution can be compromised. Whether that happened and exactly to what extent it happened in the case of the FBI, Carter Page, the FISA court, and the Steele dossier remains to be seen. The value of the Nunes memo is that it sets up the charges, and those charges are serious and merit further investigation and further disclosure of information. The whole thing may end up being a tempest in a teapot as more facts emerge, but at the moment it is—and should be—a big effing deal, as Joe Biden might say if the shoe were on the other foot.

Today there’s a lot of talk about whether or not the FBI may have actually given the FISA court some of the information about the funding behind the Steele dossier. Like so many reports, this one was made by anonymous sources (“two U.S. officials familiar with the matter”), and we have no idea if it’s true or not and no idea what the FBI actually said. For what it’s worth, though, here’s the story:

The Justice Department may have told a court of the political origins of an opposition research dossier that formed part of the application for a warrant to surveil a former Trump campaign adviser.

The Washington Post reported Friday that Justice Department officials made “ample disclosure of relevant, material facts” to the court that a political entity provided financial backing for the research, though they did not name Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign or the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

We don’t know what the FISA application actually said–we don’t know whether it said anything of the sort, because we haven’t seen it, and we don’t even know who those anonymous “officials familiar with the matter” are, how reliable they are, or how they came by that familiarity. We can certainly assume that they didn’t show the FISA application to the WaPo reporter writing the story, or that would have been stated.

But let’s accept for the sake of argument that the FISA application did include an indication that some “political entity” had backed the dossier. The FISA court certainly would not have assumed that it was actually the DNC and the Clintons who were that entity or entities. Remember, among other things, that many Republicans were very anti-Trump, and that the MSM originally reported that the Steele dossier was funded by Republicans. There are a lot of political entities in the world, some big and some small, major and very minor. The DNC and Clinton were among the biggest fishes of all, and the most suspect in terms of their motives. The FISA court was unaware they were the funders of the dossier, although the FBI was well aware of it.

What did the Nunes memo actually state regarding this?:

a) Neither the initial [FISA] application in October 2016, nor any of the renewals, disclose or reference the role of the DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign in funding Steele’s efforts, even though the political origins of the Steele dossier were then known to senior and FBI officials.

b) The initial FISA application notes Steele was working for a named U.S. person, but does not name Fusion GPS and principal Glenn Simpson, who was paid by a U.S. law firm (Perkins Coie) representing the DNC (even though it was known by DOJ at the time that political actors were involved with the Steele dossier). The application does not mention Steele was ultimately working on behalf of””and paid by””the DNC and Clinton campaign, or that the FBI had separately authorized payment to Steele for the same information.

If the unnamed “officials” are correct and the FISA application said that “a political entity” helped fund the dossier, is this contradicted by the Nunes memo? The memo states that the FISA application failed to disclose that the dossier funding was provided by “DNC, Clinton campaign, or any party/campaign.” Those three things—the DNC, the Clinton campaign, and a party/campaign are certainly all “political entities,” but “political entity” is a much broader term that encompasses a lot of other things. So if the report of the unnamed “officials” is true then no, the FBI still didn’t disclose those things specifically, it only stated a much more general fact (“political entity”) although it knew the specifics (DNC and Clinton) at the time. So yes, the FISA court would have known that politics was somehow involved, but virtually nothing else.

There’s also this:

Nor was the court informed that the dossier’s author, former British spy Christopher Steele, told a senior Justice Department official that he was “desperate” to prevent Trump from being elected president.

Moreover, despite presenting dossier information as probable cause on four separate occasions ”” for the initial FISA warrant in October 2016, and three times in the ensuing months ”” the FBI failed to verify the dossier’s explosive allegations and failed to inform the court that its efforts to corroborate the allegations had been unavailing. Indeed, the memo relates that the government once presented a news story to the court as corroboration for Steele’s claims, apparently unaware that Steele himself was the source for the news story.

These are also shocking facts—that is, they should be shocking to everyone concerned with the rule of law. Apparently, they’re not shocking to a lot of people.

And there’s more that’s shocking, or should be:

Obviously, the obscure Page was not the main target of the investigation. What animated the government was the possibility of Russian collusion with the Donald Trump presidential campaign. It is also what animated Steele in crafting the dossier. Yet, the Intelligence Committee’s memo notes former FBI director James Comey’s acknowledgement in June 2017 Senate testimony that these dossier allegations were “salacious and unverified.”

It appears that they always were. The FBI’s assistant director Bill Priestap told the committee that efforts to corroborate Steele were in their “infancy” when the first warrant was sought.

So the problem is not just what the FBI may have presented to the FISA court. The problem is also what the FBI knew and when they knew it, and what their motive was for deciding to go ahead and seek the warrant anyway.

And the incredibly fair and unbiased James Comey…

The New Neo Posted on by

…had this to say about the Nunes memo:

“That’s it?” If the allegations seem like a nothingburger to you, Mr. Comey, then it’s only more reason to hope you never get near a government post again.

“Dishonest and misleading”—Which parts, and what is your evidence for claiming they are dishonest?

“wrecked the House intel committee”—in what way? Is it not still in operation? The vote was along predictable party lines, as so many things are these days.

“damaged relationship with the FISA court”—how, and whose relationship? If anything might have “damaged” that relationship, it would have been the alleged actions themselves, if in fact the FISA court was not informed of the extremely pertinent information about the origins of the dossier.

“inexcusably exposed classified investigation of an American citizen”—If the investigation was begun through the use of partisan opp research, not only do Americans have a right to know, but that fact also provides the “excuse” for this “inexcusable” exposure. What’s more, virtually all of the information contained in the dossier and released was already in the public domain, having been revealed by internal leaks to the MSM. I don’t recall Comey being so incensed at that.

In fact, I seem to recall that a leaker of other classified information was Comey himself:

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley is pressing the Justice Department for answers on whether James Comey violated bureau rules, saying it appears the former FBI director leaked “at least one” classified memo to a professor friend shortly after his firing.

Grassley, R-Iowa, penned a letter to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein late Wednesday, saying he and his staff had reviewed the Comey memos which were “created purportedly memorializing his interactions with President Trump.” They did so in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF) at the FBI and the Senate, because the FBI deemed the “majority of the memos” to be “classified.”

“Of the seven memos, four are marked classified at the ‘SECRET’or ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ levels,” Grassley wrote, adding that “only three did not contain classified information.”

Grassley’s letter appears to back up July 2017 reports that several of Comey’s private memos contained classified material. The Hill first reported this development; Fox News confirmed with a legal source at the time that some material contained classified information. The president seized on those reports at the time with a tweet saying: “That is so illegal!”

Comey admitted in congressional testimony in June 2017 that he had given his friend, Columbia University Professor Daniel Richman, his memos about discussions with Trump in order to have his notes leaked to The New York Times — hoping to spur the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Somehow Comey’s faux outrage is unconvincing, despite his vehement language.

Comey’s tweet ends like this: “For what? DOJ & FBI must keep doing their jobs.” The answer to “for what?” should be obvious: to expose possible wrongdoing on the part of government entities tasked with protecting the law and keeping us safe. And the response to “DOJ & FBI must keep doing their jobs” would be doing their jobs correctly, not in a partisan manner or because they were fed information by one side attempting to do a hit on the other.

[ADDENDUM: A reminder from Ace:

When Comey “briefed” Trump about the memo, he also withheld from Trump the dossier’s partisan origins as well as the unreliablity (and firability) of its alleged author.

Note I always put “briefed” in quotes when I speak of this “briefing,” because this briefing was not for the President’s information, but for CNN’s: The plan was to make the dossier “reportable” by giving it a newsworthy angle (It’s so explosive the president was briefed on it!).

CNN was almost immediately leaked the news of this “briefing.” It should be pointed out that one of the four reporters pushing this leak to the public was Evan Perez, who is a best friend of Fusion GPS’ Glenn Simpson.

Moving right along, nothing to see here.]

The Nunes memo is now published

The New Neo Posted on by

You can find a summary and the text of the memo at Legal Insurrection.

Since a great deal of its contents had already been revealed, there aren’t too many surprises there. Not surprising, but still shocking and disturbing, although we’ve become used to that sort of thing.

THe investigation of Carter Page was triggered by the FISA court’s approval, which in turn rested on the Steele dossier, which in turn was opposition research paid for by the DNC and Clinton campaign. What’s more, when the FBI applied to the FISA court on the basis of that dossier, they already knew that its provenance was campaign opp research and they didn’t reveal that rather salient fact to the FISA court.

Have we become so partisan that the vast majority of Democrats don’t care about this? Probably.

Have too many of us become inured to shady government actions, much like that frog that’s boiled slowly by degrees?

Would many of Hillary Clinton’s supporters think it’s okay because of course Trump colluded with the Russians as every intelligent and good person knows, so it doesn’t matter how the warrant was obtained?

There’s more in the memo:

The memo then goes into detail about Steele’s relationships within the DOJ even after his termination as a source. That man is then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, who we have blogged about before due to the DOJ demoting him because of contacts at Fusion GPS. That contact was his wife and she worked at the firm during the election.

You can study the tone and tenor of the coverage here. The spin is much as one would expect. Examples of some headlines indicate that Nunes is a partisan hack, the process “tarnishes the House”, it’s a “Republican plot against the FBI”, Sean Hannity advised Trump on the memo (“because of course he has”).

[ADDENDUM: Ace points out the following: “The FBI and DOJ do not seem to have alerted the court to Steele’s firing or unreliability (or partisan bias) in any application, even after they themselves fired him.”]

Worker who sent Hawaii nuclear alert message is fired, but he’s only the end point of a deeply flawed system

The New Neo Posted on by

The announcement:

Officials revealed that the employee who sent the [nuclear] alert was fired Friday. His name has not been revealed. A second worker quit before disciplinary action was taken, and another was being suspended without pay, officials said.

“The protocols were not in place. It was a sense of urgency to put it in place as soon as possible. But those protocols were not developed to the point they should have,” retired Brig. Gen. Bruce Oliveira, who wrote the report on Hawaii’s internal investigation, said at a news conference.

The firing is not surprising, because this worker really messed up. But the situation as revealed by the article is much much worse than that. In fact, this same worker had been messing up for years, just not on quite so large a scale, and nothing was done:

Hawaii emergency management officials knew for years that an employee had problems performing his job. Then, he sent a false alert warning of an imminent missile attack earlier this month.

The worker had mistakenly believed drills for tsunami and fire warnings were actual events, and colleagues were not comfortable working with him, the state said Tuesday. His supervisors counseled him but kept him for a decade in a position that had to be renewed each year.

So this behavior was part of a known pattern of alarmist misunderstanding by this guy, and yet he was retained for a decade. Why? It’s pure speculation. It could be that it’s almost impossible for a civil servant in Hawaii to be fired. It could be that there was some extra reason this man was protected. But there’s no question that quality control was virtually nonexistent.

But it wasn’t just this guy’s fault, although he definitely should shoulder some of the blame. And it wasn’t just the fault of those who failed to fire him, although they definitely should shoulder some of the blame. The system also wasn’t set up to protect from human error. It was shockingly bad:

The agency had a vague checklist for missile alerts, allowing workers to interpret the steps they should follow differently. Managers didn’t require a second person to sign off on alerts before they were sent, and the agency lacked any preparation on how to correct a false warning.

Excuse me but, WTF? Is this some sort of caricature? Some of you may respond by saying “typical liberal bureaucracy.” But I don’t think this is typical—this goes way beyond anything I think of as typical. Are these people all perpetually stoned? What gives?

For some odd reason, YouTube thought I’d like this

The New Neo Posted on by

I can’t imagine why 🙂 :

As a child, I would have practically killed for those costumes and those fans. But my ballet teacher, who was British, had a very austere attitude towards recitals and fancy costumes: none.

Here’s the grownup variation they’re conjuring up, by the way. This is one of my all-time favorites, Maya Plisetskaya, in 1968 when she would have been 43, practically geriatric in the ballet sense:

Here’s a typical modern-day extreme ballet version. I want to ask her why the need for so much control and so little speed? Do you think that’s in tune with the character?. You decide:

And speaking of costumes, here’s something I’ve posted on this blog before. It’s a costume I wore in the third act of “Swan Lake” at summer camp when I was sixteen years old. That’s me. It was the most beautiful costume by far I’d ever worn, before or since. It belonged to my teacher, who’d been a prominent ballerina in the 30s and traveled round the world with Diaghilev’s company, among others.

ADDENDUM: I had to actually play that tambourine as I danced. That photo of me was taken during a dress rehearsal, and it’s posed. If memory serves me, during the performance the tambourine had ribbon streamers coming from it, something like the ones on the hat only narrower.

I was performing the Neapolitan (Italian) dance from Act III. Like this, only somewhat different choreography. I think my costume was much nicer. Unlike her, I didn’t do a lot of standing around and waiting during the fast portions, either; there was more dancing in my part. And unlike her, I didn’t fake-slap that tambourine. I really let that sucker have it:

Nielson reports on the number of viewers for the SOTU address

The New Neo Posted on by

I wondered the other day about how many people watched the SOTU address, and here’s the figure: 45.6 million.

To put that into perspective, see this. That number is similar to Obama’s second SOTU speech and also very similar to Trump’s first (Obama’s first was somewhat higher, but not a ton higher). Viewership in general has come down from the days of Clinton and Bush—even for Obama. But there’s a simple explanation, which is that Nielson only reports on TV-watching and does not include online watching. These days, that’s a pretty big omission.

That’s why Trump’s statement that it was the most viewed in history is impossible to fact-check.

More importantly, it means that an awful lot of people saw the Democrats sitting on their hands—not just at times when a viewer might expect them to, but at times when Congressional Democrats should have been applauding.

When I tried to Google “who watched the SOTU address”—that is, what was the political makeup of the viewers—I got a ton of articles falsely claiming that Trump falsely claimed to have the largest viewership in history. As I already explained, Trump’s claim was seemingly baseless but impossible to prove or disprove unless a person has access to a secret source of reliable information about online viewers.

I wanted to know the political makeup of the viewers, because I had a hunch that they were mostly Trump-supporters or Trump-neutral. It’s the Trump-neutral ones I’m interested in. They’re the ones who might have been both surprised and turned off by the Democrats’ antics.

All I’ve been able to find so far is the breakdown of those who answered a CBS poll in which 75% of respondents had a favorable view of the speech:

In the latest CBS national poll released earlier this month, 24 percent of Americans identified themselves as Republicans. Among those who watched tonight’s address, that percentage was 42 percent, bolstering the overall approval of the address.

So in addition to these 42% who were Republicans, 25% of the poll respondents were Democrats and 33% Independents. That 75% positive response to the speech was much higher than the percentage of Republicans. Also, 81% of respondents said Trump was trying to unite the country in the speech. To me, that indicates that Democratic operatives are barking up the wrong tree by calling it “divisive.” Remember that 32% of those polled called themselves “Trump opponents,” so some of them must have approved of not only parts of the speech but the speech as a whole, as well as Trump’s uniter-not-divider motives.

The poll wasn’t one of those online polls in which just anybody could respond (I had originally completely discounted it because I had thought it was). Here’s the research method used:

This CBS News 2018 survey is based on 1,178 interviews conducted on the internet of U.S. residents who watched the State of the Union Address. Panelists were previously interviewed on January 29-30, 2018 to indicate whether they planned to watch the address, and if they were willing to be re-interviewed after the address.

The detailed results can be found at the link.

Polls are polls, of course. I take them all with a grain of salt. But this one’s certainly interesting.

If Democrat voters are so fired up, why is the DNC nearly going broke?

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t know the answer, but that’s my question.

Here’s the basis for my question:

This report is nothing short of a disaster. Having $6.1 million in debt with only $6.3 million cash on hand is basically being broke. Debt means interest payments, after all, which will eventually overtake the COH position ”” and probably sooner rather than later. The DNC has to be able to spend to set up its fundraising, and right now that’s looking iffy.

More to the point, the DNC has to organize and fund a GOTV effort this fall if they want to score big in the midterms. Some have suggested that the dollars are going instead to the candidates directly, although there’s no real data to support that as of yet. It’s not going especially to the congressional committees, at least not in ways that show a serious advantage for Democrats. However, as 2016 should have proven to everyone but especially Democrats, it’s dangerous to leave GOTV to the candidate campaigns. They usually don’t have sufficient resources for significant coordination and usually rely on the central committees for at least the heavy data crunching.

Ed Morrissey, who wrote the piece, believes that DNC heads Tom Perez and Rep. Keith Ellison are to blame for the lackluster showing.

I have no idea what or who’s to blame. But I don’t think the problem is that there’s any dearth of angry Democrats willing to give money to help unseat Trump and the Republicans, and convinced they can accomplish it.

No wonder the FBI dragged its feet on Clinton’s emails

The New Neo Posted on by

Two items.

The FBI was slow in examining the evidence that Hillary Clinton’s emails from her server, containing possibly classified material, were found on Anthony Weiner’s laptop:

The DOJ inspector general, Michael Horowitz, is reportedly looking at why McCabe neglected for at least three weeks to look at new emails related to the investigation that were found on former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y)’s laptop during the later months of the 2016 election.

Investigators want to know if McCabe or others at the FBI wanted to avoid coming up with results in that probe until after the 2016 election concluded, the Post reports.

Clinton supporters have long argued that the FBI’s late decision to reopen the former secretary of State’s email investigation swung the election to now-President Trump, while the president’s supporters have argued that FBI officials let Clinton off without charges due to political bias…

McCabe was notified in late September or early October, according to the report. For three weeks, however, little changed in the investigation, which some law enforcement officials told the Post was a sign of the issue nearly dying at McCabe’s desk.

The probe was eventually reopened weeks before Election Day.

This is one of the reasons that McCabe seems to be in trouble these days. Maybe he would have been in trouble anyway had Clinton been elected, although for the opposite thing—investigating her emails at all.

So, why the reluctance? One reason could be that they were sure she’d be elected and didn’t want to be on her enemies list. Another could be that they wanted her to be elected and thought the email evidence would damage her chances. Another is that they’re incompetent.

Or some combination of all of this.

But maybe there was still another reason. Here’s what just came out today in the continuing Strzok/Page text saga:

In new texts between the two released Thursday by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Page wrote that she was to get an Apple iPhone, likely from the FBI’s IT director.

Texted Strzok: “Hot damn. I’m happy to pilot that…we get around our security/monitoring issues?”

Page: “No, he’s proposing that we just stop following them. Apparently the requirement to capture texts came from omb, but we’re the only org (I’m told) who is following that rule. His point is, if no one else is doing it why should we.”

While it is unclear if the iPhones were private or government, the committee raised concerns of a plot to avoid rules to capture official correspondence by using non-government phones.

So, everybody’s doin’ it. Maybe the entire FBI was vulnerable to similar charges.