Gray-damp ground-fog this early-evening Wednesday on California’s north coast, an all-day weather thingy without a bit of sunshine at all.
Rain forecast for tomorrow night, Friday morning, though not too heavy, and then back to mostly-sunny over the weekend until the middle of next week.
Latest asshole word-shit came today from FBI Director James Comey — testimony in the US Senate on the the Hillary Clinton e-mail debacle, twisting the 2016 election: ‘“It makes me mildly nauseous to think we might have had an impact on the election. But, honestly, it wouldn’t change the decision.”‘
Just allowed the worse creature ever to become POTUS — no big deal…
(Illustration: ‘Art Critic‘ by Norman Rockwell, found here).
Comey’s appearance was before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which seemed a bit pissed at the prick and his nonchalant-attitude answers to some serious questions, and was just another continuing slow slog of investigations on the Russian connection with the T-Rump. Supposedly, along with the FBI, investigations on Russkie meddling in the 2016 election, are grinding forth in the House, Senate, and the DOJ itself.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein afterwards said Comey is full of you-know-what:
“This was eleven days before [the election],” Feinstein noting, adding the FBI “didn’t get a search warrant to see what was in the ‘Weiner computer,’ ‘but nevertheless “made an assumption” about Clinton’s guilt.
“There is no recourse,” Feinstein explained.
“The election took place, Secretary Clinton lost and I just can’t believe what happened.”
Pressed by Chuck Todd about the “Strawman argument” that Comey would have faced criticism no matter his decision, Feinstein replied, “that argument in my view, is baloney.”
“It’s very hard for me to believe that he felt so sanctimonious about having to come forward,” Feinstein said.
“This was an historic election,” she continued.
“This was the first woman, she was every qualified … she won the popular vote by 3 million votes, she lost the electoral vote narrowly, and everybody that knows her believe that this played a role.”
And the media, too.
Pollster Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight this morning lays-out a really-good analysis of the twist-n-turns of the 2016 election, a cyclone of a perfect storm of events to allow a horror to gain the Oval Office (h/t BJ):
Hillary Clinton would probably be president if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28.
The letter, which said the FBI had “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” into the private email server that Clinton used as secretary of state, upended the news cycle and soon halved Clinton’s lead in the polls, imperiling her position in the Electoral College.
And yet, from almost the moment that Trump won the White House, many mainstream journalists have been in denial about the impact of Comey’s letter.
The article that led The New York Times’s website the morning after the election did not mention Comey or “FBI” even once — a bizarre development considering the dramatic headlines that the Times had given to the letter while the campaign was underway.
Books on the campaign have treated Comey’s letter as an incidental factor, meanwhile.
And even though Clinton herself has repeatedly brought up the letter — including in comments she made at an event in New York on Tuesday — many pundits have preferred to change the conversation when the letter comes up, waving it away instead of debating the merits of the case.
The motivation for this seems fairly clear: If Comey’s letter altered the outcome of the election, the media may have some responsibility for the result.
The story dominated news coverage for the better part of a week, drowning out other headlines, whether they were negative for Clinton (such as the news about impending Obamacare premium hikes) or problematic for Trump (such as his alleged ties to Russia).
And yet, the story didn’t have a punchline: Two days before the election, Comey disclosed that the emails hadn’t turned up anything new.
Too late the hero…shit screaming.