SteveWolfer

I agree completely - that's an excellent point. And, another view of this is that the stock shares (or a Honda) are a specific kind of property and come with the right to resell them. I have some books for sale on Amazon and I will be paid a royalty for each new book that sells. When someone turns around and resells one of my books as a used book it does diminish the sale of new books, and the market for new books does not depend upon the existence of a secondary market. But the paperback versions come with the right to resell, whereas the eBook versions... not so much. Sometimes it is about economics, sometimes it is about property rights. Comparing the sale of stock in the secondary market to a Ponzi scheme is misleading since markets go up and down and since individual companies fortunes go up and down. In this sense it is not a fixed pie that requires losers for their to be winners. (In today's mixed economy and with quantitative easing it might be more accurate to call it gambling than investing... at least for those not doing it for a living - but that's a different issue).

I programmed computers - that's manipulating symbols. I was also a psychotherapist and the 'stuff' I produced there wasn't made of atoms, but it made a difference between misery and happiness for some people. I not going to saying anything against Musk (don't know anything about him). Rocket ships and electric cars certainly have quite a bit of glamor, but the market place serves all actual demand, even things like drinking straws, or the services of fortune tellers, or yo-yos, or massage chairs. And I'm all for people who produce stuff, and for a free market. But I do want to reiterate that some 'stuff' isn't made of atoms. There can be real economic value to other 'stuff' - like an agreement - say a merger - or funding like IPOs, the sale of bonds, etc. A free market measures the worth of all voluntary transactions. A culture may have biases for or against certain kinds of voluntary transactions, but then those of us schooled in rational evaluations can have a say on which biases make sense.

The young have been educated under the Progressive's strong belief in global governance.

O'Reilly has never brought out Obama negatives of this sort before. In the past, he might have reported that others had said this or that, and then he would given the speaker a mild rebuke. I suspect that O'Reilly really wants a Trump presidency and maybe even sees himself steering the nation from behind the throne. He sees Obama's high popularity ratings, he knows how effective Obama can be when he campaigns and he suspects that if Obama really cranks up his energy level on behalf of Hillary that it will help with the base who might otherwise have stayed home - that Obama will make then think that a vote for Hillary is a vote for him. That is my totally unsupported theory of why O'Reilly finds himself skating as close to the "Obama is secretly a Muslim" crowd as he can and still retain credibility with the rest of his audience.

A person is "innocent until proven guilty" under the law. It isn't just opinion, because without it there is a serious lack of legal protection for individual rights. Requiring government to use rational evidence, and to take nothing from a person without judicial process, joins the moral (individual rights) to the law (legal protection) and does so with reason.

My brother, trying hard to hold onto some kind of wishful thinking, was wondering if the reason Comey didn't request an indictment (and didn't take any questions at that announcement), was because he has a much bigger hammer he is going to drop - bribery charges relating to the Clinton foundation and Teneo. (By the way, Dick Morris reports that about 700 not yet released emails went from Hillary's State Dept. staff to Teneo or the Foundation and that works out to around 25 a day - that is a lot of activity from people on Hillary's staff, as they drew state dept. salaries, and may well tie closely to payments to Bill or the foundation. These are the emails that the State Dept. won't release until sometime well into Hillary's first term as president.) Is Comey a man who is honest enough and courageous enough to call a crime a crime and pursue it even if the criminal is named 'Clinton'? Or, was he pressured or bought? Or, is he really a partisan hack and we just didn't see that? Or, does he have some kind of bizarre boyscout complex where he thinks that he helped the country by trashing the request for an indictment that he knew would only generate conflict and be turned down by the DOJ? That last seems like pretty thin soup. The only way to believe that the man is honest and courageous enough to match his previously held reputation and to match the currently held respect for the FBI, is to assume that he is still pursuing the Clintons and plans to cut loose with some big guns. But, again, that feels a lot like wishful thinking... like a Charlie Brown-Lucy-football situation.

I certainly agree with that statement (in the Alex Jones video) that we have demarcation - i.e., below some sort of line you are just one of the little people and the laws apply to you. Above that line and you are exempt. All tyrannies are divided into the rulers and the ruled - the process of going from where we are to there has to look like this. I think Roger Stone may be overly confident of Trump's debating ability.

Hillary Clinton does nothing without the advice of counsel. She is a lawyer. Her husband is a lawyer (although disbarred for while), she had her lawyers do the deleting of her 'personal' emails, her chief of staff, Mills, is a lawyer. She can't turn around without bumping into lawyers. I mention this because Comey says there was no intent to violate any of the security laws (which actually don't require intent, only gross negligence). But if shown that only a complete fool would think that Clinton didn't act with complete knowledge of the law, having been fully briefed on the law, being a lawyer, having been surrounded by lawyers, then engaged in the illegal acts any way - for years.... that person should be considered to have knowingly violated the law. Mens rea and actus reus.

Last Sunday, the New York Times printed this: "Democrats close to Mrs. Clinton say she may decide to retain Ms. Lynch, the nation's first black woman to be attorney general, who took office in April 2015." Gee, was that the quid pro quo for rigging the game? Did Loretta tell Bill, "Okay, I'll give you all the answers Hillary needs to give Comey to ensure she gets no indictment, but she has to publically announce...." And Trump thinks he knows how to make deals. Combine high levels of partisanship with a secretive, corrupt environment and what do you get? Conspiracy theories - how could it not happen.

We are not a democracy, but rather a republic. (Important technicality!) But to do an impeachment is, to a degree, a repudiation of the votes that put the person in office (unless there is a significant change in popularity or significant new information). The founding fathers didn't like unlimited democracy - they didn't trust that the people would not be swayed by a demagogue or caught up in strong emotions. They hoped that the electoral system might be a check on that and that if each congressional district would elect a person of above average intelligence and character and therefore the results would be better than with a more unlimited democracy. -------------------- The impeachment process is not criminal in nature. It is political. The wording is “treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors.” George Mason wanted to include the charge of "maladministration" and Madison agreed with the concept, but thought the word "maladministration" was too vague. Madison, author of the constitution, said that the impeachment process was needed for political reasons, and that an election every four years was not enough of a check and that "corruption... might be fatal to the republic" if the president could not be removed until the next election. Notice that Hillary is already up to the neck of her pants suits in evidence of bribery (which the founding fathers described as taking money in exchange for political favors - something where she and Bill appear to have set new records - anyone want to rent a night in the Lincoln bedroom.... or get a pardon). In the Federalist, Hamilton said, “...those offences which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or in other words from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

You are absolutely correct. The House should wait till she has been in office for a few days.... it probably wouldn't take longer than that for her to violate some law. But this is really a technicality. Impeachment is an indictment to remove someone who shouldn't be in office. She shouldn't be in office.

Any president that seriously wants to do what Trump says he wants to do, and wants to weed out corruption in the many corrupt agencies, will need to get the Civil Service Act reformed again (along with other statutes). And break some unions. He needs to be able to fire people. If he can't.... it will be like trying to make a clean sweep of a very dirty stable.... with a small toothbrush.

I'd love to see the Inspector General's office publically declare that based up the report given by the Director of the FBI that Hillary Clinton's security clearance had been revoked. Then let her campaign staff try to explain how she could be president without a security clearance.

She has already done plenty.... more than enough to be impeached on. The moral case for impeachment is simple; she shouldn't be president because of the many crimes she has committed and lies she has made. Impeachment is like an indictment if successful. Whether it is successful or not, it is a public investigation that has more teeth than an oversight committee hearing can exercise. If they get the impeachment, then the Senate take that indictment and tries to convict. I agree that the Senate never would. Too bad. Bill and Hillary could have matching Tee-shirts: "I went to Washington and all got was impeached". She could be the first woman impeached. Maybe the house could play dirty politics and give her a backroom agreement not to start any impeachment hearings her on past crimes if she only nominates Supreme Court justices from that list of Trumps.

I don't think Trump stands a chance of winning (just my opinion). And if the GOP holds the Senate (I don't think they will), then the House should start planning an immediate impeachment, but that will depend upon who Hillary chooses as her running mate. She may choose Senator Warren because that would be an impeachment poison-pill. The House probably doesn't have the balls for that anyway, and even a GOP senate doesn't either. And if they did try that, they'd probably botch it. I'm not feeling terribly optimistic for the Republic at this moment.

True. But, if we are talking "should" the FBI director should have recommended an indictment be drawn. And I've always thought that the Clinton foundation should have been approached like a RICO investigation - Bill was the bag man, there had to be go-betweens, and Hillary used her many flight miles to go close the deal with a wink and nod. But if they are letting Hillary off on the email security violations, that says they are probably not even investigating the foundation shenanigans.

I don't know anything about him at all... just watching him, and hearing a little on the news about his record. I've heard a couple of different lawyers rattle of quite a few federal statutes (by number) that they were positive Hillary had violated. Some of them were felony, some of them were misdemeanor - they all related to the handling of confidential data - that is what I meant by security crimes.

Given that his intent was to let her off the hook, I see why he wouldn't want to mention anything new might be negative for her. The stunning part of that long statement was the existing, and very damning facts, that were coming out of the mouth of the head of the FBI. That was new in itself.

If my memory serves me, it was her broker, or his assistant, who sat next to her on a flight and he said that the CEO of the company whose stock is in question was going to sell all of his shares and that was not public knowledge. Stewart had no part as a professional in Wall Street, and was not employed by or taking money from the company, and was just a stockholder, and just used the information to sell her own shares. If I remember right, she was once a broker, many decades before, back before she started her businesses. And that was what scared her... remembering that at that time she had to be very careful to discriminate between which bits of information were "insider" and which weren't. They failed to get a conviction on insider trading, and instead got convictions on making false statements, Obstruction of Justice, and on Conspiracy (to do what? Sell a stock that was about to tank?).

I always thought that was a real travesty. She heard information that would cause some stock she held to drop so she sold the stock. When the FBI came around investigating, she became worried that she might have broken a law and lied to the FBI. In the end they determined that she did NOT break any insider investing law (she wasn't even an insider by the definition of the law) but they got her for lying to a federal officer (she should have know that only the government employees are permitted to lie). I've always suspected that while it might have been a case of pure accident that her name came up in an investigation, it also might have been a case of someone putting her under investigation because she wouldn't make a campaign donation or something like that. I mean, why with all the real criminal activity going on, even if her name popped up... why do you devote x number of FBI agents to pawing through Martha Stewart's pantry?

That might be. We may never know. Clinton speaks to Lynch, then in days, Comey says no recommendation. No wonder so many people will have nothing to do with anyone who has held office before and insist on an outsider.

How true. As we see from today's news, even if it becomes politically necessary to have an investigation, or hearings, that has nothing to do with even a request for prosecution. The trend is clear: It is becoming more and more unthinkable that a politician should go to jail.

Comey is either a delusional boyscout who lying to himself - thinking he is doing right for the nation, or he is bought and paid for. With his own words he laid out the many violations Clinton was guilty of, and then, in the end, pretends that there is no case - as if he hadn't just made it. It is clear she was intentionally hiding things, but he says no intent. I mean, don't we all have our team of lawyers attend to cleaning out our old emails? There were whole threads containing Top Secret and there were those actually marked confidential, but he ignores that as well, after saying that she, at her position, could not lay any claim to ignorance. He shows that she willingly risked the security of all of the data passing her way to foreign hands, but there isn't even a misdemeanor? I wonder if we will hear squawks of protest from some of the FBI who did the actual work - they were betrayed by Comey. Was Comey trying to have his cake and eat it too by letting Clinton off in the recommendation, but only after spelling out the details of her security crimes? Is this some ego thing of his where he plays Solomon? And why was there no mention, and perhaps no investigation of the Clinton Foundation and Pay-for-Play? Paul Ryan is exactly right. Our system is infested with corrupt parasites who have destroyed all but that fading image of what we once were.

I woke up early today, and having nothing better to do I looked into the tea leaves. Forget Nate Silver, here's the real stuff. Hillary pulls ahead of Trump after the conventions and it does look like she is going to take it walking away, but then the FBI leak their report on all the monkey business the Clintons have been into and Trump surges ahead. The election is a dead tie in the popular vote. Some people say that Clinton operatives cheated in a couple of states to rig the electoral vote. But the best they could do was a tie there as well. The election was thrown to the Supreme court. But those eight Supremes split four-four. That took it to the floor of the House. They elected John Boehner. Seriously, the tea leaves wouldn't lie (Obama once used them to predict 57 out of 57 states). As Boehner walked in, tears streaming down his cheeks, the entire Freedom Caucus got up and walked out and Paul Ryan went with them. The Democrats also left - to a man (and woman). Trump declared himself president anyway at a rally in Fargo, and at last report, the Clintons were caught trying to sneak into the residence. (You know, it's hard to try to make up something that is more bizarre than this election season has already been - I couldn't do it.)

Designing a weapon system shouldn't be equated with serial killers. Wouldn't that be like making a moral equivalency between Samuel Colt and Osama Bin Laden or Charles Manson? Doesn't it matter who the weapons were designed for, and that designing, say a gun, is different from firing a gun at an innocent person? Weapons are good things when used to defend individual rights. The problem is that we've gone so far down the road of political correctness that even a mention of weapons is like a condemnation.