This Is Just Getting Embarrassing

With all the Far Right outrage over Joe Biden getting caught with classified documents from his days as Vice President at his home, finding out this afternoon that former Vice President Pence has this same problem makes this slightly enjoyable as schadenfreude (via Dustin Jones at NPR):

A "small number of documents bearing classified markings that were inadvertently boxed and transported to the personal home of the former Vice President at the end of the last Administration" were collected by FBI officials from his Indiana home, according to letters from Pence's representatives to the National Archives and Records Administration.

In a letter dated Jan. 18 to Kate Dillon McClure, the acting director of NARA's White House Liaison Division, Greg Jacob, a spokesman for Pence, wrote the documents were discovered Jan. 16 when Pence, "out of an abundance of caution" following the classified documents recovered at the home of President Biden, "engaged outside counsel, with experience in handling classified documents, to review records stored in his personal home."

Jacob said that the counsel identified a small number of documents that could potentially contain sensitive or classified information interspersed throughout the records, but added the counsel was unable to provide an exact description of the folders or briefing materials...

Can I get an "Oops?" Did anyone say "Oops" for me?!?!

There's a gag now on social media of everybody running around checking their own garages for Classified Documents, with emphasis on the likes of Obama, Dubya, Clinton, and Gore pulling in the extra hours to ensure they're not caught. Nobody wants to harass Dick Cheney (shotgun clacking in the background) and Jimmy Carter is too honest (anybody joking about Carter building Habitats for Humanity out of documents ought to be ashamed of themselves). Nobody's asking Dan Quayle because we're pretty sure he never read anything during his Veephood.

For all the genuine scandal involving donald trump - HIS problem is he knowingly took boxes of classified materials and refused to give them up - and all the faux scandal involving Biden and now Pence who are working with National Archives and the Justice Department to properly return such materials, I want to go back to what I mentioned earlier about this: We are witnessing a serious problem with the lack of proper handling of classified documents across decades of different administrations.

I saw an article yesterday from Water Girl over on Balloon Juice, and I want to refer to the points she makes about the overwhelming amount of paperwork streaming through any Presidential office:

As a mid-level person with top secret classification, his (Andrew McCabe who podcasted with Water Girl) office was a SCIF.  He worked with dozens of top secret documents every day, he says he was “buried” in top secret SCI documents.  Receiving dozens of Top Secret SCI documents every day, he would have to read them all, and he could carry those documents out of his office to another agent’s office.

The other folks he worked with also had the same classification level, so those documents could be discussed with other agents that had a need to know.  At the end of the day, those documents never left the SCIF...

McCabe: "At this level – as a principal in an organization like the FBI, as Vice President, as POTUS – you need access to Top Secret, SCI information all the time, 24 hours a day. Staffers are constantly carrying these documents around.

• At work.
• At home.
• When you travel in the US.
• When you travel overseas.

McCabe: “There are people on your staff whose sole responsibility is to take those documents, transport them, carry it, store it, protect it, and give it to you when you need it.”

McCabe: “As a principal, it is literally following you around everywhere you go.”

McCabe: “Special security folks are responsible for taking care of all those documents.”

As President or Vice President, for instance, the documents follow you to the residence, to the office, as you get ready for the next briefing or a phone call with a world leader...

In short: You can't escape the paperwork.

What's the most likely answer to the reason why Biden - and now Pence, and likely other former White House occupants except for trump, who's an asshole about it - are finding a handful of classified documents on themselves years after their tenures as Veeps or Prezes is that with literally hundreds of such documents going in and out of your hands - and the hands of your handlers - something will get misfiled, stuck in the wrong drawer, and overlooked because nothing about that folder or paperwork said "Holy Shit I Don't Belong Here."

There is a scandal here (not for trump, who is earning his fate): We have too many documents stamped as classified. There's stuff not even related to foreign policy or domestic security matters that still gets stamped by a bureaucrat somewhere as "sensitive" and so the whole system has to treat it as such, even if that information gets outdated (or outed) years down the line.

Our intelligence agencies need to get together and re-evaluate their entire classification system, to ease up on the types of materials that our Presidents (and Vice Presidents, and Cabinet Secretaries, and Senators and Representatives) have to review every day of the job.

Pretty soon we're going to find out that Socks the Cat got caught with TSI paperwork stuck under his litter box. /headdesk

(P.S. Yes I know poor Socks is dead, but I won't put it past this Republican-controlled House to go digging through his poop for the cheap political points against the Clintons... again.)

So How Bad Is Pence?

Update: Tengrain, no. I am so sorry, but you got the link at Crooks & Liars wrong. I never met Pence. RUDE PUNDIT did, which is why I opened the article quoting him. Ack, please please please change the Mike's Blog Round-up link to reflect Rude Pundit's actual article. I am so so sorry about this to anyone coming from the Round-up link. Just, you know, hey here's my blog, just hang out, I update from time to time with moderate, left-leaning views, and hey buy my books and stuff, and... ahhh, so sorry. :(


Okay, so...

Probably this bad. The Rude Pundit actually met the guy once:

See, he was this blogger's Congress member for a brief, horrible period when the Rude Pundit was slowly watching his life seep away in that hellhole of flat land, cold winds, and backwards ass people, Indiana. So he has met Pence, spoken briefly to him, looked into those beady, sleepy eyes and realized, "Holy (bleep), this guy is so (expletive) dumb that he could hammer a nail in with his head and it wouldn't do any damage." No wonder Donald Trump chose him (although, hilariously, it looks like Trump was trying to back out of it at the last minute, possibly realizing that touring the nation with an tight-assed evangelical Christian with the personality of a corn-speckled turd wouldn't be a nonstop party).

Okay, so I curse often on my own blog, but I occasionaly filter it out to tone down the anger just a smidge... Anywho, I digress. Back to Rude Pundit:

Back in 2009, while in Congress (where he squatted and dumped until 2013), Pence was ahead of the curve in trying to defund Planned Parenthood... Or maybe we can look fondly back to when he declared that the Affordable Care Act was antithetical to the ideals of the American Revolution...

And, in 2010, in a preview of the kind of leadership we could expect from Veep Pence, he set the tone for the House of Representatives in telling President Obama and his agenda to go f-ck itself: ..."Look, the time to go along and get along is over...Look, there will be no compromise on stopping runaway spending, deficits and debt. There will be no compromise on repealing Obamacare. There will be no compromise on stopping Democrats from growing government and raising taxes. And if I haven’t been clear enough yet, let me say again: No compromise..."

Yes, yes, yes, Mike Pence, who, at the time, was harboring illusions that he might be president hisself one day, was one of the people responsible for the congressional f-ckery that stalled virtually any legislation in the House...

As for myself, my first direct confrontation with Pence came with his sadistic push as Governor to make Indiana a home for "religious freedom" by essentially mandating private businesses discriminate against gays:

The governor who signed this, Mike Pence, has spent the past few days trying to defend this law.  He keeps saying that the law is about "protecting religious liberty," but when asked about whether the law discriminates, or asked if it's wrong to discriminate, he avoids giving a straight answer.

It's telling that this "great and wonderful and Christian law" for religious liberty had to be signed behind closed doors and with only a handful of religious leaders - some of them known for their rabid brand of hate - rather than a broad range of church pastors and fellowships.  That's probably because a lot of the larger Christian denominations - Presbyterians, Episcopalians and most Lutheran churches in particular - support gay rights.  And a lot of other Christian churches such as the Methodists may oppose homosexuality on principle due to Leviticus and other books, but they refuse to make it a public stance to openly discriminate. 

The thing is: this law does not protect religious freedom at all.  It has nothing to do with ensuring our churches stay open, it has nothing to do with protecting people who gather in public to pray, it has nothing to do with making sure that God remains in Heaven while the flock tend to their affairs within the world.

It has everything to do with letting haters use religion as a weapon to hurt others.  It has everything to do with twisting the words of love and forgiveness from Christ himself to justify rash and reckless judgment of others.  It has everything to do with those few so-called Christians who want to persecute and punish a very small minority group in the name of other Christians who do not want to hate at all...

You can see why Trump saw value adding Pence to his lineup. Pence has inroads to the Religious Right that push their social conservative agenda on the Republican Party - so much so that the party's official platform favors their faction to a disgusting degree - that Trump wants to double-down on keeping that faction - the biggest part of his Nativist base - satisfied.

"It has everything to do with letting haters use religion as a weapon to hurt others." Trump's been campaigning on hate ever since his opening speech against Mexicans and Asians, he's been campaigning on misogyny and racism throughout his primary run, and he's campaigning on that so strongly that he can't "pivot" lest he lose that hater base.

This is the starting lineup for your 2016 Republican Party, America.

For the Love of God, for the Love of Love, do not vote Republican.

A Quick Post For Laughing Insanely at Trump's Pick for Vice President (w/ Update)

A more serious post will follow.

So today, in the middle of Friday (traditionally a news dump day in the United States), and after weeks of indecision that could no longer be delayed because the CONVENTION IS NEXT MONDAY, and after the evening where Trump said he would delay his announcement in honor of the tragic terror attack in Nice, France during Bastille Day...

Without much fanfare, the Trump campaign announced they were going with Governor Mike Pence of Indiana as Trump's Vice Presidential nominee.

As part of the announcement, the campaign revealed their brand new bumper sticker logo of doom, thusly:

They REALLY didn't think this one through, did they?

Because I swear, first thing I realized when I saw that logo was "why does it look like Trump's T is inserting itself into Pence's P?"

Put it another way:

"This is even better in GIF form!"

(I would love to get a downloadable GIF of it someday...)

And to think, the Republicans are the party putting the "NO PORN" policy on their platform, those naughty boys...

Sigh. That's pretty much the only thing to laugh about. More on the horror story aspect of this later.

(Update): Annnnnnnnnd, the Trump people pulled the logo from their websites within less than a day.

We're gonna miss it now it's gone.

Somebody's gonna get fired for this. Induce satisfying wave of Schadenfreude... ahhhhhhhhhh...

It Is Not Christian To Hate, Indiana

Whoever says he is in the light and hates his brother is still in darkness.
- 1 John 2:9

My personal experience with Indiana is fleeting.  I drove through the state on a road trip to Chicago ages ago.  All I can say is that was the flattest piece of land I had ever seen in my life.  And I've driven through the Everglades on a regular basis, which is basically sawgrass as far as the eye can see.

I dunno if the flat unending bland landscape does something to the mindset of the locals, because I can't think of many other excuses that the state's residents can offer to explain how they elected a bunch of self-satisfied haters to run their government.

This is a historical thing.  People may well remember that Indiana was one of the major Union states of the Civil War and fought to end slavery and all that, but they need to remember that Indiana was one of the most redneck-y haters-gonna-hate state north of the Ohio River.  When the Klu Klux Klan, dear God, became a massive political movement that threatened to run its own candidate for the White House back in the 1920s, Indiana was the state with the largest membership at 250,000 men.  That was three out of ten white guys.

This is a historical debacle.  Indiana just passed and signed into law a bill that allows, in some ways encourages, private businesses to discriminate people even on the supposition those people are gay/lesbian.  There's actually laws similar to this one on the books in other states and even in the federal code, but as Garrett Epps points out at The Atlantic none of them do this:

...That becomes clear when you read and compare those tedious state statutes.  If you do that, you will find that the Indiana statute has two features the federal RFRA—and most state RFRAs—do not. First, the Indiana law explicitly allows any for-profit business to assert a right to “the free exercise of religion.” The federal RFRA doesn’t contain such language, and neither does any of the state RFRAs except South Carolina’s; in fact, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, explicitly exclude for-profit businesses from the protection of their RFRAs.
The new Indiana statute also contains this odd language: “A person whose exercise of religion has been substantially burdened, or is likely to be substantially burdened, by a violation of this chapter may assert the violation or impending violation as a claim or defense in a judicial or administrative proceeding, regardless of whether the state or any other governmental entity is a party to the proceeding...”  Neither the federal RFRA, nor 18 of the 19 state statutes cited by the Post, says anything like this...
...Of all the state “religious freedom” laws I have read, this new statute hints most strongly that it is there to be used as a means of excluding gays and same-sex couples from accessing employment, housing, and public accommodations on the same terms as other people. True, there is no actual language that says, All businesses wishing to discriminate in employment, housing, and public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation, please check this “religious objection” box. But, as Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk...”

The governor who signed this, Mike Pence, has spent the past few days trying to defend this law.  He keeps saying that the law is about "protecting religious liberty," but when asked about whether the law discriminates, or asked if it's wrong to discriminate, he avoids giving a straight answer.

It's telling that this "great and wonderful and Christian law" for religious liberty had to be signed behind closed doors and with only a handful of religious leaders - some of them known for their rabid brand of hate - rather than a broad range of church pastors and fellowships.  That's probably because a lot of the larger Christian denominations - Presbyterians, Episcopalians and most Lutheran churches in particular - support gay rights.  And a lot of other Christian churches such as the Methodists may oppose homosexuality on principle due to Leviticus and other books, but they refuse to make it a public stance to openly discriminate.

The thing is: this law does not protect religious freedom at all.  It has nothing to do with ensuring our churches stay open, it has nothing to do with protecting people who gather in public to pray, it has nothing to do with making sure that God remains in Heaven while the flock tend to their affairs within the world.

It has everything to do with letting haters use religion as a weapon to hurt others.  It has everything to do with twisting the words of love and forgiveness from Christ himself to justify rash and reckless judgment of others.  It has everything to do with those few so-called Christians who want to persecute and punish a very small minority group in the name of other Christians who do not want to hate at all.

And Indiana just keeps its historical reputation as a Hater state continue on.