An excellent question

In particular, during Tuesday’s public hearing, Burr wanted to know why the Democratic National Committee didn’t give the FBI direct access to servers and devices that had been compromised in a cyberattack.
FBI Director James Comey told Burr the agency and its investigators had made “multiple requests at different levels” for access to DNC infrastructure and John Podesta’s devices for the purposes of investigating cyberattacks and subsequent information leaks. Podesta was chairman of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign.
“Would that access have provided intelligence or information helpful to your investigation?” Burr asked.
Comey answered that such access renders the “best evidence,” but investigators had to settle on getting information about the cyberattack through a reputable private company that worked with Democratic hacking victims.
“We’d always prefer to have access hands-on ourselves,” Comey said.
He told Burr he did not know why the DNC and Clinton’s campaign chairman wouldn’t give the FBI direct access.
Burr told McClatchy afterward that he’s been focused on the DNC denying the FBI access since at least May of last year.
He said he wants to know why “any organization that had been attacked as viciously and had had as much data exfiltrated wouldn’t want to have law enforcement involved in the forensics and why they chose to go to an outside (entity).

Hey Hollywood

Or take these videos that celebrities have been making, first trying to persuade voters not to vote for him, then trying to persuade Electoral College members not to vote for him, and finally just giving up and issuing a sort of bleak existential scream. These things are so ham-fistedly unpersuasive that I began to suspect a secret cabal of Hollywood Trump fans, masterfully orchestrating a coup. When I realized no, they’re really serious, I thought about rounding up a group of #NeverTrump Republicans to make an outreach video for celebrities thinking about making an outreach video. This video would explain, with lots of repetition to drive the point home, that smug self-congratulation is the exact opposite of a good way to attract voters.

Partisanship requires hypocrisy

Partisanship requires a certain level of hypocrisy. Republican Congresses and the conservative media put on their green eyeshades and become budget hawks during Democratic presidencies, then abandon such fiscal principles in favor of big new spending commitments when Republicans are in the White House. We're seeing this play out in real time now: After eight years of railing against President Obama's deficit spending, the GOP Congress seems ready to embrace Donald Trump's big ideas about infrastructure spending.

Democrats have a version of this hypocrisy as well. It's on foreign policy.

Wars launched under Democrats are often lauded by many liberals as great patriotic exercises, vindicating our nation's commitment to human rights. When those same wars are prosecuted by Republicans, they ipso facto lack congressional oversight and authorization, and the connecting lines between U.S. action and the suffering of poor non-white innocents around the globe suddenly reveal themselves to the bleeding hearted.

Never trust Geek Squad

In 2014, Geek Squad brought in $1.8 billion in revenue, which was a drop from the previous year, but still accounted for 5 percent of Best Buy revenue. So, it's not insignificant. 

And it seems the geeks are making a few extra bucks. The Orange County Weekly reports that the company's repair technicians routinely search devices brought in for repair for files that could earn them $500 reward as FBI informants. 

That, ladies and gentlemen, is about as blatant a case of unconstitutional search and seizure as it gets

No felicidades en Mexico

 Long-simmering social tensions in Mexico are threatening to boil over as failing neoliberal reforms to the country’s formerly nationalized gas sector are compounded by open corruption, stagnant standards of living, and rampant inflation.

The U.S. media has remained mostly mute on the situation in Mexico, even as the unfolding civil unrest has closed the U.S.-Mexico border in San Diego, California, several times in the past week. Ongoing “gasolinazo” protests in Mexico over a 20 percent rise is gas prices have led to over 400 arrests, 250 looted stores, and six deaths. Roads are being blockaded, borders closed, and government buildings are being sacked. Protests have remained relatively peaceful overall, except for several isolated violent acts, which activists have blamed on government infiltrators

...

NAFTA was a contentious issue in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but it’s just as controversial in Mexico, if not more so. The grand 1994 “free trade” scheme, signed into law by Bill Clinton, saw a dramatic redesign of both the U.S. and Mexican economic landscapes. Corn farmers, long a vital factor in Mexico’s peasant farming economy, were wiped out by low-priced corn subsidized by the U.S. government, which immediately flooded Mexican markets after NAFTA was passed. The Mexican immigration crisis at the U.S.’ southern border soon followed.

Meanwhile, manufacturing plants soon began moving into Mexico from the U.S. to take advantage of extremely cheap labor — leaving many workers in the U.S. out of a job. American agricultural corporations like Driscoll’s have recently come under fire for employing slave-like labor conditions to produce boutique organic fruit for U.S. consumers. Protests for workers rights in Mexico, which recently raised its minimum wage to 80 pesos (~$4) per day, are often met with heavy-handed police crackdowns.

Supposedly to ramp up production and lower prices, the Mexican government pushed through neoliberal privatization schemes in 2013 and 2014, which were backed by U.S. oil interests and incubated by the Hillary Clinton-run State Department. President Enrique Peña Nieto promised the reforms would result in increased production and lower fuel prices, though production has fallen and prices spiked 20 percent on January 1st. Prices are expected to rise even further, as fuel subsidies will be completely phased out by March 2017. Peña Nieto claims the prices must go up to match international prices, though consumers in the U.S. currently pay less for gas than Mexicans.

Peña Nieto’s neoliberal reforms have fallen flat as economic growth has been anemic for years and wealth inequality has grown out of control.

Echoes of 1930's

Outside the headlines, however, are demographic pressures reaching levels not seen since the Great Depression. That bodes ill for achieving the 3 percent to 4 percent gains in gross domestic product envisioned by Trump's pick for U.S. Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin. Without an improvement in productivity or an influx of people into the workforce, GDP can't accelerate.
Like many things, including business formation, productivity and capital spending, the expansion in U.S. residents shows sustained damage from the financial crisis of 2008-2009. The American population rose by 0.7 percent to 324 million people last year, according to an estimate released by the Census Bureau in December. That matched 2013's figure for being the smallest rise since 1937, when the country was struggling with the Great Depression, according to analysis by Thomas Costerg at Standard Chartered Plc...
The nation's real estate market is already feeling the hit, Costerg argues. The number of new households has averaged 32 percent fewer in the past five years than in the decade to 2008, Costerg wrote, citing Census Bureau data. That means lower demand for everything from builders to painters to home appliances — reducing incentives for companies to boost investment in the U.S., despite aging plants and equipment:

Kurds approach Raqqa

Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) pushing towards Raqqa on two axes from the north and the northwest have liberated several villages in recent days, bringing the two fronts together, they announced on Wednesday.
“Since the second phase of the campaign started, forces managed to liberate 57km on the Qadiriya axis and 34km from the centre of Ayn Issa,” reads a statement from the Raqqa campaign published on social media.

Mosul: 3 more months

A top Iraqi commander told The Associated Press that the operation to retake the city of Mosul from the Islamic State group could be complete in three months or less.
"It's possible" that Mosul will be liberated in in that time frame, Lt. Gen. Talib Shaghati said in an interview with the AP on Tuesday evening. However, he warned it is difficult to give an accurate estimate of how long the operation will take because it is not a conventional fight.
"There are many variables," he said, describing the combat as "guerrilla warfare."
The massive offensive involving some 30,000 Iraqi forces was launched in October and Iraqi leaders originally pledged the city would be retaken before 2017. However as the fight enters its fourth month, only about a third of the city is under government control.