Good morning 99percenters!
News and Pure Prairie League.

Hillary Clinton faces new questions over personal emails she 'chose not to keep'
The former secretary of state said she had preserved official communications but her office said she ‘chose not to keep her private, personal emails’

Hillary Clinton failed to quell mounting criticism over her controversial private email account on Tuesday evening after her office suggested she had erased more than half of her emails before turning them over for release to the American public.

In a statement released after a press conference intended to end a week-long controversy, Clinton’s office said that she did not preserve 31,830 of the 62,320 emails she sent and received while serving as Barack Obama’s secretary of state from 2009 to 2013.

“After her work-related emails were identified and preserved, Secretary Clinton chose not to keep her private, personal emails that were not federal records,” her office said, in a defiant nine-page explanation for the unusual arrangement that has put her under political fire.

Republicans accused Clinton of blocking transparency. It could not be confirmed whether the deleted archives included messages sent and received by Clinton relating to her family’s philanthropic foundation. Donations to the foundation by foreign governments and corporations are the subject of a separate ongoing controversy.

Hillary’s enduring media rift: Why her campaign needs structure and leadership ASAP
Haters will hate. Democrats may fret. But Clinton’s email troubles reflect a larger challenge that won't go away

Hillary Clinton still doesn’t get it. Maybe she never will. And maybe that’s just fine.

The former secretary of state and current 2016 frontrunner doesn’t get why anyone but her right-wing enemies would think she did anything wrong when she mixed personal and professional email on a private account, stored on a private server, during her time at the State Department. She broke no laws, she turned over her professional email when asked to, and it will soon be displayed to the public in an “unprecedented” show of transparency, she said Tuesday.

Clinton’s ultimate reasoning – that even if she’d used two different accounts, she would still be the one who decided what were matters of state – actually makes some sense.

But she also doesn’t get that when she has to face down the media, in a real or a trumped-up scandal, she is expected to take questions patiently and without seeming rattled or aggrieved, while at least trying to pretend that she doesn’t believe everyone in the room is hopelessly biased against her.

How the Public Are Deceived by the ‘News’
Top ‘News’ Executives Suppress Key Facts;
The Public Sees a Chaotic, Disjointed, Picture.
Here Is How that Is Done, in Personal Detail.

If the public is systematically lied-to by the Government and by a virtually uniformly cooperative press suppressing key facts in order to pump that lie, such as was the case during 2002 and 2003 in the lead-up to America’s invasion of Iraq, then there can’t possibly be an authentic democracy, because democracy is founded upon a truthfully informed public, and so any ‘news’ institution that violates its solemn public trust of reporting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, is traitorous to democracy itself.

That’s why the press has been called “the fourth estate” of government. The first three “estates” are the aristocracy, the clergy, and the public. If the press represent not the public, but instead one of the two other classes — the aristocracy and/or the clergy — then what exists is a dictatorship by that actually ruling class against the public, not a democracy by the public. The public cannot rule in such a country. They instead are manipulated in it.

They may be manipulated to believe that they rule, but it’s only a manipulated illusion then; it’s not real; it’s a fraud, of the most massive type. Such a country cannot possibly be a real democracy; it’s a fraudulent ‘democracy.’

Evidence will be presented here that democracy no longer exists in the United States. Part of this evidence is personal, something that I always prefer to avoid, but which happens to be integral to this particular news-report and analysis. So: it’s necessary, in this case.

Wikimedia vs. NSA: Major Lawsuit Challenges Government Surveillance of US Citizens
'By tapping the backbone of the Internet, the NSA is straining the backbone of democracy.'

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia and one of the most highly-trafficked websites in the world, announced Tuesday that it—alongside a host of civil liberty advocates, news outlets, and privacy rights organizations—has filed a lawsuit against the National Security Agency for violating the constitutional rights of its users by performing bulk surveillance and searching, without specific cause or warrant, the international Internet communications of all Americans including emails, web-browsing content, and search-engine queries.

The lawsuit, named as Wikimedia v. NSA, was filed by the ACLU on Tuesday. In addition to the Wikimedia Foundation (of which Wikipedia is a part), the other plaintiffs include: the conservative Rutherford Institute, The Nation magazine, Amnesty International USA, PEN American Center, Human Rights Watch, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Global Fund for Women, and Washington Office on Latin America.

Filed in federal court in Maryland where the NSA is headquartered, the lawsuit (pdf) argues that the NSA is violating the plaintiffs' privacy rights under the Fourth Amendment and infringing on their First Amendment rights. The complaint also argues that what is called "upstream surveillance"—mass surveillance on all communications that pass through certain "backbone" structures of the network—exceeds the authority granted by Congress under the FISA Amendments Act.

The complaint reads, in part:

This lawsuit challenges the suspicionless seizure and searching of internet traffic by the National Security Agency (“NSA”) on U.S. soil. The NSA conducts this surveillance, called “Upstream” surveillance, by tapping directly into the internet backbone inside the United States — the network of high-capacity cables, switches, and routers that today carry vast numbers of Americans’ communications with each other and with the rest of the world. In the course of this surveillance, the NSA is seizing Americans’ communications en masse while they are in transit , and it is searching the contents of substantially all international text-based communications — and many domestic communications as well — for tens of thousands of search terms.

Obama’s war authorization request against ISIS in limbo, even with Democrats

Republicans and Democrats are equally critical of President Barack Obama’s request for military authorization against the Islamic State, which will receive its first hearing by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday.

Giving testimony to the Committee will be Secretary of State John Kerry, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey. The resolution proposed by President Obama in February would grant a three-year time frame for the campaign against the Islamic State (IS, also known as ISIS/ISIL) and repeal the 2002 authorization used for the Iraq war. It would also grant permission to continue the maintenance of 3,000 troops already on the ground, and the campaign of airstrikes in Iraq that were extended to Syria.

“The resolution we’ve submitted...does not call for the deployment of US ground forces to Iraq or Syria,” Obama said in February. “It is not the authorization of another ground war, like Afghanistan or Iraq…as I’ve said before, I’m convinced that the United States should not get dragged back into another prolonged ground war in the Middle East. That’s not in our national security interest and it’s not necessary for us to defeat ISIL.”

Republicans, however, have said they would like to see a full-scale military campaign against IS before signing an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF).

"This AUMF, hardly anybody supports it that I know of," Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch (Utah) told Reuters.

Why Obama’s ISIS War Powers Request Is Going Nowhere http://t.co/j7372k0yw5

— Defense One (@DefenseOne) March 10, 2015