Sure, perfectly legal if you make all of your drone research team run out and get a pilot's license, and then file flight plans for every single test. You know, if you take a quadcopter out into the parking lot and hover it ten feet off the ground to test a delivery mechanism, you need an FAA licensed pilot and a filed flight plan for all 30 seconds that will take. Sounds like a really great environment in which to conduct thousands of man hours of testing, huh?

And no, there is no provision in the FAA rules for Amazon to test a single flight where the vehicle goes out of line of site of the hands-on operator. The entire premise of what they're researching is prohibited, barring a waiver that they've only issued to an operator in rural Alaska inspecting pipelines while using existing, military-class equipment.

There's only one way to punish Amazon for taking this activity outside of the US. We must find a way, since they have a business presence in the US, to add a larger regulatory and tax burden onto them until they submit, and return this activity, which we won't let them do anyway, to US soil. At which point of course we will not reduce that new tax or regulatory burden, but that'll show 'em anyway.

Way to go, Executive Branch.

Now you're just being coy. Do you really think that it has ever been a feature of the Freedom of Information Act to require the archivists at the FAA to scour, say, the records kept by Justice, or Agriculture or Commerce etc when someone submits a FOIA request to the FAA for all correspondence involving a given FAA official on a given topic? Of course not. It's understood that the FAA is the keeper of all of the FAA staff's correspondence. If that agency's director was running all of his official mail through a private domain on a server kept in his house, and corresponded with, say, a Senator or someone at Justice, the FAA's own mail archives would have no record of that because said message never traversed the FAA's systems and the archiving mechanisms they have in place. A FOIA request to the FAA's records office for that official's correspondence with said Senator would - just like the FOIA requests for some of Clinton's mail - come up dry. Why? Because a FOIA request to the FAA doesn't cause the FAA's archivists to ask every other agency in the government to also scour the archives of all of those agencies.

We have no record of Clinton's correspondence with anyone in any other agency or branch of the government because the FOIA requests to State can't come up with them. Because those messages didn't traverse State's systems. Her claim that she was relying on her correspondence with other people at State to serve as a record of her official mail deliberately avoids the topic of how her personal server was allowing State to keep records of correspondence that didn't involve State's mail servers or archives. The only possible record of such external communication was going to be found through bottomless research against mail servers all around the government and the world, or through access to her own server - which she says she's wiped clean and will not allow anyone to see. We also get her own personal decisions on which fraction of her email she decided to print to hardcopy, rather than simply passing along in their entirety. And this she did only when pressed to do so, long after she left office. That is in direct violation of the Federal Records Act generally, as well as the 2009 NARA. That it's also in contradiction to her own signed policy just helps to illustrate how phony she's being on the subject.

But using that system would have been a good faith effort to comply with the FRA and NARA. Rather than make that good faith effort, she deliberately acted to keep her records from going anywhere near State's servers, didn't provide ANY of the records during her tenure, and didn't provide any when she left.

Yeah, an assistant DID. A personally paid aid, working for the family foundation. Someone who's not cleared for sensitive/classified information, and whose paycheck is funded in part by the millions of dollars Clinton collected from foreign donors to her family enterprise while on tour as the country's top diplomat. Regardless, she's the one telling the press that she decided when a message wasn't to be kept for being irrelevant from the State archivist's perspective. I'm sure the career archivists appreciate being told what to think and cut out of that process - not for the incidental use of a staffer's private mail, but for ALL of the top official's communications.

I didn't say that. But because it is the slower method with more work involved, it reflects a deliberate choice to produce the required documents in a way that maximizes the delay in allowing FOIA requesters to see the results and minimizes the contextual information that can be gleaned from the stripped-down information. That was a deliberate choice made by her. She chose to have her staff do more work, and to make far more work for the many third parties requiring the records. Just icing on the cake, to go with not having provided the records on the fly, during her tenure and at departure, as required by the FRA and NARA.

Because if you admitted that the odds of her having corresponded, even once, with another agency or external party in the course of doing her job were 100%, then you have to explain why you think that the complete absence of any of that in the FOIA requests doesn't impact your narrative about how she must have been BCC'ing all along to remain compliant. State has her correspondence with internal staff, but nothing external. She generated and received tens of thousands of emails, and you think that by sheer coincidence, flaky archiving at State accidentally lost ALL of the external stuff she faithfully CC'd, while happening to retain the stuff she sent internally? You can't actually believe that happened, which means you're spinning.

What? Clinton herself signed a memo to her staff reminding them that they had to use state.gov mailboxes for their official correspondence. The woman you're trying to let off the hook certainly supported the common practice of each department (which have to handle their own FOIA requests) maintaining their own records. Do you really think that when someone at, say, the FAA gets a FOIA request, that it's the intention or the practice for their own records people to then contact hundreds of other agencies and departments to scour THEIR records for FAA-related correspondence? I guess you might think that if it allows you to ignore the hypocrisy of Clinton's own words.

What are you talking about? You're essentially saying that absolutely no career archivists and investigators can be trusted to know if they've looked through stored email records, but we can trust Hillary Clinton to be 100% upright when she tells us that we have to trust her when she says that the tens of thousands of records she destroyed were without relevance to the multiple inquiries that she's stonewalled for the past few years. You operate on a really bad case of mixed premises.

Who's speculating? She's the one who says she destroyed the records without allowing State archivists to do what they're required to do with all of the staff under her (review mixed private/official communications to make judgement calls about what's a public record). She's the one who deliberately transformed convenient, searchable electronic records with context-providing header info into clumsy, labor-requiring hardcopies ... and only after they were demanded of her long after leaving office. Her own description of her actions shows that she didn't provide State with any magical CCs of her communications with external third parties or other agencies, but YOU'RE the one saying not to worry, she probably CC'd somebody, somewhere, somehow, in order to be in compliance with the 2009 NARA requirement. Since you're so tired of speculating, how about being specific on why you think the thing that she's carefully avoided saying she did was none the less actually done, even though it left no trace whatsoever for multiple investigators to find at State? Please, be specific.

That's the point. There ARE NONE. The only way your lame, blithe dismissal of that can be anything other than shameless spin is if you are asserting that she never exchanged a single piece of official email with anyone in another agency, branch of government, or third party/nation. How about answering one single question: do you really think that's true, that she neither sent nor received a single email from anyone in the Senate, at the CIA, at DoJ, in Germany/Japan/UK/Arkansas/NY, or with any long-time fixer like Blumenthal during her entire tenure? Not a single email? Yes or no.

If you say no, then please just stop the hand-waving "she did nothing wrong" nonsense, since it's BS. If you say yes, then please just stop everything, including voting, because you're either toxically naive or being completely disingenuous.

So, yes or no? One single email with any one single contact outside of subordinates at State?

Failing to stop your multi-thousand-pound vehicle as you drive at a military checkpoint is telegraphing violent intent. At least, that's how the guards have to treat it. Driving a suicide car bomb at/through checkpoints is a well established tactic, and has produced a no-compromises protocol in response. When you give off all the signs of violent intent, there's really no way to just let them carry on and decide later if they were a threat. It's not video game with a retry button the guards can push after they've been blown to pieces.

No, you're getting your media memes all wrong. If they were brown, it would have been, by default and without any need for further analysis, another case of police brutality blah blah blah. Please get your coverage spin in sync with contemporary standards. There are people who make a living off of faux racial outrage, and if you don't help their hype, they're going to have to find other work.

A poor choice of things to compare.

"It needs to be fixed" can read like "It needs to be changed from its current state to a new state, in which is has been fixed." What it needs is something that, once done, will put the act of fixing it in the past tense. "It needs some fixing, so that it will then be fixed." If you're going with the shorter "It needs to be fixed," the "to be" needs to be there if you're going to used that future-sense changed state of "fixed." Or, one should just use: "It needs fixing," where "fixing," a gerund, acts like any other noun that would serve as the object of the sentence.

"It seems fixed," on the other hand, is a completely different construction. There is no assertion of the need for an action (like needing TO BE fixed). It's an observation about its current state (it's in the state of already having been fixed). The "seems" casts mild doubt on the quality of the assertion, but that's just modifying the word "fixed" in this case, which is acting as an adjective (the thing is fast, the thing is light weight, the thing is expensive, the thing is fixed). Think of saying, "It looks blue." Normal usage is rarely, "It looks to be blue," any more than it is, "It seems to be fixed." You could replace "seems" with "feels," knowing that you'd also be far more likely to say, "It's no longer wobbly. It feels fixed," than you would "It feels to be fixed."

No, it seems I'm not.

No, an inquiring mind would have thought it through before trotting that one out.

Hint: not everything you see on NCIS or CSI:Wherever actually works like it dos on TV.

It can definitely help to be able follow the trail after someone does something especially awful - sometimes bad guys actually have accomplices.

But more to the point in this case: reports are that the vehicle they used was stolen, along with its license plates.

To be, or not to be. That is the ques... no, it's not even a question in this case.

No, that doesn't cut it. Each agency/department has its own archiving systems, especially those that deal (as State does) with sensitive and frequently compartmentalized information. That's why FOIA requests go to the agency and to "the government." And of course that still doesn't have anything to do with all of her correspondence with other governments and other non-State.gov parties.

Let's ignore Blumenthal, since you have lots of patience still waiting for him to say that's not his correspondence with Clinton. He's only had a couple of years, so I'm sure he's still gathering his notes. Happily, he's apparently not nearly as clever as Clinton herself, and used an AOL mailbox while routinely sending her his intel memos. And AOL will have retained all of that, and is very responsive to subpoenas.

But the existence of a single piece of correspondence with her long-time aide/confidant Blumenthal or anyone else outside of State will show where she was violating the law. Why? Because two years worth of FOIA requests to State turned up no such emails. You're saying that maybe she CC'd them to unknown mailboxes at State in order to archive them. If so, multiple exhaustive FOIA requests would have turned up perhaps ONE email, yes? State's mail servers contain untold thousands of messages between staffers there and correspondents throughout the rest of the government and other third parties around the world. But not a single one tucked away as a CC or BCC from Clinton's home-based private server that shows sending or receiving such mail. State's IT people responded to FOIA requests saying there was no such data. They have her notes to staff, but nothing between her and third parties that she CC'd in the way you're suggesting. None.

Because with some crazy people, the fact there even is a president is enough to want to kill him/her. Or the fact that the president is whoever is in that role on a given day when Crazy Person suddenly decides they've had enough of the fact that the US allows people to grow and cut down trees ... or allows women to go to school ... or allows anyone to own domestic animals ... or allows men to walk around without beards or not protect everyone from the Space Aliens, whatever.

No, what you've done is continued to avoid the actual issue. Are you really suggesting that all of a secretary of state's sensitive and official communication is with her own staff? That she has no communication with people in the senate, the congress, with other federal agencies? That she has no communication with anyone in the White House (you know, where her boss works), and - as the country's top diplomat - no communication with other diplomats, heads of state, or foreign ministers? No communication with the people in other countries who then turned around and wrote huge checks to her family enterprise? Is that your assessment of how little she did in that role? Or are you really going to keep up the charade that all of her email was with, and only with, people who reported to her at State? If she sent a single email outside of those bounds, then your blanket assertion of her compliance is incorrect. So, do you really think not a single email was sent to her from outside of State? You're convinced that, for example, Blumenthal's emails are all fake? Be specific. He hasn't said the leaked mail was fake, but you seem to know something he doesn't.

Any mechanism in place to automatically mirror her correspondence with third parties. None.

So, you'd be all for what the current investigation proposed: handing her server over to completely neutral third party for forensic analysis, and review of her tens of thousands of hidden emails by the same archivists that already review the mixed-with-private emails of other government officials to decide what's relevant as public records? Sounds pretty satisfactory, doesn't it? Woops, too late, her lawyer says that she has deliberately destroyed all of those records with no chance for said archivists to review them, and that they will never let anyone else look at the server.

Except in the ways you already have, which contradict things she's saying in public, you mean.

The laws that matter? How about the Federal Records Act? It requires federal officials to proactively keep their public documents available for things like FOIA searches. She actively hid her records from such searches, and in fact multiple FOIA requests came and went both during and following her tenure that absolutely would have included correspondence to and from her - but came up dry because she had not provided the records, even after she left office. When a federal official deliberately keeps their records out of public scrutiny, it's a violation of the US Code (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2071), a criminal offense.

You're probably going to contend that her violation of that law was magically un-done by her eventual coughing up of her cherry-picked hardcopies when she was hounded, years later, by investigators. No go. This isn't the Presidential Records Act, which provides for a "cooling off" period before those records are subject to FOIA. Her correspondence with people like Blumenthal, or with the entities in Saudi Arabia that handed her millions of dollars, are subject to immediate FOIA scrutiny. She took deliberate actions that made that impossible. https://www.law.cornell.edu/us...

That's not true. You're just doing your best to play like you really think all of this is just a misunderstanding. It's not, and you know it. I know you've already spent ten seconds and Googled for things like this, but I'll play along if it makes you feel better. Here's just one random first-on-Google example:

http://america.aljazeera.com/a...

You've speculated that her records were kept correctly (despite what she and everyone else says), and that there's no evidence she's done anything wrong. The implication then, by you, is that she did things correctly - and the ONLY way that could be, is if there was some sort of mechanism in place to do what the 2009 NARA and other rules required. But there wasn't. SHE SAID THERE WASN'T. So you are tap-dancing around the whole "show me proof" thing in order to avoid just plain facing what the woman involved has herself been saying. Why, I can't imagine. Are you working for her or her party?

Yeah, sure. It was someone else hacking your account when you complained that the current people looking at the matter weren't objective and a-political enough for you. It's perfectly reasonable to ask you if you found the prior investigation - which was run by HER party - to be likewise. You're implying it's not, which means you're being hypocritical on the subject. Only the party you don't like can be political in such matters, or only the party you favor can be objective?

The politicians doing the spin, here, are the ones relying on the fact that the person they're backing has conveniently destroyed records. The politicians conducting the investigation are relying on the documents SHE cherry-picked, and those are the ones that show the date gaps, a matter which they (unlike her, with tens of thousand of mixed-in emails we'll never see) will be placing right in front of your nose to review. Asserting that they're probably lying as they talk about public records you can review, while proposing the exact opposite about a stridently partisan person who has just been caught avoiding the very rules she said her department employees must all follow, shows how objective you're (not) being.

This has been the case for a long time. Jason Baron, former director of litigation with the National Archives, explains the problem here. He said in an interview that "Clinton’s use of a private server gave her exclusive control, thus preventing the department from having full access to emails she sent and received while a federal employee. Government employees have no right to privacy on government computers and even personal emails are subject to review and perhaps release at the department’s discretion. Setting up a private server to conduct public business inappropriately shifts control of what is accessible to the end user alone rather than allowing the institution to decide threshold questions.” That's been true of federal records for decades: the agency archivists decide what's private, not the person running her official email on a server she's keeping in her home.

Who's cornered? Not me. I'm just explaining the facts to someone who seems really desperate for them to go away.

No. Pretending that market pressures don't drive companies updating their products and their pricing is ridiculous. You have to know that. So what are you trying say, by pretending that it's otherwise? My "argument" isn't wrong: companies continue to improve their products and adjust their pricing because markets require that. It's very reasonable to wonder about someone's experience and awareness of economics and business realities when they say otherwise.

Why the hell do you think that people who make things bother to improve production? Because if they don't someone else will, and they'll lose their market. You really do lead a sheltered life, don't you. I can tell you've never actually made anything, or been tuned into the bottom line of any business entity that does. You should. You'd learn a lot.