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.

NO! In a democratic society, we should NEVER tolerate intolerance.

Fair enough, but what scares me is how many extremists are already in power, in Congress and in the Senate. And on the road to the White House. We as a society really do need to take a close look at what is known as the "christian dominionist movement". This movement seeks to establish an American theocracy with the rule of law given by the bible. We should think about what these people are actually proposing: the death penalty for abortion, both for doctor and mother. The death penalty for homosexuality. Here is an article to give you an idea of what I am talking about. A very good read on this subject is American Fascists.

It is easy to dismiss these people as being a crazy fringe. Indeed every society has its own lunatics. What is concerning is how this extreme form of christianity has infiltrated the main stream of christianity and what we commonly know as the christian right. What is extremely concerning is how many mainstream politicians share similar modes of thought to this movement. When I hear about laws such as what Tim Cook is writing about, I hear the clicking of a ratchet, bringing us a small step towards an American version of the taliban government.

Those of us with a sense of what is actually going on must work towards steering our society away from this cliff. Above all, we should promote the idea that although we live in a tolerant nation, we should never tolerate intolerance. The bastards who bring in laws like this should be run out of town.

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.

Chris Christy scares the bejesus out of me. His personality is scary. He is the kind of guy who in my opinion you don't want to give too much power. The way he shouts down people who are weaker than him particularly concerns me. This article is a good summary of him.

Or she can sell off the US government's core technological assets and turn America into a hollow corporate brand name that creates almost nothing. Just like she did with HP when she sold off HP's advanced technology division as Agilent, and changed HP from a technological powerhouse into a brand-name for shitty computers and components.

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.

State Department IT staff are on the record having told her multiple times that her method of communicating was preventing them from archiving her official email as required. Are you saying that despite the steps she took to make sure that no mail sent to and from her counterparts all around the world, to and from other agencies and branches of government (including the White House) , and to and from the well known mile-long list of donors to her family enterprise and political operation, that somehow there was a magic link between her private server and some archiving mechanism at State? A link that you think might exist, but which SHE acknowledges did not exist, and which some how - despite no email address involving state.gov being used in such communication - magically somehow got archived at State, and not one single example of such can be found by multiple investigative teams? And why would they find it - preventing it from getting into that system is exactly why she built a path around it. State's archives have copious correspondence from hundreds and hundreds of their other officials, staff, contractors, previous cabinet appointees and related users - just not a single scrap from her? Of course they don't: she didn't use that system.

And SHE HERSELF says that she thinks having corresponded with staffers inside State was a good enough way to retain those messages. She hand-picked reporters and pre-approved questions in the only Q&A she's allowed on the subject, and so conveniently was able to avoid being asked how she thought that method would apply when corresponding with people like Blumenthal (who hasn't denied that the leaked emails were his, by the way). Which is why she's never had to address the fact she wasn't personally taking any steps to CC or otherwise mirror all of the mail sent to and from her private server, as required by law. She hasn't mentioned CCing her State.gov mailbox that because at her direction, State's IT never even established an email account for her to which she would mirror her mail.

When finally capitulating to demands that her public records actually be made available, she didn't print out 55,000 pages of them because of a failure by the staff and systems at State, she printed them out because that was the only way she was willing to make them available. She could have forwarded them electronically, in their entirety, as required (so that, as the law requires, a government archivist can evaluate the messages and cull the official from the private). But no - she and her lawyers opted for a method that would absolutely maximize the additional delays in allowing other people to look through the records, would remove helpful header information, and would add untold thousands of hours of taxpayer-funded work to turn the documents back into searchable form. That was a deliberate choice that added work on her part in order to make the process more difficult and slow for investigators and the press, who had been requesting the documents for years.

Do you consider the investigation run congress when it was controlled by HER own party (which established after spending millions of dollars looking into related things, that there were NO such records at State) to have also been polticized against her? Now - under pressure - she's dumped hardcopies of the records that actually did exist all along (well, just some of them), and investigators who - unlike the last ones - aren't in her pocket for political gain say that the records have large date gaps. Unlike HER, they are conducting activity that will be entirely in the public record. When the investigators looking into this say something, you and they know that they will be fact checked to death by her political operatives. Despite her deliberate attempts to hide her communications from standard public review, you are giving her the benefit of the doubt ... but when a long-time career prosecutor (with a sterling record) and now congressman who knows that everything he says will be subject to endless review tells you what's present (and absent) in what are now public records available soon for YOU to look at, too, you're assuming he's lying?

It goes to establishing her deliberate actions in this area. In cases of private communications being mixed in with official ones, government archivists are supposed to look at ALL records, separate the official from the private, and return the private records to the person who blended them together. She knew this, and took actions to deliberately prevent such review. And knowing that subpoenas were coming, destroyed all evidence of how such decisions were made.

And in many cases, also cheaper. The examples I cited above show that behavior as well. You need to get out more if you think that, say, a given tablet computer from this year isn't better and cheaper than it was a year or two ago. Or that an off-the-shelf quadcopter and gimbaled camera rig isn't many times as capable for a fraction of the cost it was just a couple years ago. Eeeeeevil market economics at work.