Tag Archives: Bill Clinton

The Numbers Tell The Story

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According to Wikipedia:

The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 5 U.S.C. § 552, is a federal freedom of information law that allows for the full or partial disclosure of previously unreleased information and documents controlled by the United States government. The Act defines agency records subject to disclosure, outlines mandatory disclosure procedures and grants nine exemptions to the statute.[1][2] This amendment was signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, despite his misgivings,[3][4] on July 4, 1966, and went into effect the following year.[5]

The Freedom of Information Act works well as long as the people in power respect it. Sometimes getting information is a bit of a challenge.

Hot Air posted the following today:

Speaking of Hillary and her top aides, one guess which agency within the Obama administration had the very worst record when it came to responding to FOIA requests. If you guessed the State Department under Hillary Clinton, you are correct. A report published in January by the State Department Inspector General found that out of 240 FOIA requests for information connected to Secretary Clinton, 177 were still outstanding more than a year after she left office. Here’s a chart from the report showing that:

State FOIA responseIf Clinton wins the 2016 election, the Obama administration will look like the most transparent administration in history by comparison.

The article reports that the Obama Administration has broken the record for not being able to find documents requested in FOIA requests. Miraculously, when a court order is involved, the documents mysteriously appear. As I said in the beginning of this article, when people on both sides of the request respect FOIA requests, the system works. If an administration or member of an administration thinks they are above the law, FOIA requests do not always get honored.

This Could Present A Problem In The Democratic Party Primary Elections

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The Washington Examiner is reporting today that last fall the Clinton Foundation received a subpoena for documents related to projects that required State Department approval as well as records related to Huma Abedin, a top aide of Secretary Clinton and currently vice chairman of Secretary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

The article reports:

The State Department inspector general probe is entirely separate from an FBI investigation into Clinton’s use of a private server to shield her official communications.

An inspector general cannot charge anyone with a crime.

But the independent government watchdogs can make referrals to the Justice Department and recommendations to the agencies they oversee.

A referral from the inspectors general for the State Department and the intelligence community sparked the FBI probe of Clinton’s server use, for example.

The Post (The Washington Post) report noted the “full scope” of the inspector general inquiry into the Clinton Foundation and Abedin’s role there was “unclear.”

As I reported here in December:

Bill and Hillary Clinton have amassed a tremendous amount of money since leaving the White House. A lot of that money has been channeled through the Clinton Foundation, which the Charity Navigator refused to rate because its “atypical business model . . . doesn’t meet our criteria.” The Federalist posted an article in April pointing out that the Clinton Foundation actually spends approximately 10 percent of its donations on charity.

It is somewhat amazing how many of our career politicians whose jobs pay $100,000 a year (more or less) seem to become millionaires. That is something that needs to change. While the New Hampshire primary election proves that you cannot buy elections (Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush spent the most money in the New Hampshire primary.), it seems that once you get elected, you can pretty much buy anything you want to. The voters are the only people who can change the current system. As a voter, you have two choices–vote for someone who is outside ‘the system’ and does not seem to want to play inside ‘the system’ or vote for someone who is already rich and really does not need to make any  money by using his political office as a personal fund raiser.

It will be interesting to see if this new inquiry into the financial dealings of the Clintons has any impact on the primary. Polls in New Hampshire already indicated that voters did not see Secretary Clinton as honest–91% to 5%. How much worse can it get?

More Questions Than Answers

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The Wall Street Journal posted an editorial this morning about Hillary Clinton’s charges that Donald Trump is sexist. Excuse me for being cynical, but I suspect that if you questioned or listened to most men long enough, you could eventually find something to refer to as sexist. I wouldn’t use the word sexist to describe Donald Trump. I would be more inclined to use the words rude, crude, and blunt, and frankly, based on the persona he shows to the media, he is not someone I would be interested in hanging around with. However, that in itself does not disqualify him as a presidential candidate.

The Wall Street Journal points out that Hillary needs to be careful when charging people with sexism and conducting a ‘war on women.’ Her closet does not lack skeletons in this area due to the escapades of her husband, Bill.

The Wall Street Journal editorial reminds us:

Yet no one in American politics better personifies a war on women than Mrs. Clinton’s husband. For readers too young to recall the 1990s, we aren’t merely referring to Trumpian gibes about female looks or “Mad Men” condescension. Mr. Clinton was a genuine sexual harasser in the classic definition of exploiting his power as a workplace superior, and the Clinton entourage worked hard to smear and discredit his many women accusers.

Start with “bimbo eruptions,” the phrase that Mr. Clinton’s Arkansas fixer Betsey Wright used to describe the women who had affairs with Bill. Gennifer Flowers almost derailed his primary campaign in 1992, until Hillary stood by her man on CBS ’s “60 Minutes” and the media portrayed Ms. Flowers as a golddigger.

The article also quotes James Carville‘s statement about Paula Jones, “If you drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you’ll find.” Hardly an affirming statement. There were also the charges that Monica Lewinski was a stalker.

There have been various reports on the internet about Hillary Clinton being fired from the Watergate investigation for unethical behavior. When I checked out these stories, I found contradictory information. However, World Net Daily posted a story in 2008 that seems to verify that there were some problems with Mrs. Clinton’s conduct during the investigation. I have no idea if the story is true, but it is telling that Mrs. Clinton’s actions often seem right on the edge of honesty and ethics.

Getting It Half Right

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The mainstream media never hesitates to rewrite history when it is to their advantage, but every now and again they accidentally begin to report actual facts.

The Nation posted an article yesterday about the role Bill Clinton played in the 2008 mortgage meltdown. This information is readily available information that the mainstream media has so far ignored.

The article reports:

Candidate Clinton is essentially whitewashing the financial catastrophe. She has produced a clumsy rewrite of what caused the 2008 collapse, one that conveniently leaves her husband out of the story. He was the president who legislated the predicate for Wall Street’s meltdown. Hillary Clinton’s redefinition of the reform problem deflects the blame from Wall Street’s most powerful institutions, like JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, and instead fingers less celebrated players that failed. In roundabout fashion, Hillary Clinton sounds like she is assuring old friends and donors in the financial sector that, if she becomes president, she will not come after them.

The seminal event that sowed financial disaster was the repeal of the New Deal’s Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which had separated banking into different realms: investment banks, which organize capital investors for risk-taking ventures; and deposit-holding banks, which serve people as borrowers and lenders. That law’s repeal, a great victory for Wall Street, was delivered by Bill Clinton in 1999, assisted by the Federal Reserve and the financial sector’s armies of lobbyists. The “universal banking model” was saluted as a modernizing reform that liberated traditional banks to participate directly and indirectly in long-prohibited and vastly more profitable risk-taking.

While that is true, you need to take a step back and look at what actually made that change necessary. Due to some changes in federal regulations and pressure by groups like ACORN, banks were forced to issue loans to people who could not pay them back. This sub-prime loans were doomed to fail, and banks needed to find a way to cut their loses. The issuing of the sub-prime mortgages goes back to a law passed during the Carter administration that was put on steroids during the Clinton administration. When the Bush administration called for curbs on Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, they were rebuffed by Chris Dodd and Barney Frank in Congress. It was later revealed that Chris Dodd had a ‘friends and family’ mortgage from one of the major players in the sub-prime mortgage market.

For the entire story, please watch the video below. I have posted it before; it is not new. I am embedding it because I am afraid that it will disappear from YouTube.

 

This is the real story of what happened in the economic meltdown.

The Legal Double Standard

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Yesterday The Wall Street Journal posted an article about Kim Davis, the county clerk for Kentucky’s Rowan Country.Ms. Davis is now in jail because she refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples because it was against her religious beliefs. There are some people who believe that because she is an elected official, her religious beliefs are not allowed to influence the way she does her job, but there is a bit of inconsistency here.

The article reports:

We don’t recall President Obama insisting on “the rule of law” when his then Attorney General, Eric Holder, announced in 2011 that he wouldn’t defend challenges to what was then the law—the Defense of Marriage Act signed by President Bill Clinton—in the courts. Nor did we hear about upholding the law when mayors such as Gavin Newsom in San Francisco issued marriage licenses to same-sex couples in defiance of state laws.

Officials such as Messrs. Holder and Newsom were as guilty as Ms. Davis of elevating personal preferences over the law. Yet they were lionized by those now holding up an obscure Kentucky clerk as a national villain. Meanwhile, five of Rowan County’s six deputy clerks say they will start processing licenses for same-sex couples Friday, but Miss Davis says she will not authorize them.

I don’t have the answer to this dilemma. I do believe religious beliefs should be protected, but I am not sure how that would play out in this situation. I suspect our Founding Fathers would come down on the side of Ms. Davis. However, the past behavior of the Obama Administration seems to indicate that if you disagree with a law, you don’t have to enforce (or follow) it. Obviously you can’t have it both ways.

Words Of Wisdom From A Democrat

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Yes, you read that right. As the Democrat party deals with the candidacies of Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Martin O’Malley, and possibly Elizabeth Warren there is a quieter, more rational candidate. His name is Jim Webb.

Jim Webb was interviewed on Fox News Sunday today. The Daily Caller posted an article about the interview.

The article posted Jim Webb’s remarks about the direction his party has taken:

BRET BAIER: You mentioned the Democratic race. In the RealClearPolitics average of polls, you’re at about 2.3 percent, and well behind the front runner, Hillary Clinton. You have an uphill climb against this Clinton machine. Most political analysts will tell you that Democrats have moved resolutely to the left and that basically Hillary Clinton has renounced Clintonism, which really was the vital core of the center, used to be, in your party. In a party that seems to thrill to Bernie Sanders and maybe long for Elizabeth Warren, who are the Jim Webb Democrats?

JIM WEBB: I believe we can bring a different tone to the Democratic Party. You’re right. The party has moved way far to the left, and that’s not my Democratic Party, but in and of itself. We need to bring working people back into the formula. Next Saturday, in the far southwest of Virginia there’s going to be a medical clinic, a remote area medical clinic to take care of people who don’t have medical insurance. It’s out at the Wise County fairgrounds. I hope Fox will go down there and take a look at it. They’ll going to take care of at least 6,000… people with no medical care. They’re going to pull about 3,000 teeth. These are people who have been forgotten by both parties and, I think, they need a voice.

The Democrat party has claimed for years to represent the forgotten man. However, both the Republican and Democrat parties have been taken over by special interest groups that have forgotten the forgotten man. Very few Americans are currently represented by either party establishment. It is time for Americans to begin to take back whichever party they choose to support. The time for allowing the establishment of both parties to do what is in the interest of their party rather than what is in the interest of America is over. There used to be small-government, constitutional conservatives in both political parties. Now it is hard to find those people in either party. It is up to the American people to elect people who will support the U.S. Constitution as the law of the land and who will actually represent the voters and not the political class.

POSTSCRIPT: I just watched the entire interview. Frankly, that is the only thing Jim Webb said that I agree with.

This Is Not Really A Surprise

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The hope of the Hillary Clinton for President campaign is that by the time Americans vote, they will be so tired of hearing about Benghazi and Mrs. Clinton’s private email server that they won’t even care. So far that strategy has been somewhat successful, but it’s success may be drawing to a close.

On Monday the Daily Caller posted a story about emails provided to a House Committee by Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton insider.

The article reports:

The new Blumenthal-Clinton correspondence was included in a batch of emails Blumenthal gave in response to a subpoena from the Benghazi committee. He will testify in a closed-door session in front of the panel on Tuesday.

It is unclear exactly why Blumenthal’s emails are only now being provided to the committee, though there are two likely explanations. Either Clinton failed to turn the records over to the State Department in December, or the State Department received the emails from Clinton but for some reason failed to turn them over to the Benghazi committee, which is led by South Carolina Rep. Trey Gowdy.

This, of course, is contrary to Mrs. Clinton’s claim in March that she had turned over all of her emails.

The article further reports:

Clinton said her handlers had sifted through her private email account to find her official emails. She said her personal emails were deleted. A private email server Clinton used to host the email account has also reportedly been wiped clean.

The rest of Clinton’s emails will be released in increments beginning at the end of the month.

This does matter. However, it will probably not matter to Mrs. Clinton’s supporters. I believe that there is no level of dishonesty that Mrs. Clinton could be guilty of that would derail her presidential campaign. That really does not say good things about the American voter.

 

It Will Be Interesting To See If This Goes Anywhere

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The Washington Examiner posted an article today about a lawsuit filed in Florida charging the Clinton Foundation with racketeering. The lawsuit was filed by Larry Klayman of Freedom Watch.

The article reports:

The racketeering, influenced and corrupt organizations, or RICO, case alleges the former first couple and their family philanthropy traded political favors for donations or generous speaking fees for Bill Clinton while his wife was the nation’s chief diplomat.

“Negotiations by email about influencing U.S. foreign policy or U.S. Government actions to benefit donors to … The Clinton Foundation or sponsors of speaking engagements would not be captured on a U.S. Government email account because her emails would not be with a U.S. Government official,” Klayman said in court documents obtained by the Washington Examiner.

“Hillary Clinton deleted 32,000 email messages from her email server that included her communications arranging, negotiating, and agreeing upon speaking engagements by Bill Clinton in return for large speaking fees and donations to The Clinton Foundation,” the documents, dated May 20, said.

There has been so much questionable behavior regarding finances surrounding the Clintons, it is amazing that there have not been more legal steps taken to hold them accountable. I am reminded that the life expectancy of many people involved with the Clintons in Arkansas seemed to be very short. It would be very interesting to see Hillary Clinton’s emails involved in negotiating speaking fees and consulting fees.

 

A Private State Department?

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The Wall Street Journal posted an article today about the latest batch of Hillary Clinton’s emails released by the State Department. While there is no ‘smoking gun’ in the emails as such, the emails reveal a State Department that was not run according to the usual chain of command.

The article reports:

In the pre-Memorial Day weekend news dump, long-time Clinton plumber Sidney Blumenthal plays Maxwell Smart, passing along intel on Benghazi from half a world away. Secret Agent Blumenthal apparently derived this wisdom from his new business associates who were attempting to win contracts from Libyan nationals. Mrs. Clinton often circulates the memos among her top diplomats with comments like “useful insight” and “very interesting,” and they would often then push them down the chain of command, without identifying the source.

Mrs. Clinton was the Secretary of State, for heaven’s sake, one of the five most powerful national security positions in the U.S. government. She had the entire State Department intelligence division at her disposal, known as the Bureau of Intelligence and Research or INR, and presumably had access to the 16 other U.S. agencies that make up the intelligence community.

Yet she’s consuming and taking seriously information from an “analyst” who knows nothing about the subject. Mr. Blumenthal’s expertise is in political wet work and monetizing his connections to the Clintons. The imprimatur that Mrs. Clinton’s office put on Mr. Blumenthal’s outside improv offered him a way to influence policy even after the Obama White House had barred Mrs. Clinton from formally hiring him.

It is becoming very obvious that Mrs. Clinton ignored the advice of the White House and played by her own rules.

It is also interesting that the emails the State Department released had certain items redacted that were not redacted in the emails that the New York Times obtained. It is interesting to see what the State Department chose to redact. I strongly suggest following the link above to read the entire article in the Wall Street Journal.

It is obvious to me (and I suspect to any thinking person) that the Clinton emails had been well scrubbed before they were released. It is also obvious that they were released just before Memorial Day when the American public would be least likely to pay attention to them. This is typical of the past behavior of the Clintons and could be expected to be typical of any future behavior should Mrs. Clinton be successful in her bid for the presidency.

The article concludes:

The larger question isn’t Mr. Blumenthal’s faux life of danger. It’s why a potential Commander in Chief invested so much trust in such a figure. The Southern Gothic novel that is Clinton family political history—with its melodrama, betrayals and paranoia—has left them dependent on insular loyalists like Mr. Blumenthal whose opinions are never second-guessed. Voters should know they’d not only be electing Hillary, and Bill, and Chelsea, but this entire menagerie.

It Just Gets Worse

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The presidency of the United States used to have an air of dignity about it. Unfortunately, in recent years that seems to have disappeared. I understand that we are not responsible for the actions of our family members, but sometimes you just have to shake your head.

The Weekly Standard posted a story today about Hillary Clinton’s brother. The New York Times has posted a story in which Tony Rodham (Hillary Clinton’s brother) states, used the Clinton family foundation to make deals. I suppose that is not a surprise, but still…

The article reports:

“I deal through the Clinton Foundation. That gets me in touch with the Haitian officials,” Mr. Rodham said, according to a transcript of his testimony. “I hound my brother-in-law, because it’s his fund that we’re going to get our money from. And he can’t do it until the Haitian government does it.

“And he keeps telling me, ‘Oh, it’s going to happen tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow.’ Well, tomorrow hasn’t come yet.”

…“I was complaining to my brother-in-law I didn’t have any money. And he asked McAuliffe to give me a job,” Mr. Rodham said during the court proceedings, which were the result of a lawsuit over unpaid legal bills filed by his lawyer in a child support case.

Do we really want this family back in the White House?

 

This Really Does Not Seem To Be An Innocent Mistake

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The Washington Examiner is reporting today that the head of the Clinton Foundation has stated that the Foundation made mistakes in the way donations to the Foundation were reported.

The article reports:

Pally (acting Foundation CEO Maura Pally) wrote that the foundation didn’t list individual donors to its Canadian arm because national law requires charities to gain permission from individuals before disclosing them.

She also acknowledged mistakenly combining government grants with other donations in tax filings, although she said the grants were still publicly available on the foundation’s financial statements posted online.

The donations to the Foundation are in the news right now, but the more interesting part of the Clintons financial story is the exorbitant speaking fees President Clinton began to collect from foreign countries after Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State. Again, it is questionable as to what laws (if any) have been broken, but there is certainly the appearance of dishonesty. That appearance is aggravated by the disappearing emails, which would have either provided proof of total innocence or guilt.

The Clintons have amassed a tremendous amount of wealth while serving in public office. Unfortunately, that is not unusual at the present time. The question is whether they did it by cutting the usual corners or they did it by inventing a few new corners to cut. I do know that if you or I acted in the way that they are acting, we would find ourselves in jail for a very long time.

Quote Of The Week (And It’s Only Tuesday)

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This quote is from the Conservative Tribune. It is harsh, but I believe it is something to think about when considering the presidential candidacy of Hillary Clinton:

It’s a great irony that the first woman to have a reasonable shot at becoming president has gotten there merely by championing the public shaming of women simply unlucky enough to be hit on, if not sexually assaulted, by her own husband.

With all of the hero-worship coming out of the media in the wake of Hillary’s announcement, it’s funny that there was little to no mention of the women whose life she’s played an active part in ruining.

Give it time, though. No matter how complicit the media wants to be, the truth seldom stays buried for long, especially when the Clintons are involved.

What Do Equal Rights Mean?

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On Sunday the Independent Journal Review posted an article about Indiana‘s ‘Religious Freedom’ Act. There has been an outcry from gay and lesbian groups that say that the law will discriminate against them. I would like to point out that 21 states already have similar laws, and that the goal of the law is to protect EVERYONE’S rights.

When you open a business, you do not give up your First Amendment rights. According to the First Amendment you are guaranteed the right to practice your religion. There is also a right of association–you have the right to choose who you will do business with. Christians who hold a Biblical view on homosexuality have as much right to practice their beliefs as anyone else. The law in Indiana will protect these rights.

This is the map of the states that have passed laws similar to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA):

RFRA Existing graphic

Incidentally, the RFRA was signed into law by former President Bill Clinton–not by a Republican.

The article concludes:

In other words, not only can the Christian owners of a bakery refuse to write an inscription on the wedding cake of a gay couple, but the black owners of a T-shirt business don’t have to print the KKK’s burning crosses on shirts, and Jewish owners of a gift shop don’t have to put Nazi symbols on coffee cups.

Everyone has equal rights, or no one does.

The Baggage Increases

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Hillary Clinton seems to be the frontrunner for the Democrat presidential nomination in 2016, but things keep turning up. Yesterday Hot Air posted a story about the Clinton Foundation‘s adventures in Haiti. It’s a rather complicated story (complete with videos), so I can understand why the major media has not paid a lot of attention to it. A soundbite will simply not tell the story. It is a typical Clinton scandal, involving money and influence–the Clintons make money and questionable people (or countries) gain influence.

Please follow the link above to read the entire story.

Here is the conclusion:

So to sum up, the foundation rifles money from the nefarious human rights violating Algerian regime through donations that were in breach of Hillary’s agreement with the Obama administration when she joined it, kept them secret while being lobbied more heavily than before on the human rights concerns at State, and when caught about the appearance of impropriety with the donations, pointed to the good work done in Haiti. Naturally, the ones protesting the loudest are the Haitians, who think the Clintons have used the island nation as their own personal front company to funnel money. One of the few natural resources the island apparently has is gold in them thar hills. One company gets the permit, and of the seven billion people who populate Earth who could possibly be chosen to join the advisory board, it’s Tony Rodham, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s brother, and all apparently without Hillary Clinton’s knowledge. With the ability to beat the odds like this, you’d think Hillary would skip the presidential aspirations altogether and try and make some real money. I mean, she could totally make a killing betting on cattle futures or something.

Sure glad we can trust her. If she can run this shell game in Haiti for five years, she can totally decide which emails are public and which ones are private, right?

This really isn’t anything new.

The Techie Take On The Clinton Email Server

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James Rosen posted an article at Fox News yesterday about some technical people who decided to investigate some of Hillary Clinton’s claims about her private, secure email server.

Some findings from the article:

Now, working with publicly available tools that map network connectivity, experts have established that the last “hop” before the mail server’s Internet Protocol, or IP, address (listed as 64.94.172.146) is Internap’s aggregator in Manhattan (listed as 216.52.95.10). 

 “This is a very strong indication that the clintonemail.com server is in Manhattan,” the source told Fox News.  

 Obviously the server is not in Chappaqua being guarded by the Secret Service–most likely it is in President Clinton’s Manhattan office. Not that physically guarding a server is worth anything anyway unless someone is going to steal the server itself.

The ‘good hackers’ also discovered:

  Perhaps most concerning, private analysts determined that clintonemail.com has been running an older model of Microsoft Internet Information Services, or IIS – specifically version 7.5, which has been documented to leave users exposed on multiple fronts. The website CVEDetails.com, which bills itself as “the ultimate security vulnerability datasource,” is awash with descriptions of serious security vulnerabilities associated with version 7.5, including “memory corruption,” “password disclosure vulnerability,” and the enabling of “remote attackers to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service.”  

The cyberlab technician who discovered the Clintons’ use of version 7.5 marveled at “the vulnerabilities the Clintons are ignoring” in an email to Fox News. “This is a big deal and just the thing real-world hackers look for in a target and will exploit to the max,” the source said.  

“Several of these vulnerabilities have been known since 2010 and yet HRC is running official State comms through it.”  

The article concludes:

Just the original decision to use a private email account, with Clinton’s own surname embedded in it, has baffled the hacker community. The analyst with experience in the intelligence community, a “white hat” hacker — the kind corporate firms retain to conduct “penetration testing” that exposes businesses’ cybersecurity lapses — told Fox News: “If we learned that the foreign minister of a major foreign country was using her own private server to send and receive emails, and was relying on outdated commercial software to operate and protect it, that’d be a hallelujah moment for us.”

As you read this article, please understand a few things. It sounds as if the people who set up the server for the Clintons lacked some of the knowledge they needed to make the server totally secure. Making a server totally secure is nearly impossible and you need really good technical people to do it. If the server was hacked during Mrs. Clinton’s time as Secretary of State, there is no reason to believe that the Clintons or anyone else would know about it. That is a serious problem. The other thing I would appreciate anyone reading this article to be aware of is that I have very little knowledge of how this all works. I have a husband and a daughter that hopefully keep me (and my computer) out of trouble. I do know, however, from being around serious techies that computer security is an issue, particularly in our government. Foreign countries that do not love America are constantly attempting to hack into military, commercial, and government computers. The last thing we need to do is to make it easy for them.

 

Some Perspective On Parallel Government

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Yesterday Commentary Magazine posted an article entitled, “Clinton’s Parallel Government and Obama’s Great Miscalculation.” The article deals with some of the implications of the recent revelation regarding Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State using a private email account and her own private server. This is not normally the way government business is conducted.

The article points out:

Operating her own server would have afforded Clinton additional legal opportunities to block government or private subpoenas in criminal, administrative or civil cases because her lawyers could object in court before being forced to turn over any emails. And since the Secret Service was guarding Clinton’s home, an email server there would have been well protected from theft or a physical hacking.

But homebrew email servers are generally not as reliable, secure from hackers or protected from fires or floods as those in commercial data centers. Those professional facilities provide monitoring for viruses or hacking attempts, regulated temperatures, off-site backups, generators in case of power outages, fire-suppression systems and redundant communications lines.

There are a few interesting things here. How many investigations into the Benghazi attack failed to note the private email account? If the investigations missed that, what else did they miss? How many people in the Obama Administration received emails relating to government business from this private email account and failed to notice that it did not come from a government email account? Was this noted? Did anyone care?

The article concludes:

…Sometimes the Clintons’ parallel government works in Obama’s favor, such as Clinton’s Benghazi disaster. Her independent email server and private addresses enabled her to hide her correspondence on the attack, which also shielded the rest of the administration from that scrutiny. Obama is infamously secretive about his own records and his administration’s unprecedented lack of transparency was a good match for the Clintons.

But it also meant a certain degree of this went beyond his control. Hillary’s family foundation, which essentially became a super-PAC for foreign governments, was supposed to have donations vetted. They didn’t. They were supposed to have Bill Clinton’s paid events cleared. And they did–they were cleared by Hillary’s State Department. They weren’t supposed to accept foreign-government money while Hillary was secretary of state. They did.

Clintonworld operated as a distinct, independent entity for its own purposes while also running American foreign policy. The phrase “conflict of interest” does not even begin to approach the disturbing ethical calculations here. But it can’t be argued that Obama didn’t know what he was getting the country into. He just thought he could control it. He was wrong, and he was wrong to try. And we’re only beginning to see the consequences.

This could get interesting. There is, after all, no honor among thieves.

 

 

Disrespect For The Law

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Yesterday the New York Times reported that during her time as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton did not use a government email account, but strictly used her personal email account to conduct government business. This is a violation of the law that states that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.

The article reports:

Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

…Under federal law, however, letters and emails written and received by federal officials, such as the secretary of state, are considered government records and are supposed to be retained so that congressional committees, historians and members of the news media can find them. There are exceptions to the law for certain classified and sensitive materials.

Mrs. Clinton is not the first government official — or first secretary of state — to use a personal email account on which to conduct official business. But her exclusive use of her private email, for all of her work, appears unusual, Mr. Baron said. The use of private email accounts is supposed to be limited to emergencies, experts said, such as when an agency’s computer server is not working.

This is another example of the Clintons playing fast and loose with the law. Anyone who supports a presidential run by Hillary Clinton is opening the way for a president and cabinet that have no respect for the laws that are supposed to govern America.

Ethics Are Always A Bit Of A Challenge With The Clintons

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After Bill Clinton left office, he set up the William J. Clinton Foundation, now called the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation. The Foundation, under whatever name, has had some interesting challenges along the way.

Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal posted an article which included the following:

The Clinton Foundation has dropped its self-imposed ban on collecting funds from foreign governments and is winning contributions at an accelerating rate, raising ethical questions as Hillary Clinton ramps up her expected bid for the presidency.

Recent donors include the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Australia, Germany and a Canadian government agency promoting the Keystone XL pipeline.

In 2009, the Clinton Foundation stopped raising money from foreign governments after Mrs. Clinton became secretary of state. Former President Bill Clinton, who ran the foundation while his wife was at the State Department, agreed to the gift ban at the behest of the Obama administration, which worried about a secretary of state’s husband raising millions while she represented U.S. interests abroad.

The ban wasn’t absolute; some foreign government donations were permitted for ongoing programs approved by State Department ethics officials.

As Mrs. Clinton prepares to run for President, foreign donations are again coming in.

The foundation did not announce the foreign donations, The Wall Street Journal had to look for them:

The donations weren’t announced by the foundation and were discovered by The Wall Street Journal during a search of donations of more than $50,000 posted on the foundation’s online database. Exactly when the website was updated isn’t clear. The foundation typically updates its website with the previous year’s donations near the beginning of the year. All 2014 donations were noted with asterisks.

The dangers here are obvious–if a country wanted to curry favor with President Hillary Clinton (or gain access to the President), all they would have to do would be make a large donation to the foundation. Whether it is decided that this is legal or not, it is another example of the Clinton family being involved in financial activities that are questionable at best. Do we really want these ethically challenged people back in the White House?

The Impact Of President Obama On The Democrat Party

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Ed Morrissey posted an article at Hot Air today about President Obama’s impact on the Democrat party. Mr. Morrissey states that members of the party are seeing the damage President Obama has done to the party and are asking him to move to the center to make peace with the Republicans. It is becoming very clear that President Obama has no such intentions.

Politico reported today:

As much Hillary Clinton anticipation as there is, two weeks later, Democrats are still reeling and anxious. Obama may have built his political career without the party — and created anti-establishment alternatives — but he’s a lame duck with a new Congress that’s been elected to oppose him. He needs Democrats. And they need him.

“The base craves his leadership,” Brazile said in an interview later that week, following a meeting of the DNC committee that’s beginning to set the rules for the next presidential nomination. “They want him in the mix, talking about what Democrats accomplished, what Democrats are fighting for, and what the president has done to make lives better.”

President Obama could easily make Washington work–under normal conditions, a President who was so soundly defeated in the mid-term election would move toward the center. We are already seeing that President Obama has no such intention.

The article at Hot Air concludes:

Obama didn’t learn the Bill Clinton lesson after the first midterms. He’s not interested in learning it after his second massive defeat, either. Even with Bill Clinton’s more strategic direction, Democrats ended up losing narrowly at the end of his presidency. Obama may be leading Democrats into a reverse 2008, or perhaps even worse.

The future looks very interesting.

Is This What We Had In Mind?

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Abortion has been legal in America since 1973. For those Americans under forty, it was an established fact of life before they were born. Abortion is one of the most financially lucrative industries in the United States because of the lack of regulation (something that is changing in many states) and because the government subsidizes Planned Parenthood,  one of the largest providers of abortions. So what is abortion about?

On Wednesday, National Review posted an article titled, “We Only Whisper It.” The article deals with some recent statements by Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a recent interview.

The article reports:

Speaking about such modest restrictions on abortion as have been enacted over the past several years, Justice Ginsburg lamented that “the impact of all these restrictions is on poor women.” Then she added: “It makes no sense as a national policy to promote birth only among poor people.”

…In an earlier interview, she described the Roe v. Wade decision as being intended to control population growth, “particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” She was correct in her assessment of Roe; the co-counsel in that case, Ron Weddington, would later advise President Bill Clinton: “You can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy, and poor segment of our country,” by making abortifacients cheap and universally available. “It’s what we all know is true, but we only whisper it.”

I thought America was the land of opportunity–not the land of killing children because they were born into poor households. Some of our greatest leaders were born into poverty. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas grew up in poverty and now sits on the bench with Ms. Ginsburg.

The article points out a basic philosophical difference between those who encourage abortion and those who oppose it:

There are two ways to account for humans beings: as assets, or as liabilities. For those who see the world the way Justice Ginsburg does — which is also the way Barack Obama does, along with most of his party — human beings are a liability. That is why they fundamentally misunderstand challenges such as employment; if you see people as a liability, then you see labor in terms of “creating jobs,” i.e. neutralizing that liability with a check every two weeks. It does not matter whether that labor produces anything valuable; if the liability is being met with a sufficient paycheck, problem solved. It should go without saying that Barack Obama et al. do not see themselves as liabilities. They see themselves as assets, which is how left-wing activists and Democratic functionaries justify their own enormous paychecks.

And they don’t see their own children as liabilities, either — just your kids, loser.

The alternative is to view human beings as having inherent value. In economics, that means thinking of every worker as having something potentially valuable to contribute. In broader terms, that means thinking of every person as a full member of the human family, no matter if they are healthy or sick, running marathons or profoundly disabled, Bill Gates rich or Bangladesh poor.

We need to elect leaders who value human beings. It is frightening to think that a Supreme Court Justice feels that babies born into poverty have less value than babies born into wealth. That is the kind of thinking that leads to genocide.

The Planning For The Hamas Attack On Israel Must Have Gone On For Some Time

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CBN News posted an article today about the conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. The article mentioned the tunnels going from the Gaza Strip into Israel.

The article reports:

The tunnels are designed to infiltrate communities close to the border. Gaza is about a mile away and some of these tunnels are more than a mile long and 60 feet deep with multiple exits. It proves Hamas has been planning this for a very long time.

The article explains the strategy of Hamas being used in the war:

Meanwhile on Sunday, 13 IDF soldiers died in an attack on one Hamas stronghold in Shejaiya. More than 100 Palestinians were killed in the incident, both terrorists and civilians. 

For three days, Israel warned residents by phone calls and leaflets to get out of harms’ way, while the Hamas interior minister told them to stay there. 

“Hamas is effectively conducting self-genocide,” Israeli Economy Minister Naftali Bennett said. “They’re placing their women and children around missile launchers, shooting rockets at Israel [and] waiting for us to retaliate in order for them to kill their own, and that’s what’s happening.”   

Former U.S. President Bill Clinton said using civilians as human shields is part of Hamas’ strategy.

“They have a strategy designed to force Israel to kill their own civilians so the rest of the world will condemn them,” he said.

Middle Eastern terrorists have long used the media to aid them in their cause. The thing to remember when hearing stories of the war between Israel and Hamas is that Israel is using the Iron Dome to protect its citizens and its military. Hamas is using civilians to protect its military and its weapons. That alone illustrates the values of the two sides.

There’s Broke And There’s Broke

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Fox News posted an article today about Hillary Clinton’s comment that she and Bill Clinton were “dead broke” after leaving the White House. It seems that financial forms filed for 2000 show assets between $781,000 and almost $1.8 million — and liabilities between $2.3 million and $10.6 million, mostly for legal bills. The article also notes that as the former President and his wife, they had tremendous earning potential, and within a year had earned enough to be financially afloat.

The article reports:

All told, their financial snapshot in 2001 was drastically different than when they left the White House — assets were listed at between $6 million and $30 million; liabilities were between $1.3 million and $5.6 million. And despite their financial issues, they got help from family friend and fundraiser Terry McAuliffe (now, the governor of Virginia) to secure a loan at the time for a $1.7 million home in Chappaqua, N.Y. 

These finer details made Clinton’s comment about being “dead broke” all the more questionable. 

I think most of us would like to be ‘broke’ like the Clintons were broke after leaving the White House.

The Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC)

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On Sunday the Wall Street Journal posted an article about Haiti’s Superior Court of Auditors and Administrative Disputes demanding an audit the Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC).

The article states:

Four years after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake toppled the capital city of Port-au-Prince and heavily damaged other parts of the country, hundreds of millions of dollars from the State Department’s U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), allocated to the IHRC, are gone. Hundreds of millions more to the IHRC from international donors have also been spent. Left behind is a mishmash of low quality, poorly thought-out development experiments and half-finished projects.

Haitians are angry, frustrated and increasingly suspicious of the motives of the IHRC and of its top official, Mr. Clinton. Americans might feel the same way if they knew more about this colossal failure. One former Haitian official puts it this way: “I really cannot understand how you could raise so much money, put a former U.S. president in charge, and get this outcome.”

We could have warned them. While Bill Clinton was running the IHRC, he was reporting to his wife, Hillary, who was Secretary of State at the time. The article goes on to say that the IHRC as staffed by Bill Clinton excluded Haitian board members in the staffing and consultant selection.

The article further reports:

A June 2013 Government Accountability Office report gave a barely passing grade to USAID’s Haiti reconstruction effort. It said $170 million was allocated to build a power plant and a port near the Caracol Industrial Park, not far from Cap-Haïtien. The two projects “are interdependent; each must be completed and remain viable for the other to succeed,” the GAO explained. The first phase of the power plant was completed on time and under budget. But the port construction was delayed by two years “due in part to a lack of USAID expertise in port planning in Haiti.” Projected costs, according to the report, say the estimated shortfall of $117 million to $189 million is larger than originally estimated. “It is unclear whether the Haitian government will be able to find a private sector company willing to finance the remainder of the project.”

This is not a surprise when you consider how the Clintons ran the White House, but did we have to export their corruption overseas?

Is This Something We Really Want To Do?

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CBN News posted a story today about the Obama Administration’s plan to give up control of the internet.

The article reports:

America has always been the main player in managing the World Wide Web. Even conservatives who typically want to limit the role of government say it’s an example of Washington doing something well.

“It’s a very relaxed control, which is why I think we’ve seen the Internet grow to be an incredible voice of freedom, not just in the United States, but around the world,” Jordan Sekulow, with the American Center for Law and Justice, told CBN News.

In the late 1990s, the Commerce Department formed a nonprofit agency called the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, which governs the system that assigns website addresses and directs Internet traffic.

The Obama Administration has stated that as a result of the activities of Edward Snowden, America has been under international pressure to give up control of the internet.

The article points out that Russia and China are waiting to fill the vacuum if America gives up control and that eventually the internet would fall under the control of a U.N. organization called the “International Telecommunications Union.” This could easily result in the end of free speech on the internet or a curtailing of business activity.

The article further reports:

Congress is considering two actions. The first delays the transfer of control and the second requires congressional approval before the Obama administration can act.

There’s also bipartisan concern. Even former President Bill Clinton thinks the administration’s plans are a bad idea.

“A lot of people who have been trying to take this authority away from the United States wanted to do it for the sole purpose of cracking down on Internet freedom and limiting it and having governments protect their backsides instead of empower their people,” Clinton said.

President Clinton is right. This may be the first and last time I agree with him, but he is right.

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