Published on Jun 15, 2013
June 15, 2013 - Hillary Clinton Denies Knowledge Of State Department Scandal, Cover-Up - Judge Jeanine Pirro - Hookers, Drugs & Benghazi At The Hillary Clinton State Department Cover-Up!
Monday, June 24, 2013
Hillary Says Female President Would Send Right Signal.
Hillary Clinton told a Canadian audience that she hoped the United States would elect a woman to the White House because it would send ‘exactly the right historical signal’ to men, women and children. She said women in politics need to ‘dare to compete’ and the nation needs to ‘take that leap of faith.’”
Nice sound bites but completely devoid of any substantive content.
In what way does a woman make a difference in taking an oath to uphold the Constitution? She either will or she won’t. What does a person’s gender have to do with keeping your word?
Americans and the world were all atwitter because the United States elected the first officially black president in 2008. (Bill Clinton was called “America’s first black president” by Toni Morrison.) So what has Obama’s blackness done in terms of keeping his oath to uphold the Constitution? Can we say that he has ignored it?
Color and gender shouldn’t have anything to do with being president.
In a country where everybody is black, what would a candidate’s color mean? Would electing a white man send the “right kind of signal”? And what would that be?
We’re beginning to see in sports that it matters who has sex with whom.
Homosexuality is the new “authentication” mark among athletes. First it was Jason Collins (whoever he is). Now it’s Phoenix Mercury basketball rookie Brittney Gainer who’s a self-professed same-sexer.
“In April Griner revealed she is gay, an announcement Griner says was an easy decision when she considered the large number of people her message could reach.
"‘I've heard people say, “Why do you need to say you’re gay, keep your personal life to yourself?” I say to them, “What about the kids who need someone to look up to?” I'm not trying to target whoever's complaining. I'm targeting the people struggling who need someone to set an example,’ she explains. ‘Just knowing that you can help somebody out, that's a feeling you can't express.’”
What does what she does sexually with whom have to do with basketball?
Why don’t we hear sports figures saying, “Hi. I’m an adulterer. I want to help other adulterers. They need someone to look up to. That’s why I’m announcing today that I’m a serial adulterer.”
I’m not against a woman running for president; I just don’t want Hillary Clinton to be that woman.
Her body parts don’t have anything to do with my decision; it’s her political and moral views that disturb me. It's the same with a majority of the members of Congress -- skirt or no skirt.
Read more: http://godfatherpolitics.com/11427/hillary-says-female-president-would-send-right-signal/#ixzz2X9w5sQCZ
Thursday, June 20, 2013
Hillary 2016 — What difference does it make?
The Clintons are getting the old band back together again for one last geriatric tour.
Hillary 2016. Because 22 years of Clintons dominating the Beltway isn’t enough.
Her campaign slogan: “Vote for me. I am a woman. What difference does it make?”
The Draft Hillary movement is really taking off. There hasn’t been this much excitement behind a Draft Hillary movement since, well, the last time there was a Draft Hillary movement.
Remember that? Back in 2008? When she was the “inevitable nominee”? She was the “most electable” Democrat running? She was the only one who could beat the Republicans?
Didn’t exactly work out as advertised. But this being the Clintons, there is no more shame in that than there is in the incident with the intern, sketchy stories about cattle futures or missing law firm records magically reappearing.
They’re not even changing the talking points. Once again, the nomination is hers for the asking. She is inevitable — again. It is time for a woman in the White House — again. She is the only electable Democrat in the mix — again.
She’s even picked up a Twitter handle and describes herself as a “glass ceiling cracker.” You go, girl!
Deep down, she’s got to be having flashbacks and night sweats thinking to herself: “I have seen this movie before and I really didn’t like how it ended.”
But what difference does it make? She’s Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The last time, her exhausting quest ended with her defeated and broke. Then she had to muster up the energy to dine on some seriously rancid crow and become the single most visible employee of the man who had beaten her.
He beat her because she had a history and he did not. He beat her because she had made very public decisions that he had not faced. He beat her because she supported a military action overseas that he was able to blithely campaign against. In the end, he beat her because people wanted something new. They wanted change.
What difference does it make? In that case, it was the difference between winning and losing.
So, what will have happened in eight years to make her not less, but more, appealing to voters? Absolutely nothing.
It is just eight years more of fraught Clinton history. Eight more years of public decisions that will be mercilessly picked apart. Eight more years further and further away from being something new. She will be a calcified statue representing the very opposite of change.
She will be forced to answer endless questions about the deadly terrorist attack in Benghazi. We will see the endless loop of her baring her teeth during a congressional hearing and angrily shouting: “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
Cruelest of all: She will be blamed and pay the political price for every single unpopular foreign military action the current president has launched during his tenure. She got beaten last time for being a war hawk. She’ll get beaten this time because President Obama became the drone-loving war hawk he had campaigned against.
In 2008, Mrs. Clinton cut an ad showing children asleep. The phone at the White House rings at 3 a.m. announcing some serious national security threat. The narrator intoned: “Who do you want answering the phone?”
Without mentioning Mr. Obama’s name, it was a bid to paint his lack of world experience as a frightening liability.
Well, Mrs. Clinton certainly does not share any such liability. But eight years on, we now know exactly what she will say if she ever does have to answer that phone at 3 a.m. in the White House.
Hillary 2016. Because 22 years of Clintons dominating the Beltway isn’t enough.
Her campaign slogan: “Vote for me. I am a woman. What difference does it make?”
The Draft Hillary movement is really taking off. There hasn’t been this much excitement behind a Draft Hillary movement since, well, the last time there was a Draft Hillary movement.
Remember that? Back in 2008? When she was the “inevitable nominee”? She was the “most electable” Democrat running? She was the only one who could beat the Republicans?
Didn’t exactly work out as advertised. But this being the Clintons, there is no more shame in that than there is in the incident with the intern, sketchy stories about cattle futures or missing law firm records magically reappearing.
They’re not even changing the talking points. Once again, the nomination is hers for the asking. She is inevitable — again. It is time for a woman in the White House — again. She is the only electable Democrat in the mix — again.
She’s even picked up a Twitter handle and describes herself as a “glass ceiling cracker.” You go, girl!
Deep down, she’s got to be having flashbacks and night sweats thinking to herself: “I have seen this movie before and I really didn’t like how it ended.”
But what difference does it make? She’s Hillary Rodham Clinton.
The last time, her exhausting quest ended with her defeated and broke. Then she had to muster up the energy to dine on some seriously rancid crow and become the single most visible employee of the man who had beaten her.
He beat her because she had a history and he did not. He beat her because she had made very public decisions that he had not faced. He beat her because she supported a military action overseas that he was able to blithely campaign against. In the end, he beat her because people wanted something new. They wanted change.
What difference does it make? In that case, it was the difference between winning and losing.
So, what will have happened in eight years to make her not less, but more, appealing to voters? Absolutely nothing.
It is just eight years more of fraught Clinton history. Eight more years of public decisions that will be mercilessly picked apart. Eight more years further and further away from being something new. She will be a calcified statue representing the very opposite of change.
She will be forced to answer endless questions about the deadly terrorist attack in Benghazi. We will see the endless loop of her baring her teeth during a congressional hearing and angrily shouting: “What difference, at this point, does it make?”
Cruelest of all: She will be blamed and pay the political price for every single unpopular foreign military action the current president has launched during his tenure. She got beaten last time for being a war hawk. She’ll get beaten this time because President Obama became the drone-loving war hawk he had campaigned against.
In 2008, Mrs. Clinton cut an ad showing children asleep. The phone at the White House rings at 3 a.m. announcing some serious national security threat. The narrator intoned: “Who do you want answering the phone?”
Without mentioning Mr. Obama’s name, it was a bid to paint his lack of world experience as a frightening liability.
Well, Mrs. Clinton certainly does not share any such liability. But eight years on, we now know exactly what she will say if she ever does have to answer that phone at 3 a.m. in the White House.
Friday, June 14, 2013
Hillary Clinton Denies Knowledge of State Department Scandals, Cover-Ups:
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a statement through a spokesman Tuesday that claimed total ignorance of rampant sex crimes and cover-ups occurring on her watch that were alleged in an Inspector General’s memo reported by CBS News and the New York Post.
The IG memo, dated October 23, 2012, contains shocking allegations of overseas criminal conduct by State Department officials including sexual assault , ‘endemic’ procurement of prostitutes (including children), and drugs—all of which were alleged to have been covered-up by various officials at the highest levels of the State Department including Clinton’s chief of staff Cheryl Mills.CNN reported Clinton spokesman Nicholas Merrill issued a written statement saying, "We learned of it from the media and don't know anything beyond what's been reported."
Clinton would have the American people believe that she was completely out of touch about the lawlessness at her department during her four year tenure as Secretary of State.
For her statement to be true, Clinton would have to not know that members of her protective detail were disciplined and reassigned away from her for having sex with prostitutes in hotels she stayed at in foreign countries including Russia and Colombia; that a 2008 bundler to the Obama campaign appointed ambassador to Belgium was brought home for questioning about allegations by his security detail that he repeatedly ditched them to have sex with underage prostitutes in a Brussels park known for boy prostitutes; that a security official was accused of sexually assaulting foreigners hired as guards in as many as four nations; that her chief of staff squelched an investigation of a nominee to be ambassador to Iraq; that a drug ring supplied State Department security contractors in Baghdad and that the State Department involved shooting deaths of four Hondurans, including two pregnant women, was blocked by a high ranking State Department official. (This new scandal from the IG memo was reported Wednesday by the New York Post.)
Howard Gutman, the U.S. Ambassador to Belgium named by the Post as the ambassador accused in the IG memo of picking up underage prostitutes, issued a statement Tuesday vehemently denying the allegations:
"I am angered and saddened by the baseless allegations that have appeared in the press and to watch the four years I have proudly served in Belgium smeared is devastating. I live on a beautiful park in Brussels that you walk through to get to many locations and at no point have I ever engaged in any improper activity."CNN reported Gutman claimed to his bosses at Foggy Bottom he frequented the park to get away from his wife.
The ambassador went to Washington and was asked what he was doing and he denied any wrongdoing, the source told CNN. The ambassador explained that sometimes he fights with his wife, needs air and he goes for a walk in the park because he likes it.The Atlantic reported that the park Gutman trolled, Parc Royal Warandepark, was well-known as a place to pick up adult homosexual and adolescent boy prostitutes.
Gutman probably could have stopped after the first sentence of his statement. His neighborhood park is Brussels's Parc Royal Warandepark, where some of the alleged solicitations and ditching of security took place, as the New York Daily News reported. He isn't exactly wrong about it being nice, either — the royal park is bordered by the BOZAR museum and Parliament.
Picturesque as the digs may be, according to a local report from 2010, the park is rumored to be a site of frequent homosexual and underage prostitution. And in 2009, RTL reported on prostitution arrests involving young boys and a policeman.State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki repeatedly refused to clear Gutman of the allegations in the IG memo when badgered by reporters, who suggested Gutman retaining his post indicated his exoneration. Psaki even refused to state that Clinton’s successor John F. Kerry has confidence in Gutman.
QUESTION: First, has Secretary Kerry spoken to the Ambassador?
MS. PSAKI: Not that I’m aware of.
QUESTION: Does the Secretary have full faith and confidence in this Ambassador?
MS. PSAKI: Well, the Secretary is proud to lead, of course, a Department of 70,000
dedicated men and women serving. He takes every accusation seriously, as we all do. And I can assure you, as I just said, that in any case, if there were documented evidence and action was needed to be taken, he would be taking that action.
QUESTION: So you’re declining this opportunity to say, on behalf of the Secretary, that he has full confidence in this Ambassador?
MS. PSAKI: I’m just seeing through the process, James.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/06/12/Clinton-Kerry-State-Dept-Scandals
Thursday, June 13, 2013
ABC Gushes Over Hillary On Twitter:
ood Morning America hasn’t made time to cover a possible prostitution
scandal involving Hillary Clinton’s State Department, but the show’s
hosts gushed over the politician’s debut on Twitter.
http://www.westernjournalism.com/abc-gushes-over-hillary-on-twitter/
http://www.westernjournalism.com/abc-gushes-over-hillary-on-twitter/
Clinton confidante at center of Benghazi damage-control tied to probe of suspected diplomat crimes.
A longtime confidante of Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton who
reportedly played a key role in the State Department’s damage-control
efforts on the Benghazi attack last year is also named in accusations
that department higher-ups quashed investigations into diplomats’
potential criminal activity.
Cheryl Mills, who served in a dual capacity in recent years as general counsel and chief of staff to Mrs. Clinton as secretary of state, was accused of attempting to stifle congressional access to a diplomat who held a senior post in Libya at the time of the attack.
Now she has become the closest member of Mrs. Clinton’s inner circle to have her name appear in an internal State Department Office of Inspector General memo at the heart of this week’s scandal.
The memo, believed to have been based on anonymous complaints from rank-and-file agents in the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security that arose during a 2012 inspector general’s review of the bureau, has sent shock waves through Foggy Bottom since becoming public Monday.
At its core, the document outlines a variety of cases in which high-ranking department officials quashed internal investigations into accusations of sexual assault, drug dealing, solicitation of sexual favors from prostitutes and minors, and other improper activity against American diplomatic personnel overseas.
The State Department has vigorously criticized the memo. Spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki told reporters repeatedly this week that the accusations are “unsubstantiated.”
A spokesman for the inspector general’s office has called the memo a “preliminary” document that triggered investigations into suspected criminal activity and claims that earlier probes were blocked by State Department higher-ups. Outside law enforcement specialists have been called in to conduct the investigations.
With bipartisan pressure mounting from lawmakers on Capitol Hill to ensure such claims are investigated and resolved, Secretary of State John F. Kerry weighed in Wednesday, saying he takes the investigative process “very seriously” and that “all employees of this department are held to the highest standards, now and always.”
“I am confident that the [inspector general’s] process, where he has invited outsiders to come and review whatever took place a year ago, will be reviewed,” Mr. Kerry told reporters after meeting at the State Department with British Foreign Secretary William Hague. “I welcome that, I think the department welcomes that, because we do want the highest standards applied.”
Simmering beneath the surface of the scandal, however, is a political ingredient that some news reports suggest has to do with Mrs. Clinton’s potential ambitions to run for president and with Republican hopes to use Benghazi and other scandals against the former secretary of state.
It follows that the scandals would have to reach not only to anonymous State Department higher-ups, but to Mrs. Clinton herself.
That’s where Mrs. Mills comes in.
She has worked as a Clinton loyalist for more than two decades, first as a lawyer who helped facilitate Mr. Clinton’s transition into the White House after the 1992 election. She was named White House counsel in the Clinton administration and became a key litigator and public face of the defense team during his 1999 impeachment and trial on perjury and obstruction of justice charges related to a sexual-harassment lawsuit.
More recently, working in Mrs. Clinton’s inner circle at the State Department, Mrs. Mills made headlines in the aftermath of the Benghazi attack for the pressure she reportedly put on Gregory Hicks, the former deputy chief of mission to Libya, to be careful in his dealings with Republican members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee seeking answers about the attack.
During testimony before the committee in May, Mr. Hicks revealed that he got an aggressive phone call from Mrs. Mills after meeting with Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican, who had traveled to Libya on a fact-finding mission about a month after the attack that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
Mr. Hicks testified that other higher-ups at the department ordered him not to meet with Mr. Chaffetz during the visit, but he ignored them. At one point, he met with the congressman without a State Department attorney present because the lawyer did not have a high enough security clearance to attend the meeting. Afterward, the call came from Mrs. Mills, demanding “a report on the visit,” said Mr. Hicks, who added that Mrs. Mills “was upset” by the attorney’s absence.
Mr. Hicks suggested that the call was serious because it had come from an official so high in the State Department and so close to Mrs. Clinton. “A phone call from that senior of a person is, generally speaking, not considered to be good news,” he said.
The call may simply show how seriously Mrs. Clinton’s uppermost staff members took the task of ensuring that officials like Mr. Hicks had the necessary legal protections as the Benghazi scandal unfolded.
But the attention given to Mrs. Mills — along with Mr. Hicks’ comments about her call during a congressional hearing on Benghazi — has made the appearance of her name in the more recent internal OIG memo scandal all the more pertinent.
According the memo, Mrs. Mills may have similarly attempted to block an investigation last year into suspected misconduct by Brett McGurk, whom President Obama had nominated to become ambassador to Iraq.
The memo outlines how agents from the Bureau of Diplomatic Security’s special investigations division had opened an probe into Mr. McGurk, who was working at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad at the time, on suspicion that had been improperly emailing government information with his girlfriend, a Wall Street Journal reporter.
“Some of the information may have been cleared for release, but other information reportedly was not,” states the memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times after it was first reported by CBS News.
Investigators “never interviewed McGurk, allegedly because Cheryl Mills from the Secretary’s office interceded,” the memo states. “Email from Mills reportedly shows her agreeing to a particular course of action for the case, but then reneging and advising McGurk to withdraw his name from consideration for the ambassadorship.”
Mr. McGurk withdrew his name from consideration for the post last June.
His case is just one of eight outlined in the memo and appears to rank low in terms of the level of potential criminal behavior that was alleged.
State Department officials remained vague this week about details of any of the cases and refused to say whether any of them have been resolved during the inspector general’s ongoing investigations.
In one case, the memo states that an agent from the special investigations division had opened a probe into the activities of Howard Gutman, the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, and “determined that the ambassador routinely ditched his protective security detail in order to solicit sexual favors from both prostitutes and minor children.”
“The ambassador’s protective detail and the embassy’s surveillance detection team (staffed by host country nationals) were well aware of the behavior,” the memo states.
But as the agent “began to plan surveillance on the ambassador to obtain corroboration, the agent reportedly received notification that [Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick] Kennedy had directed [the Bureau of Diplomatic Security] to cease the investigation and have the agent return to Washington.”
Mr. Kennedy issued a statement Tuesday saying he has “never once interfered, nor would I condone interfering, in any investigation.”
Mr. Gutman also issued a statement Tuesday, saying he was “angered and saddened” by “baseless allegations that have appeared in the press.”
“To watch the four years I have proudly served in Belgium smeared is devastating,” he said. “I live on a beautiful park in Brussels that you walk through to get to many locations, and at no point have I ever engaged in any improper activity.”
The ambassador’s denial appeared to represent the first official acknowledgment of the various accusations of criminal activity cited in the inspector general’s memo.
Cheryl Mills, who served in a dual capacity in recent years as general counsel and chief of staff to Mrs. Clinton as secretary of state, was accused of attempting to stifle congressional access to a diplomat who held a senior post in Libya at the time of the attack.
Now she has become the closest member of Mrs. Clinton’s inner circle to have her name appear in an internal State Department Office of Inspector General memo at the heart of this week’s scandal.
The memo, believed to have been based on anonymous complaints from rank-and-file agents in the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security that arose during a 2012 inspector general’s review of the bureau, has sent shock waves through Foggy Bottom since becoming public Monday.
At its core, the document outlines a variety of cases in which high-ranking department officials quashed internal investigations into accusations of sexual assault, drug dealing, solicitation of sexual favors from prostitutes and minors, and other improper activity against American diplomatic personnel overseas.
The State Department has vigorously criticized the memo. Spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki told reporters repeatedly this week that the accusations are “unsubstantiated.”
A spokesman for the inspector general’s office has called the memo a “preliminary” document that triggered investigations into suspected criminal activity and claims that earlier probes were blocked by State Department higher-ups. Outside law enforcement specialists have been called in to conduct the investigations.
With bipartisan pressure mounting from lawmakers on Capitol Hill to ensure such claims are investigated and resolved, Secretary of State John F. Kerry weighed in Wednesday, saying he takes the investigative process “very seriously” and that “all employees of this department are held to the highest standards, now and always.”
“I am confident that the [inspector general’s] process, where he has invited outsiders to come and review whatever took place a year ago, will be reviewed,” Mr. Kerry told reporters after meeting at the State Department with British Foreign Secretary William Hague. “I welcome that, I think the department welcomes that, because we do want the highest standards applied.”
Simmering beneath the surface of the scandal, however, is a political ingredient that some news reports suggest has to do with Mrs. Clinton’s potential ambitions to run for president and with Republican hopes to use Benghazi and other scandals against the former secretary of state.
It follows that the scandals would have to reach not only to anonymous State Department higher-ups, but to Mrs. Clinton herself.
That’s where Mrs. Mills comes in.
She has worked as a Clinton loyalist for more than two decades, first as a lawyer who helped facilitate Mr. Clinton’s transition into the White House after the 1992 election. She was named White House counsel in the Clinton administration and became a key litigator and public face of the defense team during his 1999 impeachment and trial on perjury and obstruction of justice charges related to a sexual-harassment lawsuit.
More recently, working in Mrs. Clinton’s inner circle at the State Department, Mrs. Mills made headlines in the aftermath of the Benghazi attack for the pressure she reportedly put on Gregory Hicks, the former deputy chief of mission to Libya, to be careful in his dealings with Republican members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee seeking answers about the attack.
During testimony before the committee in May, Mr. Hicks revealed that he got an aggressive phone call from Mrs. Mills after meeting with Rep. Jason Chaffetz, Utah Republican, who had traveled to Libya on a fact-finding mission about a month after the attack that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
Mr. Hicks testified that other higher-ups at the department ordered him not to meet with Mr. Chaffetz during the visit, but he ignored them. At one point, he met with the congressman without a State Department attorney present because the lawyer did not have a high enough security clearance to attend the meeting. Afterward, the call came from Mrs. Mills, demanding “a report on the visit,” said Mr. Hicks, who added that Mrs. Mills “was upset” by the attorney’s absence.
Mr. Hicks suggested that the call was serious because it had come from an official so high in the State Department and so close to Mrs. Clinton. “A phone call from that senior of a person is, generally speaking, not considered to be good news,” he said.
The call may simply show how seriously Mrs. Clinton’s uppermost staff members took the task of ensuring that officials like Mr. Hicks had the necessary legal protections as the Benghazi scandal unfolded.
But the attention given to Mrs. Mills — along with Mr. Hicks’ comments about her call during a congressional hearing on Benghazi — has made the appearance of her name in the more recent internal OIG memo scandal all the more pertinent.
According the memo, Mrs. Mills may have similarly attempted to block an investigation last year into suspected misconduct by Brett McGurk, whom President Obama had nominated to become ambassador to Iraq.
The memo outlines how agents from the Bureau of Diplomatic Security’s special investigations division had opened an probe into Mr. McGurk, who was working at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad at the time, on suspicion that had been improperly emailing government information with his girlfriend, a Wall Street Journal reporter.
“Some of the information may have been cleared for release, but other information reportedly was not,” states the memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times after it was first reported by CBS News.
Investigators “never interviewed McGurk, allegedly because Cheryl Mills from the Secretary’s office interceded,” the memo states. “Email from Mills reportedly shows her agreeing to a particular course of action for the case, but then reneging and advising McGurk to withdraw his name from consideration for the ambassadorship.”
Mr. McGurk withdrew his name from consideration for the post last June.
His case is just one of eight outlined in the memo and appears to rank low in terms of the level of potential criminal behavior that was alleged.
State Department officials remained vague this week about details of any of the cases and refused to say whether any of them have been resolved during the inspector general’s ongoing investigations.
In one case, the memo states that an agent from the special investigations division had opened a probe into the activities of Howard Gutman, the U.S. ambassador to Belgium, and “determined that the ambassador routinely ditched his protective security detail in order to solicit sexual favors from both prostitutes and minor children.”
“The ambassador’s protective detail and the embassy’s surveillance detection team (staffed by host country nationals) were well aware of the behavior,” the memo states.
But as the agent “began to plan surveillance on the ambassador to obtain corroboration, the agent reportedly received notification that [Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick] Kennedy had directed [the Bureau of Diplomatic Security] to cease the investigation and have the agent return to Washington.”
Mr. Kennedy issued a statement Tuesday saying he has “never once interfered, nor would I condone interfering, in any investigation.”
Mr. Gutman also issued a statement Tuesday, saying he was “angered and saddened” by “baseless allegations that have appeared in the press.”
“To watch the four years I have proudly served in Belgium smeared is devastating,” he said. “I live on a beautiful park in Brussels that you walk through to get to many locations, and at no point have I ever engaged in any improper activity.”
The ambassador’s denial appeared to represent the first official acknowledgment of the various accusations of criminal activity cited in the inspector general’s memo.
Bill Clinton warns Obama not “wuss” out on Syria: It looks as if former President Bill Clinton is just as eager to get into the Syrian civil war as Senator John McCain,
because surreptitiously-recorded audio from a closed-press event at
the McCain Institute for International Leadership in Manhattan have
Clinton offering some spicy-hot criticism of President Obama’s inaction.
As transcribed by Politico, Clinton spent a lot of time hammering Obama for being over-sensitive to public opinion polls:
Basically, Clinton thinks Obama should do something to balance out the assistance the Assad regime is receiving from Russian, Iran, and Hezbollah, “so that these rebel groups have a decent chance, if they’re supported by a majority of the people, to prevail.” He made approving references to Reagan-era assistance to the Afghan resistance against the Soviet invasion. Bill Clinton is apparently a big fan of those policies. It sounds like he doesn’t want to dwell on what happened next in Afghanistan, which would seem very
pertinent to the situation in Syria, where a lot of the front-line resistance troops are linked to al-Qaeda.
Personally, I’ve been appalled by the human tragedy of Assad’s struggle to retain power since the early days of the uprising, and the international community’s belief it can address such outrages with Strongly Worded Letters is a grim farce, but there are great dangers to direct intervention. A glance at the terrorist-infested ruins of Libya should remind us to be very careful about who we choose to equip with those fantastic American weapons and training. There’s an unlovely but honest strategic case to be made for leaving a weakened, exhausted Assad in power after he beats the snot out of al-Qaeda, rather than discovering the horrifying answer to the question, “What could be worse for Syria than Bashar Assad?” There are counters to that argument, too, but it’s a complex issue, made more difficult by the lack of good options for effective U.S. intervention.
Leaving the specifics of the Syrian crisis aside, Clinton’s general point about leadership and public opinion polls is interesting… but it’s highly amusing for the master of “triangulation” – the man who dedicated his last few years in office to an all-out effort at keeping his poll numbers up, to avoid getting bounced out of Washington – to portray himself as a fearless leader who doesn’t care about the transient passions of the uninformed public.
http://www.humanevents.com/2013/06/13/bill-clinton-warns-obama-not-wuss-out-on-syria/
His remarks came during a question-and-answer session with McCain, who has been among Obama’s harshest critics over what he calls a failure to take “decisive” action in Syria. Obama has come under growing pressure to step up American intervention by sending military and other assistance to the rebels.
“Some people say, ‘Okay, see what a big mess it is? Stay out!’ I think that’s a big mistake. I agree with you about this,” Clinton told McCain during an event for the McCain Institute for International Leadership in Manhattan Tuesday night. “Sometimes it’s just best to get caught trying, as long as you don’t overcommit — like, as long as you don’t make an improvident commitment.”
[...] Clinton repeatedly said it would be “lame” to blame a lack of intervention on opposition in polls or among members of Congress.
If Clinton had ever blamed a lack of action because “there was a poll in the morning paper that said 80 percent of you were against it … you’d look like a total wuss,” he said. “And you would be. I don’t mean that a leader should go out of his way or her way to do the unpopular thing, I simply mean when people are telling you ‘no’ in these situations, very often what they’re doing is flashing a giant yellow light and saying, ‘For God’s sakes, be careful, tell us what you’re doing, think this through, be careful.”
Clinton continued, “But still they hire their presid
ent to look around the corner and down the street, and you just think – if you refuse to act and you cause a calamity, the one thing you cannot say when all the eggs have been broken, is that, ‘Oh my God, two years ago there was a poll that said 80 percent of you were against it.’ Right? You’d look like a total fool. So you really have to in the end trust the American people, tell them what you’re doing, and hope to God you can sell it” and that it turns out okay in the end.It’s not clear from Clinton’s remarks what he wants Obama to do in Syria, exactly, but the boys in the Improvidence Battalion of the Over-commitment Brigade will be glad to know he doesn’t want to put their boots on the streets of Damascus.
Basically, Clinton thinks Obama should do something to balance out the assistance the Assad regime is receiving from Russian, Iran, and Hezbollah, “so that these rebel groups have a decent chance, if they’re supported by a majority of the people, to prevail.” He made approving references to Reagan-era assistance to the Afghan resistance against the Soviet invasion. Bill Clinton is apparently a big fan of those policies. It sounds like he doesn’t want to dwell on what happened next in Afghanistan, which would seem very
pertinent to the situation in Syria, where a lot of the front-line resistance troops are linked to al-Qaeda.
Personally, I’ve been appalled by the human tragedy of Assad’s struggle to retain power since the early days of the uprising, and the international community’s belief it can address such outrages with Strongly Worded Letters is a grim farce, but there are great dangers to direct intervention. A glance at the terrorist-infested ruins of Libya should remind us to be very careful about who we choose to equip with those fantastic American weapons and training. There’s an unlovely but honest strategic case to be made for leaving a weakened, exhausted Assad in power after he beats the snot out of al-Qaeda, rather than discovering the horrifying answer to the question, “What could be worse for Syria than Bashar Assad?” There are counters to that argument, too, but it’s a complex issue, made more difficult by the lack of good options for effective U.S. intervention.
Leaving the specifics of the Syrian crisis aside, Clinton’s general point about leadership and public opinion polls is interesting… but it’s highly amusing for the master of “triangulation” – the man who dedicated his last few years in office to an all-out effort at keeping his poll numbers up, to avoid getting bounced out of Washington – to portray himself as a fearless leader who doesn’t care about the transient passions of the uninformed public.
http://www.humanevents.com/2013/06/13/bill-clinton-warns-obama-not-wuss-out-on-syria/
Wednesday, June 12, 2013
Damage control: Hillary Clinton loyalists suspected of criminal cover-ups for diplomats
Congress and the State Department’s inspector general are examining allegations that senior officials working under Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton may have suppressed investigations into suspected criminal activity among U.S. diplomats abroad — including the alleged solicitation of prostitutes by an ambassador in Europe.
Lawmakers from both parties said the charges are “very serious” — and point out the need for a permanent inspector general at the State Department. A deputy inspector general has been active in recent years, but the department’s top watchdog post, tasked with investigating practices at roughly 260 embassies worldwide, has been vacant for more than five years.
A spokesman for office of inspector general said Tuesday that the probe into “allegations of quashing” by State Department higher-ups was triggered by a 2012 office of inspector general review of the department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security.
That review uncovered complaints by some officials that they were not allowed to thoroughly investigate the allegations of criminal activity. As a result, the office of inspector general has hired independent law enforcement specialists to examine the complaints and the extent to which investigators within the Bureau of Diplomatic Security are being allowed the level of independence required to do their jobs effectively.
In addition to reviewing “eight allegations of criminal misconduct” that arose during the 2012 review, Doug Welty, a spokesman for the office of inspector general, said the office is “also looking into the allegations of quashing.”
Mr. Welty made the remarks as Undersecretary of State Patrick F. Kennedy issued a statement to reporters Tuesday saying he has “never once interfered, nor would I condone interfering, in any investigation.”
Mr. Welty and others at the State Department have declined to comment on the specific allegations related to “quashing.”
But Mr. Kennedy apparently made the statement in response to the CBS News report this week that insinuated that he was involved in suppressing an investigation into the activities of a U.S. ambassador accused of patronizing prostitutes in a public park.
Citing “sources,” CBS News reported that after the accusation surfaced, the ambassador was called to Washington to meet with Mr. Kennedy, but then was permitted to return to his post.
CBS also reported that officials from the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security told the office of inspector general that they were told to stop investigating the case.
The State Department has vigorously rejected the CBS report. A senior spokeswoman called it “preposterous” to claim the department would not vigorously investigate allegations of criminal misconduct.
Department officials have remained vague, however, about the details of the allegations in question.
As spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki refused Tuesday to confirm or deny whether a U.S. ambassador had been accused of patronizing prostitutes, U.S. Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman emailed an abrupt statement to reporters, saying he was “angered and saddened” by “baseless allegations that have appeared in the press.”
“I live on a beautiful park in Brussels that you walk through to get to many locations, and at no point have I ever engaged in any improper activity,” Mr. Gutman said in the statement.
“To watch the four years I have proudly served in Belgium smeared is devastating,” he said.
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/11/ambassador-irked-baseless-prostitute-allegations/#ixzz2W32PkjGU
Follow us: @washtimes on Twitter
Monday, June 10, 2013
Dems, GOP waiting for Hillary:
Hillary?
That one-word question hangs over both parties as the 2016 presidential race comes into focus.
For Democrats, the former secretary of State looms over everything, a female Gulliver among Lilliputian rivals.
“Doubts about the GOP as a viable force in presidential elections will be far more justifiable if the party loses a third straight presidential election,” said Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia.
In contrast to Clinton’s dominance among Democrats, the battle for the GOP nomination is wide-open. Those who appear to be readying a White House run are taking markedly different approaches in terms of how they treat the Democratic frontrunner.
Some potential contenders have set about proving, in ostentatious fashion, that they are willing to attack the former first lady head-on.
Last month, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) spoke in the first-to-caucus state of Iowa and lit into Clinton over last year’s attacks on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were killed.
“First question to Hillary Clinton: Where in the hell were the Marines?” Paul said. The same morning, Paul had published an opinion article in The Washington Times in which he had asserted that Clinton “should never hold high office again.”
At a January Senate hearing, Paul had told Clinton that had he been president, “I would have relieved you of your post.”
Paul’s speech at the Iowa Republican Party’s Lincoln Dinner was prefaced by remarks from Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa). “The process of selecting the next leader of the free world begins in Iowa, and it’s already begun,” King told the audience.
Going after Clinton scores big with the GOP base and helps attract donors. But ripping her also poses risks, especially when the Republican Party is trying to court female voters.
Still, other possible GOP candidates have demonstrated their willingness to lock horns with Clinton. During an appearance on Fox News last month, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) alleged there were political motivations at play in the explanations initially given by the Obama administration for the Benghazi attack.
“What I think is sad is how many people were around the administration — including the former secretary of State, Secretary Clinton — [who] knew this to be the case and allowed this to move forward anyway,” he added.
Not everyone has adopted such a confrontational stance. In January, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) suggested on “Meet the Press” that a Clinton administration would have done more to address the United States’ fiscal problems than Obama has done.
“Look, if we had a Clinton presidency ... I think we would have fixed this fiscal mess by now,” Ryan said. “That’s not the kind of presidency we’re dealing with right now.”
(It was not wholly clear whether Ryan was referring to Hillary Clinton or her husband, the former president. But as a CBS News report noted, “it was eminently clear that he thought both Clintons would be better fiscal stewards than Obama.”)
In April, there were some murmurs of interest from the media when former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) and Clinton delivered speeches in Dallas on the same day, albeit at different locations. But Bush took no shots at Clinton, nor vice versa.
An even more high-profile match-up occurs later this week. Clinton and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) will attend the Clinton Global Initiative summit in Chicago. Clinton will speak on Thursday, Christie on Friday.
Christie has bolstered his bipartisan credentials over the past year, most famously with two high-profile joint appearances touring the Sandy-damaged Jersey Shore with President Obama.
The Christie-Obama relationship has helped the governor’s reelection chances this year, but it will hurt him in states like Iowa and South Carolina if he seeks the 2016 GOP presidential nomination.
Some in the GOP have a more specific concern: If the ever-combative New Jerseyan found himself in a presidential contest with Clinton, would he keep his temper under control? And, if not, just how damaging could that be against a female candidate?
When then-Rep. Rick Lazio (R-N.Y.) was Clinton’s opponent in a 2000 Senate race, he attracted criticism for invading Clinton’s personal space during a televised debate. It is easy to imagine Christie doing or saying something much more aggressive.
Still, some Republican strategists caution that it is important not to let Clinton get too deep into the party’s collective head.
Asked if her possible participation made it more important for the GOP to choose a seasoned candidate, former Rick Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley demurred.
“No. Barack Obama wasn’t seasoned and he took her apart,” he replied.
But Gidley added, “Hillary Clinton is a force to be reckoned with. Any Republican who says she’s going to be dead in the water because of Benghazi, or because of Bill Clinton, or because of whatever: They are sorely mistaken.”
There are, nevertheless, plenty of suspicions on the GOP side that Clinton will, indeed, be damaged by Benghazi.
“There are still a lot of questions about how Hillary ultimately emerges from the Benghazi investigation,” conservative strategist Keith Appell said. “Everyone among conservatives right now is thinking about Hillary as someone who could be in real trouble.”
Others point to the fact that Clinton’s fortunes are tied to those of Obama, and to the country’s economic progress between now and 2016.
If things are booming by then, even the strongest GOP candidate would face an uphill battle. But if the recovery fails to maintain a head of steam, public patience with the Democrats could run out.
“If she chooses to run, she is going to be awful tough to beat in the Democratic nominating process,” said veteran Republican strategist Ed Rollins.
“Whether she is a viable candidate in the general depends an awful lot on what happens to Obama. One thing’s certain, though: If she runs, she will raise the money and she will get the staff.”
One other thing is certain, too.
“Hillary’s shadow looms over this field,” Kondik said. “On both sides.”
That one-word question hangs over both parties as the 2016 presidential race comes into focus.
For Democrats, the former secretary of State looms over everything, a female Gulliver among Lilliputian rivals.
“Doubts about the GOP as a viable force in presidential elections will be far more justifiable if the party loses a third straight presidential election,” said Kyle Kondik of the University of Virginia.
In contrast to Clinton’s dominance among Democrats, the battle for the GOP nomination is wide-open. Those who appear to be readying a White House run are taking markedly different approaches in terms of how they treat the Democratic frontrunner.
Some potential contenders have set about proving, in ostentatious fashion, that they are willing to attack the former first lady head-on.
Last month, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) spoke in the first-to-caucus state of Iowa and lit into Clinton over last year’s attacks on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans were killed.
“First question to Hillary Clinton: Where in the hell were the Marines?” Paul said. The same morning, Paul had published an opinion article in The Washington Times in which he had asserted that Clinton “should never hold high office again.”
At a January Senate hearing, Paul had told Clinton that had he been president, “I would have relieved you of your post.”
Paul’s speech at the Iowa Republican Party’s Lincoln Dinner was prefaced by remarks from Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa). “The process of selecting the next leader of the free world begins in Iowa, and it’s already begun,” King told the audience.
Going after Clinton scores big with the GOP base and helps attract donors. But ripping her also poses risks, especially when the Republican Party is trying to court female voters.
Still, other possible GOP candidates have demonstrated their willingness to lock horns with Clinton. During an appearance on Fox News last month, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) alleged there were political motivations at play in the explanations initially given by the Obama administration for the Benghazi attack.
“What I think is sad is how many people were around the administration — including the former secretary of State, Secretary Clinton — [who] knew this to be the case and allowed this to move forward anyway,” he added.
Not everyone has adopted such a confrontational stance. In January, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) suggested on “Meet the Press” that a Clinton administration would have done more to address the United States’ fiscal problems than Obama has done.
“Look, if we had a Clinton presidency ... I think we would have fixed this fiscal mess by now,” Ryan said. “That’s not the kind of presidency we’re dealing with right now.”
(It was not wholly clear whether Ryan was referring to Hillary Clinton or her husband, the former president. But as a CBS News report noted, “it was eminently clear that he thought both Clintons would be better fiscal stewards than Obama.”)
In April, there were some murmurs of interest from the media when former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) and Clinton delivered speeches in Dallas on the same day, albeit at different locations. But Bush took no shots at Clinton, nor vice versa.
An even more high-profile match-up occurs later this week. Clinton and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) will attend the Clinton Global Initiative summit in Chicago. Clinton will speak on Thursday, Christie on Friday.
Christie has bolstered his bipartisan credentials over the past year, most famously with two high-profile joint appearances touring the Sandy-damaged Jersey Shore with President Obama.
The Christie-Obama relationship has helped the governor’s reelection chances this year, but it will hurt him in states like Iowa and South Carolina if he seeks the 2016 GOP presidential nomination.
Some in the GOP have a more specific concern: If the ever-combative New Jerseyan found himself in a presidential contest with Clinton, would he keep his temper under control? And, if not, just how damaging could that be against a female candidate?
When then-Rep. Rick Lazio (R-N.Y.) was Clinton’s opponent in a 2000 Senate race, he attracted criticism for invading Clinton’s personal space during a televised debate. It is easy to imagine Christie doing or saying something much more aggressive.
Still, some Republican strategists caution that it is important not to let Clinton get too deep into the party’s collective head.
Asked if her possible participation made it more important for the GOP to choose a seasoned candidate, former Rick Santorum spokesman Hogan Gidley demurred.
“No. Barack Obama wasn’t seasoned and he took her apart,” he replied.
But Gidley added, “Hillary Clinton is a force to be reckoned with. Any Republican who says she’s going to be dead in the water because of Benghazi, or because of Bill Clinton, or because of whatever: They are sorely mistaken.”
There are, nevertheless, plenty of suspicions on the GOP side that Clinton will, indeed, be damaged by Benghazi.
“There are still a lot of questions about how Hillary ultimately emerges from the Benghazi investigation,” conservative strategist Keith Appell said. “Everyone among conservatives right now is thinking about Hillary as someone who could be in real trouble.”
Others point to the fact that Clinton’s fortunes are tied to those of Obama, and to the country’s economic progress between now and 2016.
If things are booming by then, even the strongest GOP candidate would face an uphill battle. But if the recovery fails to maintain a head of steam, public patience with the Democrats could run out.
“If she chooses to run, she is going to be awful tough to beat in the Democratic nominating process,” said veteran Republican strategist Ed Rollins.
“Whether she is a viable candidate in the general depends an awful lot on what happens to Obama. One thing’s certain, though: If she runs, she will raise the money and she will get the staff.”
One other thing is certain, too.
“Hillary’s shadow looms over this field,” Kondik said. “On both sides.”
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
Looking to 2016, Iowa GOP Gets Excited About Walker
When Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker visited Iowa recently to speak at a
well-attended Republican dinner, only one national political reporter
(NBC's Alex Moe) showed up. That just proves you don't need national
press attention to make a strong start in the 2016 Republican
presidential race
.
There's a Walker boom, or at least a boomlet, going on in the nation's first voting state. When you hear speculation about the '16 GOP field -- Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal and others -- it's rare to hear Walker's name included in the group. But keep an eye on him; politically-savvy Republicans certainly are.
Here's one way to test Walker's appeal. Talk to Iowa politicos who supported Mitt Romney last time around, and then talk to politicos who supported anybody but Romney, and ask what they think about Walker. You'll hear a lot of positive things from both groups.
"He's the guy to beat in Iowa as it stands right now," says David Kochel, who ran Romney's 2012 campaign in the state. In an email exchange recently, Kochel, who is not working for any candidate at the moment, ran down the list of Walker's strengths. The Wisconsin governor is "a full-spectrum conservative who's comfortable with and speaks the language of Iowa social conservatives," Kochel said. His showdown with public-sector unions won him great admiration and a substantial fundraising base among Republicans. He's a favorite of Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad. And he has "real Tea Party credibility." Put it all together, and it's a pretty strong resume. "I think Walker's ability to reach across coalitions could be unmatched," Kochel said.
A similar assessment comes from an Iowan who worked hard to defeat Romney. "Gov. Walker spoke in a very conversational tone, a very Iowa tone, like an old neighbor," said Jamie Johnson, a GOP State Central Committee member who was at the Des Moines event last week. "He connected." And Johnson -- who strongly supported Rick Santorum in last year's race -- notes that while Walker did well in Iowa's biggest city, he will likely "connect even better in the God-and-guns counties."
Out in those God-and-guns counties, in western Iowa, conservative radio host Sam Clovis calls Walker "a rock star." "He gets great reviews from all who have seen him," says Clovis.
Here is the thing that really impresses Republicans looking for a candidate: Scott Walker has done things. As part of the gubernatorial faction in the 2016 field -- the list includes Christie and Jindal -- Walker not only has executive experience. He has used executive authority to achieve a goal conservatives have pursued for years: to break the hold public employee unions have on government in many states. The result in Wisconsin has been millions of taxpayer dollars saved and improved schools.
And Walker did it while going through the most intense trial by fire of any politician in America in recent years. Democrats and their allies on the left threw everything they had at him. They tried to stop him in the streets, in the courts, in a recall election. He survived it all.
The senators who are potential candidates -- Paul, Rubio, perhaps Ted Cruz -- don't have anywhere near that level of accomplishment.
So it was no surprise that Walker reminded voters in Des Moines that governors get things done. "Reform happens in the laboratories of democracy, which is our states," he told the crowd. "We've laid a positive foundation to move Wisconsin forward, and people want to continue down that path. We can do that nationally, as well."
Walker's appearance drew more people, and raised more money for the GOP, than an earlier visit from Sen. Paul. But it attracted far less media coverage. So far, he's still mostly flying under the radar.
But look for that to change. Walker is getting such good notices from Iowa insiders that outside attention will surely follow.
"Scott Walker has impressed me most," says Craig Robinson, of the influential Iowa Republican blog. Walker's trip to Des Moines, Robinson says, was all about laying a solid foundation for a possible candidacy.
"Other potential presidential candidates like Sen. Paul came to Iowa and whaled away on the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton," says Robinson. "That will get a standing ovation and elicit plenty of cheers, but it really does nothing to paint a vision for where they want to take the country. Walker provided Iowans a glimpse of the type of national leader he would be."
http://townhall.com/columnists/byronyork/2013/06/03/looking-to-2016-iowa-gop-gets-excited-about-walker-n1612259/page/full
.
There's a Walker boom, or at least a boomlet, going on in the nation's first voting state. When you hear speculation about the '16 GOP field -- Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal and others -- it's rare to hear Walker's name included in the group. But keep an eye on him; politically-savvy Republicans certainly are.
Here's one way to test Walker's appeal. Talk to Iowa politicos who supported Mitt Romney last time around, and then talk to politicos who supported anybody but Romney, and ask what they think about Walker. You'll hear a lot of positive things from both groups.
"He's the guy to beat in Iowa as it stands right now," says David Kochel, who ran Romney's 2012 campaign in the state. In an email exchange recently, Kochel, who is not working for any candidate at the moment, ran down the list of Walker's strengths. The Wisconsin governor is "a full-spectrum conservative who's comfortable with and speaks the language of Iowa social conservatives," Kochel said. His showdown with public-sector unions won him great admiration and a substantial fundraising base among Republicans. He's a favorite of Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad. And he has "real Tea Party credibility." Put it all together, and it's a pretty strong resume. "I think Walker's ability to reach across coalitions could be unmatched," Kochel said.
A similar assessment comes from an Iowan who worked hard to defeat Romney. "Gov. Walker spoke in a very conversational tone, a very Iowa tone, like an old neighbor," said Jamie Johnson, a GOP State Central Committee member who was at the Des Moines event last week. "He connected." And Johnson -- who strongly supported Rick Santorum in last year's race -- notes that while Walker did well in Iowa's biggest city, he will likely "connect even better in the God-and-guns counties."
Out in those God-and-guns counties, in western Iowa, conservative radio host Sam Clovis calls Walker "a rock star." "He gets great reviews from all who have seen him," says Clovis.
Here is the thing that really impresses Republicans looking for a candidate: Scott Walker has done things. As part of the gubernatorial faction in the 2016 field -- the list includes Christie and Jindal -- Walker not only has executive experience. He has used executive authority to achieve a goal conservatives have pursued for years: to break the hold public employee unions have on government in many states. The result in Wisconsin has been millions of taxpayer dollars saved and improved schools.
And Walker did it while going through the most intense trial by fire of any politician in America in recent years. Democrats and their allies on the left threw everything they had at him. They tried to stop him in the streets, in the courts, in a recall election. He survived it all.
The senators who are potential candidates -- Paul, Rubio, perhaps Ted Cruz -- don't have anywhere near that level of accomplishment.
So it was no surprise that Walker reminded voters in Des Moines that governors get things done. "Reform happens in the laboratories of democracy, which is our states," he told the crowd. "We've laid a positive foundation to move Wisconsin forward, and people want to continue down that path. We can do that nationally, as well."
Walker's appearance drew more people, and raised more money for the GOP, than an earlier visit from Sen. Paul. But it attracted far less media coverage. So far, he's still mostly flying under the radar.
But look for that to change. Walker is getting such good notices from Iowa insiders that outside attention will surely follow.
"Scott Walker has impressed me most," says Craig Robinson, of the influential Iowa Republican blog. Walker's trip to Des Moines, Robinson says, was all about laying a solid foundation for a possible candidacy.
"Other potential presidential candidates like Sen. Paul came to Iowa and whaled away on the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton," says Robinson. "That will get a standing ovation and elicit plenty of cheers, but it really does nothing to paint a vision for where they want to take the country. Walker provided Iowans a glimpse of the type of national leader he would be."
http://townhall.com/columnists/byronyork/2013/06/03/looking-to-2016-iowa-gop-gets-excited-about-walker-n1612259/page/full
Video: Jesse Ventura running in 2016 with … Howard Stern?
After watching this video, I’m suddenly seized with equal portions of
nostalgia and amazement. Jesse Ventura returned last night to CNN, in a
long segment with Piers Morgan, and it’s almost like being in Minnesota
from 1998-2002 … and that’s not a pleasant feeling. Ventura tells
Piers Morgan that he’s considering a run for President in 2016, but
Ventura doesn’t get off to a good start on his campaign.
Morgan essentially dices him up on the issues, where Ventura says more “I don’t knows” than Eric Holder in front of a House committee these days. Morgan starts off each issue by having Ventura offer his incredibly superficial opinion, challenges him on the basics, and then watches as Ventura admits he doesn’t know much about it. The capper comes on the Maryland v King decision yesterday on DNA samples taken during bookings, which Ventura opposes because that should only happen when people are arrested and charged, which is … exactly what a booking does.
Be sure to stick around until the end, when Ventura explains why he’s suing the widow of a murder victim, too (via Twitchy):
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/06/04/video-jesse-ventura-running-in-2016-with-howard-stern/
Morgan essentially dices him up on the issues, where Ventura says more “I don’t knows” than Eric Holder in front of a House committee these days. Morgan starts off each issue by having Ventura offer his incredibly superficial opinion, challenges him on the basics, and then watches as Ventura admits he doesn’t know much about it. The capper comes on the Maryland v King decision yesterday on DNA samples taken during bookings, which Ventura opposes because that should only happen when people are arrested and charged, which is … exactly what a booking does.
Be sure to stick around until the end, when Ventura explains why he’s suing the widow of a murder victim, too (via Twitchy):
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/06/04/video-jesse-ventura-running-in-2016-with-howard-stern/
Has Bill Clinton’s Favorite Co-Conspirator Just Lost His Magic Touch?
In the 1990s, Eric Holder was known as a “fixer.” He was always
cleaning up for Bill Clinton’s controversial Attorney General, Janet
Reno.
Reno had a string of problems. You may remember some of them… Ruby Ridge, Waco, the Oklahoma City bombing. All of these events caused Reno serious headaches.
But Holder made sure the government suppressed any damaging info, protecting Reno and Clinton.
As a result, Holder became a hero in liberal circles. He was rewarded for his loyalty by being named Barack Obama’s Attorney General.
How, during the second term of Barack Obama, Holder has lost his magic ability to suppress damaging information. He needs a fixer of his own. The sharks in Washington, D.C. are circling.
Blood is in the water.
The Untouchables
Until recently, Holder had the reputation of being as untouchable as Barack Obama.
But that ship sailed as soon as Holder signed off on the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) surveillance of Fox News reporter James Rosen. To make matters worse, Holder told Congress a totally different story… and now he’s hanging on to his job for dear life.
You see, the damning disclosure of the DOJ surveillance has raised the ire of Rep. Bob Goodlatte, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. He’s recently launched a probe to see if Holder lied to Congress under oath, which seems likely.
When the scandal broke, Holder told the committee that he hadn’t been involved in any such surveillance of reporters. In fact, Holder’s exact words to Congress were: “In regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material – this is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy.”
But the record is clear. Holder did personally sign off on just such a venture. At a minimum, Holder misled Congress. The Goodlatte investigation will determine whether his misleading statements were intentional.
And Holder’s involvement in DOJ’s tracking of Rosen isn’t his only problem. He’s also dealing with the fallout from the secret subpoena of Associated Press telephone records. The records the DOJ grabbed included those of at least 20 AP journalists.
One knowledgeable friend called me to say that Holder is the John Mitchell of the current Obama scandals. In case you don’t recall, John Mitchell was Nixon’s Attorney General and was convicted in 1975 of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury. He served 19 months in prison.
The Power of the Press
Severe damage has been done to Holder. Even left-leaning news outlets and personalities, who regularly defended Holder in the past, have had enough. Some are even calling for him to leave office.
The Huffington Post ran this headline: “Time to go: Holder OK’d probe.” Former MSNBC anchor and outspoken liberal Keith Olbermann has called on Holder to resign or be fired by Obama.
You can expect Congress to be emboldened by the cheers from the media as they take apart Eric Holder this summer. In many respects, it was news organizations that brought down President Nixon. Now, given Holder’s illegal intrusions on the media, that same institution will likely end his career as well.
http://www.westernjournalism.com/bill-clintons-favorite-co-conspirator-just-lost-his-magic-touch/
Reno had a string of problems. You may remember some of them… Ruby Ridge, Waco, the Oklahoma City bombing. All of these events caused Reno serious headaches.
But Holder made sure the government suppressed any damaging info, protecting Reno and Clinton.
As a result, Holder became a hero in liberal circles. He was rewarded for his loyalty by being named Barack Obama’s Attorney General.
How, during the second term of Barack Obama, Holder has lost his magic ability to suppress damaging information. He needs a fixer of his own. The sharks in Washington, D.C. are circling.
Blood is in the water.
The Untouchables
Until recently, Holder had the reputation of being as untouchable as Barack Obama.
But that ship sailed as soon as Holder signed off on the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) surveillance of Fox News reporter James Rosen. To make matters worse, Holder told Congress a totally different story… and now he’s hanging on to his job for dear life.
You see, the damning disclosure of the DOJ surveillance has raised the ire of Rep. Bob Goodlatte, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. He’s recently launched a probe to see if Holder lied to Congress under oath, which seems likely.
When the scandal broke, Holder told the committee that he hadn’t been involved in any such surveillance of reporters. In fact, Holder’s exact words to Congress were: “In regard to potential prosecution of the press for the disclosure of material – this is not something I’ve ever been involved in, heard of, or would think would be wise policy.”
But the record is clear. Holder did personally sign off on just such a venture. At a minimum, Holder misled Congress. The Goodlatte investigation will determine whether his misleading statements were intentional.
And Holder’s involvement in DOJ’s tracking of Rosen isn’t his only problem. He’s also dealing with the fallout from the secret subpoena of Associated Press telephone records. The records the DOJ grabbed included those of at least 20 AP journalists.
One knowledgeable friend called me to say that Holder is the John Mitchell of the current Obama scandals. In case you don’t recall, John Mitchell was Nixon’s Attorney General and was convicted in 1975 of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury. He served 19 months in prison.
The Power of the Press
Severe damage has been done to Holder. Even left-leaning news outlets and personalities, who regularly defended Holder in the past, have had enough. Some are even calling for him to leave office.
The Huffington Post ran this headline: “Time to go: Holder OK’d probe.” Former MSNBC anchor and outspoken liberal Keith Olbermann has called on Holder to resign or be fired by Obama.
You can expect Congress to be emboldened by the cheers from the media as they take apart Eric Holder this summer. In many respects, it was news organizations that brought down President Nixon. Now, given Holder’s illegal intrusions on the media, that same institution will likely end his career as well.
http://www.westernjournalism.com/bill-clintons-favorite-co-conspirator-just-lost-his-magic-touch/
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
Weiner Holder 2016:
My name is Barney Frank and I endorse this advertisement
http://www.westernjournalism.com/weiner-holder-2016/
http://www.westernjournalism.com/weiner-holder-2016/
Monday, June 3, 2013
Bill Clinton’s Half-Million Dollar Speech Is Drawing Outrage in Israel
Senior Israeli media figures are
voicing outrage at a revelation this weekend that former U.S. President
Bill Clinton received $500,000 for a gala speech later this month in
honor of Israeli President Shimon Peres’s 90th birthday.
The commissioned speech at the Peres
Academic Center in Rehovot is expected to last 45 minutes, meaning each
minute is costing sponsors $11,111.
According to Israeli news accounts,
the large sum will go to the William J. Clinton Foundation which
focuses its efforts on a range of causes including economic, health,
leadership and environmental.
The Jewish National Fund paid the half-million dollar fee to secure the former president’s participation a year in advance, according to Yedioth Ahronoth.
The Jewish National Fund is known for
its tree planting campaigns, park planning and nature reserve
construction, which includes encouraging Jews around the world to buy a
tree in Israel. As TheBlaze reported
last year, it has also been the focus of pro-Palestinian activists who
accuse the organization of “war crimes” for its environmentally-friendly
activities in Israel which the activists consider to be on Palestinian
land.
The liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz called the fee paid by the nonprofit a “cause for embarrassment.”
Ayala Hasson, chief diplomatic correspondent for Israel TV tweeted she believes it indicates “a loss of all shame.”
“The founders of the JNF are turning in
their graves,” she posted. “The JNF spokeswoman didn’t answer me who
approved this scandalous amount. She only responded that it is a great
honor blah blah…”
Amir Mizroch who edits Israel Hayom’s English language edition tweeted, “Aren’t they supposed to plant trees with donor cash?”
“I guess money does grow on trees,” he quipped.
Clinton regularly commands high speaking fees, earning $13.4 million from speeches in 2011. His most lucrative speech that year, in Hong Kong in November 2011, came with a $750,000 price tag.
Haaretz said the Jewish National Fund
had hoped “to generate positive PR for itself abroad − where
pro-Palestinian activists have been attacking the agency − by inviting
Clinton to speak on sustainability at its annual conference, while at
the same time introducing some of its biggest donors to Clinton. This
was in the hope of facilitating the JNF’s long-term fund-raising goals.”
The gala dinner drew further scrutiny
when former Member of Knesset Yossi Sarid revealed that each invited
guest was being asked to donate approximately $800 (3,000 New Israeli
Shekels) for scholarships distributed by the Peres Academic Center.
Haaretz reports:
But after learning of the event’s fund-raising ambitions, the chief of staff of the President’s Residence, Efrat Duvdevani, sent a letter to the heads of the Peres Academic Center in which she made it clear that Peres would not attend the dinner if donations were solicited during the event.The PAC [Peres Academic Center] declined the offer by the president’s staff to cancel Peres’ attendance to enable the fund-raising to go ahead; instead, the institution would waive the ticket fee.
Globes quoted
the JNF spokesman’s office which stated: “The Peres Academic Center in
Rehovot invited Clinton, closed the financial terms with him, and paid
him.”
The Peres Academic Center issued this
statement, as quoted by Globes: “President Bill Clinton will be the
guest of honor at the special tribute which the center will hold in
Rehovot. The event at the Center’s campus will be held in the presence
of the President of Israel, ministers, and public figures. Belying
previous reports, it was decided that there will be no fundraising at
the event, and people attending will not be asked to pay for their
participation.”
While in Israel, Clinton is also
scheduled to take part in the President’s Conference in Jerusalem along
with other celebrity headliners such as Barbra Streisand, Robert De
Niro, Sharon Stone, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and former
Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/02/bill-clintons-half-million-dollar-speech-is-drawing-outrage-in-israel/
New book: Bill Clinton forges secret deal with ‘incompetent’ Obama:
Noted political writer Edward Klein claims in his latest book that Bill Clinton dismissed President Obama as inept and incapable of performing the duties of the White House — but that he formed a secret deal
to give him an endorsement for office anyway.Mr. Klein’s book
is called “The Amateur,” and it’s published by Regnery.The deal was this: Mr. Clinton would endorse Mr. Obama for the White House in 2012 if Mr. Obama would endorse Hillary Rodham Clinton for president in 2016, the book claimed.
At the same time, Mr. Clinton wasn’t completely happy about the deal — he would have preferred his wife challenge Mr. Obama for the White House in 2012, Mr. Klein’s book claimed.
Bluntly, Mr. Clinton thought Mr. Obama wasn’t up to the job, Mr. Klein wrote.
In the book, Mr. Klein writes that several sources attributed Mr. Clinton as saying: “I’ve heard more from Bush, asking for my advice, than I’ve heard from Obama. I have no relationship with the president — none whatsoever. Obama doesn’t know how to be president. He doesn’t know how the world works. He’s incompetent. He’s an amateur.”
Nonetheless, Mr. Clinton ultimately endorsed Mr. Obama for a second term — at the pushing of political adviser David Axelrod, who was watching Republican challenger Mitt Romney’s rising poll numbers with alarm, Mr. Klein said in his book.
Mr. Klein has previously penned books
about Mrs. Clinton and the Kennedys, and is a former foreign editor with Newsweek.Saturday, June 1, 2013
Early 20th Century Progressive”, Hillary Proudly Proclaimed To The World — You Remember
The individual must go, be squashed into submission. Individualism is their enemy, thinking people cannot be tolerated. Haven’t you read the new lesson books for our school children? You tell me what that is all about? Changing our history, because the U.S. Constitution is in their way.
The Corporate Socialist now call themselves, progressive patriots. As they try and hide their true intentions.
Hillary Clinton uncloaked herself in our 2008 campaign.
Hillary Clinton Cites History in Call For New Progressive Movement
Hillary Clinton has called upon Democrats to look back to the history of the original progressive movement in the early 20th century for inspiration in the building of a new progressive movement for the early 21st century.
“Back then, the American economy was dominated by large corporate monopolies. Corruption was far too common and good government far too rare. Women couldn’t vote, and the minimum wage, well, that wasn’t heard of and worker rights were completely unimagined. Back then, America was a country filled with haves and have nots — and not enough people in between.
In response to these excesses, the progressive movement was born. Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, the progressives busted trusts and fought for safe working conditions and fair wages. They created the national park system, and replaced a government rife with cronyism with a merit-based civil service. They understood, as the great progressive President Teddy Roosevelt once said, that ‘The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us.’
Well, today, at the beginning of the 21st century, I think it’s time we remembered those lessons.”Whether or not you support the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton in particular, her call to remember the role of progressives in improving the civic standards in American government is worth heeding. We citizens should stand up and do our part to revive that tradition.
(Source: HillaryClinton.Com, May 29, 2007)
So rather we like it or not, that is what Obama is doing. He is trying to complete the Fabian Socialist dream. Which will be a catastrophe for freedom and liberty. A world dominated by Big Government and their “customers“. Just the latest world communists dream.
Do you understand why Sen Ted Cruz must be destroyed? Why not ask Sen John McCain? You think the Republicans are on your side? Think again, Either we rebuild the GOP into the model of Lincoln or we all turn into Corporate Socialists.
Nudge, shove, shoot … it’s the way forward.
http://tarpon.wordpress.com/2013/05/30/you-remember/
Hillary Clinton: return to Whitewater mode.ON LANGUAGE; Shoulda-Coulda-Woulda
Whitewater
Whitewater, popular name for a failed 1970s
Arkansas real estate venture by the Whitewater Development Corp., in
which Governor (later President) Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, were partners; the name is also used for the political ramifications of this scheme.
When Foster, now White House counsel, committed suicide (1993), however, more questions arose. Strongly pursued in Washington, mainly by Republicans, but largely ignored by the general public,
Whitewater was investigated by a special prosecutor beginning in 1994 and by congressional committees in 1995–96. Special prosecutor Kenneth Starr's investigation included testimony from Mrs. Clinton (which was the first time a first lady was subpoenaed by a grand jury) and videotaped testimony from the president.
In a 1996 trial, the McDougals and Jim Guy Tucker, Clinton's successor as governor of Arkansas, were found guilty of fraud in the case, and in another decision the former municipal judge David Hale, who had pled guilty to fraud and had been a witness in the McDougal trial, received a jail sentence. In yet another trial the same year two Arkansas bankers were acquitted of some charges, and the jury deadlocked on others. Although nothing conclusive concerning the Clintons' involvement in the Whitewater deal was proved in the congressional or special prosecutor's inquiries,
Republicans charged Hillary Clinton with having sought to suppress politically damaging information and accused Clinton administration officials of lying under oath.
In early 1998, Starr won authorization to expand his investigation to include the Lewinsky scandal, and questions about Monica Lewinsky's relationship with Clinton quickly overshadowed Whitewater matters. However, in late 1998, when Starr presented his case for impeachment of the president for his attempts to conceal the Lewinsky affair, he indicated that his office had no impeachable evidence in the Whitewater matters. Starr resigned in Oct., 1999, and was succeeded by Robert W. Ray, the senior litigation counsel in Starr's office. In Sept., 2000, Ray ended the Whitewater inquiry, stating there was insufficient evidence to prove that President Clinton or his wife had committed any crime in connection with the failed real estate venture or the independent counsel's investigation into it; the final report was issued 18 months later. Susan McDougal was pardoned by President Clinton in Jan., 2001, shortly before he left office.
A hard-edged question was posed to Hillary Rodham Clinton at her Whitewater news conference: what about "the suggestion in the R.T.C. memorandum . . . you and your husband knew or should have known that Whitewater was not cash-flowing and that notes or debts should have been paid"?
"Shoulda, coulda, woulda," the First Lady replied. "We didn't."
Some journalists narrowed their eyes at this airy dismissal of financial responsibility in land speculation at the place Mrs. Clinton prefers to refer to as "northern Arkansas." My own investigative lust was instantly replaced, however, by linguistic curiosity: Whence the reduplication shoulda, coulda, woulda?
The order of words in this delicious morsel of dialect varies with the user. On the sports pages of The Washington Post of Dec. 7, 1978, Gerald Strine wrote about the New England Patriots football team: "The Pats coulda, shoulda and woulda been ahead of the Cowboys by at least 16-3 at halftime . . . but three field goals were blown."
Eleven
years later, in a United Press International account of another
football game, the phrase again led with coulda, as a shamefaced kicker
was quoted: "I should have kicked the extra point, but coulda, shoulda,
woulda doesn't do it."
By the 90's, football players were fumbling the order. Said a Notre Dame tackle, Aaron Taylor, offside on his subject-verb agreement: "There's no excuses. Woulda, shoulda, coulda is not going to cut it."
During the last two decades, an author told Vernon Scott of The Hollywood Reporter he planned a "Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda book"; a retailer opined to Investor's Business Daily about the decline of Carter Hawley stores: "There are shoulda-beens, coulda-beens, woulda-beens, but the fact is they didn't meet the retail revolution that happened in the past five years." And the funk-and-roll singer Anthony Kiedis (misidentified as a "rap singer" by the incognoscenti) wrote and sang in 1991, "Shoulda been, coulda been, woulda been dead if I didn't get the message going to my head."
We have here an elision field. Elide, rooted in the Latin for "to strike out," means "to omit"; in speech, an elision is the omission of letters and sounds to produce compressions like don't and couldn't, or as the would-be boxer played by Marlon Brando in "On the Waterfront" said, "I coulda been a contender."
In this rhyming compound, a triple elision does the hat trick: although each elision expresses something different, when taken together, the trio conveys a unified meaning. Shoulda, short for should have (and not should of, which lexies call a variant but I call a mistake), carries a sense of correctness or obligation; coulda implies a possibility, and woulda denotes conditional certainty, an oxymoron: the stated intent to have taken an action if only something had not intervened.
These meanings were explored separately in a 1977 song by the country singer Tammy Wynette, whose earlier song "Stand By Your Man" was unintentionally derogated by Mrs. Clinton during the 1992 campaign. In "That's the Way It Could Have Been," Ms. Wynette's chorus goes: "That's the way it could have been [ possibility ] ./Oh, that's the way it should have been [ correctness ] ./If I had met you way back then,/That's the way it would have been [ conditional certainty ] ."
Lexicographers have been tracking the individual elisions for decades. First came woulda, translated into Standard English in Dialect Notes in 1913: "Would a went, would have gone." Theodore Dreiser introduced coulda and the solid woulda in his 1925 novel, "An American Tragedy": "I coulda chucked my job, and I woulda." A 1933 book on crime used the third elision: "You shouldda seen him."
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/15/magazine/on-language-shoulda-coulda-woulda.html
By the 90's, football players were fumbling the order. Said a Notre Dame tackle, Aaron Taylor, offside on his subject-verb agreement: "There's no excuses. Woulda, shoulda, coulda is not going to cut it."
During the last two decades, an author told Vernon Scott of The Hollywood Reporter he planned a "Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda book"; a retailer opined to Investor's Business Daily about the decline of Carter Hawley stores: "There are shoulda-beens, coulda-beens, woulda-beens, but the fact is they didn't meet the retail revolution that happened in the past five years." And the funk-and-roll singer Anthony Kiedis (misidentified as a "rap singer" by the incognoscenti) wrote and sang in 1991, "Shoulda been, coulda been, woulda been dead if I didn't get the message going to my head."
We have here an elision field. Elide, rooted in the Latin for "to strike out," means "to omit"; in speech, an elision is the omission of letters and sounds to produce compressions like don't and couldn't, or as the would-be boxer played by Marlon Brando in "On the Waterfront" said, "I coulda been a contender."
In this rhyming compound, a triple elision does the hat trick: although each elision expresses something different, when taken together, the trio conveys a unified meaning. Shoulda, short for should have (and not should of, which lexies call a variant but I call a mistake), carries a sense of correctness or obligation; coulda implies a possibility, and woulda denotes conditional certainty, an oxymoron: the stated intent to have taken an action if only something had not intervened.
These meanings were explored separately in a 1977 song by the country singer Tammy Wynette, whose earlier song "Stand By Your Man" was unintentionally derogated by Mrs. Clinton during the 1992 campaign. In "That's the Way It Could Have Been," Ms. Wynette's chorus goes: "That's the way it could have been [ possibility ] ./Oh, that's the way it should have been [ correctness ] ./If I had met you way back then,/That's the way it would have been [ conditional certainty ] ."
Lexicographers have been tracking the individual elisions for decades. First came woulda, translated into Standard English in Dialect Notes in 1913: "Would a went, would have gone." Theodore Dreiser introduced coulda and the solid woulda in his 1925 novel, "An American Tragedy": "I coulda chucked my job, and I woulda." A 1933 book on crime used the third elision: "You shouldda seen him."
http://www.nytimes.com/1994/05/15/magazine/on-language-shoulda-coulda-woulda.html
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