Click on WORD or PDF for full content
Ron Fournier, liberal journalist, is still after Clinton.
Hillary Clinton doesn’t play by the rules.
That’s not a partisan attack. It’s not a talking point. It’s not a fantasy. It’s a fact—an agonizing truth to people like me who admire Clinton and her husband, who remember how Bill Clinton rose from a backwater governorship to the presidency on a simple promise: He would fight for people who “work hard and play by the rules.”
The evidence is overwhelming and metastasizing: To co-opt a William Safire line, Hillary Clinton is a congenital rule-breaker.
In the three days since my last column on Clinton, the headlines are revealing:
“More than 180 Clinton Foundation donors lobbied her State Department.” “That’s not illegal,” writes Vox reporter Jonathan Allen, “but it is scandalous.” The coauthor of a fair-minded Clinton biography, Allen notes that while there’s no evidence of illegal corruption, “The size and scope of the symbiotic relationship between the Clintons and their donors is striking.” He adds, “The Clintons have shown they can’t police themselves.”
“Clinton Foundation failed to disclose 1,100 foreign donations.” The cofounder of the Clinton Foundation’s Canadian affiliate revealed to Joshua Green of Bloomberg Politics that 1,100 donors to the foundation had never been disclosed. “The reason this is a politically explosive revelation is because the Clinton Foundation promised to disclose its donors as a condition of Hillary Clinton becoming secretary of State,” writes Green, a widely respected political reporter.
“Clinton charity never provided foreign data.” A spokeswoman for the Clinton Health Access Initiative, which makes up nearly 60 percent of the Clinton charitable network, told The Boston Globe that CHAI never submitted information on foreign donations to State Department lawyers for review during Clinton’s tenure as secretary of State. The reviews were required as a condition of her joining President Obama’s Cabinet, the Globe reported. …
Jonathan Tobin asks if the Clinton Foundation is really a charity.
One of the mantras one must invoke when discussing the Clinton Cash controversy is to say that whatever one might think of the pay-to-play aspects of the former first family’s charitable endeavors, the Clinton Foundation does a lot of good work around the world. But now that more of the press is finally asking tough questions about the Clintons’ activities, it appears that their charity may not pass the basic question donors ask of any philanthropy: how much of the money raised is actually spent on the causes you are supposed to be aiding? Though the foundation has claimed that 88 percent of its expenditures are spent on good deeds, their own tax filings reveal that the real number is about ten percent. But far from being an unrelated, albeit embarrassing, sidebar to the allegations about influence peddling, this data is a reminder that the main point of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation is to support its namesakes in a lavish fashion and to allow wealthy donors access to them.
Sean Davis highlighted the discrepancy between the 88 percent figure and the reality of the Clinton Foundation spending ten percent on charity in a recent Federalist article. He followed up with another, skewering a claim by the left-wing Punditfact site that this claim was “mostly false.” As he wrote, the only way to come to such a conclusion was to simply ignore facts, including, most importantly, the filings of the Clinton Foundation that made it clear that it spent very little of its money on good deeds. …
And Jennifer Rubin points out two more headaches for Clinton.
At a time when she is reeling from multiple scandals, the foreign policy debacles she helped create and a political talent deficit, Hillary Clinton got two more pieces of bad news. Since she is firmly adhering to the White House, running for essentially a third Obama term, she will have to bear the burden of not only the president’s foreign policy but also his domestic track record.
The Post reports: “The U.S. economy ground nearly to a halt in the first three months of the year, according to government data released Wednesday morning, as exports plunged and severe winter weather helped keep consumers indoors. The gross domestic product grew between January and March at an annualized rate of 0.2 percent, the U.S. Commerce Department said, adding to the picture of an economy braking sharply after accelerating for much of last year. The pace fell well shy of the 1 percent mark anticipated by analysts and marked the weakest quarter in a year.” This is symptomatic of the puniest economic recovery in memory, one in which the economy has never truly taken off. Clinton has few ideas to juice economic growth because her view of the United States is so government-centric. President Obama has ladled on a host of regulations (including Environmental Protection Agency regulations, Obamacare and Dodd-Frank), is only now getting to a significant new free-trade deal (about which Clinton sounds unenthusiastic) and nixed tax reform that doesn’t include a tax hike. It is no wonder the economy is anemic.
The second data point today comes from Gallup poll: “Americans are considerably less likely now than they were in 2008 and years prior to identify themselves as middle class or upper-middle class, while the percentage putting themselves in the working or lower class has risen. …
Switching subjects from the proposed presidential disaster of Hillary, Karl Rove points out that barry’s present presidential disaster leaves behind problems in domestic policy as large as his serial goofs in foreign affairs.
… Regardless of what items Mr. Obama checks off, he will leave to his successor a staggering array of domestic problems, some he ignored and many he made worse.
Slow economic growth will be at the top of the list of problems. The pattern of American history has been that the more severe the recession, the stronger the recovery. Until now. In Mr. Obama’s recovery, average annual growth has been the slowest since the U.S. began compiling reliable economic statistics near the 20th century’s beginning—a feeble 2.9%. This year is off to an even slower start, with GDP growing 0.2% in the first three months.
The number of jobs also will be on that list. It took from June 2009 to April 2014—nearly five full years—to get back to having the same number of people working as when the recession began in December 2007. That’s a longer period of time to return to the starting point than in any recession in U.S. history. Meantime, roughly 14.7 million people came of age without a job available. The last time the job participation rate was this low was 1978. A third of Americans between 18 and 31 last year were living with their parents, the highest percentage in at least four decades.
The quality of jobs available will be another topic on that list. …
Erick Erickson of RedState wishes the president was not black. Then maybe he’d figure our why he is disliked.
Over the weekend, most of the worst people in the world gathered together in Washington, D.C. as a circle of jerks to sing each other’s praises. Sadly, there was no Samson to tear down the columns and collapse the roof on the Philistines of Washington. But there was a President of the United States willing to make jokes about the “F-word” and an Imperial Court to worship him.
Byron York notes that much of President Obama’s speech to the White House Correspondents Dinner centered around “black anger.” In other words, President Obama let loose over the weekend that he has concluded all the opposition to him is because he is black. …
… If only President Obama weren’t black, maybe he would realize that people don’t dislike him because he is black, they dislike him because he is a self-absorbed ass.
Kevin Williamson rode on Amtrak’s Acela with Joe (Man of the People) Biden. He calls Biden”Herr Gropenfuhrer” and that is why we read Kevin Williamson.
… And then came Herr Gropenführer himself. Biden’s biography alleges that he is six feet tall, and maybe he is, but he scurried into the train in a thoroughly rodential fashion, looking tiny and terrified, like a very old man who has wandered out of a dementia ward.
The entourage on the train wasn’t all of it, of course. At each station, the forward door of our train car was guarded on the platform by additional agents, whose job it was to prevent people from using the door the vice president used. Whatever additional unseen security was deployed beyond this I cannot guess. Drones circling overhead, I suppose, with agents in some underground black-site bunker intoning into headseats: “Creepy is on the move! Creepy is entering Sector 4!”
At Union Station, the sub-imperial entourage was met with yet more security, and the train’s passengers were prevented from exiting until the vice president had meandered to the end of the platform toward whatever it is he pretends to do all day.
One understands that security measures are necessary — there are more people who wish to do harm to the vice president of the United States than to Finland’s minister of education (who but a monster could wish harm to Krista Kiuru?). My neighborhood Starbucks apparently generates enough cash to justify a Brink’s pickup. We conservatives believe in nothing if not caution.
But in Biden’s case, all of this is done for the sake of theater — so that Joe Biden can continue doing his ordinary-guy shtick. Ordinary people have to be inconvenienced so that Joe Biden can pretend to be an ordinary guy. The serfs have to be forcibly reminded of their serfdom — no, you cannot just get off a train in our nation’s capital, willy-nilly and whenever you like, and here’s a man with a gun to make sure! — so that the lords can show us that they’re just like us. …