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Editors at the WSJ call attention to the abuse potential in the Clinton Foundation.
Transparency is a popular word in this presidential election, with all three candidates finally having released their tax returns. Yet the public still hasn’t seen the records of an institution with some of the biggest potential for special-interest mischief: The William J. Clinton Foundation.
Bill Clinton established that body in 1997 while still President. It has since raised half-a-billion dollars, which has been spent on Mr. Clinton’s presidential library in Arkansas and global philanthropic initiatives. The mystery remains its donors, and whether these contributors might one day seek to call in their chits with a President Hillary Clinton.
That’s no small matter given the former first couple’s history. Yet Mr. Clinton says he won’t violate the “privacy” of donors by disclosing their names, even if his wife wins the Oval Office. What is already in the public record should make that secrecy untenable, however:
Chicago bankruptcy lawyer William Brandt Jr. pledged $1 million for the Clinton library in May 1999, at the same time the Justice Department was investigating whether he’d lied about a Clinton fundraising event. The Clinton DOJ cleared him a few months later.
Loral Space and Communications then-CEO, Bernard Schwartz, committed to $1 million in 2000, at the same time the firm was being investigated for improperly sending technology to China. Loral agreed to a $14 million fine during the Bush Administration.
A major investor in cellular firm NextWave – Bay Harbour Management – pledged $1 million in 1999, when NextWave was waiting to see if the Clinton FCC would allow it to keep its cellular licenses. NextWave didn’t immediately get its licenses, and Bay Harbour never made good on its pledge. …
Marty Peretz thinks Bill Clinton is showing his real colors.
So now Bill Clinton wants us to think that, when he compared Barack Obama’s victory in the South Carolina primary this year to to Jesse Jackson’s win in the same race two decades ago, he was actually complimenting his wife’s opponent rather than deriding him. What’s more, said our Pinocchio president, Jackson himself took the likening as tribute. Well, why wouldn’t he?
Jackson has been washed up for years. He has not had real work, perhaps for decades, and does no real work now, sort of like Clinton himself. You can imagine JJ going from city to city, always with an entourage of more than anyone in his position needs, searching for racist incidents that he can ambulance-chase into an outrage. But he does have a steady income largely through PUSH (whatever tangible has PUSH ever accomplished?), financed by big corporations and financial institutions, some guilty of racial misbehavior, some not, that would rather pay Jackson off than risk nasty picket lines or even boycotts against them. When hip-hop came along Jackson seemed like the people’s poet. Now, almost everyone grasps that he’s simply a wise-ass charlatan. …
Jim Taranto had the best analysis of the Jackson comparison. This from Jan. 31 Pickings.
… Jesse Jackson is not a racial healer but an ambulance chaser. He has made his career exploiting black insecurity and white guilt, seizing on racial disputes and misunderstandings to profit financially and enhance his own status. If racial disharmony disappeared tomorrow, Jackson would be out of a job.
In this sense–the sense that is most important to Jackson’s political identity–Obama is Jackson’s opposite. He has emerged as a national political figure, and a plausible prospective president, by calling for unity, not by seeking to take advantage of division.
When Mr. Clinton likens Obama to Jackson, the clear message to white voters is that a black candidate cannot be better than Jackson, cannot be relied upon to put the interests of the country above those of his race or himself. This is a truly bigoted notion–and it is one that Jackson cannot protest, for to protest it would be to acknowledge the truth about himself.
When speaking of Bill Clinton, Rep Jim Clyburn is ready to call a spade, a spade.
… In an interview with The New York Times late Thursday, Mr. Clyburn said Mr. Clinton’s conduct in this campaign had caused what might be an irreparable breach between Mr. Clinton and an African-American constituency that once revered him. “When he was going through his impeachment problems, it was the black community that bellied up to the bar,†Mr. Clyburn said. “I think black folks feel strongly that that this is a strange way for President Clinton to show his appreciation.â€
Mr. Clyburn added that there appeared to be an almost “unanimous†view among African-Americans that Mr. and Mrs. Clinton were “committed to doing everything they possibly can to damage Obama to a point that he could never win.†…
Sarah Baxter explains the Dem race to the readers of the London Times.
Given Hillary’s new math, John Fund thinks she might try to sue her way to the nomination. Perhaps she’s been studying at the feet of Al Gore.
Speaking of suing your way to high office, Ann Althouse has a link to tonight’s 60 Minutes interview with Scalia.
“It was Al Gore who made it a judicial question…. We didn’t go looking for trouble. It was he who said, ‘I want this to be decided by the courts.’”
“What are we supposed to say — ‘Not important enough?’
Here’s a CBS link to that interview.
… “I say nonsense,” Scalia responds to Stahl’s observation that people say the Supreme Court’s decision in Gore v. Bush was based on politics and not justice. “Get over it. It’s so old by now. The principal issue in the case, whether the scheme that the Florida Supreme Court had put together violated the federal Constitution, that wasn’t even close. The vote was seven to two,” he says, referring to the Supreme Court’s decision that the Supreme Court of Florida’s method for recounting ballots was unconstitutional. …
Speaking of tonight’s TV, a Pickings reader alerts us to a surprising series starting on PBS.
Starting on PBS this Sunday, April 27th, from 9pm to 11pm, is the documentary on the USS Nimitz.
It’s airing for 5 days in a row, through May 1st, for two hours each day, for a total of 10 hours.
Making the film CARRIER required 17 filmmakers to take a six-month journey aboard the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz during its deployment to the Gulf in support of the Iraq War. They disembarked from Coronado, California on May 7, 2005 and returned there November 8, 2005 with stops at Pearl Harbor, Hong Kong, Guam, Kuala Lumpur, Bahrain and Perth, Australia.
http://www.pbs.org/weta/carrier/
Even though it airs on PBS, the documentary was made during the time when a conservative, Ken Tomlinson (forced out since then), was at the helm (pun intended). So, there is a chance that the documentary is more fair and balanced.
Enjoy,   Victor
Mark Steyn says “Feed your Prius, Starve a Peasant.”
… Unlike “global warming,” food rioting is a planetwide phenomenon, from Indonesia to Pakistan to Ivory Coast to the tortilla rampages in Mexico and even pasta protests in Italy.
So what happened?
Well, Western governments listened to the ecowarriors and introduced some of the “wartime measures” they’ve been urging. The EU decreed that 5.75 percent of petrol and diesel must come from “biofuels” by 2010, rising to 10 percent by 2020. The United States added to its 51 cent-per-gallon ethanol subsidy by mandating a fivefold increase in “biofuels” production by 2022.
The result is that big government accomplished at a stroke what the free market could never have done: They turned the food supply into a subsidiary of the energy industry. When you divert 28 percent of U.S. grain into fuel production, and when you artificially make its value as fuel higher than its value as food, why be surprised that you’ve suddenly got less to eat? Or, to be more precise, it’s not “you” who’s got less to eat but those starving peasants in distant lands you claim to care so much about.
Heigh-ho. In the greater scheme of things, a few dead natives keeled over with distended bellies is a small price to pay for saving the planet, right? Except that turning food into fuel does nothing for the planet in the first place. That tree the U.S. Marines are raising on Iwo Jima was most-likely cut down to make way for an ethanol-producing corn field: Researchers at Princeton calculate that, to date, the “carbon debt” created by the biofuels arboricide will take 167 years to reverse.
The biofuels debacle is global warm-mongering in a nutshell: The first victims of poseur environmentalism will always be developing countries. In order for you to put biofuel in your Prius and feel good about yourself for no reason, real actual people in faraway places have to starve to death. On April 15, the Independent, the impeccably progressive British newspaper, editorialized:
“The production of biofuel is devastating huge swaths of the world’s environment. So why on Earth is the government forcing us to use more of it?”
You want the short answer? Because the government made the mistake of listening to fellows like you. Here’s the self-same Independent in November 2005:
“At last, some refreshing signs of intelligent thinking on climate change are coming out of Whitehall. The Environment minister, Elliot Morley, reveals today in an interview with this newspaper that the Government is drawing up plans to impose a ‘biofuel obligation’ on oil companies … . This has the potential to be the biggest green innovation in the British petrol market since the introduction of unleaded petrol.” …
Jonah Goldberg writes on Time’s cover too.
Time magazine recently doctored the iconic photo of the flag-raising at Iwo Jima in order to “celebrate†Earth Day. Instead of Marines valiantly struggling to lift the stars and stripes, they are depicted planting a tree.
No doubt Time’s editors think they will be celebrated in poetry and song for generations to come for their high-minded cleverness. Still, if the symbolism wasn’t clear enough, Time writer Bryan Walsh spells it out: “Green is the new red, white and blue.†…
… The yearning for a moral equivalent of war is an understandable desire, perhaps even noble in its intent. But it is not democratic. It is fundamentally authoritarian, which might explain why so many environmentalists envy China’s ability to ban plastic bags without reference to a vote or a court or anything other than the will of the China’s technocratic rulers. Indeed, the authors of “The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy†openly question whether the crisis of climate change should render liberal democracy obsolete. For some it seems the moral equivalent of war requires the moral equivalent of a police state.
This is the atmosphere Time is helping to poison, with pollutants far worse than mere greenhouse gasses.
So, how did we get into the ethanol mess? NewsBusters reports on Al Gore’s contribution.
As the international disaster of ethanol begins taking its toll on the planet — and, maybe more important, as press outlet after press outlet finally begins recognizing it — will media remember that Vice President Al Gore cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate requiring this oxygenate be added to gasoline? …
Corner posts on ethanol.
BreitBart reports on interesting discoveries about our prehistoric beginnings.
Human beings for 100,000 years lived in tiny, separate groups, facing harsh conditions that brought them to the brink of extinction, before they reunited and populated the world, genetic researchers have said.
“Who would have thought that as recently as 70,000 years ago, extremes of climate had reduced our population to such small numbers that we were on the very edge of extinction,” said paleontologist Meave Leakey, of Stony Brook University, New York.
The genetic study examined for the first time the evolution of our species from its origins with “mitochondrial Eve,” a female hominid who lived some 200,000 years ago, to the point of near extinction 70,000 years ago, when the human population dwindled to as little as 2,000.
After this dismal period, the human race expanded quickly all over the African continent and emigrated beyond its shores until it populated all the corners of the Earth. …