It seemed like such a good idea at the time. Hillary Clinton would hire out the Richard Rodgers Theatre in Times Square for a special fundraising performance of Broadway musical phenomenon Hamilton on July 12.
Generating cash for her presidential campaign by taking over a show about a US Founding Father told through the lens of a multi-racial cast reflecting America as it is today. What could go wrong for Team Hillary?
But the move by the Hillary Victory Fund to buy all 1321 seats for the performance has disastrously backfired judging by the reaction on social media.
While Hamilton has won 11 Tony Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and a Grammy Award, the Democratic presidential candidate has lost tremendous amounts of goodwill with her takeover of the musical that she first saw at the Public Theater during its pre-Broadway run last year.
I, too, have been spammed by the Clinton campaign about this. Nothing says “I’m one of the people” like buying out a show for which tickets cost thousands and the wait for a seat stretches months.
by Owen | 2206, 25 Jun 1616 | Politics | 1 Comment
It’s pretty clear that Clinton did everything possible to avoid public scrutiny of her actions as a public official. What else is she hiding?
(WASHINGTON) — An Associated Press review of the official calendar Hillary Clinton kept as secretary of state identified at least 75 meetings with longtime political donors, Clinton Foundation contributors and corporate and other outside interests that were not recorded or omitted the names of those she met.
The fuller details of those meetings were included in files the State Department turned over to the AP after it sued the government in federal court.
The missing entries raise new questions about how Clinton and her inner circle handled government records documenting her State Department tenure — in this case, why the official chronology of her four-year term does not closely mirror the other, more detailed records of her daily meetings.
At a time when Clinton’s private email system is under scrutiny by an FBI criminal investigation, the calendaromissions reinforce concerns that she sought to eliminate the “risk of the personal being accessible” — as she wrote in an email exchange that she failed to turn over to the government but was subsequently uncovered in a top aide’s inbox.
by Owen | 1928, 9 Jun 1616 | Politics | 12 Comments
As I said weeks ago, the fix is in for Clinton. She won’t be indicted. Obama wouldn’t have endorsed her if she was going to be.
President Obama has officially endorsed Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Party presidential nominee.
His endorsement came after meeting Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders who has been battling Mrs Clinton for the nomination.
Speaking in a video tweeted out by Mrs Clinton, Mr Obama said she may be the most qualified person “ever” for the role of president.
What a (not-so) shockingly ignorant statement by Obama. Just to get started… Washington, Adams (both of them), Jackson, Polk, Cleveland, T. Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Nixon, Bush 41… were all more qualified than Hillary Clinton. Even her husband was more qualified than she is. At least he ran a state as a chief executive.
The sexism is less virulent now than it was in 2008, she said, but still she encounters people on rope lines who tell her, “ ‘I really admire you, I really like you, I just don’t know if I can vote for a woman to be president.’ I mean, they come to my events and then they say that to me.”
It’s like the snipers in Bosnia or authorization from the State Department to use a private email server… it only exists in her mind.
Unfortunately, the American public is showing that we don’t care about lying anymore when it comes to presidential candidates.
by Owen | 1720, 26 May 1616 | Politics | 1 Comment
Of course she did. Did anyone really think that she was forthcoming? If so, I have a bridge for sale…
After 14 months of public scrutiny and skepticism over Clinton’s motives in keeping her emails secret, new questions emerged Thursday. They centered on her apparent failure to turn over a November 2010 message in which she worried that her personal messages could become accessible to outsiders, along with two other messages a year later that divulged possible security weaknesses in the home email system she used while secretary of state.
The Clinton campaign has previously denied that her home server was breached, but newly revealed emails show an aide worried it could have been compromised.
The existence of these previously unreleased messages — which appear to have been found among electronic files of four former top Clinton State Department aides — renews concerns that Clinton was not completely forthcoming when she turned over a trove of 55,000 pages of work-related emails. And it has drawn fresh criticism from presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
The report draws attention to two staff members in the Office of Information Resources Management, who back in 2010 “discussed their concerns about Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal email account in separate meetings with the then-Director” of their office.
The report says, “According to the staff member, the Director stated that the Secretary’s personal system had been reviewed and approved by Department legal staff and that the matter was not to be discussed any further.” The same director reportedly “instructed the staff never to speak of the Secretary’s personal email system again.”
But the report notes that interviews with officials from the Under Secretary for Management and the Office of the Legal Adviser found “no knowledge of approval or review by other Department staff” of the server.
This is the forgotten part of the interview in 1998 where Hillary Clinton described the “vast right wing conspiracy” she said was after her husband. In this segment of the interview, she very clearly threatens Bill’s accusers and lets other potential ones know in the most public way possible what they will face. She said:
I think that when all of this is put into context, and we really look at the people involved here, look at their motivations and look at their backgrounds, look at their past behavior, some folks are going to have a lot to answer for.
Hillary Clinton’s role in trying to intimidate or suppress the stories of women her husband had affairs with is a legitimate topic of conversation and inquiry, given that a foundation of her campaign is women’s rights and that she would be the first woman president.
Remember that it’s not that Hillary tolerated Bill’s extramarital sex life. She was an active participant in demonizing his prey and protecting him so that he could continue doing it.
“I have a lot of experience dealing with men who sometimes get off the reservation in the way they behave and how they speak,” Clinton said in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, which first aired on “The Lead.”
The Democratic presidential front-runner did not elaborate which men she was referring to.
It’s pretty clear that the next potential POTUS used the State Department as a cash machine to shake down foreign governments for personal gain. Unfortunately, she did so by helping arming some pretty reprehensible regimes.
Under Clinton’s leadership, the State Department approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation, according to an IBTimes analysis of State Department and foundation data. That figure — derived from the three full fiscal years of Clinton’s term as Secretary of State (from October 2010 to September 2012) — represented nearly double the value of American arms sales made to the those countries and approved by the State Department during the same period of President George W. Bush’s second term.
The Clinton-led State Department also authorized $151 billion of separate Pentagon-brokered deals for 16 of the countries that donated to the Clinton Foundation, resulting in a 143 percent increase incompleted sales to those nations over the same time frame during the Bush administration. These extra sales were part of a broad increase in American military exports that accompanied Obama’s arrival in the White House. The 143 percent increase in U.S. arms sales to Clinton Foundation donors compares to an 80 percent increase in such sales to all countries over the same time period.
American defense contractors also donated to the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state and in some cases made personal payments to Bill Clinton for speaking engagements. Such firms and their subsidiaries were listed as contractors in $163 billion worth of Pentagon-negotiated deals that were authorized by the Clinton State Department between 2009 and 2012.
The State Department formally approved these arms sales even as many of the deals enhanced the military power of countries ruled by authoritarian regimes whose human rights abuses had been criticized by the department. Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Oman andQatar all donated to the Clinton Foundation and also gained State Department clearance to buy caches of American-made weapons even as the department singled them out for a range of alleged ills, from corruption to restrictions on civil liberties to violent crackdowns against political opponents.
“Had Senator Sanders won the day with his refusal to support and invest in stem cell research, Americans would have lost access to a new frontier of medicine that could one day cure Alzheimer’s, ALS, and other fatal diseases,” Doyle said in a statement. “When medical progress needed support from Sanders, he not only was absent, but was among those leading the effort against it. This is in stark contrast to Hillary Clinton who in the Senate successfully fought to expand funding for the National Institutes of Health and has consistently supported stem cell research and its potential to save the lives of Americans and their loved ones.”
Clinton said she was joining her voice to others who were saying “no to discrimination, no to hate speech and no to Bradley.” She said there was “no place at all” on any court for Bradley’s “dangerous rhetoric.”
I had a couple of thoughts when reading this…
First, there’s no way that Clinton knew anything about Bradley or Kloppenburg – much less cared about either of them – until she needed votes in Wisconsin. This has all of the marks of a deal whereby some state Dems promised to push for her if she would help out on the Supreme Court election. If only Bradley were a man, it would have helped Clinton pimp her “war on women” meme.
Second, Kloppenburg’s big faux claim for months has been that she’s “independent” despite her long-standing ties to Democrats and liberal interests. Having the Democratic presidential front-runner advocate for her drops any pretense of independence. I think it’s fine for judges running for office to have opinions and associations with fellow travelers – nobody is a blank slate and we certainly wouldn’t want to elect anyone who is – but they should be honest about them.
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Soon after Hillary Clinton’s arrival at the State Department in 2009, officials in the information technology office were baffled when told that a young technician would join them as a political appointee, newly disclosed emails show.
The technician, Bryan Pagliano, was running the off-grid email server that Clinton had him set up in her New York home for her work as secretary of state. But even as years passed, Pagliano’s supervisors never learned of his most sensitive task, according to the department and one of his former colleagues.
Pagliano’s immediate supervisors did not know the private server even existed until it was revealed in news reports last year, the colleague said, requesting anonymity because of a department ban on unauthorized interviews.
Clinton’s decision to side-step the official state.gov email system has since shrouded her campaign for the U.S. presidency this year in controversy and legal uncertainty. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is conducting one of several inquiries into the arrangement, which saw classified information passing through her unsecured clintonemail.com account.
Clinton continued, claiming Libya can be counted as a U.S. foreign policy success due to the fact no Americans were killed during the ousting of Gaddafi. On the other hand, she added, the same probably couldn’t be said if the United State involved itself in stopping Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s bloody civil war.
“Yes, Libya was a different kind of calculation, and we didn’t lose a single person,” Clinton told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews.
Mills describes how hackers tried to get into her account, but says, “I am not sure we want to telegraph how much folks do or don’t do off state mail b/c it may encourage others who are out there.”
In another chain, Clinton asks assistant Nora Toiv for her email address, prompting Toiv to respond: “You’ve always emailed on my State email.” Clinton replied: “Even weirder — I just checked and I do have your State but not your gmail — so how did that happen. Must be the Chinese!”
(CNN)Hillary Clinton will win the Nevada Democratic caucuses, CNN projects, a crucial victory that could ease concerns about her ability to secure the party’s nomination.
With 72% of the expected vote in, Clinton was ahead of Sanders 52.2% to 47.7%.
The win provides a jolt of momentum to the former secretary of state as she heads into the February 27 South Carolina Democratic primary and Super Tuesday on March 1.
(CNN)Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, combined to earn more than $153 million in paid speeches from 2001 until Hillary Clinton launched her presidential campaign last spring, a CNN analysis shows.
In total, the two gave 729 speeches from February 2001 until May, receiving an average payday of $210,795 for each address. The two also reported at least $7.7 million for at least 39 speeches to big banks, including Goldman Sachs and UBS, with Hillary Clinton, the Democratic 2016 front-runner, collecting at least $1.8 million for at least eight speeches to big banks.
It looks like the Democratic debate might have actually been mildly amusing to watch last night.
After yet another Sanders swipe at Clinton as part of a political establishment bankrolled by Wall Street and drug companies, she unloaded.
“Time and time again, by innuendo, by insinuation, there is this attack that he is putting forth which really comes down to, you know, anybody who ever took donations or speaking fees from any interest group has to be bought. And I just absolutely reject that, senator, and I really don’t think these kinds of attacks by insinuation are worthy of you. And enough is enough,” Clinton said.
Then she challenged him: “If you’ve got something to say, say it directly, but you will not find that I ever changed a view or a vote because of any donation I ever received.”
And finally, Clinton made it just a little bit more personal, saying: “I think it’s time to end the very artful smear that you and your campaign have been carrying out in recent weeks.”
While I have little doubt that Clinton herself has not actually traded favors for money, what she says is true of most people. Usually when you see that a particular special interest or group of people financially support a candidate it is a reflection of supporting a fellow believer rather than an attempt to change a politician’s behavior. For example, the NRA supports Governor Walker because Walker has a long history of supporting gun rights and the NRA wants to see Walker continue to be in a position to support gun rights.
