January 5, 2016

Review of Bill Clintons policies enacted/ended in the 1990's. WOW! She's good!

Nothing needs to be added to this...including the media consolidation under the Communications Act of 1996.



This covers so much of why I support Bernie Sanders!

January 1, 2016

State Department misses court-ordered goal on Clinton email release

State Department misses court-ordered goal on Clinton email release
• New York Times
Thursday, December 31, 2015 10:35am

5,500 pages of Hillary Clinton’s emails were released.

WASHINGTON — The State Department fell short of a court order requiring the release of the vast bulk of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's emails by the end of 2015 but promised Thursday to catch up early in the new year.

Just hours before the year ended, the department disclosed another 5,500 pages of Clinton's messages in its latest monthly release. But it acknowledged that it would not meet the target set by a federal judge of producing 82 percent of her emails by the end of December.

"We have worked diligently to come as close to the goal as possible, but with the large number of documents involved and the holiday schedule, we have not met the goal this month," the department said in a statement. "To narrow that gap, the State Department will make another production of former Secretary Clinton's email sometime next week."

Last May, Judge Rudolph Contreras of U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ordered the State Department to release Clinton's emails on a rolling basis each month in response to a lawsuit filed by Vice News under the Freedom of Information Act. He specified no penalties for any violations.

The department has released thousands of pages of the emails — which were housed on a private server in Clinton's home — on the last day of each month and is supposed to complete the disclosure by Jan. 29.

The emails posted Thursday provided a further glimpse into the cloistered and sometimes caustic world of Clinton's entourage during her four-year stint as the nation's top diplomat. On display once again were the rivalries and insecurities in her circle as she represented to the outside world the man who beat her for the presidency.

One ally confided to her that Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany did not care for "the Obama phenomenon," while another urged immediate aid to Libya if Moammar Gadhafi were to fall, as he later did. Some of her advisers did little to hide their disdain for President Barack Obama's aides, while Clinton herself fretted about reports that she did not exercise enough influence in the White House. "Pls go through my schedules and count my visits to refute this and correct record," Clinton wrote an aide in response to a "ridiculous column" on the number of times she had visited the White House.

Subordinates and outsiders lavished praise on her. Henry A. Kissinger, perhaps her most famous living predecessor, wrote in 2012 seeking help to declassify some of his papers, ending with this handwritten note: "I greatly admire the skill and aplomb with which you conduct our foreign policy."

The sometimes Byzantine nature of Clinton's orbit was summed up in one email from Philippe Reines, who designed an irreverent flow chart to determine who should ride in her limousine while she traveled abroad. "Ambassador Tolerable?" one entry asked. If yes, he or she got to ride in the car. If not, Clinton would ride without the intolerable envoy.

Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime friend who regularly provided advice, scorned "Gibbs' and Axelrod's rock bottom performances exposing utter political vacuity on the Sunday shows," referring to Robert Gibbs and David Axelrod, two close Obama aides.

Blumenthal was the one who passed along advice about Merkel in 2009 from John Kornblum, who was Bill Clinton's ambassador to Germany. "He says she dislikes the atmospherics surrounding the Obama phenomenon, that it's contrary to her whole idea of politics and how to conduct oneself in general," Blumenthal wrote.

As for Clinton, she continued to struggle with technology. "I've had big problems w my blackberry, which has been having a nervous breakdown on my dime!" she wrote one day.
With the latest releases, more than 1,200 messages have been found to contain classified information. But even some of those released Thursday were redacted heavily under a privacy exemption.

State Department misses court-ordered goal on Clinton email release 12/31/15 [Last modified: Thursday, December 31, 2015 10:23pm]
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http://www.tampabay.com/news/politics/national/qa-what-to-expect-in-the-latest-batch-of-hillary-clintons-emails-today/2259595

January 1, 2016

NYT-OP - and why I no longer think Bill Clinton's Shenanigans are important today

Frank Bruni DEC. 30, 2015
snip....

In American politics, one narrative — one question — eclipses all others: Who will become the 45th president?

Some of the following subplots could greatly influence the outcome of the presidential contest, while others have big implications for the sway and the health of the Republican and Democratic parties.

They’re just a glimmer of what 2016 has in store.

Bill Clinton on the Loose. Until recent weeks, it was almost possible to forget him as presidential-race factor. Then Hillary Clinton, in the last Democratic debate, tagged him as a key economic adviser in any second Clinton administration. Her campaign confirmed that he’d be popping up more often on the campaign trail. And references to his Oval Office misdeeds and the Clintons’ marital psychodrama started to creep back into the news.

All of that was a fresh reminder that his proper role in, and impact on, his wife’s candidacy is unsettled and unclear. He remains both wildly charismatic and maddeningly undisciplined. He connotes both prosperous times and cynical scheming.

There’s no legitimate worry that his presence might eclipse and diminish hers, but the two of them together root her candidacy as much in the past as in the future. So how to deploy and integrate him? Is it controllable?

more at link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/30/opinion/the-juicy-subplots-of-2016.html?_r=0
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No, I no longer think of these shenanigans. Now when I think of Bill, I think of his signing NAFTA, CAFTA, the end of the GLASS STEAGALL ACT (WALL STREET), COMMUINCATIONS ACT OF 1996 to consolidate OUR media! This is what I think of now when I think of Bill Clinton and how we are all now living in his world. I don't want him near the WH again, nor his Wall Street wife! I no longer find Bill charismatic. I no longer care about Monica and all of the other women, Hillary doesn't really seem to care about. This is not the mentality this country needs today. Hillary meeting in Tampa with her son in laws friend, for a contract on 'deep sea mineral mining rights', is just deplorable. I no longer fall for Bill's smile and charisma.
THIS IS WHY I SUPPORT BERNIE SANDERS. Sanders truthiness is what is charismatic today.

December 30, 2015

Scrutiny for all - LTE Tampa Bay Times - What's coming around the corner -

Scrutiny for all

I read with interest your front-page political fact-check article on Donald Trump, complete with the unflattering caricature. I am looking forward to your equally fair and balanced report on Hillary Clinton, caricature included.

Your fact check can start off with her little self-aggrandizing lies like dodging bullets in Bosnia, her daughter jogging around the World Trade Center during the 9/11 attack, being named after Sir Edmund Hillary, trying to join the Marines and claiming all of her grandparents were immigrants.

Then you can examine some of the really big recent lies like the Benghazi attack video, having no classified material on her private email server and Donald Trump videos being used for ISIS recruitment. And if you really want to do an in-depth examination of Clinton, look again at Travelgate, her cattle futures trading explanation, her role in the "bimbo eruption" and of course Whitewater. The list is endless.

http://www.tampabay.com/opinion/letters/wednesdays-letters-alzheimers-research-gets-a-boost/2259341


******************************
Democrats supporting Hillary can ignore this at their peril. This is reason #1,000,000,000 why I support Bernie Sanders for President.

When Brian Williams lied, I did not like it. When Lara Logan lied, I did not like it. When Hillary told the same type of lies, while troops are serving, again, I don't like it. We have the very best ever in Bernie Sanders. Don't think all of this won't be thrown back at Hillary, if she is the nominee. Just my two cent. Letters are already appearing in the Florida newspapers, like the one above.

December 29, 2015

Sam Smith - How the Koch brothers helped dismantle the Democratic Party

More here from Sam Smith archives.....on Koch funding the DLC

April 14, 2015 Clintons, Obama, Politics


Sam Smith

For over 20 years I have reported on the mostly unnoted role played by the Democratic Leadership Council dismantling the Democratic Party, disconnecting it from its New Deal and Great Society past and turning it into Republican Lite. For example, in a 1992 book on Clinton, I wrote:


In 1988, the 1992 play was already being cast. Conservative Democrats were holding strategy meetings at the home of party fund-raiser Pamela Harriman. The meetings — eventually nearly a hundred of them — were aimed at ending years of populist insurrection within the party. They were regularly moderated by Clark Clifford and Robert Strauss, the Mr. Fixits of the Democratic mainstream. Democratic donors paid $1000 to take part in the sessions and by the time it was all over, Mrs. Harriman had raised about $12 million for her kind of Democrats.

The play was also being cast by a group that called itself the Democratic Leadership Council. Although lacking any official role in the Democratic Party (and often appearing more a Democratic Abandon Ship Council), the DLC claimed it was the voice of mainstream party thought. In fact, it was primarily a lobby for the views of southern and other conservative Democrats, yet so successful was its media manipulation that it managed with impunity to call its think tank the Progressive Policy Institute.

In such places the important Democratic politics of the late 1980s was being made. Clinton may have bored millions of Americans on TV that night, but Clifford, Strauss, Harriman and the DLC found him intensely interesting, extremely intelligent — an appealing pragmatist, willing to compromise, and fully at home with the policy jargon of the capital.

The DLC would later help bring Barack Obama to the fore, although its role this time was carefully concealed so as not to tarnish Obama’s liberal image.

But what I had failed to note in this story, until Green Party Asher Platts mentioned it recently, was the involvement of the rightwing Koch Brothers in this supposedly Democratic organization.

For example, Sourcewatch reported:


An August, 2000 Newsweek story on Joe Lieberman, The Soul And The Steel reveals that some of the early funding came from ARCO, Chevron, Merck, Du Pont, Microsoft, Philip Morris and Koch Industries:

Among the DLC’s biggest benefactors last year (contributions of between $50,000 and $100,000) were ARCO, Chevron and the drug giant Merck. Other big underwriters include Du Pont, Microsoft and Philip Morris … “We’ve been able to have a dialogue with the [Senator Joseph Lieberman] and his staff,” said Jay Rosser, spokesman for another DLC benefactor, Koch Industries, an oil-pipeline firm that is also a big GOP donor.

The fact that these rightwing brothers were successfully interfering in Democratic politics shows how artificial popular and media assumptions about politics can be.

For example, when Obama came along, The DLC already had a bad rap among liberals so its role in his unprecedented rise to power from state senator to presidential candidate in just a few years was best kept quiet. It only cropped up a few times, such as in this Chicago Sun Times story by Abdon Pallasch in 2008:


Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama may be the most liberal senator by one group’s scorecard, and the Democratic Leadership Council may be a centrist organization trying to pull the Democratic party away from the left.

But with the smell of victory in the air, no one at the DLC convention in Chicago is quibbling with the presumptive nominee’s positions.

Is there any issue on which Obama differs from the DLC agenda?

None, said Chairman Harold Ford, who narrowly lost a race for U.S. Senate in Tennessee two years ago. He said the organization’s main goal now is getting Obama elected president.

It helps that the organization —founded after the 1984 election to move the Democratic Party to the right — has no issue positions it asks members to sign on to. Leaders generally back a more pro-business, pro-trade agenda. Today is the last day of the group’s annual convention in Chicago.

As some of his potential vice presidents participated in break-out sessions here Sunday, Obama played basketball for about three hours just a few blocks away and got a haircut. But not one of the principals here begrudged him not stopping by…

“No, he’s really very, very busy,” Mayor Daley said, making his second appearance this weekend at the convention. “He needs time for his family. It [was] an exhausting primary. We’re all representing Barack Obama. He doesn’t have to be at every meeting. He has to take time out for his family. It’s important for his well-being.”

Some McCain backers decry Obama as the most liberal senator or nominee the Democrats have put up. And the National Journal ranked him the Senate’s most liberal member. But Daley said, “I never looked at him as a liberal” when he worked with Obama on issues in the state legislature.

Bill Clinton was the face of the DLC in 1992. And Obama told supporters four years ago that his inclusion on a DLC list of up-and-coming elected officials four years ago did not mean he was surrendering his progressive credentials on issues such as the War in Iraq.

“Democrats need to be pro-business Democrats again,” said Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, touted by some as a potential vice-president for Obama…

Such a partnership – between something called the Democratic Leadership Council and the Koch Brothers – goes a long way to explaining why our last two Democratic presidents have been so disloyal to their party’s traditions. And why Obama is pushing something as atrocious and anti-American as the secret TPP agreement.

Bipartisanship may be gone on Capitol Hill, but it’s still flourishing in the checks that are written for politicians.

https://samsmitharchives.wordpress.com/2015/04/14/6467/

December 25, 2015

MERRY CHRISTMAS! Gyrocopter Pilot Running Against Debbie Wasserman Shultz

I missed this yesterday, as I was busy with the holiday. I woke up this wonderful Christmas morning to the front page of the Tampa Bay Times, to see he is running for her congressional seat.

Wow, another campaign finance candidate with national recognition. All we have to do is give him a few dollars like Bernie, and he's off and running!

She has asked for this contest. If she won't resign from the party, then let's take her out of her congressional seat. Haul her right out of DC and back to the private sector.
This is exciting, and made this adult squeal with delight, when I woke up this Christmas morning.

No more Lil' Debby on our dime.

Many thanks to our new candidate for standing up for the people!

http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/the-buzz-florida-politics/gyrocopter-pilot-doug-hughes-to-run-against-rep-debbie-wasserman-schultz/2258888

December 24, 2015

I have not forgotten the Clintons tried to take our belongings out of our White House when they left

This is a BIG reason they have an 'integrity' problem with me. That episode was awful, and not forgotten by me. What were they thinking? They knew Bill would now be commanding 230 million a year in speeches, so why did they try to take our belongings? Did they really need those things? Gads. This is exactly what happened. I will also never believe they did not know better. I don't care about 'grey' areas. If I'm in a store, I don't even like to take an item if its' the last one. Just imagine the mindset to do this. And they didn't NEED any of it.

Remember this? History is taught for a reason. So it doesn't repeat itself, if not in the best interest of the people.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=121856

Clintons Return White House Furniture


Former President Clinton and his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, have sent $28,000 worth of household goods back to Washington after questions arose over whether the items were intended as personal gifts or donations to the White House.

“We have been informed that it is being shipped back, and the National Park Service is ready to receive it, take possession of it and take custody of it,” Jim McDaniel, the National Park Service’s liaison to the White House, said Wednesday.

“The property is being returned to government custody until such time that the issues can be resolved. It may well turn out that that property is rightly the personal property of the Clintons.”

Giving Back

After they were criticized for taking $190,000 worth of china, flatware, rugs, televisions, sofas and other gifts with them when they left, the Clintons announced last week that they would pay for $86,000 worth of gifts, or nearly half the amount.

Their latest decision to send back $28,000 in gifts brings to $114,000 the value of items the Clintons have either decided to pay for or return.

McDaniel discussed the matter Wednesday with Betty Monkman, the White House curator, and Gary Walters, the chief usher, or executive manager of the White House.

They were reviewing the gifts the Clintons chose to keep after $28,000 worth of items were found on a list of donations the Park Service received for the 1993 White House redecoration project. The Washington Post this week quoted three people who said that they assumed the furnishings they donated for the project would stay in the White House.

“As a result of questions about the status of certain property donated to the White House during the Clinton administration, the National Park Service will accept the return of the property in question and act as a custodian of such property,” according to a statement released by the Park Service, which administers the White House as a unit of the national park system.

A person familiar with the Clintons’ move out of the White House, who spoke on condition of anonymity, would say only: “They’ve been returned.”

Furniture Movers

While the Clintons’ decision to return these gifts was a way to get out from under this and other criticism surrounding their departure from the White House, the couple provided scant details about the shipment.

Mrs. Clinton’s office referred all questions about the gift return to the former president’s transition office. Transition office workers said the Clintons would make no statement. They referred all questions to the Park Service, which wasn’t exactly sure which gifts were being returned or where they had been kept.

December 24, 2015

Trump will be the star of Fox New Year's Eve on TV

He'll come on around 11 and stay to ring in the new year with millions.



just the messenger.

December 24, 2015

"The Private CIA" - Who/What is KROLL? Hardly an independent auditor

"The Private CIA" - Who/What is KROLL, and why did NYC Mayor Bloomberg hire them to spy?


So as I'm going through my email today, I read a small news notice about the undercover video shot of gun shows in Ohio and elsewhere that NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg commissioned to have done. You've heard about these covert video recordings, showing how easily "the gun show loophole" allows people to buy guns.

You may have assumed that it was NY investigators; either cops or officials in some sort of capacity,...who shot or gathered the video.

But it was a private contractor. As in,...a profit-driven group who had reason to make their employer (Bloomberg) happy.

Now of course, there is nothing wrong with free enterprise and profit-based endeavors, nor with gov't using private contractors where officials or officers might not be best suited to a task.

But look at KROLL International a little more closely, and the hairs start to go up on your neck and your "Spidey-Sense" begins to tingle.

KROLL is a LARGE supplier of all manner of gear to the law enforcement and prison industries. They also have a private investigations and corporate threat assessment division. (Gee,...if you want to get the contracts for NYC police and jail gear, what better way than to make Bloomberg happy?!) More than that, KROLL supplies the lion's share of prison gear to the US Military. Abu Gharib prisoners wear Kroll's orange jumpsuits, as do those in Guantanamo Bay. But it goes deeper. Among the things I have found in just a few minutes of snooping online;.....

1991 Kroll hired by Kuwait to investigate Saddam's finances;

1992 Kroll -advising Enron;

97-98 teamsters union elections;

1993-2001 responsible for security at World Trade Center (which ought to concern those who question what REALLY happened)

Due to activities like these, long before 9/11, KROLL earned the moniker of "The Private CIA".

Below is some more info on KROLL.

http://xiandos.info/Kroll
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kroll_Inc.

What does all this mean? Well,...perhaps nothing at all. Perhaps what we saw in those video clips was exactly as it appeared. Perhaps KROLL International really was impartial. Perhaps nobody in the company was obsessed with pleasing the media mogul billionaire mayor of the nation's largest city who controls the purse strings of a very important customer. Perhaps it didn't occur to anyone at KROLL how much money they could lose by not delivering to Bloomberg what he expected and demanded. Perhaps nobody was tempted to stage anything.

Perhaps.

https://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Opinion/060858-2009-11-02-the-private-cia-who-what-is-kroll-and-why-did.htm

December 24, 2015

Merry Christmas Bernie Sanders - YOU are the greatest gift to the American People this Christmas

THANK YOU FOR RUNNING.

I can't say it enough. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

When I look at the not so independent auditor chosen for the NGP failure and breach, this is getting serious. You, are going to be the next President, so help me and the rest of us.

Merry Christmas to you and your family Bernie. You are my greatest gift this Christmas.
We all love you very much. Thanks again.

Signed,
A big believer in you.