Saturday, June 25, 2016

Cuba Cartoons





Cuba denies visas for House lawmakers

Lessons from Cuba: Why people are seduced by socialism

Cuba is refusing to approve visa applications for members of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee, according to the committee's chairman.
Members were hoping to leave on Friday afternoon to examine lagging security in the country's airports, which are set to begin making flights to the U.S. this year. The lawmakers were forced to cancel when their applications were denied that morning.
"We wanted to look at their airport security ... because TSA has been backchanneling to us that it's not adequate," said Chairman Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas. "So I attempted to go down there to just look at them, there were five of us, and they denied our visas."
Officials say Cuba is set to begin making 110 daily flights into the U.S. from 10 airports in the country this fall, but lack security measures that include scanners and bomb-sniffing dogs.

Clinton's State Dept. calendar missing scores of entries


An Associated Press review of the official calendar Hillary Clinton kept as secretary of state identified at least 75 meetings with longtime political donors, loyalists, Clinton Foundation contributors and corporate and other outside interests that were not recorded or were listed without the names of those she met.
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 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 calendar omissions 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 Obama administration but was subsequently uncovered in a top aide's inbox.
The AP found the calendar omissions by comparing the 1,500-page historical record of Clinton's daily activities as secretary of state with separate planning schedules often supplied to Clinton by aides in advance of each day's events. The AP obtained the planning schedules as part of its federal lawsuit against the State Department. At least 114 outsiders who met with Clinton were not listed in her calendar, the AP's review found.
No known federal laws were violated and some omissions could be blamed on Clinton's highly fluid schedule, which sometimes forced cancellations at the last minute. But only seven meetings found in Clinton's planning schedules were replaced by substitute events listed on her calendar. More than 60 other events listed in Clinton's planners were omitted entirely in her calendar, tersely noted or described only as "private meetings" -- all without naming those who met with her.
Clinton campaign spokesman Nick Merrill said Thursday night that the multiple discrepancies between her State Department calendar and her planning schedules "simply reflect a more detailed version in one version as compared to another, all maintained by her staff."
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Merrill said that Clinton "has always made an effort to be transparent since entering public life, whether it be the release of over 30 years of tax returns, years of financial disclosure forms, or asking that 55,000 pages of work emails from her time as secretary of state be turned over to the public.
Clinton's State Department calendar omitted the identities of a dozen top Wall Street and business leaders who met with her during a private breakfast at the New York Stock Exchange in September 2009, minutes before she appeared in public at the exchange to ring the market's ceremonial opening bell.
State Department planning schedules from the same day listed the names of all Clinton's breakfast guests -- most of whose firms had lobbied the government and donated to her family's global charity, the Clinton Foundation. The event was closed to the press and merited only a brief mention in her calendar, which omitted all the names -- among them Blackstone Group Chairman Steven Schwarzman, PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi and then-New York Bank of Mellon CEO Robert Kelly.
The missing or heavily edited entries in Clinton's calendar also omitted private dinners with political donors, policy sessions with groups of corporate leaders and "drop-bys" with old Clinton campaign hands. Among those whose names were omitted from her calendar were longtime adviser Sidney Blumenthal, lobbyist and former Clinton White House chief of staff Thomas "Mack" McLarty and Clinton campaign bundler Haim Saban.
The AP first sought Clinton's calendar and schedules from the State Department in August 2013, but the agency would not acknowledge even that it had the material. After nearly two years of delay, the AP sued the State Department in March 2015. The department agreed in a court filing last August to turn over Clinton's calendar, and provided the documents in November. After noticing discrepancies between Clinton's calendar and some schedules, the AP pressed in court for all of Clinton's planning material. The U.S. has released about one-third of those planners to the AP, so far.
The State Department censored both sets of documents for national security and other reasons, but those changes were made after the documents were turned over to the State Department at the end of Clinton's tenure.
The documents obtained by the AP do not show who logged entries in Clinton's calendar or who edited material. Clinton's emails and other records show that she and two close aides, deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin and scheduling assistant Lona J. Valmoro, held weekly meetings and emailed almost every day about Clinton's plans. According to the recent inspector general's audit and a court declaration made last December by the State Department's acting executive secretary, Clinton's aides had access to her calendar through a government Microsoft Outlook account. Both Abedin and Valmoro were political appointees at the State Department and are now aides in her presidential campaign.
Unlike Clinton's planning schedules, which were sent to Clinton each morning, her calendar was edited after each event, AP's review showed. Some calendar entries were accompanied by Valmoro emails -- indicating she may have added those entries. Every meeting entry also included both the planned time of the event and the actual time -- showing that Clinton's calendar was being used to document each meeting after it ended.

With Clinton at helm, State Dept. got 'prestigious' award for record-keeping

What a Joke!
At the same time then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was storing emails on a personal server in violation of the rules, her department twice received a "prestigious" award for its record-keeping practices -- an honor that, in retrospect, has watchdogs scratching their heads.
The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) gave the so-called Archivist Award to the State Department in 2010 and again in September 2012, toward the end of Clinton's tenure.
During the 2012 ceremony, NARA Chief Records Officer Paul Wester described the honor, also bestowed upon the Treasury Department, as “prestigious.”
How did State merit such recognition?
According to NARA spokesman John Valceanu, the award was “specifically focused” on its work related to the management of inactive paper records stored in the State Department records center.
But at the time both awards were given, Clinton was skirting records rules with her email practices, according to a recent and highly critical inspector general report.
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“It is ironic, to say the least, that the National Archives and Records Administration presented awards to the State Department for their record-keeping practices while Secretary Clinton was violating the law by using a private email server,” said Alfred J. Lechner, Jr., president of Cause of Action Institute, a public interest law firm suing over department record-keeping.
At the beginning of Clinton's tenure, the department started using State Messaging and Archive Retrieval Toolset (SMART), a system that let employees preserve emails through their department accounts without having to print and file them the old-fashioned way for record-keeping purposes.
Clinton chose not to use it. While the Democratic presidential candidate claimed all along that her emails were being captured on the government accounts with which she corresponded, the IG report said that was not an “appropriate method of preserving any such emails that would constitute a Federal record.”
Further, the IG indicated Clinton potentially violated federal law when she left State without handing over her emails.
“At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act,” said the IG report.
The report also cited officials affirming that her private email set-up would not have been approved had she sought permission.
At the time, Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said the report still showed “how consistent her email practices were with those of other Secretaries and senior officials,” while urging steps to improve record-keeping. Though no official had a known set-up quite like Clinton's, the IG report did cite former Secretary of State Colin Powell as well for not turning over records when he left.
Lechner, a former judge, has joined with conservative watchdog Judicial Watch to file a lawsuit against U.S. Archivist David S. Ferriero and Secretary of State John Kerry for the alleged failure to carry out statutory obligations to ensure records were preserved.
They filed a joint brief on Monday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia arguing that some email records from Clinton’s private server have yet to be recovered by the department in accordance with the Federal Records Act (FRA).
NARA’s Valceanu says they were in the dark about Clinton’s email practices at the time of the award.
“At that time, NARA was not aware of the use of non-governmental email accounts by Secretaries of State, which we only found out about in March 2015, when the New York Times article was published,” he said in a statement to FoxNews.com.
NARA was not completely unaware of potential record-keeping problems, however, according to an email released by the Archives’ chief counsel.
In a Dec. 11, 2012 email to colleagues, Wester asked for a meeting to talk about concerns that an effort was afoot to take her records to the Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Ark.
“Tom heard (or thought he heard) from the Clinton Library Director that there are or may be plans for taking her records from State to Little Rock,” Wester wrote. “Tom then got to asking questions about what we are doing to make sure everyone leaving the Administration does not leave with Federal records. I told him we are aware of the issue and are working on it.”

Lawsuit seeks to unbind RNC delegates from backing Trump


A Virginia delegate to this summer's Republican National Convention filed a lawsuit Friday challenging a state law which commits him to backing presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump.
Carroll B. Correll, who served as a campaign co-chair for Texas Sen. Ted Cruz in Virginia's 10th congressional district, is seeking class action status for his suit on behalf of the commonwealth's 49 Republican delegates and 110 Democratic delegates.
At issue is a Virginia law that states "Delegates and alternates shall be bound to vote on the first ballot at the national convention for the candidate receiving the most votes in the primary unless that candidate releases those delegates and alternates from such vote."
Correll, who argues in his complaint that Trump is "unfit to serve" as President, claims the law violates his right to free speech. He's seeking an injunction that would exempt him from criminal penalties under Virginia law or possible retaliatory litigation by Trump for backing another candidate on the first ballot.
Trump won Virginia's primary in March, narowly defeating Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and scooping 17 delegates in the process.
Correll's attorneys, who filed the lawsuit in the Eastern District of Virginia, have asked for the case to be expedited in the hope of getting a ruling for the start of the convention in Cleveland July 18.

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