Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Crooked Hillary Cartoons





Hillary Clinton and the Pickle Jar :-)


Trump camp: 'Loophole' would allow smaller Clinton charities to take foreign cash


The Trump campaign is making the case that the Clinton Foundation pledge not to accept foreign and corporate donations if Hillary Clinton is elected president doesn't go far enough -- since related charities could still take that money.
The nonprofit foundation announced last week it would accept donations only from U.S. citizens and independent charities if Clinton wins in November. The move was meant to settle ethical concerns amid newly released emails that Trump claims reveal a "pay-to-play" operation.
But such a donation ban has not yet been announced regarding smaller Clinton-tied charities including the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership and the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI).
The Trump campaign argues the the groups are exploting a "corporate loophole."
“The Clinton Foundation’s laughable attempt to address conflicts of interest fails to include many of its umbrella organizations," Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller said Tuesday. "The bottom line is that conflicts of interest with foreign governments and special interests would continue unabated in a Hillary Clinton administration under their insufficient and unacceptable proposal.”
The Boston Globe first reported on the implications for these lesser-known charities. The newspaper also reported the alliance has no plans to change its fundraising.
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Still, the groups could be planning other changes.
Canadian philanthropist Frank Giustra, who founded the enterprise partnership with former President Bill Clinton, said he plans to make the charity an independent entity, according to the newspaper.
Bill Clinton, daughter Chelsea Clinton and family lawyer Bruce Lindsey sit on the alliance and the foundation boards. The alliance says the groups are separate legal entities but that the alliance board would soon meet to “determine its next steps.”
Former President Clinton also announced Monday a series of steps he'd take to distance himself and his wife from the 12-year-old foundation and other groups if Hillary Clinton is elected. Among them, he said he would no longer do fundraising for the foundation and would resign from the board.
He also said he would step down from the board of CHAI, though did not address its fundraising. He said only that the board is considering "a range of options to ensure that its vital work will continue and will announce details soon."
The CEO of that group is Ira Magaziner, a former Clinton White House adviser.
Clinton, in his statement, defended the work of his network of charities. “When I left the White House in 2001 and returned to life as a private citizen, I wanted to continue working in areas I had long cared about … That’s what the Clinton Foundation has tried to do,” he said.
Clinton also said the Clinton Global Initiative would hold its final CGI America meeting in September.

Heightened political and media scrutiny on the Clinton-Giustra partnership began at about the time Hillary Clinton announced her presidential campaign last year, considering Canadian law does not require nonprofit charities to disclose their donor rolls.
Giustra responded in May 2015 by saying the partnership had two legal opinions that confirmed donors “have a right and an expectation of privacy” under Canadian law and charitable best practices.
However, he said the partnership would ask major donors for permission to disclose their contributions. And he rejected accusations and reports that the partnership had accepted foreign donations or that he made donations to the foundation to further his business interests.
The partnership did not response to a request Monday for comment.

BIAS ALERT: Professor says Trump is so bad, class doesn't have to be balanced

Gettysburg College Prof. Kathleen Iannello

Critics have accused academia of subtly indoctrinating students with a liberal agenda for years, but the possibility of a Donald Trump presidency has brought one Pennsylvania political science professor out into the open.
Gettysburg College Prof. Kathleen Iannello announced in an Op-Ed penned for Philly.com that she will not even try to treat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and GOP choice Trump equally because, in her mind, Trump is a “lightning rod for promoting further hate.”
“My approach for the fall semester will be boldly honest: It is a disservice to students to attempt to provide balance when I know that balance is an offense to the truth,” Iannello wrote.
In the column, titled “Balanced Presentation A Dishonest Exercise In Presidential Race,” Iannello admits that, “as a liberal, [she has] no problem extolling the virtues of Democrats.”
To prove her fairness, Iannello notes that she has assigned readings of moderate Republicans and has even offered praise for Ronald Reagan. But Trump is another story, she claimed.
“His harsh and distasteful commentary regarding religious and ethnic groups, as well as women, only serves as a lightning rod for promoting further hate,” Iannello wrote. “He displays neither a record of public service nor an understanding of the word statesmanship. In the history of our country, it is hard to recall anyone less prepared to take office.”
When asked by The College Fix if her stance would be fair to students who might not share her politics, Iannello said it would.
“I can assure you that all students will have a voice in my classes,” she told the site.
Officials at Gettysburg College said they believe the class will be fair, too.
“It’s an important part of our mission as a liberal arts institution to ensure that ideas can be shared openly, and we have every confidence that students will be given opportunity to express their views freely in their classes,” a spokesperson told the site.
Students who claim to have taken Iannello’s classes in the past may doubt her ability to tolerate dissenting opinions.
“Professor Iannello means well and is a decent teacher, but she preaches her liberal propaganda way too much in class,” read a 2008 entry on Ratemyprofessor.com, adding, “she is not open to new ideas and is very closed-minded on her beliefs.”
Other entries described her as “intimidating if you lean right” and a person who gives “conservatives a hard time.” “If you’re a right-winger, be prepared to walk into a brick wall whenever you enter the classroom,” one review states.

Multiple donors to Clinton Foundation met with her while at State Department


More than half of the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was serving as secretary of state gave money to the Clinton Foundation, either personally or through or companies or groups, according to a review of State Department calendars released to the Associated Press.
At least 85 of the 154 people from private interests who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Clinton donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its international programs, according to the documents obtained by the AP.
The 85 donors contributed as much as $156 million combined, and at least 40 donated more than $100,000 each while 20 gave more than $1 million.
Republican Vice Presidential candidate Mike Pence reacted Tuesday to the AP report while campaigning in Pennsylvania, saying it was not a "laughing matter."
"Hillary was on Jimmy Kimmel last night, joked about it, said her emails were boring. Hillary Clinton this is not laughing matter, nobody is above the law," Pence said. "American people are sick and tired of pay to play."
Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called for a special prosecutor to look into pay for play allegations in reaction to the AP report.
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“The evidence is clear – it’s time a special prosecutor be appointed to investigate the growing proof of pay-to-play at Hillary Clinton’s State Department,” he said in a statement. “This is among the strongest and most unmistakable pieces of evidence of what we’ve long suspected: at Hillary Clinton’s State Department, access to the most sensitive policy makers in U.S. diplomacy was for sale to the highest bidder."
Donors who were granted time with Clinton included an internationally known economist who asked for her help as the Bangladesh government pressured him to resign from a nonprofit bank he ran; a Wall Street executive who sought Clinton's help with a visa problem and Estee Lauder executives who were listed as meeting with Clinton while her department worked with the firm's corporate charity to counter gender-based violence in South Africa.
Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said the AP story relied on "utterly flawed data," in a statment released Tuesday afternoon.
"It cherry-picked a limited subset of Secretary Clinton's schedule to give a distorted portrayal of how often she crossed paths with individuals connected to charitable donations to the Clinton Foundation.
"The data does not account for more than half of her tenure as Secretary. And it omits more than 1700 meetings she took with world leaders, let alone countless others she took with other U.S government officials, while serving as Secretary of State.
"Just taking the subset of meetings arbitrarily selected by the AP, it is outrageous to misrepresent Secretary Clinton's basis for meeting with these individuals. Melinda Gates is a world-renowned philanthropist whose foundation works to address global health crises and eradicate disease in the developing world. Meeting with someone like Melinda Gates is squarely in the purview of America's top diplomat, whose job involves confronting these same global challenges."
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said Tuesday night at a campaign rally in Austin, Texas that Clinton is "unfit to hold office."
"It is impossible to figure out where the Clinton Foundation ends and where the State Department begins," he told supporters. "Its clear the Clintons set up a business to profit off of public office, they sold specific actions by and for large amount of money."
The meetings between the Democratic presidential nominee and foundation donors do not appear to violate legal agreements Clinton and former president Bill Clinton signed before she joined the State Department in 2009. But the frequency of the overlaps shows the intermingling of access and donations, and fuels perceptions that giving the foundation money was a price of admission for face time with Clinton. Her calendars and emails released as recently as this week describe scores of contacts she and her top aides had with foundation donors.
The AP's findings represent the first systematic effort to calculate the scope of the intersecting interests of Clinton foundation donors and people who met personally with Clinton or spoke to her by phone about their needs.
The 154 did not include U.S. federal employees or foreign government representatives. Clinton met with representatives of at least 16 foreign governments that donated as much as $170 million to the Clinton charity, but they were not included in AP's calculations because such meetings would presumably have been part of her diplomatic duties.
The review presents an extraordinary proportion of visitors indicating her possible ethics challenges if elected president.
Last week, the Clinton Foundation moved to head off ethics concerns about future donations by announcing changes planned if Clinton is elected.
On Monday, Bill Clinton said in a statement that if his wife were to win, he would step down from the foundation's board and stop all fundraising for it. The foundation would also accept donations only from U.S. citizens and what it described as independent philanthropies, while no longer taking gifts from foreign groups, U.S. companies or corporate charities. Clinton said the foundation would no longer hold annual meetings of its international aid program, the Clinton Global Initiative, and it would spin off its foreign-based programs to other charities.
Those planned changes would not affect more than 6,000 donors who have already provided the Clinton charity with more than $2 billion in funding since its creation in 2000.
"There's a lot of potential conflicts and a lot of potential problems," Douglas White, an expert on nonprofits who previously directed Columbia University's graduate fundraising management program, told the AP. "The point is, she can't just walk away from these 6,000 donors."
Former senior White House ethics officials said a Clinton administration would have to take careful steps to ensure that past foundation donors would not have the same access as she allowed at the State Department.
"If Secretary Clinton puts the right people in and she's tough about it and has the right procedures in place and sends a message consistent with a strong commitment to ethics, it can be done," said Norman L. Eisen, who was President Obama's top ethics counsel and later worked for Clinton as ambassador to the Czech Republic.
Eisen, now a governance studies fellow at the Brookings Institution, said that at a minimum, Clinton should retain the Obama administration's current ethics commitments and oversight, which include lobbying restrictions and other rules. Richard Painter, a former ethics adviser to President George W. Bush and currently a University of Minnesota law school professor, said Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton should remove themselves completely from foundation leadership roles, but he added that potential conflicts would shadow any policy decision affecting past donors.
Some of Clinton's most influential visitors donated millions to the Clinton Foundation and to her and her husband's political coffers. They are among scores of Clinton visitors and phone contacts in her official calendar turned over by the State Department to AP last year and in more-detailed planning schedules that so far have covered about half her four-year tenure. The AP sought Clinton's calendar and schedules three years ago, but delays led the AP to sue the State Department last year in federal court for those materials and other records.
S. Daniel Abraham, whose name also was included in emails released by the State Department as part of another lawsuit, is a Clinton fundraising bundler who was listed in Clinton's planners for eight meetings with her at various times. A billionaire behind the Slim-Fast diet and founder of the Center for Middle East Peace, Abraham told the AP last year his talks with Clinton concerned Mideast issues.
Big Clinton Foundation donors with no history of political giving to the Clintons also met or talked by phone with Hillary Clinton and top aides, AP's review showed.
Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering low-interest "microcredit" for poor business owners, met with Clinton three times and talked with her by phone during a period when Bangladeshi government authorities investigated his oversight of a nonprofit bank and ultimately pressured him to resign from the bank's board. Throughout the process, he pleaded for help in messages routed to Clinton, and she ordered aides to find ways to assist him.
American affiliates of his nonprofit Grameen Bank had been working with the Clinton Foundation's Clinton Global Initiative programs as early as 2005, pledging millions of dollars in microloans for the poor. Grameen America, the bank's nonprofit U.S. flagship, which Yunus chairs, has given between $100,000 and $250,000 to the foundation -- a figure that bank spokeswoman Becky Asch said reflects the institution's annual fees to attend CGI meetings. Another Grameen arm chaired by Yunus, Grameen Research, has donated between $25,000 and $50,000.
As a U.S. senator from New York, Clinton, as well as then-Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry and two other senators in 2007 sponsored a bill to award a congressional gold medal to Yunus. He got one but not until 2010, a year after Obama awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Yunus first met with Clinton in Washington in April 2009. That was followed six months later by an announcement by USAID, the State Department's foreign aid arm, that it was partnering with the Grameen Foundation, a nonprofit charity run by Yunus, in a $162 million commitment to extend its microfinance concept abroad. USAID also began providing loans and grants to the Grameen Foundation, totaling $2.2 million over Clinton's tenure.
By September 2009, Yunus began complaining to Clinton's top aides about what he perceived as poor treatment by Bangladesh's government. His bank was accused of financial mismanagement of Norwegian government aid money -- a charge that Norway later dismissed as baseless. But Yunus told Melanne Verveer, a long-time Clinton aide who was an ambassador-at-large for global women's issues, that Bangladesh officials refused to meet with him and asked the State Department for help in pressing his case.
"Please see if the issues of Grameen Bank can be raised in a friendly way," he asked Verveer. Yunus sent "regards to H" and cited an upcoming Clinton Global Initiative event he planned to attend.
Clinton ordered an aide: "Give to EAP rep," referring the problem to the agency's top east Asia expert.
Yunus continued writing to Verveer as pressure mounted on his bank. In December 2010, responding to a news report that Bangladesh's prime minister was urging an investigation of Grameen Bank, Clinton told Verveer that she wanted to discuss the matter with her East Asia expert "ASAP."
Clinton called Yunus in March 2011 after the Bangladesh government opened an inquiry into his oversight of Grameen Bank. Yunus had told Verveer by email that "the situation does not allow me to leave the country." By mid-May, the Bangladesh government had forced Yunus to step down from the bank's board. Yunus sent Clinton a copy of his resignation letter. In a separate note to Verveer, Clinton wrote: "Sad indeed."
Clinton met with Yunus a second time in Washington in August 2011 and again in the Bangladesh capital of Dhaka in May 2012. Clinton's arrival in Bangladesh came after Bangladesh authorities moved to seize control of Grameen Bank's effort to find new leaders. Speaking to a town hall audience, Clinton warned the Bangladesh government that "we do not want to see any action taken that would in any way undermine or interfere in the operations of the Grameen Bank."
Grameen America's Asch referred other questions about Yunus to his office, but he had not responded by Tuesday.
Earlier this month, State Department spokeswoman Elizabeth Trudeau acknowledged that agency officials are "regularly in touch with a range of outside individuals and organizations, including nonprofits, NGOs, think tanks and others." But Trudeau said the State Department was not aware of any actions that were influenced by the Clinton Foundation.
In another case, Clinton was host at a September 2009 breakfast meeting at the New York Stock Exchange that listed Blackstone Group chairman Stephen Schwarzman as one of the attendees. Schwarzman's firm is a major Clinton Foundation donor, but he personally donates heavily to GOP candidates and causes. One day after the breakfast, according to Clinton emails, the State Department was working on a visa issue at Schwarzman's request. In December that same year, Schwarzman's wife, Christine, sat at Clinton's table during the Kennedy Center Honors. Clinton also introduced Schwarzman, then chairman of the Kennedy Center, before he spoke.
Blackstone donated between $250,000 and $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Eight Blackstone executives also gave between $375,000 and $800,000 to the foundation. And Blackstone's charitable arm has pledged millions of dollars in commitments to three Clinton Global aid projects ranging from the U.S. to the Mideast. Blackstone officials did not make Schwarzman available for comment.
Clinton also met in June 2011 with Nancy Mahon of the MAC AIDS, the charitable arm of MAC Cosmetics, which is owned by Estee Lauder. The meeting occurred before an announcement about a State Department partnership to raise money to finance AIDS education and prevention. The public-private partnership was formed to fight gender-based violence in South Africa, the State Department said at the time.
The MAC AIDS fund donated between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation. In 2008, Mahon and the MAC AIDS fund made a three-year unspecified commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative. That same year, the fund partnered with two other organizations to beef up a USAID program in Malawi and Ghana. And in 2011, the fund was one of eight organizations to pledge a total of $2 million over a three-year period to help girls in southern Africa. The fund has not made a commitment to CGI since 2011.
Estee Lauder executive Fabrizio Freda also met with Clinton at the same Wall Street event attended by Schwarzman. Later that month, Freda was on a list of attendees for a meeting between Clinton and a U.S.-China trade group. Estee Lauder has given between $100,000 and $250,000 to the Clinton Foundation. The company made a commitment to CGI in 2013 with four other organizations to help survivors of sexual slavery in Cambodia.
MAC AIDs officials did not make Mahon available to AP for comment.
When Clinton appeared before the U.S. Senate in early 2009 for her confirmation hearing as secretary of state, then- Sen. Richard Lugar, a Republican from Indiana, questioned her at length about the foundation and potential conflicts of interest. His concerns were focused on foreign government donations, mostly to CGI. Lugar wanted more transparency than was ultimately agreed upon between the foundation and Obama's transition team.
Now, Lugar hopes Hillary and Bill Clinton make a clean break from the foundation.
"The Clintons, as they approach the presidency, if they are successful, will have to work with their attorneys to make certain that rules of the road are drawn up to give confidence to them and the American public that there will not be favoritism," Lugar said.

Where's Hillary? Clinton off campaign trail as Trump seeks comeback


Hillary Clinton is riding a summer wave in the polls – yet the Democratic nominee has left the campaign trail in recent days to fundraise in America’s wealthiest enclaves, potentially giving rival Donald Trump the opening he needs as he works to regain his political footing.
While Trump was balancing his fundraising Tuesday with a public rally and a town hall in Texas, Clinton once again was courting donors. Her fundraiser at the Hollywood Hills home of movie stars Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel follows a weekend fundraising spree in Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard.
In the weeks following last month's Democratic National Convention, Clinton has made only a handful of public campaign stops -- and held one quasi-press conference.
Her most recent rally was almost a week ago, on Wednesday at a Cleveland high school, followed by a roundtable discussion the following day in New York with law enforcement officials.
Meanwhile, Trump has been essentially non-stop on the campaign trail, trying to re-ignite his White House bid and woo voters in battleground states like Florida, North Carolina and Virginia with his law-and-order message.
"Hillary Clinton is in hiding because she doesn't want to face voters or even the press,” Trump campaign spokesman Jason Miller said Tuesday. “Her scandal-plagued time at the State Department was an ethical disaster, not to mention a failure by allowing the rise of radical Islamic terrorism. With a track record like that, you'd be in hiding too."
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Strategists on both sides of the aisle seem to agree -- though for different reasons -- that the Democratic nominee’s limited campaign schedule is for now perhaps her best strategy.
“Every page of her playbook says avoid the public at every opportunity,” Republican strategist and Vox Global partner David Payne said Tuesday.
“It’s more choreographed than a Broadway musical, but without the fun. Warm, approachable -- Clinton doesn’t have those qualities. What she does have is message discipline, a dedicated staff and a disciplined campaign. So why should she do rallies or town halls?”  
Douglas Smith, a Democratic strategist and managing director at Kent Strategies, in Washington, D.C., disagrees with the idea that Clinton is missing opportunities.
"She has built a robust campaign that is using her in very strategic ways," he said. "They have all the resources they need for after Labor Day. They’re just going to let Donald Trump be Donald Trump. Nobody makes a better case for Hillary Clinton than him."
Right now, Clinton leads in most battleground state polls, and the RealClearPolitics average shows her with a roughly 5-point lead nationally.
But amid a string of politically damaging reports about the alleged overlap between her family foundation and tenure at the State Department, Republicans hope to use this opportunity to close that gap. As Trump shakes up his campaign leadership and aims for a reset, GOP party boss Reince Priebus reportedly predicted Tuesday the nominee could catch up with Clinton by Labor Day.
Clinton isn't entirely out of the public eye.
She appeared to use a Monday night appearance on ABC’s “Live with Jimmy Kimmel!” to respond to rumors about her health, dismissing the allegations as “wacky” and opening a jar of pickles to try to discredit critics.
While Clinton has been off the campaign trail for about a week, running mate Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine has been making almost daily stops in battleground states. Clinton’s next campaign event is scheduled for Thursday in Nevada, where her campaign says she’ll deliver a speech that will outline “The Dangers of Trump's Divisive ‘Alt-Right’ Candidacy.”
Clinton also has faced criticism for not hosting a full-blown press conference for roughly the past eight months.
The Washington Post and the Republican National Committee are each counting the number of days she has gone without what they consider a real press conference -- 262.
In early August, the former secretary of state took questions from reporters following a speech at a National Association of Black Journalists and National Association of Hispanic Journalists convention in Washington.
Some national news media and others complained that two of the five reporters who asked questions were also event moderators and that the other three were invited guests.
"Pretty sure she is standing at a podium taking questions on a broad range of topics from national print and TV reporters," Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon tweeted.

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