Showing posts with label 2012. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2012. Show all posts

Friday, September 4, 2015

Longtime Clinton aide grilled by House committee on Benghazi

Longtime Clinton aide grilled by House committee on Benghazi
WASHINGTON — Long­time Hillary Rodham Clinton aide Cheryl Mills was grilled for hours Thursday by a House committee — a day after a former Clinton staffer said he would invoke his Fifth Amendment rights to avoid giving testimony.
Mills’ appearance followed the release last week of 7,000 pages of ­emails from Clinton’s private server — including many to and from Mills that were heavily redacted.
The appearance by Mills, who testified behind closed doors before the House committee investigating the 2012 Benghazi attack, came after it was revealed that former Clinton tech expert Byran Pagliano would refuse to answer committee questions.
That created another political embarrassment for Clinton, who “has made ­every effort to answer questions and be as helpful as possible, and has encouraged her aides . . . to do the same, including Bryan Pagliano,” said campaign spokesman Nick Merrill.
Pagliano isn’t just any staffer. He was responsible for Clinton’s private server during her 2008 presidential campaign, and followed her to the State Department as a “special ­adviser.”

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

The Democrats: Too Old and Too White?

Leftwingers’ taunts in 2008 and 2012 have come back to haunt them. 


In the jubilation of the Obama election victories of 2008 and 2012, the Left warned Republicans that the party of McCain and Romney was now “too old, too white, too male — and too few.” Columnists between 2008 and 2012 ad nauseam berated Republicans on the grounds that their national candidates “no longer looked like America.” The New York Times stable crowed that the Republicans of 2008 were “all white and nearly all male” — not too long before McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running-mate. In reaction to the defeats of McCain and Romney, Salon and Harper’s ran stories on the “Grand Old White Party” and “Angry White Men.”

For Democratic progressives, Hawaiian Barack Obama could not be of mixed ancestry and decidedly middle class, but simply “black” or “African American” — as if he had shared the Jim Crow experience of Clarence Thomas. Nor was there any allowance that race itself had become hard to sort into neat categories in a nation of immigration, intermarriage, and assimilation, in which millions of Americans were one-half this and one-quarter that. Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King proved that well enough by successfully constructing themselves as white for quite a long time. 



Liberals had reversed the vision of Martin Luther King Jr.: The color of our skin, not the content of our character, is what matters. Superficial appearance, the ossified politics of the tribe — the curse of the world outside the United States, where corpses have piled up in the Balkans, Rwanda, and Iraq — alone mattered. Identity politics dictated that a shrinking white insular conservative party lacked the Democrats’ “inclusiveness” and “commitment to diversity.” Icons like Barack Obama were what mattered.



Saturday, July 11, 2015

The Democrats Turn Left

Between the 2010 midterms and President Obama’s re-election in 2012, the conventional understanding of political polarization was that Republicans had shifted sharply to the right, while Democrats had remained essentially where they were, or maybe edged ever-so-slightly leftward. The argument that polarization is largely a Republican-driven phenomenon—that the two poles are drifting apart, but that the red pole is moving much faster than the blue one—looked weaker after the 2012 election, when Obama came out swinging for an ambitious liberal agenda in his inaugural address. Now, as the 2016 election gets underway, this narrative will likely need to be scrapped entirely. The New York Times recently reported on the Democratic Party’s leftward lurch, and how frontrunner Hillary Clinton is adapting to it:
Nearly 20 years after President Bill Clinton declared that “the era of big government is over,” Hillary Rodham Clinton is proposing muscular federal policies that would require hundreds of billions of dollars in new spending and markedly expand Washington’s influence in a host of areas, from universal prekindergarten to Alzheimer’s disease research…
Against the sweep of Democratic Party history, Mrs. Clinton’s proposals reflect a decided return to vibrant liberalism.
The government programs of Franklin D. Roosevelt – whose presidency Mrs. Clinton regularly invokes – and Lyndon B. Johnson aimed to transform the lives of poor and elderly Americans with jobs, health care, and retirement benefits. But the consecutive electoral losses of Jimmy Carter, Walter F. Mondale, and Michael S. Dukakis in the 1980s – as well as President Ronald Reagan’s framing of government as “the problem” – gave rise to centrist Democrats like Bill Clinton who envisioned federal programs as safety nets rather than solutions to every social ill.
During the 2012 election, Barack Obama memorably attacked the Republicans’ rightward shift, saying that Ronald Reagan could not win a modern Republican presidential nomination. That may be true, but it’s also true that Bill Clinton could not win a modern Democratic presidential nomination—as evidenced by the fact that Hillary Clinton has had to renounce the majority of her husband’s positions in order to be competitive.
This left-populist resurgence comes even as the nation might be poised to drift rightward, for two reasons. The big challenge—and opportunity—facing America today is the decline of the postwar welfare and managerial state beginning in the 1970s (what we call the “blue model”). The Democratic party’s orthodox response to this trend is to try to shore up what’s left of that model, and rebuild some of what’s been lost. But as Walter Russell Mead has documented at length, the blue decline traces, at least in part, to economic and demographic factors like globalization, technological change, and the aging of the population that simply can’t be put back in the genie’s bottle
Via: The American Interest
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Friday, July 3, 2015

Is the Clinton Email Coverup Unraveling?


Federal investigators may be closer to seizing former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s illicit off-site email server as evidence emerges that she transmitted classified information through it and that key Obama White House officials knew about her clandestine email account for years.

On Tuesday the Department of State made available on its website 3,000 pages of Clinton’s emails. Clinton emphatically declared months ago that none of the thousands of emails she sent using her hacker-friendly dedicated server contained classified information.

As it turns out the State Department had to redact 25 of the newly unveiled emails because they contained the very same classified information Hillary said she didn’t send. This is but a fraction of the 55,000 pages of email the former secretary of state gave to the diplomatic agency for processing. Under federal court order, the State Department is conducting monthly Clinton document dumps after screening and redacting the emails.

Clinton has admitted that tens of thousands of the emails she sent that happened to be U.S. government property were deleted. Emails were scrubbed while subject to a subpoena from the House Select Committee that is investigating the terrorist attack on a U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, that took place on Sept. 11, 2012.

Around the time of the attack Clinton scapegoated the innocent director of an anti-Islam movie trailer that almost nobody had seen. She claimed back then that the sophisticated military-style operation materialized spontaneously from an angry mob of protesters gathered outside the facility which was in Islamist-held territory. The Benghazi coverup the Obama administration engineered to get President Obama safely reelected in November 2012 has been gradually falling apart.

This new revelation that classified information went out into cyberspace by way of Clinton’s laughably insecure server clears the way for the U.S. government to seize the machine itself, theWashington Times reports.







Saturday, June 6, 2015

Benghazi Panel to Hear from Clinton Friend Blumenthal in Private Testimony

Long-time Hillary Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal is set to be interviewed on June 16 by the House committee investigating the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya. 

The committee, in announcing Blumenthal's appearance Friday, said his deposition will be conducted in a closed session. The media will be barred from coverage.

Blumenthal has become a focus of the House Select Committee on Benghazi since revelations he has been sending Clinton what she called "unsolicited" memos about Libya, where he was trying to arrange business deal, while she was secretary of state.
Latest News Update
Those briefings included early suggestions that terrorists were responsible for the 2012 Benghazi attacks in which U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens was killed.

Blumenthal had also been employed by the Clinton Foundation full-time from 2009 to 2013, at which point he became a consultant for the organization, which was founded by Clinton's husband, former President Bill Clinton.

Democrats have accused the House committee, chaired by Republican Trey Gowdy of South Carolina, of stringing out its investigation of the Benghazi attacks to undercut Hillary Clinton's campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.


Via: NewsMax


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Thursday, June 4, 2015

[VIDEO] Perry announces presidential run

The 2016 election will be one in which “voters will look past what you say to what you’ve done,” Rick Perry says in a new video on his website. The former four-term governor of Texas will put that to the test, as he announced on his website overnight that he will run for the Republican presidential nomination — again. Later today, Perry will make a public announcement in Addison, Texas:
Rick Perry, the former Texas governor whose 2012 campaign for the White House turned into a political disaster that humbled and weakened the most powerful Republican in the state, announced Thursday that he will run for president again in 2016.
Mr. Perry is the latest candidate to officially enter a crowded field of Republican presidential contenders, declared and undeclared, several of whom have Texas ties and have overshadowed him in recent months, including Senator Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush, the brother of former President George W. Bush, Mr. Perry’s predecessor in the governor’s mansion.
Mr. Perry made the announcement on his website and planned a speech later in the day at a small municipal airport here in Addison, a northern suburb of downtown Dallas.
In promoting his political plans, Mr. Perry has cited his 14-year tenure as governor of the nation’s second-most-populous state and a vibrant Texas economy he has called “the envy of the nation.” As he has often pointed out, Texas added 1.8 million private-sector jobs on his watch, from January 2001 to October 2014, although his critics — and some economists — say he is taking too much credit for macro-economic forces, including an oil boom, beyond his control during that time.
Well, Perry had to be doing something right. It wasn’t just a coincidence that a third of all new jobs after the recession came in Texas, and the oil boom was not just a Texas phenomenon. The “macro-economic forces” over the years since the Great Recession have actually been a lot less than phenomenal, so the growth in Texas is remarkable on any level, and Perry was the man at the top during the entire time.
The biography video uploaded last night to the channel tells the campaign story Perry wants: a military veteran, a successful governor, and a man who connects with both the grassroots and the establishment to bring unity to the GOP. The flip side of this story is that all this was true in 2012, and the nomination could have been Perry’s for the taking except for the implosion during the primary. The campaign isn’t running away from that debacle, and they’ve wisely chosen Anita Perry as their point person for confronting it head-on:
“Rick is absolutely the guy that you want to have a beer with, but he’s so much more than that. He’s prepared now,” Anita said. “I want people to really give him a second look.”
Rick kicked off his first presidential bid in 2011 with six weeks of preparation, and he vaulted to the top of the polls. Things quickly unraveled.
He hadn’t fully recovered from an elective back surgery, was in pain and didn’t get much sleep. As a result, he couldn’t campaign as aggressively as he wanted to. He made errors like the infamous “oops” moment on the debate stage when he forgot one of the government agencies he wanted to eliminate.
“He will tell you he was arrogant at that time,” Anita said. A former nurse, both she and her husband underestimated how severely his back surgery would impact him. “I had a health care background. I should’ve realized he wasn’t ready and prepared health-wise, but I didn’t,” she said.
Via: Hot Air

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Sunday, May 31, 2015

Todd Starnes: Feds Want You to Eat Healthier S’Mores

By Todd Starnes, Fox Nation
I have disturbing news to share with you from your federal government. The USDA wants Americans to remove chocolate and marshmallows and fire from our summertime s’mores. Instead, the USDA is suggesting we load up the graham crackers with strawberries and low-fat yogurt.
That's not a s'more. That's a fruit salad with an oversized graham cracker crouton.
Over the past six years the Obama administration has waged a War of Culinary Aggression against lard-loving Americans, banning cupcakes and Ho-Hos, cheeseburgers and Cheetos. Remember back in 2012 when Mrs. Obama served cabbage sloppy?
Last year, the US Forest Service tried to convince us that S'mores would taste better if we replaced the chocolate with banana chunks and the graham crackers with angel food cake. It's culinary heresy!
And yet, according to Gallup, Americans are fatter than ever before -27 percent of the population. An all-time high.
When President Obama said he wanted to fundamentally transform the nation, is this what he had in mind? What kind of dystopian society have we become where a red-blooded American cannot enjoy a graham cracker smothered in milk chocolate and topped with a slightly charred marshmallow?
Friends, the federal government is breaking a cardinal rule. You don’t tinker with the Big Mac’s special sauce. You don't add a twelfth herb to the Colonel's secret recipe. And you certainly do not take the chocolate or the marshmallow out of a s’more.

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

DNC Chairwoman: Benghazi Committee ‘Political Ploy’

DNC Chairwoman: Benghazi Committee Political PloyDemocratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz on Wednesday accused House Republicans of creating a select investigative committee on the 2012 attacks in Benghazi, Libya, solely to motivate their base to turn out in the November midterm elections.
“Let’s call this what it is — it is nothing more than a political ploy because continuing to focus obsessively on repealing the Affordable Care Act has lost its luster, even among their own party members,” the Florida lawmaker said at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.
Republicans selected Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., to lead the committee and gave their party seven slots on the 12-member panel, to just five for Democrats. House Democratic leaders sent a letter to Speaker John A. Boehner Tuesday night urging him to reconsider the committee’s partisan split.
Wasserman Schultz said she agrees with the request from Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Minority Whip Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md., and believes they “should seriously consider not participating if the process is not going to be fair.”
If House Republicans “want to ensure that the investigation — which, like I said, I believe is really just an election-year turnout operation for their base — if they want to make sure it’s fair, there is no reason to reject the leader’s request to have the committee be evenly split.”
In response, Republican National Committee spokeswoman Kirsten Kukowski said, “Republicans want answers from a White House that spent more time politicizing this issue than trying to figure out how Americans died.”
The chairwoman pointed to the special election in Florida’s 13th District — which in the immediate aftermath served as a red flag for Democrats already concerned about turnout in November — as an example of the GOP’s own turnout issues, saying Republicans should have “run away” with the open-seat race.
Despite polling showing a challenging climate for Democrats, she said the party is headed for a successful midterm cycle, particularly when looking at the races individually, rather than at a macro level.
“We’re looking forward to the midterms,” Wasserman Schultz said, citing some gubernatorial opportunities in Pennsylvania, Florida and Maine. “We have opportunities in the Senate in Georgia and Kentucky, and keep a close eye on Mississippi. When it comes to our incumbent senators, the Republicans and pundits are pointing some of the vulnerable incumbents — these are challenging races, but we have incumbent members who have their finger on the pulse of their constituencies, know the people that they represent, and I think we’ll be successful in November.”

Monday, December 23, 2013

[VIDEO] George Will: Obama would be better off today if Supreme Court voted down Obamacare


George Will said Sunday that President Obama would be in a better position today if the Supreme Court ruled his health care law was unconstitutional in 2012.
“By now it seems to me fair to say three things,” Will said on “Fox News Sunday,” speaking of the implementation of the president’s health care law. “First: If he told the truth about the law — about keeping your doctor and your health care — he probably wouldn’t have been elected in 2012. Second: He’d  be better off today if in 2012 the chief justice had voted the other way and [the Supreme Court] had struck down the law. It wouldn’t be such a burden on this presidency.”
“But beyond that, we’ve now added to incompetence and dishonesty, naked unfairness,” Will continued. “When he says, ‘if you had health insurance and it was canceled, you’re preferred. If you didn’t have health insurance you could still be punished by the government for not getting it.’ People just think it’s … unfair.”
Via: Daily Caller

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Wednesday, November 20, 2013

I TOLD YOU SO: OBAMA REALLY STOLE THE ELECTION

I Told You So: Obama Really Stole the ElectionI don’t mean to say, “I told you so”…But I told you so.
In October of 2012, just before the election, we heard miraculous unemployment reports that made it sound like the economy was turning around. Hundreds of thousands of jobs were supposedly created. Happy days were here again. “Bravo Obama,” said the adoring mainstream media. It was the biggest one month jobs increase ever.
But I smelled a rat. I warned again and again in the media that “the books were cooked.” I screamed this was pure fraud and the voters were being scammed. I accused Obama and his friends in the government employees union of fixing the election. Democrats and the mainstream media (I know, I repeat myself) called those charges “preposterous.” They said it was impossible to fake jobs reports.
Surprise, surprise, guess who was right? It turns out government employees faked the jobs reports to re-elect Obama. They wanted the man who protects their bloated salaries, obscene pensions, and corrupt unions, to be re-elected. They would stop at nothing to keep the gravy train rolling, so they made up reports about job increases out of thin air. 
The entire election was pure fraud. Based on fantasy. Americans walked into the voting booths hearing fresh news that indicated the economy was improving and jobs were dramatically increasing. It was all fake. The numbers were made up out of thin air by pro-Obama government employees. The voters of America made their final decisions based on pure fraud.
Worse this fraud endangered our entire economy. The Federal Reserve bases billion dollar decisions, like interest rate hikes and quantitative easing, on jobs reports. If those job increases don’t actually exist, the Fed is moving in the wrong direction. Crimes were committed that falsely elected a President and could cause billion dollar damages for years to come to the U.S. economy.
But wait, that’s only the latest reported fraud that stole the election. 
Via: The Blaze
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Thursday, November 14, 2013

Shock report: Liberal groups spent more on state elections in 2012 than conservatives

Shock report: Liberal groups spent more on state elections in 2012 than conservativesDo you think the Koch brothers and other super-rich conservatives are the ones spending more money than anyone else to influence elections in states across the country?
You’re wrong.
A new study by a non-profit investigative journalism outfit says unions and liberal groups are actually the ones dumping the most dough into elections through third party groups.
The nonprofit Center for Public Integrity — funded in part by the liberal billionaire George Soros — did an analysis of spending since the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision. That case opened up the ability of outside groups to spend freely on elections.
What the report found: in 2012, outside nonprofits and super PACs spent at least $209 million on state elections, but pro-Democratic Party groups outspent their Republican counterpoints by about $8 million.
The authors use last year’s gubernatorial election in New Hampshire to show how such spending from liberal groups have won races. Republican candidate Ovide Lamontagne had much more in the campaign coffers than Democrat Maggie Hassan. But the report points out that the groups with union ties spent nearly $7 million and national unions spent $2 million directly in support of Hassan, who went on to win the race.
“Hassan was propped up and carried to victory by the outside groups,” Fergus Cullen, a GOP operative, told the authors.

Friday, November 8, 2013

'Time' Cover Calls Christie 'Elephant in the Room'

Image: 'Time' Cover Calls Christie 'Elephant in the Room'
Time magazine slapped landslide re-election victor Chris Christie on its Nov. 18 cover with the headline "The Elephant in the Room" below an outsize silhouette of Christie's profile — and a package of stories that question whether he is the savior of the Republican Party.

The Star Ledger, which got a sneak-peak of the issue that is available Friday, said New Jersey Gov. Christie's pal, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, writes about "What the party needs," comparing Christie to GOP icon Ronald Reagan and Garden State hero Bruce Springsteen.

"For a pro-life conservative running in a deep blue state, it was a performance every bit as dominant as the Boss ripping through a live version of 'Rosalita,'" Scarborough writes of Christie's commanding election win, according to Yahoo News

"And like Springsteen himself, Christie made it all look easy."

In two other articles in the package, the Ledger reported, White House correspondent Michael Scherer explains "How Chris Christie can win over the GOP, " while Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, authors of the new book "Double Down: Game Change 2012," lay out "What his rivals will use against him." 

The "Elephant in the Room" cover line is a not-so-veiled reference not only to Christie's party, but to his girth, Yahoo News points out. In "Double Down," the writers revealed that 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney passed on picking Christie as a VP running mate in part because of his weight. Since then, Christie has taken steps to shed pounds, undergoing lap-band surgery in February. On Tuesday, he told The New York Times he's more than halfway to meeting his weight-loss goal. 

Via: Newsmax


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Thursday, October 24, 2013

Obama rallies immigration advocates for 2014 race

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s speech urging passage of a bill to increase immigration quickly turned into a rally for the 2014 midterm elections, and also for Vice President Joe Biden’s potential 2016 bid.
“It’s up to Republicans in the House to decide whether reform becomes a reality or not,” he insisted, before a bank of cameras for Spanish-language TV stations that reach Latino voters.
“We’ve got the time to do it. … Keep putting the pressure on all of us to get this done,” he declared in the East Room speech.
He dismissed numerous media reports about growing GOP opposition to any immigration-related negotiations with Obama. ”The press will declare something dead, [that] ‘It’s not going to happen,’ but that can be overcome,” he said.
He quickly moved into campaign mode. “I want you to keep working, and I’m going to be right next to you to make sure we get immigration reform done,” Obama declared, while almost shouting in the same style he used during the final stages of the 2012 campaign.
In June 2012, Obama boosted his re-election campaign by unilaterally approving a mini-amnesty for younger immigrants. Today’s rally was broadcast to Latino audiences, eve as much of the media was focused a congressional hearing into the crippled rollout of Obamacare.
Throughout Obama’s rally,  Biden stood beside him. The vice president’s participation may be a bid to win progressive votes during the 2016 Democratic nomination process.
To his mostly Latino audience, Obama called for passage of the Senate’s immigration bill, which would bring in one new working-age immigrant and one new guest worker for every two Americans who turn 18. Overall, the bill passed by the Senate in June would provide green cards to 33 million immigrants over the next 10 years.
Via: The Daily Caller

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Tuesday, October 22, 2013

The Democratic Disasters to Come

The defunding wars are over. The accusations are fading. We are back to reality. Of course, America’s long-term prospects, at least in comparison with other countries’ futures — whether in terms of demography, military power, food-production, constitutional stability, energy sources, or higher education — are bright.
But short term, we are walking over landmines that threaten to blow up the normal way of doing business, and pose far more harm for Democrats than for Republicans.
Zero Interest
The real story about the debt is that by the end of Obama’s eight years, he will have matched the borrowing of all previous presidents combined.  Yet incredibly, the present huge sum of $17 trillion in debt is serviced at the same cost that we paid over 15 years ago. Such free use of money without raging inflation is almost historically unprecedented — and it won’t last.
Indeed, we are paying today about the same amount in aggregate annual interest payments, in non-inflation-adjusted dollars no less, as in 1997 — even though the 2012 figure of $17 trillion in debt is about three times larger than it was a decade-and-a-half ago. That anomaly is possible only because today’s interest rate of about 2.2% is only a third of what it was back then.
If interest ever returned to 1997 levels, at say 6.6%, we’d be paying over a trillion dollars a year in debt service. In crude terms, the winners of this Ponzi scheme are the very wealthy connected to Wall Street, which is flooded with foreign and domestic capital. It need not do much of anything more than outperform a pathetic 1% return on savings accounts.
The poor benefit from the vast increase in federal spending and exemption from federal income taxes. In contrast, the middle class still pays high interest on its student loans, credit card, and, to a lesser extent, car debt, receives almost no interest on its meager savings accounts, and is not so ready, after 2008, to dabble in real estate and the stock market.
In some sense, holders of U.S. Treasury debt and passbook savers are giving up hundreds of billions of dollars in interest returns (cf. the difference, say, between 1% and a more normal 5%) to subsidize the redistributive policies of the federal government.
The lack of interest, or de facto negative interest, keeps the near-retired working and hampers job prospects of the young; discourages thrift, savings and investment; and plays an underappreciated role in the slow economic recovery. The Democrats must deal with the contradiction of needing zero interest rates to service their recent extra $6 trillion in debt, and higher interest to encourage savings, investment, and job growth.

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