This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: “The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves”

  • More Evidence of Clintoon “Pay for Play”? Sure Looks Like It – Part II

    I’ve written about this subject before (and before, and before).  But it’s the “gift that keeps on giving”.

    Or perhaps that should read that it’s the “corruption that reeks to high heaven”.  Because at first glance, that’s exactly what it looks like.

    We know that Clintoon Foundation donors and/or executives appear to have gotten “preferred access” when it came to personal meetings with a certain SECSTATE between 2009 and early 2013.  But it seems that they may have gotten some other perks, too.

    In particular, it appears that one of those “other perks” in some cases may have been unwarranted diplomatic passports.  Unwarranted, as in “issued to private individuals who do not travel on diplomatic business for the United States”.

    And yeah:  as was the case with preferred access, it looks like Clintoon’s “protégé” Huma Abedin was involved hip-deep in this as well.

    Predictably, Clintoon’s        naive sycophants and/or paid “spin doctors”         supporters have sought to downplay this latest revelation.  They’ve claimed that some of those folks “were actually at times engaged in diplomatic efforts”.

    Yeah, right.  Sure they were.  Just like I’m the freaking King of Siam.

    The Daily Caller has a short article giving a few details; Fox News has a longer one giving more.  Both articles IMO are worthwhile – if disgusting – reading.

    You or I would be in jail by now.

  • “The exemptions or loopholes are happening in secret, and it appears that they favor Iran.”

    The title above is not a quote from some Trump campaign speech, or from some “Right wing” editorial.  Rather, it comes from David Albright.

    Albright’s president of the Institute for Science and International Security.  He’s a former UN weapons inspector.

    He’s also co-author of a report by his institute concerning the US-Iran nuclear agreement.  That report documents numerous “exemptions” the US and its partners granted to Iran so that Iran would not be in violation of the agreement on 16 January of this year.  That was the date at which the agreement required return of Iranian “assets” to begin.

    Or, in other words:  it had to happen so that we could      fund a $400 million cash blackmail payment for the return of some US citizens held hostage by Iran      begin returning Iranian assets frozen after the 1979 seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran.  And it was necessary not only for that, but so that afterwards we could       continue to give Iran money in the future they’ll use to fund their nuclear program      continue returning assets to Iran in the future.

    Funny, but I don’t recall hearing that Iran had returned our Embassy – or compensated the US for damages relating to its seizure.  But maybe I missed it.

    Reuters has a good article discussing this idiocy.  Since Reuters articles seem to have short on-line lifetimes, I’m also linking to a Fox News article which provides much the same info.

    Yeah, that Iranian nuclear agreement certainly seems to be a manifestly “good deal” – for Iran.  For the US and the rest of the West . . . not so much.

    Coming from this Administration that’s no surprise, though. Given their track record,       this bunch of clueless naive dolts        the current Administration seems so incompetent that I believe they could eff up a wet dream three times before breakfast.

  • The Clintoon “Private” Email Saga Continues . . . .

    Well, Clintoon’s “private” email is in the news again.

    Yeah, so what else is new?  Hell, I’ve written about it so many times now that a Google search of this site for the terms “Clintoon” and “email” turns up more than two pages of previous stories.

    In any case:  a few days ago I wrote that even more previously unreleased Clintoon email had been recovered recently by the FBI.  “Even more”, as in about 50% of the amount previously turned over by Clintoon’s lawyers.

    Supposedly, only non-work-related email wasn’t returned by Clintoon’s lawyers to the State Department 2 years ago.  You know, stuff about yoga, recipes, vacation plans and the like.  But rather obviously that claim now . . . seems suspect.  Highly suspect.

    Anyone wanna guess what I’m about to tell you today?

    Well, that’s actually a trick question; today you might well be wrong if you guessed.  No, there hasn’t been yet another batch of Clintoon “private” email located or recovered.

    However, it seems that some of the newly-recovered emails appear . . . interesting. Some of these new emails appear to be from mid-September 2012.  And among the new stuff around 30 emails – including some from mid-September 2012 – appear to concern something called “Benghazi”.

    Yeah, that Benghazi.  The same Benghazi where 4 Americans died while the Federal government sat around for hours with its thumb firmly inserted, doing nothing.

    I somehow just don’t think the Clintoons were planning a North African yoga vacation or discussing a local restaurant serving “Benghazi couscous” in those mid-September 2012 emails.  And of course all of those newly recovered emails that weren’t previously turned over were deleted “by accident” – not to cover up anything.

    Oh, and it also appears that Clintoon continued to send and/or receive classified email at that “private” account months after she left the State Department.

    Damn.  You or I would be in jail by now.

     

  • Want to See “Single-Payer” Healthcare In Action? Read This.

    Linked story pretty much says it all. You might want to grab a tissue (and a dose of high-blood pressure medicine, if you think you might need it) before reading the link, though.

    ‘This is the saddest photo I have ever taken,’
    woman says of grandparents forced to live apart
     

    A real-world variant of the “golden rule” is operative here: “He who pays the gold makes the rules.” And in Canada, the folks running Canada’s      Socialized      single payer medicine pay the gold – and make these kinds of rules.

    Of course, under US “single payer” medicine it will be an agency of the Federal government effectively making those decisions – just like in Canada. That’s the same folks that have brought us those “wonderful examples of common sense, simplicity, and bureaucratic flexibility” called the IRS, the EPA, the BLM, and HHS.

    But remember: “single payer” will fix American healthcare’s “problems”.

    Just like it has in Canada.

  • More Evidence of Clintoon “Pay-for-Play”? Sure Looks Like It.

    I’ve written before about the Clintoon Foundation’s “interesting” financial dealings.  In fact, I’ve observed – on more than one occasion – that appearances indicate there could well be a “pay for play” component to the Clintoon Foundation’s dealings while Clintoon was SECSTATE.

    Well the news today to me seems, as Alice said in Wonderland might have put it, “Curioser and curioser”.

    While Clintoon was SECSTATE, it turns out her chief-of-staff Cheryl Mills was in reasonably frequent contact with top executives at the Clintoon Foundaton.  “Reasonably frequent” here translates to 148 phone messages for Mills from senior Clintoon Foundation executives over a 2 –year period (2010-2012).  State Department phone logs show that no other private individual or concern came anywhere close in terms of the number of contacts with Mills over this period.

    Further, regarding Mills there’s also this:

    Last week, the State Department acknowledged that in June 2012, Mills spent two days traveling to New York to interview job applicants at the foundation. The State Department said Mills “volunteered” to do so, but neither the department nor a spokesman for the Clinton presidential campaign, nor Mills’s attorney, would say whether Mills used annual leave or unpaid days to perform that work – or whether it was done on the taxpayers’ time.

    If that was done while Mills was “on the clock” as a Federal employee, that means it was done on taxpayer’s nickle.  If so, yeah – IMO that’s a serious problem on multiple levels.  Ditto if taxpayers funded Mills’ travel.

    Moreover, some additional and previously unreleased email involving Clintoon confidante and protégé Huma Abedin has also come to light.  What it contains is similarly quite disturbing.

    Specifically, the public interest group Judicial Watch obtained a number of Abedin’s emails recently.  Collectively, these emails show a pattern of high-dollar donors to the Clintoon Foundation receiving expedited access to the SECSTATE.  Abedin appears to have been instrumental in coordinating that expedited access.

    . . . the messages show Clinton aide Huma Abedin “provided influential Clinton Foundation donors special, expedited access to the secretary of state.” The documents include exchanges not previously turned over to the State Department.

    You can view the 725 pages of Abedin email recently released by Judicial Watch here if you like.

    IMO, that’s disturbing as hell.  It appears to bolster the theory that Clintoon was engaging in “quid quo pro” trading of official influence (as SECSTATE) for contributions to the Clintoon foundation.

    And that’s not all, either.  It appears a total of over 150 non-government officials representing private concerns met with Clintoon while she was SECSTATE.  The exact number appears to have been 154.

    So, how many of those private individuals have perchance “donated” to the Clintoon Foundation?  Glad you asked.

    Of those 154 private individuals, 85 – or over 55% of those individuals representing private concerns – also “dontated” to the Clintoon Foundation.  At least 40 of those individuals – or nearly 26% –“donated” in excess of $100k.  And 20 of them – or roughly 13% – “dontated” $1M or more.

    That makes the lower limit for those “dontations” somewhere north of $22M.  It’s estimated that the total “dontated” could be over $150M.

    One extreme case was that of the the Crown Prince of Bahrain, who had previously contributed $32M to the Clintoon Foundation for a “scholarship fund”.  That individual was given virtually immediate access to Clintoon in terms of getting a personal meeting with her after contacting Abedin.

    After seeing all of that, well, it’s kinda hard to avoid the conclusion that there’s a damn good chance that “pay for play” is indeed exactly what was going on.  Circumstantial?  Yeah, it is. But here, the circumstances seem persuasive as hell.

    Even so, Clintoon has her       weak-minded sycophants incapable of facing ugly reality      defenders.     Predictably, both Clintoon and her defenders say that occurrences such as these are “coincidental”.

    Yeah, right.  And Al Capone was just a savvy businessman in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s, too.

    Clintoon and her cronies might want to remember one thing, though.  Capone didn’t go to jail for racketeering.

    He ended up in prison because investigators “followed the money”.

     

    (Edited to Add:  here’s an article from Yahoo News giving more details.  I don’t recommend you read it immediately after eating.)

     

    Author’s Note:  new or occasional readers may notice the spelling “Clintoon” and assume that is a typographical error.  It is not.  That is intentional.

    In behavior, both famous Clintoons are IMO exemplars of the stereotypical corrupt politician – and are such compelling exemplars that they appear to be near-cartoonish representations of same.  (However, though each is IMO thoroughly corrupted they do appear to be corrupted in different ways.)  Thus, referring to them as “Clintoons” simply seems apropos.

  • More Clintoon “Private” Email Surfaces

    Remember those roughly 30,000 work-related emails on Clintoon’s unsecured private email server?  You know, the ones that were turned over to State for review by Clintoon’s lawyers in 2014?   The batch of emails turned over by Clintoon’s lawyers was supposed to consist of “all of them” – right?

    Well, it turns out that 2014 bunch wasn’t exactly “all of them”.  Rather, it turns out that that first batch of 30,000 was only about 2/3 of the total.

    State Department lawyers confirmed recently that the FBI has uncovered another nearly 15,000 emails sent by or to Clintoon at that “private” address while she was SECSTATE.  This new batch of emails wasn’t previously disclosed.  And they haven’t yet been reviewed.

    State is currently “prioritizing” the appraisal of this new batch of email to see what can be released to the public.

    This story at The Hill has more details.  It’s worth a read.

    Sheesh.  If you or I had pulled this stunt, we’d be in jail awaiting trial.  And we’d have been there for months already.

  • Clintoon: “Colin Told Me to Do It.” Powell: “Um, No I Didn’t.”

    Readers by now have probably heard about Clintoon’s claim – in a soon-to-be-published book – that former SECSTATE Colin Powell recommended to her that she use private email for everything except classified communications.

    Well, it seems that there’s a bit of a difference of opinion on that point.

    In the book, Clintoon apparently claims Powell and she had a conversation concerning the matter in which he told her to use private email for unclassified matters.  However, Powell flatly states that he doesn’t recall any such conversation.

    And while Powell did in fact send Clintoon a memo describing how he used email while SECSTATE, that memo was apparently sent to Clintoon over a year after she took office.  She started using private email shortly after taking office as SECSTATE.

    Hmm.  A Clintoon making statements that on investigation turn out not to be true.

    Figures.  Simply more Clintoon “business as usual”.

  • Yeah, It Was Ransom. The State Department Now Admits It.

    Something curious happened last week, on Thursday.

    Asked by a reporter if the U.S. wouldn’t have paid the money until the prisoners were released, State Department spokesman John Kirby replied, “That’s correct.”

    Hmm.  From Merriam-Webster

    ransom:  a consideration paid or demanded for the release of someone or something from captivity

    Seems pretty clear to me that the US State Department has now contradicted the POTUS’s (and its own) prior public statements regarding the Iran payment.  Above, State now plainly admits that the USA paid ransom to Iran for the return of some of our citizens.  Previously, the “party line” was that the timing was “a coincidence”.

    “Coincidence?”  Yeah, right.  The payment was ransom, plain and simple.  Anyone with half a functional brain could see that.

    The media’s reaction to this admission has also been interesting.  While in a rare display of responsible journalism the New York Times apparently gave this story the Page 1 treatment it deserves, some       pernicious “Progressive” propaganda purveyors      mainstream media outlets did not.  The Washington Post and USA Today each chose to bury the story deep inside their respective Friday editions.

    But the fact that at least some of the media would try to bury this isn’t surprising, either.  Most of the US media has been de facto cheerleaders for the political left for virtually my entire life.

    The only surprising parts of this disgusting incident are that this “most transparent administration in history” actually admitted the sordid truth here – and that at least some of the media didn’t try to hide that fact.