Random Politics & Religion #00

In 2008, Hillary Clinton promised Barack Obama, the president-elect, there would be no mystery about who was giving money to her family's globe-circling charities. She made a pledge to publish all the donors on an annual basis to ease concerns that as secretary of state she could be vulnerable to accusations of foreign influence.

At the outset, the Clinton Foundation did indeed publish what they said was a complete list of the names of more than 200,000 donors and has continued to update it. But in a breach of the pledge, the charity's flagship health program, which spends more than all of the other foundation initiatives put together, stopped making the annual disclosure in 2010, Reuters has found.

In response to questions from Reuters, officials at the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) and the foundation confirmed no complete list of donors to the Clintons' charities has been published since 2010. CHAI was spun off as a separate legal entity that year, but the officials acknowledged it still remains subject to the same disclosure agreement as the foundation.

The finding could renew scrutiny of Clinton's promises of transparency as she prepares to launch her widely expected bid for the White House in the coming weeks. Political opponents and transparency groups have criticized her in recent weeks for her decision first to use a private email address while she was secretary of state and then to delete thousands of emails she labeled private.

CHAI, which is best known for helping to reduce the cost of drugs for people with HIV in the developing world, published a partial donor list for the first time only this year.

CHAI should have published the names during 2010-2013, when Clinton was in office, CHAI spokeswoman Maura Daley acknowledged this week. "Not doing so was an oversight which we made up for this year," she told Reuters in an email when asked why it had not published any donor lists until a few weeks ago.

A spokesman for Hillary Clinton declined to comment. Former President Bill Clinton, who also signed on to the agreement with the Obama administration, was traveling and could not be reached for comment, his spokesman said.

STATE DEPARTMENT REVIEW

The Reuters inquiries also raised questions about a second assurance Hillary Clinton made to the Obama administration: that the State Department would be able to review any new or increased contributions to CHAI by foreign governments while she served as the nation's top diplomat. The Clintons said the pledge was intended to defuse accusations that foreign governments might use such donations to earn favors.

By the time Clinton left office in February 2013, the charity had received millions of dollars (Graphic: reut.rs/1Lvua8z) in new or increased payments from at least seven foreign governments. Five of the governments came on board during her tenure as secretary of state while two doubled or tripled their support in that time, according to data provided by CHAI spokeswoman Daley.

The State Department said it was unable to cite any instances of its officials reviewing or approving new money from any foreign governments. Daley confirmed that none of the seven government donations had been submitted to the State Department for review.

One instance was an admitted oversight, Daley said: CHAI should have told the State Department before accepting donations totaling $340,000 from Switzerland's Agency for Development and Cooperation in 2011 and 2012. However, it did not believe U.S. authorities needed to review the other six governments, including Britain and Australia, she said, citing various reasons.

Hillary Clinton told the Senate during her confirmation hearing in January, 2009, that the disclosures she and her husband agreed to were "very unprecedented."

At that time, she did not dispute the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's concerns that utter transparency was necessary to protect the integrity of the United States' diplomacy and foreign policy.

BRITAIN, AUSTRALIA BOOSTED DONATIONS Since it was published in 2008, the foundation's online donor list has been updated annually, naming everyone from individuals giving a few dollars to governments awarding eight-figure grants, the foundation said. It has been pored over by interest groups, the Clintons' political opponents, and the media.

The foundation list has not included those who donated just to CHAI since the initiative was spun off in 2010, foundation spokesman Craig Minassian said. Minassian said the foundation believed CHAI continued to be bound by the agreement with the Obama administration.

He did not elaborate on why CHAI did not honor it and referred inquiries to Daley.

In the donor list that CHAI published this year, for the first time since its spin-off from the Clinton Foundation, not all donors were identified. Many were grouped together as "Individual Donations", which cumulatively came to less than $1 million. Those donations were small and so "did not warrant posting," said Daley.

In 2008, the Clintons agreed that existing government contributors that wanted to "materially increase" their commitments during Hillary Clinton's tenure would be reviewed by State. Australia almost doubled its support between 2009-2012, to $12.2 million, while the United Kingdom nearly tripled its support, to $11.2 million.

CHAI did not report these increases to the State Department because the new money was for "expansions of existing programs," Daley said.

Daley also provided a number of explanations for why other governments that appeared on a donor list provided to Reuters did not need to be reviewed by the State Department. Swaziland and Papua New Guinea, which gave small grants for AIDS programs, were not submitted for review because the money they gave originated from other sources, including existing donor Australia and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, she said.

In the case of Sweden, its International Development Cooperation Agency has given CHAI $7.2 million since 2012 to train health workers in Zambia, but nothing in at least the previous three years. This did not need State review because Sweden had given to the foundation prior to 2009, Daley said.

Rwanda, which CHAI listed as a donor, gave the charity $200,000 in 2012. CHAI considered this a fee for medical work it did in the country, not a grant or donation, and so did not tell the State Department about it, Daley said.

Money from all of these governments amounted to about 1 percent of CHAI's total budget, she said.

The White House declined to answer questions about whether the Obama administration was aware of CHAI not disclosing its donors or submitting new donations from foreign governments. White House spokeswoman Jennifer Friedman noted, however, that the agreement the Clintons entered into "went above and beyond standard ethics requirements."

ESPN host Stephen A. Smith says that if every African-American voted Republican for one election, it would send a strong message to the GOP that their vote is important.

“What I dream is that for one election, just one, every black person in America vote Republican,” Smith said Tuesday during an appearance at Vanderbilt University, according to audio published by Breitbart.com.

During the 2012 presidential election, an overwhelming 93 percent of black voters supported President Barack Obama, while just 6 percent voted for Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

“Black folks in America are telling one party, 'We don’t give a damn about you,’” Smith said. “They’re telling the other party, ‘You’ve got our vote.’ Therefore, you have labeled yourself ‘disenfranchised’ because one party knows they’ve got you under their thumb, the other party knows they’ll never get you and nobody comes to address your interest[s].”

Smith compared voting with “shopping around” to let store owners know they have to cater to you to win your business.

“We don’t do that with politics, and then we blame white America for our disenfranchisement," he said.

The contours of how Republicans plan to take down Hillary Clinton in 2016 are clear. They will subtly hit her on her age, her long career in the Beltway bubble, and tie her to the scandals and secrecy of her husband’s administration.

But what the GOP hasn’t figured out how to tackle yet is something that may be even more important than Clinton’s record: the fact that if elected, she would at last break that glass ceiling and become the nation’s first female president.

Until this week, both Democrats and Republicans have been approaching the subject warily. For the GOP, anything approaching gender politics is fraught with peril. In 2012, their hopes of retaking the Senate were doomed when candidates on the campaign trail mused aloud about “legitimate rape” and whether children conceived from sexual assault were divinely sent.

For Democrats, the election season to keep in mind has been not 2012 but 2014, when their turbo-charging of rhetoric over the GOP’s “War on Women” led to charges of pandering. One incumbent, Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado, earned the moniker “Mark Uterus” – a nickname propagated by his own supporters -- for his singular focus on women’s reproductive issues.

But no more. This week, just as the uproar over her deleted State Department emails was growing deafening, Clinton took to Twitter to blast Republicans over a sex trafficking bill that included abortion provisions, and for their delays in approving the nomination of Loretta Lynch for attorney general, calling the moves “the Congressional trifecta against women.” In the last month Clinton, has appeared at a gala for Emily’s List, released a report through the Clinton foundation about women and global leadership, and spoken at a United Nations conference on the status of women and girls worldwide.

In Washington D.C, meanwhile, Concerned Women for American—a religious counter to the liberal National Organization for Women—convened a number of top Republican female leaders to declare the “war on women” officially over.

“What do most women do every week? Do they fill up the gas tank and the grocery cart?” asked GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway. “Or do they get an abortion?”

Women make up a majority of voters. In 2012, in the wake of a series of Republican efforts to limit reproductive health access and the aforementioned campaign gaffes, Barack Obama racked up an 11-point victory over Mitt Romney, a slightly worse showing for Democrats than they did in 2008. And even with Clinton as the likely nominee, Republican strategists are trying to limit her advantages with female voters.

“The idea is to keep them in the single digits,” said Katie Packer Gage, who served as a top aide to Romney in 2012 and has since started her own consulting shop dedicated to Republican outreach to women. “A gender gap of over ten points usually means a Democratic win.”

“This week has already shown that she is running a gender-based campaign,” said Conway. “There is no indication that women appreciate that, and there are many indications that men don’t like that.”
Gage laid out a string of attacks that Republicans were preparing to utilize against Clinton to hurt her standing among women, among them that the Clinton Foundation accepted money from “regimes that don’t even let women drive a car,” that the top levels of her campaign are (or will be, at least) stocked mostly with men and that in office records show that she paid her male staff members more than her female ones.

“The levels of hypocrisy are astounding,” Gage said. “She didn’t speak about these issues at all in 2008 until she was stepping out of the race, she doesn’t have a great track record when it comes to equal pay. Just being a woman isn’t enough.”

Republicans are quick to point out that Clinton can’t coast on her gender – after all, she failed to rally women to her side in the 2008 despite facing a Democratic primary electorate that is by some estimations close to 60 percent female.

“I understand the appeal of her gender,” Conway told The Daily Beast. “My eyes are wide open that there may be moderate, independent-leaning women who are motivated by voting for the first women president.”

But, she added, “The question is not will you vote for a woman. The question is would you vote for that woman. Does she have the values and the life experiences so that she connect with the plight of women?”

In 2008, Obama also never mentioned explicitly that his election would be historic; He didn’t need to. Instead, he spoke of the long sweep of American history, subtly suggesting that him in the White House would be yet another landmark towards a more equitable nation.

Republicans on the other hand are quick to accuse Clinton of already playing the gender card.

“This week has already shown that she is running a gender-based campaign,” said Conway. “There is no indication that women appreciate that, and there are many indications that men don’t like that.”

Democrats, meanwhile, say that they don’t much have to bring up Clinton’s gender—they are confident that Republicans will do it for them, more often than not in bone-headed ways that end up driving female voters their way.

Already, Rand Paul has come under criticism for setting up a fake Valentine’s Day Pinterest page for Clinton, with “likes” that included a full-length mirror and a heart-shaped bathtub.

Democrats have built a vast infrastructure around monitoring media for just such kind of GOP outburst, and will be on hair-trigger alert for any statement made on the campaign trail or on cable news that could be construed as sexist towards Clinton. On Thursday, there was already a taste of what the next twenty months could be like when an email that an aide to Rick Perry’s SuperPAC wrote in 2011 in which he questioned whether a female head of state would be in “God’s will” made the rounds on social media.

The aide backtracked from the comments, but Clinton has been such a steady target of boorish commentary by conservative men that many Democrats are already preparing to pounce.

“It’s in their D.N.A. You know it’s going to happen. I almost feel sorry for them,” said Tracy Sefl, a senior advisor to Ready for Hillary, the SuperPAC laying the groundwork for Clinton’s campaign.

Republicans, said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, will find themselves in a few months “competing for a very small percentage of the vote that really dislikes Hillary. And those kind of over-the top comments are more likely to get made and they can be very damaging. It’s exactly that kind of thing that will reignite the ‘War on Women.’”

Republicans largely avoided such controversies in 2014. But the hothouse of a presidential campaign is another matter, and as the last several cycles have shown, such off-message comments have a tendency to drive the news cycle for days and drown out whatever else a candidate is trying to convey.

“Our party has to rise up with one voice and condemn that kind of thing,” Lake said. “We made it all the way through 2014 without any of our candidates saying anything that would give people pause. I think we learned a valuable lesson.”

OLYMPIA, Wash. — The office of Washington state auditor Troy Kelley turned over documents to the federal government Thursday in response to a subpoena from the U.S. Department of Justice, just days after federal agents searched his home.

Auditor spokesman Thomas Shapley said the documents were in response to a March 6 subpoena, but he had not seen the subpoena or the documents.

The latest development comes after agents with the U.S. Department of Treasury spent about five hours searching Kelley's home early this week. He is out of state on vacation and issued a statement saying he had no knowledge of any investigation.

Shapley said that Kelley's vacation plans were in California, and that he is not aware of any plans for him to return to the state early. His schedule indicates he'll be back in the office on Monday, Shapley said.

The U.S. attorney's office in Seattle has declined to confirm or deny any investigation, and IRS officials declined to comment.

Gov. Jay Inslee hasn't spoken to Kelley, and he only learned of the search and subpoena through news reports, spokesman David Postman said Thursday. "We are certainly going to be monitoring this," Postman said.

Beyond a three-sentence written statement issued Wednesday night, Kelley has not responded to requests for interviews. In that statement, Kelley said: "I have not been served a search warrant and have not been informed of any reasons for a search."

Tacoma police spokeswoman Loretta Cool told The Associated Press on Wednesday night that her department was notified in advance of the search, but that she had no information about the nature of the search. Cool said federal agents typically notify local police when they operate in their jurisdiction.

By Thursday evening, no documents had been publicly filed in federal court related to any investigation involving Kelley or his address. The auditor's office wouldn't release the subpoena Thursday, and a spokesman for the state attorney general's office, which represents state agencies, said that the office's attorneys were looking into the details of releasing it.

Former auditor Brian Sonntag, who served as auditor for two decades before retiring in 2012, said he heard of the raid half a day before everyone else through friends of neighbors of Kelley. Sonntag said his first thought was about the employees at the agency.

"I expect and hope they're able to stay focused. They have very important work to do," he said. "I'm sure this came like a bolt out of the blue for all of those people who work in the state auditor's office across the state."

Sonntag said that for an office like the auditor — which is tasked with rooting out fraud and misuse of public funds — the news of the search "does create a cloud."

"The whole thing is going to hinge on that public trust and confidence," he said. "That public trust is pretty fragile sometimes."

Kelley, a Democrat, was elected auditor in 2012. He previously served in the state Legislature.

During a contentious campaign for auditor, details about civil lawsuits involving Kelley emerged, including a federal case brought by Old Republic Title, a former business customer of an escrow-services business owned by Kelley. The company claimed Kelley fraudulently transferred funds, evading taxes and hiding millions from creditors. That case was ultimately settled.

The state Republican Party on Thursday called on Kelley to step down until cleared of any potential allegations.

Republican Senate Majority Leader Mark Schoesler stopped short of saying that Kelley needed to resign, but said that he needs to explain why his personal files are being reviewed and also should disclose the terms of the settlement agreement with Old Republic.

"The auditor is supposed to be our statewide official fighting against fraud, waste and abuse," Schoesler said. "The most important thing is for him to come clean for the public trust. Let's see what the facts are and what his future should be."

At least the authors are honest and admitted that Hillary would be elected only because of her gender.

I would think it would be one considerable factor, just like Obama being black was a factor in his election, but would be a far cry from the only factor.

I say this because there's always the "not wanting the other guy to win" aka the "lesser of two evils" vote. Which is generally how and why I've voted the way I have since, ohh, when I turned 18 in 2000. And how I'm likely to vote again in 2016, barring a Republican candidate that I can actually get behind. I'd vote third party, but given no one actually pays attention when people do that...

Feds searched and seizured Washington State Democrat Troy Kelley's home, office


While I'm curious as to why they are searching his home and office, I'm surprised that they would do so without informing him of his rights and did so while he was away. It's also disturbing that they did it while he was away from his home and state.

If anything, whatever they find will be highly tainted and could possibly be thrown out as evidence, as the accused did not know he was even accused when this happened, which is semi-illegal.

They are treading on very thin ice, the federal investigators and IRS auditors are....

It was enough to get him elected, and it would be enough to get her elected if people vote based by "feels" and not by their brains.

If not Al Gore how about Tipper Gore !

Pretty much anyone who factors social issues into their vote is "voting with feels".

President Obama was in Ohio on Wednesday, and, let’s be up front about this, he sounded a little cocky. Speaking at the City Club of Cleveland, he had some fun at the expense of his Republican critics and their alarmist predictions about the disastrous impact his policies would have on the U.S. economy.

“One Republican in Congress warned our policies would diminish employment and diminish stock prices. Diminish stock prices,” the President said, summoning his most dismissive tone. “The stock market has doubled since I came into office. Corporate profits are—corporate balance sheets are stronger than they have ever been—because of my terrible business policies.” At this point, Obama was interrupted by laughter, but he was only getting started. “One Republican senator claimed we faced trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see,” he went on. “Another predicted my reëlection would spike gas prices to $6.60 a gallon. I don’t know how he came up with that figure: $6.60.”

The President didn’t pause to point out that, since late last year, gas prices have been below $2.50 in many parts of the country. He was too busy jabbing at Mitt Romney and John Boehner. “My opponent in that last election pledged that he could bring down the unemployment rate to six per cent by 2016—next year,” Obama said. “It’s 5.5 now. And right here in Cleveland, the leader of the House Republicans—a good friend of mine—he captured his party’s economic theories by critiquing mine with a very simple question: ‘Where are the jobs?’ he said. ‘Where are the jobs?’ I’m sure there was a headline in the Plain Dealer or one of the papers—‘Where Are the Jobs?’ ”

The answer, of course, is that they are being created at a rate not seen since the late nineteen-nineties, which just happens to be the last time a Democrat occupied the White House. Since 2010, twelve million new jobs have been created—Obama didn’t omit to cite that figure—and the unemployment rate has dropped from 9.9 per cent to 5.5 per cent. And that’s not the end of it.

Even accounting for the roughly five million jobs that were lost during the Great Recession and its aftermath, about seven million more Americans now have work than when the President took office, in January, 2009. The budget deficit sits at 2.8 per cent of G.D.P., less than it was in the last year of the Bush Administration, when it was 3.1 per cent. Stock prices and corporate profits, as Obama pointed out, have never been higher. To be sure, he didn’t create the surge in U.S. energy production that prompted Saudi Arabia to let the price of oil plummet, thereby putting smiles on the faces of American motorists. But nor did he do anything to prevent it, despite calls from environmentalists to do so. Republican claims that his policies would send gas prices soaring turned out to be wrong, and it was fair for Obama to remind people of that fact.

In short, the President has earned his lap of honor, even if he is taking it a bit early. He seemed to speak with a purpose that went beyond grandstanding, though, which came through when he called out Republicans for their dogged refusal to move with the times. “Their theory does not change,” he said. “It really doesn’t. It’s a theory that says, ‘If we do little more than just cut taxes for those at the very top, if we strip out regulations and let special interests write their own rules, prosperity trickles down to the rest of us.’ ”

Perhaps Obama was laying it on a bit thick. But in highlighting Republican obstreperousness, he was also highlighting the political reality in Washington and laying down some foundations for the 2016 Presidential race. For all the talk of a new generation of “reformicons” emerging within the G.O.P. to advocate for new thinking on economic policy, and despite some Republican politicians acknowledging that they need to have something to say about income stagnation and rising inequality, the bulk of the Party—and that includes most its candidates for 2016—seems to be stuck in a Reaganite time warp.

Exhibit A: Jeb Bush. Speaking in Detroit last month, the former Florida governor made an early pitch to middle-class voters, saying, “Far too many Americans live on the edge of economic ruin. And many more feel like they’re stuck in place: Working longer, and harder, even as they’re losing ground.” But Bush didn’t present any new policy proposals, and, speaking in South Carolina on Tuesday, he said he’s in favor of abolishing the federal minimum wage, arguing that the existence of a national wage floor makes it “harder and harder for the first rung of the ladder to be reached, particularly for young people, particularly for people that have less education.”

Now, declaring opposition to minimum-wage laws—or proposing leaving them to the states, which seems to be what Bush is calling for—isn’t an outlandish position for a G.O.P. Presidential candidate to take. Indeed, ever since 1962, when Milton Friedman argued, in his book “Capitalism and Freedom,” that the consequences of minimum-wage laws “are precisely the opposite of those intended by the men of good will who support it,” this has been a point of agreement among conservative Republicans. But that’s Obama’s point: The Republicans don’t change. They just reheat the old sauce.

Exhibit B: the new House G.O.P. budget, which, its sponsors say, would balance the budget in ten years. I won’t bore you with the details of this measure, which, on Thursday, got the approval of the Budget Committee. But take it from me, or, rather from Howard Gleckman, an analyst at the non-partisan Tax Policy Center: “It is impossible.”

That means it’s mathematically impossible, not politically impossible—although, with Obama in the White House, it’s that too. The new proposal incorporates big tax cuts skewed toward the rich, unspecified cuts in spending, flaky revenue estimates, and a massive and implausible overhaul of Medicaid and Medicare—not to mention the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. It closely resembles previous Republican budgets that weren’t serious tax-and-spending proposals either, but broad political manifestoes hewed out of the tattered old doctrine of supply-side economics.

In his speech in Cleveland, Obama made fun of this, too. He recalled how one Republican had told him that “she couldn’t agree with me more that we need to be helping working moms and dads more. Another wrote a policy memo saying that Republicans must define themselves as the party of the American worker, the party of higher wages.” The problem the Republicans have, the President went on, is that “the rhetoric doesn’t match the reality. The walk doesn’t sync up with the talk. And all you have to do is look at the budget that House Republicans put forward just yesterday,” which “doubles-down on trickle down.”

Yes, it was just a politician criticizing his opponents, and seemingly taking great pleasure in it. On this occasion, though, Obama had reason to crow. The Republicans are making it easy for him.

Nail on the head.

Voting based on social issues is the same as people who vote based on religion.

That's how the majority of people vote regardless of who they are and who they vote for; you think there aren't a significant number of people out there who voted against Obama just because he's black?

There may not be as many as voted for him only for that reason, but the number is still significant.

I'm sure there are people who vote every election cycle against Democrats solely because they condone abortions, and those people get really worked up about their feels about their beliefs regarding the status of a fetus.

Pretty much anyone who factors social issues into their vote is "voting with feels".

You know, for living in a state that is stereotypically considered "racist"

Well, religion is basically just one subset of social issues anyhow.

But social issues are a big part of our lives, soooo....

That said, I've really no desire to discuss the race/racism issue at length today.

For what it's worth, I've known a lot of negative stereotypes about Texas through the years, I even believe a few of them, though by no means most, but "racist" isn't one I generally associate with them.

Now I'm curious as what stereotypes you associate Texans with.

When social issue overtake a government's priorities societies exist, war is inevitable.

we have our own toast.

we have our own toast.

I always thought Texas style was just a gun and a bad memory !

A confidence about their state that borders on arrogance; the assumption that they're somehow better than the rest of the country.

The "wild west" encompassed so much more than Texas, but Texas is frequently associated with that and seems to embrace it, and seems to see itself as this mystical land of "doing their own thing".

A tendency to point out the worst in other states while at the same time getting very angry any time anyone says anything negative about them...*ahem*...you personally kinda do that a lot.

You're like the Quebec of the U.S. In good and bad ways both. Keep in mind Montreal is one of my favorite cities.

You guys are crazy arrogant about your god damn BBQ, as if yours is the best and only way/kind out there!

And as Chaos posted, the more literal cowboy thing with the gun obsession.

OH! And the *** children's football thing. But that's as much a big problem here as there. As I've pointed out several times, our states have similarities.