Tag Archives: White House

national news, political news

In a word, the Hillary email story is about 'trust'

You can sum up the difficulty that is building around Hillary Rodham Clinton’s probable presidential campaign in a single five-letter word: trust.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/hillary-clinton-press-conference-115989.html?hp=b3_r1#.VQaz71J0yt8

Can she be trusted to tell us the truth all the time?

The Politico story attached here talks about the history she and her husband, the former 42nd president, Bill Clinton, had in using the English language to wiggle their way out of difficulty.

President Clinton sought to tell Americans that he “did not have sexual relations” with the young White House intern. It turned out that likely did have what almost anyone describe as a sexual relationship with her — but not in the way he defined it.

Does anyone recall how the president defined the word “is”?

Hillary Clinton’s email mess, on its face, likely isn’t a huge story. It’s becoming one, though, because of her own seemingly slippery use of language to define what she did and when she did it.

The Politico essay refers to her talking about “not saving” email communications. What happened to the word “delete”? Did she delete the messages, send them to the trash bin on purpose?

It’s that kind of imprecise language that seems to be getting the former secretary of state/U.S. senator/first lady into a bit of a jam as she ramps up her 2016 presidential campaign.

Hillary Clinton once seemed like the inevitable 45th president of the United States. She remains the prohibitive favorite to become the Democrats’ next nominee for the office.

That aura of White House inevitability, however, suddenly is needs some major repair.

Straight talk would help build some much-needed trust.

 

national news, political news

House GOP 'survey' loaded with baloney

Nice try, U.S. House Speaker John Boehner.

You sought to ask me my views on how you and National Republican Congressional Committee are seeking to save the country from those reckless and feckless liberals in the White House. I ain’t taking the bait, Mr. Speaker.

You’ll get your State of the Nation Survey back in the mail. I even signed my name to it to validate its findings.

You see, sir, I don’t share your view that President Obama has wrecked the country. Almost every question you pose in your survey presumes that you and your party are right and the president and his party are wrong … across the board.

To be fair, I do agree with a few of the questions you pose. I believe, as you do, that the feds should work “closely with state and local officials to stop border violence and enforce federal immigration laws.” I also believe in the Second Amendment’s guarantee that we have a right “to keep and bear arms.” I agree with you that our legal system should “better protect victims and consumers while also giving manufacturers and small businesses confidence to keep jobs in America.” I even believe in “Republicans’ landmark ban on all earmarks” attached to federal legislation.

So, Mr. Speaker, your survey isn’t a total loser with me.

However, I do not subscribe to your notion that liberal/progressive policies are inherently bad for the country. I happen to be a good-government liberal who thinks the Obama administration has done well to revive the economy and keep us safe from terrorists. I also believe, contrary to your view, that our standing in the world hasn’t been diminished. Furthermore, I believe that the Affordable Care Act, which likely needs more fine-tuning, should remain on the books, as it is providing millions of Americans with health insurance they didn’t have before it was enacted.

Those are my views, Mr. Speaker, and I’m sticking with them.

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to vent.

God bless the United States of America.

 

national news

Have we seen enough from Secret Service?

Isn’t the Secret Service supposed to be the elite of the elite? The cream of our national security apparatus? The individuals charged with protecting the Most Powerful Person on the Planet?

What in the name of Homeland Security is going on with these individuals?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/secret-service-agents-disrupted-bomb-investigation-at-white-house/2015/03/12/0eb74590-c8c4-11e4-aa1a-86135599fb0f_story.html

Two more agents have been accused of driving under the influence of alcohol and taking their vehicle through an active investigation scene involving a bomb.

The Secret Service has a new director who was supposed to turn the agency around after it went through a series of shameful incidents involving disgraceful behavior and serious breaches of security at the White House.

Joseph Clancy hasn’t turned anything around.

The Secret Service used to be run by the Treasury Department. Since 9/11, it’s been handed over to the Department of Homeland Security. Did we hear of these kinds of screw-ups when Treasury was in charge? Maybe once in a while, but not with this kind of chilling regularity.

Any thoughts of returning the Secret Service to the Treasury Department? Well? Are there?

 

political news

Sanders sounding like a non-candidate

It’s not a stretch to equate running for president to deciding to get married.

You’d better be all in on both counts, or else you’re doomed to fail in both endeavors.

U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who sounds like a left-leaning Democrat, now says he’s not so sure about running for president, which many liberals in his party want him to do.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/bernie-sanders-isnt-so-sure-about-this-2016-thing-116031.html?hp=l3_3

Don’t hold your breath on this one, lefties. I don’t think Sanders is going to do it.

“If I run it has to be done well,” Sanders said in an interview with POLITICO this week. “And if it’s done well, and I run a winning campaign or a strong campaign, it is a real boon to the progressive community, because I believe that the issues I talk about are issues that millions and millions of people believe in. On the other hand, if one were to run a poor campaign, didn’t have a well-funded campaign, didn’t have a good organization, did not do well, because of your own limitations, then that would be a setback for the progressive community.”

Sanders is sounding, with those comments, as if he’s full of doubt about whether it’s worth it.

Politico noted that he hasn’t raised much money, has hired virtually zero key campaign advisers, has done next to no groundwork in any of the early crucial primary and caucus states.

Now he’s talking like someone who seems to question whether he has the fire in his gut to go all the way.

The late Sen. George McGovern once said that the first thing a presidential candidate needs is a huge ego. Sanders likely possesses the requisite ego to mount a campaign. He needs the rest of it — all of it — to make it a reality. I’m talking about commitment.

 

International news

Iranian hardliners find friends on Capitol Hill

Of all the criticism out there aimed at the Gang of 47 who signed The Letter to Iran, urging the mullahs to reject a nuclear deal with the United States, one point rings truer than the rest.

It is that The Letter has given ammunition to the hardline faction within the Iranian government to use against whatever the so-called “moderates” bring to any discussion on this matter.

Who would have thought that the hardline Iranian Islamic fundamentalists would find allies within the Republican majority that controls the United States Senate?

Roll that one around for a bit.

Freshman Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., drafted the letter and sent it to his GOP colleagues. Forty-six of them signed it, with seven Republicans declining to put their names on The Letter.

They’ve interfered directly with a sensitive U.S. negotiation with Iran over how to persuade the rogue nation to discontinue its nuclear development program. The Gang of 47 well might have broken U.S. law prohibiting such unauthorized negotiation with a foreign power, but the gang won’t be punished for it.

Conservatives think they’re doing the right thing. Liberals are angry with them for undermining the president of the United States, the secretary of state, and our allies who’ve joined us in seeking an end to the Iranian nuclear program.

And, yes, they’ve given the Iranian hardliners reason to smile today as they look toward the United States and see that members of our “loyal opposition” are proving to be not quite so loyal. They’ve turned a bipartisan U.S. foreign policy endeavor into a partisan contest.

The late, great Republican U.S. Sen. Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan, who coined the phrase that partisanship “ends at the water’s edge,” is spinning in his grave.

 

 

 

media news, national news

HRC turns over 55,000 emails; Colin Powell, none

A friend distributed this tweet, from Joe Conason, a liberal columnist who wonders about the Hillary Clinton email flap.

“If Beltway press isn’t satisfied that @HillaryClinton turned over 55K emails, why don’t they care that Colin Powell turned over ZERO?”

I think I know the answer.

Colin Powell isn’t considering a run for the presidency in 2016; Hillary Clinton is likely to declare her White House candidacy in a month, maybe two.

That’s the reason for the interest.

Colin Powell served as secretary of state during the first term of the George W. Bush administration. He used a personal email account, just as Clinton did. In no way does that justify anything, other than to suggest that the media have this way of applying double standards whenever and wherever possible — and against whomever they feel like doing so.

I suppose if Powell, a retired Army general as well, were to decide to run for president, then he’d become fair game, too.

International news

Senators undermining foreign policy?

The U.S. Constitution grants the president the power to negotiate treaties with foreign leaders.

It says nothing about members of Congress being a party to those negotiations, but does give the Senate the authority to ratify treaties.

What, then, are 47 Republican U.S. senators doing by sending a letter to Iranian officials telling them that whatever treaty they agree to with President Obama might not be good after the president leaves office in January 2017?

Are they injecting themselves into a negotiation that seeks to end Iran’s nuclear program? Are they interfering where they don’t belong?

http://news.yahoo.com/republicans-warn-iran-against-nuclear-deal-obama-124930463.html

It looks like it to me.

Reuters reported: “The letter, signed by 47 U.S. senators, says Congress plays a role in ratifying international agreements and points out that Obama will leave office in January 2017, while many in Congress will remain in Washington long after that.

“‘We will consider any agreement regarding your nuclear-weapons program that is not approved by the Congress as nothing more than an executive agreement between President Obama and Ayatollah Khamenei,’ the letter read.

“‘The next president could revoke such an executive agreement with the stroke of a pen and future Congresses could modify the terms of an agreement at any time,’ it read.”

My initial question is this: Do these senators think the Iranians are unaware of how treaties get ratified in this country? I think I’ll answer that one: If they do believe such a thing, they’re not as smart as they think they are.

Another issue looms, though. It is this notion that members of one party comprising the U.S. Senate can actually influence the course of a sensitive negotiation that is taking place between the executive branch of the U.S. government and the leaders of a foreign nation — and a hostile one at that.

Such meddling shouldn’t occur.

International news, national news, political news

Benghazi returns to center stage

I got a bit ahead of myself with an earlier blog post about Hillary Clinton’s email tempest.

The supposition was that she was in trouble again, but the difficulty didn’t have anything to do with Benghazi.

Wrong!

The House Benghazi Committee — that’s what I’ll call it — is going to subpoena the former secretary of state’s email messages to determine what she said at the time of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya.

http://news.yahoo.com/benghazi-committee-to-subpoena-clinton-s-emails-192823541.html

This ties into the email problem because Clinton used her personal email account to communicate official State Department business. The Benghazi panel, which already has traipsed all over the issue of the consulate fire fight and what the State Department knew about it, wants to see the emails to determine, I suppose, if there’s any “smoking gun” with which to blast away at the presumed 2016 Democratic presidential candidate.

I am concerned about the use of a private email account to conduct public business. The Benghazi matter? Not so much. Yes, the deaths of those people were tragic beyond measure. But I do not believe Secretary Clinton purposely misled Americans about the attack, nor do I believe there’s been an orchestrated cover-up by the State Department or the White House.

However, by golly, we’re going to revisit the Benghazi attack once again because of questions about whether Secretary Clinton hid pertinent information — whatever it might have been — from the public she was serving.

national news, political news

HRC looking suddenly vulnerable

What’s the opposite of “invincible”?

Is it, say, “vincible”?

Suddenly and with little warning, the chatterers of Washington and in some key political hot spots are starting to wonder aloud whether the once seemingly invincible Hillary Rodham Clinton might actually not run for president of the United States next year.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/03/what-if-hillary-clinton-drops-out-115715.html?ml=po#.VPcJFFJ0yt8

I believe a Clinton pullout from the White House contest remains the longest of long shots. She’s invested a lot of her time, money, effort and political capital in getting support on board to bail now.

But oh, man, there’s trouble out there. It has nothing to do, really, with Benghazi.

It has to do with her use of email technology and whether she might have kept the public’s business hidden from public view.

Politico is reporting that Democratic strategists aren’t yet considering the idea of Clinton dropping out of the race: “What if The Unthinkable did happen and she actually dropped out? What would be the Democrats’ response? ‘Panic,’ says Democratic consultant Chris Lapetina.”

Some questions have emerged of late about whether the then-secretary of state broke federal rules by communicating exclusively with her private email account. The way I see the trouble is that using private channels leaves open the possibility that she conducted non-classified public business in private. More murkiness has emerged as well, with some Clinton supporters suggesting that the rules weren’t put in place until after she left the State Department.

Clinton’s advisers have said she broke no laws and followed the “spirit and letter” of the rules governing such communication.

Suddenly, though, the smooth sailing Clinton has enjoyed so far has given way to some choppy waters. Have the waves built enough to capsize the Good Ship Hillary? Not yet, but factions on the Democratic Party’s left and most certainly those on the right and far right aren’t about to throw her many life lines.

Democratic Party “panic” needs to give way to some planning in the event that The Unthinkable actually occurs.

 

International news, national news, political news

Partisanship has no place in foreign policy

OK, one more attempt at making sense of this Bibi blowup and I’ll move on.

It’s being reported that about a quarter of congressional Democrats are going to stay away from the speech Tuesday that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will make before a joint session of Congress.

http://thehill.com/homenews/news/234398-bibi-boycott-grows-ahead-of-address

Democrats are angry that Republican Speaker John Boehner invited Bibi to speak without consulting with the White House. I get their anger. It is infuriating that Boehner would flout longstanding diplomatic protocol by inviting a foreign head of government in such a manner.

Netanyahu, in remarks today to a pro-Israel group, said he doesn’t want to become the object of partisan scorn in Washington. Indeed, such partisanship shouldn’t be an issue when we’re talking about foreign policy matters.

Who, though, turned it into a partisan event? I’ll go with Boehner, who stuck it in the president’s eye in the way he invited Netanyahu. The prime minister opposes negotiations to get Iran to stop its nuclear development program; he favors tougher sanctions on Iran now, along with Boehner and most Republicans; Obama opposes the sanctions; and the president is miffed over the invitation issue.

None of this means the United States and Israel are going to part company. Netanyahu will affirm the nations’ close ties Tuesday, just as he did today.

The partisan nature of the protest, though, smacks more of petulance than anything else.

I’ll say it again: Democrats should listen to Bibi in person and give him the respect that the leader of our nation’s strongest Middle East ally deserves.