OBAMA ORDERED THE DRONE STRIKES TO DISTRACT FROM HILLARY NY TIMES PIECE.
You heard it hear first.
— John Cole (@Johngcole) April 23, 2015
Wait! Obama rushes to podium and breaks 4 month old terror op… just as media saturating with Clinton scandal news? pic.twitter.com/HHVZWp4NUP
— MATT DRUDGE (@DRUDGE) April 23, 2015
Belafon
He does have a time machine, which, in some pictures, looks an awful lot like an old British police box.
Violet
Matt Drudge must have a constant boner at the thought of the Clintons back in the White House. He’ll be paying people to wear blue dresses and talk up Bill.
dmsilev
The media will _never_ be “saturated” with Clinton “scandal” “news”. It’s like peak wingnut; peak media Clinton obsessiveness is a lie.
JPL
John, you win!
Violet
My favorite part is the “hear.”
JPL
Tomorrow’s hit piece will be that the foundation took money from someone connected to Halliburton who through a subsidiary dealt with Iran.
srv
Billary must be desperate, they pushed their only known child out to the front:
I wonder where her email server is.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
It must bug Drudge that you scooped his “scoop.” Heh.
CONGRATULATIONS!
Howzabout a drone strike on Drudge’s server farm?
Drudge probably needs to go see a doctor about his boner that won’t go away. He made his bones on Clinton, Part I, The Trashing. Part II will have a much bigger budget, and he’s the go-to guy to produce the effort. He’ll be a rich(er) man by the end of this race no matter who wins it.
srv
Nothing to see here, move along.
divF
@srv: Link ?
Xboxershorts
@srv:
You sound concerened
liberal
The unspoofable thing is Burnsie repeatedly stating that TPP needs 2/3 of the Senate to pass, when in fact that’s not true.
Cervantes
@srv:
You do know who compiled those numbers, don’t you?
I suggest you look for corroboration before relying on them.
Mike E
@Violet: hear here!
askew
@srv:
Link? And how do those amounts compare to other charities?
The CF is re-filing with IRS for 2010-2012 due to errors found by Reuters and doing a complete audit. Perhaps those numbers will change as well.
New poll from Quinnipac shows Hillary’s dishonest and untrustworthy number is up to 54% but she still leads entire GOP field which just shows what a joke they are.
On a positive note, O’Malley is up to 3% in that national poll. A 300% increase. LOL. Oh, well. I’ve always liked cheering for the underdog.
Xboxershorts
@Cervantes:
It’ll be more enjoyable watching the string of retractions and corrections that the most infromed will continue to ignore and cling to the refuted accusations like dingleberries
Belafon
On a lighter note, one of my parent’s conservative friends finally realized that Paul Ryan is trying to cut Social Security and Medicare.
srv
@Cervantes:
Surely you can find some numbers from the Most Transparent Foundation Ever(TM) to dispute them.
@askew: Here
You are killing me here. Really? Who’s going to take the fall for that? Are they going to dig up Vince and blame him?
Barbara O'Brien
Folks, Doug Hughes, the gyrocopter-flying mailman, is still under house arrest and has started a legal defense fund through GoFundMe. It’s off to a slow start, so please help. http://www.gofundme.com/sn8gc2s
Mike E
CSI:srv
Cervantes
@srv:
Of course, I can.
The question is whether you can be bothered to.
Benw
Life, liberty, and unspoofable. Those are my rights, it says so in the Constitution!
Major Major Major Major
Remember when you believed in peak wingnut, John?
And oh, Matt Drudge, you and your gay fedora.
NotMax
Oh gawd, it’s gonna be a Slick Hilly post every day from now on, isn’t it.
catclub
Pierce has a good take on this. Nothing new to readers of this blog, but he writes it all in one post.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a34563/hillary-rodham-clinton-meets-the-clinton-rules/
Frankensteinbeck
@NotMax:
Along with, as the last post reminded me, brand new commenters coming out of nowhere to tell us how seriously these allegations should be taken, even if they’re not true. Amazing how that happens every time there’s some new scandal.
Belafon
I find this quote from Cardinal Richelieu to be quite appropriate for this discussion: “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.”
Mike E
It was 16 years ago tonight that this happened in a baseball game.
Belafon
@catclub: That’s good, and I like his statement that if you blow enough smoke (out of your ass I would add) you can claim there’s a climate of fire.
Frankensteinbeck
@catclub:
‘If you blow enough smoke, you can pretend there’s a fire.’ My god, I have seen that technique used so much in the last six years. It works. Liberals fall for it, too, big time. Throw out a long series of scary sounding lies, and debunking them doesn’t do a damn bit of good. There’s a Narrative. Somehow, all these lies prove each other. ‘Obama caves’, anyone?
Bill Arnold
@catclub:
That C.P. Pierce piece is a keeper, thanks.
Paul in KY
@Belafon: Halleluiah, praise Jeebus!
raven
@Mike E: I was at Wrigley for this:
CHICAGO (AP) — For the New York Mets, it was a grand slam of an
inning.
First, Cliff Floyd homered with the bases loaded. Then, Carlos
Beltran did the same. After David Wright added a two-run shot, New
York had 11 runs — the most in a single inning in club history.
“It was just amazing to keep going like that. You never think
you’re going to score 11 runs in one inning,” Floyd said Sunday
night after Mets’ sixth-inning outburst sent them to a 13-7 victory
over the Chicago Cubs.
It was one of those hot summer nights at Wrigley Field where the
wind is blowing out and the ball is flying over the wall.
boatboy_srq
@Frankensteinbeck: Koch dollars at work.
Cacti
OT but happy news…
The rats appear to be abandoning the sinking ship of the SS Joe Arpaio:
Link
Aleta
I thought you were joking until I read below the photo. Disappointing. My mood had slightly lifted today above a rising panic … but naivete never wins any more.
NotMax
@Frankensteinbeck
Almost makes one pine for the days when one ass (or paid shill, or both) would show up here multiple times per day crowing about the ultra-super-triple-secret data he/she had proving in absolute and irrefutable certainty that Romney would sweep the nation and we would be reduced to quivering blobs of liberal gelatin the day after the election, so neener neener neener.
Good times.
srv
@Cervantes: I provided a link, you provided nothing. So brave.
Here’s another link for you:
https://www.clintonfoundation.org/about/annual-financial-reports
Knock yourself out – it’s right there, pick any one. Grants of $6M and “Other Expenses” of $33M in 2013.
Show us the money.
But we both know you won’t.
scav
srv-ice, it’s what his masters expect and are delivered.
dmsilev
@NotMax: UNLIMITED CORPORATE CASH! VICTORY!
Ah, memories.
Davis X. Machina
@Belafon: Console yourself with the thought that he’ll vote R anyways.
askew
So now David Sirota has a piece up on Clinton Foundation, State Dept and Cisco. I hope this isn’t true because it damns the Obama administration as well as the Clintons and I’ve been proud of the fact that he has run such a clean administration.
http://www.ibtimes.com/hillary-clinton-cisco-china-company-funded-foundation-was-lauded-clinton-despite-role-1884160
fuckwit
@JPL: Oooh, that’s beautiful. Yeah, I’m remembering something about some guy… named Cheney I think? I don’t rememebr much. The memory hole is strong. Oceana has always been at war with Eastasia. Something about a war, started by some guy, I think he was in some high office, while he was the former CEO of a defense contractor, and still had much of his fortune in their stock… I dunno… maybe the media remembers, they’re supposed to be our watchdogs aren’t they?
askew
@srv:
Are the Clinton Foundation’s % of money for charity out of the ordinary for charities? The numbers themselves don’t mean anything until you put them into context. I don’t like the Clintons but this attack seems pretty silly at this point.
Aleta
An indiegogo fundraising link for Feidin Santana, who filmed video of Walter Scott being shot and then ignored by police as he died.
Administered by a law firm; doesn’t say how it will be distributed.
NotMax
@fuckwit
Presume you saw that someone (Kristol?) recently floated the thought (using the term in its loosest possible sense) that Cheney had the best chance for 2016 if only he would enter the race.
Not easy to laugh and puke simultaneously.
srv
@scav: You Obots will thanks us when Hillary has to withdraw. At leaset some of us have some self-respect.
fuckwit
@NotMax: Oh! That’s the guy, yeah. I also remember something about a secret closed-door meeting with his oil industry exec buddies determining energy policy for the USA. Nothing scandalous about that. Drudge didn’t make a headline out of it so it was obviously nothing.
srv
@askew: IDK, you should look that up. But I guess it’s OK if she just does what others do. Quarter of a billion in “other expenses” what do you want, you some kind of transparency nazi?
Mike E
@raven: Heh, the wind is always blowing outa that park! Here’s another wacky game which I listened to on my transistor radio, and during the era when all games were daytime since Wrigley Field was years away from installing lights.
NotMax
@fuckwit
Secret? (You know about it, and BTW we’re gonna be asking how you came by that info.)
And the doors were closed because there were a lot of flies that day.
Yeah, that’s the ticket.
/Jon Lovitz
trollhattan
@srv:
Sounds awful. She should quit now and endorse Scott Walker-Rand Paul and an all-Koch cabinet. The nation needs this now, more than ever.
Cervantes
@srv:
No, actually, you did not provide a link — hence my suggestion that you re-think your assertion.
I could not be less interested in your hormonal output.
scav
@srv: Obot, really? You really can’t be bothered to distinguish among the actual people commenting here but rather see them as an indistinguishable mass of “others” whose every action and intent you understand fully and immediately. Yes dear. srv-ile I’m thinking is a slightly better take as more multi-purpose, sir-vile.
OT and I’m coping with my “real” research with some evidence of the natural audience for a lot of the smoke-blowing. Some charmer has a family tree where the father’s death date is before each and every one of his two marriages worth of children. Some quivers are filled in mysterious ways.
Zandar
Can we just all assume that everyone who gave money to the Clinton Foundation was expecting favors from the State Department?
Would streamline the delivery of daily Hillary hate.
Paul in KY
@Zandar: You know, they could have been expecting favors from Bill or Chelsea. Don’t leave them out of the scandalpalooza!
Belafon
@askew: I seem to remember that Cisco had been selling routers to the Chinese for years before 2008. I was at Nortel, which occasionally saw Cisco as a rival.
VOR
@askew: Sigh.Where to start?
First, $500k-$1M by December 2008. Who was president in December 2008?
Second, there probably are a TON of lobbying firms with former Clinton WH aides in Washington. Probably hard to avoid hiring a firm w/o former Clinton administration aides.
Third, Cisco is the largest networking company in the world. Of course they are doing large business with the US Federal government. Of course they will have new contracts for millions of dollars during the Obama administration.
Fourth, Cisco is undoubtedly leveraging their lobbyists to pressure the US government to pressure the Chinese to buy Cisco products. Got nothing to do with the Clintons.
Not saying there is nothing to this, but hardly proof of any corruption here.
srv
@Cervantes:
Maybe you should re-think that..
@scav:
That’s like Inception-Level irony for a PUMA like me.
scav
@srv: Well, so long as you’re amused, which seems to be the whole point of your performance-as-personality.
Mike in NC
O/T: Lazy-ass Senate confirms Lynch as AG.
divF
@srv: Yes, you provided a link – to an unsourced assertion from a Chicago Tribune Op-Ed writer. “If it’s in a newspaper, it has to be true, right?”
You’ve been around here long enough to know that “link” is shorthand for “factual documentation, accessible on the web”.
Try again.
ETA: you did try again, in your link to the Clinton foundation. Will check that out.
But why didn’t you link to that in the first place ? Sloppy.
D58826
Until today I never realized until devious, dishonest, corrupt and depraved the Clinton’s are. For 8 years everyone under the sun investigated their finances and personal live and the most they could kind was a blue dress and a blow job. Now we have the Clinton foundation in which numerous people are conducting investigations for corruption using the publicly available documents found on the Foundation web site.
They truly are masters of hiding all of the corruption. To put all of that information in the public record and then still manage to be the most corrupt couple in history it is sheer genius. (yes snark)
Belafon
While we’re grumbling here, even Daily Kos is starting to like what Hillary’s saying: Clinton ‘doubling down on old-school organizing’ in all 50 states:
The comments there are almost all positive.
Mike E
@Mike in NC: Huge. Durham’s own, too. Yet another 1st for this administration.
Brachiator
@Mike in NC:
Yep. About damn time!
SiubhanDuinne
@Mike E:
When they finally bowed to the inevitable and installed lights, one of the Chicago papers (don’t remember which one) ran the headline THE DUSK OF A NEW ERA.
SiubhanDuinne
@Mike in NC:
@Brachiator:
And nobody’s going to be happier about this than Eric Holder!
Mike E
@SiubhanDuinne: Did the same paper report about the new roof addition and call it UNDER THE DOME? ;-)
srv
@divF: Ah, it’s only truthy if it’s a link to Charlie Pierce. Got it.
It’s not valued. Clearly, you don’t know how this place works.
@D58826:
Clearly, you missed all of Balloon-Juice in 2008.
ruemara
@VOR: Naw, there must be. It’s unfortunate that Obama has to be tossed under that bus, but he might support Hillz.
Cervantes
@srv:
Right.
Do you have any idea what you’ve shown to be true? (It has nothing to do with the Clintons.)
askew
@Belafon:
The article mentions that and talks about how Cisco was in hot water with Congress, shareholders and public opinion due to their dealings in China and that Clinton giving them a State Dept recognition for outstanding corporate citizenship, blah, blah that was a PR saving move. That’s the concern. Not when they started selling the routers. So, I am not sure how that was a pushback on the article.
The question is should Cisco have even been given the award considering the controversy surrounding their work in China and did Clinton give them award to help them get a PR win and then Cisco thanked Hillary by donating millions to CF.
askew
@Belafon:
Hillary has been getting glowing coverage at DK since kos declared that she’d be the nominee months ago. She is getting daily puff pieces on the front page. And Algere and the other strikers who left DK are back.
srv
@Cervantes: What I have always known to be true here – that it doesn’t really matter how much evidence is shown to you, so it’s pointless to provide it. You proved it again today. You will do anything to evade defending your position until you go ad hominem.
Good luck with that for the next 18 months. You might as well lock your doors now, because reality is going to chew you up and spit you out if you run into any real people.
Randy Khan
@srv:
I spent six long years as treasurer of a non-profit (not on this scale, but I can read an annual report and a 990). Because of that experience, I can say that you’re reading the reports wrong. First, and most important, “grants” is not a compilation of everything a charity does to fulfill its charitable purpose – for most charities, the majority of their work falls into the “other expenses” category. (Imagine a not-for-profit hospital, or a women’s shelter, neither of which is likely to give out much, if anything, in grants.) You have to dig deeper into the 990 to find that information.
For 2013, the 990 for the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation reports around $8.8 million in outgoing grants (line 13, if you care). Part IX of the 990, which is the detail you can use to figure out how much effort an organization spends on its goals, reports the same amount in grants (lines 1 and 5) and, more important, reports program service expenses of $68.3 million, admin expenses of a bit less than $8.4 million and fundraising expenses of just over $8 million, which puts the total of admin and fundraising at a bit less than 20%. This is a pretty good number.
You seem to have gotten your numbers from the front page of the 990 for the Clinton Health Access Initiative (and, by the way, for 2012, not 2013 – the 2013 numbers are the far right column, not the first column). In 2013, the health initiative had $10.9 million in grants, program service expenses (including the grants) of $99.1 million, admin expenses of $6.4 million and fundraising expenses of less than $1 million, which puts the total of admin and fundraising under 5%, which is extraordinarily good. (My non-profit, which was very efficient, couldn’t have dreamed of devoting that much of its total spending to program services. We were thrilled to be under 10% in admin and fundraising costs.)
bemused
@Belafon:
If you are still around, how did someone convince them? I need ammo.
drkrick
This was my favorite Phillies game at Wrigley from the radio era: 4/17/76. The Cubs were ahead 12-1 at the end of three (Steve Carlton didn’t finish the second), Schmidt hits 4 homers, and the Phillies won 18-16 in ten. I insisted on keeping the work radio turned to the game even though it was “over” early. In the 10th, Richie Ashburn commented that the only thing that hadn’t happened in the game was a balk. The Cubs’ Randy Schultz delivered one on the next pitch. Quite an afternoon.
JustRuss
After a quick stop at Digby’s place, I’ve come up with a new theory: Clinton’s playing 11-dimensional chess. (Wonder where she learned that?)
Hear me out:
First off, this is possibly the worst covered-up scandal in history. The Clinton Foundation made no secret of its foreign donors to anyone except the IRS. Smooth move, Einsteins. Why, it’s almost like they wanted to get caught.
Clinton has made campaign cash and Citizen’s United an issue in her campaign. Up til now, CU has been like the weather: Everyone talks about it, but no one actually does anything. Let’s assume Hillary really wants to kill CU.
Taking gobs of cash has been OKIYAR for like ever. We’ve been assured by our betters that it has no impact on how our politicians behave. But now that it’s Clinton, of course that cash is a bribe for services to be rendered. Cognitive dissonance runs strong in our media and Republicans, but maybe enough people will figure out that if it’s not OK to bribe Hillary then it shouldn’t be OK to bribe Republican candidates. Or possibly, the desire to screw HRC out of her illicit funds overcomes deference to our corporate overlords. I’m OK either way.
An unlikely coalition of Democrats and TeaParty Republicans push through serious campaign finance reform, and everyone but the Koch Brothers lived happily ever after. Well, a boy can dream.
drkrick
On what planet does a State Department “citizenship” award serve to get anybody out of any kind of hot water? If they paid a million for that, it was poor value for money
Randy P
@srv: Sheeple. You forgot to say “wake up, sheeple!”
Brachiator
@Randy Khan: Thanks very much for your very clear explanation of the Clinton Foundation’s 990. Really helps put some things into perspective.
Cervantes
@srv:
Right.
Look at those annual reports you finally found. Here’s the one for 2008. Look at page 46. Tell me what you understand from it. And here’s the report for 2013-14. Look at the pie chart on the bottom of page 92. Tell me what you understand from it.
If your response is coherent, we can go from there; otherwise carry on as you were.
Bobby Thomson
@srv: 15%? Is Mark Penn still running things? Christ, that’s political malpractice.
Bobby Thomson
@Randy Khan: thank you. That makes a lot more sense than the 15% number.
fuckwit
@NotMax: Heh, it’s been a long while and the memory hole eated this, but I seem to recall that the “secret” was unearthed by some enterprising troublemaker with a FOIA request.
As for flies in that meeting, I’m sure there were, because flies hover around shit in large numbers.
Cervantes
@fuckwit:
The fact of those meetings was not a secret. There were protests through the summer of 2001 whenever the EPA held public-comment sessions. Of course, the EPA itself was not the problem.
askew
@JustRuss:
Hillary has never proven herself to be that smart or to have the political instincts to play 11-dimensional chess. For as much crap as Obama supporters get about that theory, at least it is based on the fact Obama has outsmarted and outgamed some of the top political minds around. Hillary showed herself to not have that ability in 2008.
WDS
Probably the same place GW’s 22 million missing emails are … you know those pesky RNC servers ….
David Koch
DROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOZZZZZZZEEEEESSSS
David Koch
@askew: you do realize Kos is on the Clinton payroll (not kidding). It’s his outlet. When he tells his employed writers them to post positive and supportive pieces on the Blue-Dog/DLC/Conservadem/Goldman-Sachs/AIPAC stooge they look at their paychecks and 401Ks and say, “yes, sir”.