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Orin Kerr, law prof at GeorgeWashingtonUniversity has a comment on the country’s political class.
If I understand the history correctly, in the late 1990s, the President was impeached for lying about a sexual affair by a House of Representatives led by a man who was also then hiding a sexual affair, who was supposed to be replaced by another Congressman who stepped down when forced to reveal that he too was having a sexual affair, which led to the election of a new Speaker of the House who now has been indicted for lying about payments covering up his sexual contact with a boy.
Yikes.
John Fund says not long after Denny Hastert’s thing become public, people started to wonder where he got the cash.
Denny Hastert — the former House speaker now indicted for violating regulations on bank withdrawals that were originally meant to snare drug dealers — was a man of integrity according to his former House colleagues.
By the sketchy standards of Illinois politics, that might well have been true. But his fall from grace should prompt other questions about how a former high-school teacher who held elective office from 1981 to 2007 could leave Congress with a fortune estimated at $4 million to $17 million. When he entered Congress in 1987, he was worth at most $275,000. Hastert was the beneficiary of very lucky land deals while in Congress; and since leaving office, he has earned more than $2 million a year as a lobbyist. That helps explain how he could agree to pay $3.5 million to a former student to cover up an ancient sex-abuse scandal.
Denny Hastert used to visit the Wall Street Journal, where I worked while he was the speaker. He was a bland, utterly conventional supporter of the status quo; his idea of reform was to squelch anyone who disturbed Congress’s usual way of doing business. I saw him become passionate only once, when he defended earmarks — the special projects such as Alaska’s “Bridge to Nowhere” that members dropped at the last minute into conference reports, deliberately leaving no time to debate or amend them. Earmarks reached the staggering level of 15,000 in 2005, and their stench helped cost the GOP control of Congress the next year. …
The NY Times continues to pound the Clintons. This was front page above the fold on Saturday.
To commemorate the 10th anniversary of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, Petra Nemcova, a Czech model who survived the disaster by clinging to a palm tree, decided to pull out all the stops for the annual fund-raiser of her school-building charity, the Happy Hearts Fund.
She booked Cipriani 42nd Street, which greeted guests with Bellini cocktails on silver trays. She flew in Sheryl Crow with her band and crew for a 20-minute set. She special-ordered heart-shaped floral centerpieces, heart-shaped chocolate parfaits, heart-shaped tiramisù and, because orange is the charity’s color, an orange carpet rather than a red one. She imported a Swiss auctioneer and handed out orange rulers to serve as auction paddles, playfully threatening to use hers to spank the highest bidder for an Ibiza vacation.
The gala cost $363,413. But the real splurge? Bill Clinton.
The former president of the United States agreed to accept a lifetime achievement award at the June 2014 event after Ms. Nemcova offered a $500,000 contribution to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. The donation, made late last year after the foundation sent the charity an invoice, amounted to almost a quarter of the evening’s net proceeds — enough to build 10 preschools in Indonesia.
Happy Hearts’ former executive director believes the transaction was a quid pro quo, which rerouted donations intended for a small charity with the concrete mission of rebuilding schools after natural disasters to a large foundation with a broader agenda and a budget 100 times bigger.
“The Clinton Foundation had rejected the Happy Hearts Fund invitation more than once, until there was a thinly veiled solicitation and then the offer of an honorarium,” said the former executive director, Sue Veres Royal, who held that position at the time of the gala and was dismissed a few weeks later amid conflicts over the gala and other issues. …
… Outside Cipriani, protesters, mostly Haitian-Americans frustrated with the earthquake reconstruction effort, stood behind barricades holding signs.
“Clinton, where is the money?” they chanted. “In whose pockets?”
Jonathan Tobin posts on the above NY Times story.
… But the main point to be gleaned from this incident isn’t just that Clinton has established a lucrative personal appearance business that beggars anything ever attempted by any other retired public official, let alone a former commander-in-chief. The problem is that Happy Hearts is a real charity that does hands-on good works in the Third World. The Clinton Foundation is, at best, a charitable middleman, that funds events where people talk about charity and how best to strategize its implementation. As we’ve learned since Schweizer’s book appearance, the foundation does relatively little actual charity work on its own. Only ten percent of the vast sums it raises from the wealthy and the powerful around the world is spent on charitable efforts. The rest goes to funding conferences where the Clintons and their donors pose as philanthropists and to pay the salaries and travel expenses of those who work for the foundation. That means the money goes to feather the nests of Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton and, to a lesser extent, does the same for many of their faithful family retainers such as Clinton attack machine hit man Sidney Blumenthal.
So while the large army of Clinton fans and apologists can say that there is nothing illegal going on here, what they aren’t saying is that the Clintons don’t merely leech off the rich. They also live off of the money they extract from smaller charities that do real good works. That’s not merely “distasteful,” it’s disgraceful and unethical. …
Jack Kelly has more on Clinton corruption.
… In more than two decades in national politics, Hillary Clinton has succeeded only at peddling influence and orchestrating smear campaigns against women her husband molested. Ms. Clinton is greedy and corrupt. She has a reckless disregard for the truth and national security. She has a record barren of achievement.
Ms. Clinton is popular with her party despite all this. What that says about Democrats isn’t flattering.
Not only does Clinton hardly ever leave her bubble, Jennifer Rubin says when she steps out she takes her bubble with her.
More interesting than Bill Clinton’s shell company and the Clinton Foundation’s receipt of thousands of dollars from the just-indicted and widely reviled FIFA (but arguably a FIFA beneficiary, Qatar, whom also sent the foundation money, is much worse ethics-wise), is the newest Clinton pretense. Not the Southern accent — the other pretense. The New York Times dutifully tells us (because the Clinton campaign told them!) that she has “immersed herself in dense briefing papers” (yet has no views we can easily discern) and brings snippets of information from her roundtables back to her policy team. This is nearly as bad as taking and passing on Libya analysis from Sid Blumenthal.
Remember these are handpicked participants. So she is getting information from people who the campaign has made certain will not create discord, disagreement or doubt. Aside from the monochromatic composition of the group, she picks up whatever stray phrase one of these participants happen to use. She now wants to call education an “opportunity system” because one of her hand-picked attendees used that pretentious buzz phrase.
It is remarkable that even when she ventures outside her bubble, it is not actually outside the bubble. She brings her bubble with her in the form of a preselected, fully vetted, non-combative audience.