Hillary Clinton -- Lawless, Power-lusting, Opaque, and Now, Finally, Done

Hillary Clinton has hung around and hung around, despite her long record of lawlessness, secrecy to hide her power-lust, and disregard for others.  As an admirer of Saul Alinsky, she, like Obama, is a proponent of class and group warfare who sees oppressors and victims everywhere in American society.  That vision is most useful in justifying never-ending power grabs by government and the politicians who use that power to extort wealth and further power from the People and their private sector enterprises.  As does Obama, she turns a blind eye to the obvious conclusion that her government solution to all problems is flawed because there is no power in the private sector as great as that of government, which is controlled by people even more morally challenged for the most part.

Hillary has always been drawn into corrupt practices.  The Whitewater and Tyson's Chicken scandals while the First "Lady" of Arkansas set the expectations of rational observers before she moved into the White House.  Her unlawful practice of hiding documents and violating transparency laws was early in full evidence when she became First "Lady" of the United States.  She could not find subpenaed documents relating to Whitewater, until they or some subset of them turned up in plain sight quite mysteriously.  Then the HillaryCare fiasco she orchestrated with Ira Magaziner demonstrated a penchant for holding secret meetings that were required to be public meetings.  Hillary removed papers from Vince Foster's office after his mysterious death.  Hillary and Bill accused the operators of the White House Travel Office of wrongdoing, without any justification, in order to try to install their own friends in that job.  What kind of person would send someone to prison in order to gain a job for a friend?

So, it is hardly surprising that we are now hearing that Hillary used her position as Secretary of State to extort and/or to offer favors to nations if they granted money to her foundation.  Alright, it is true that I do not directly and certainly know that favors or harm were promised unless the donations were made.  But the appearance is very bad and what is worse, knowing Hillary's ethics and practice, the rational individual has to expect it to be most likely that promises or threats were made, which caused some nations not very friendly to America or to the equal rights of women to make contributions to her foundation.  Once again, one senses that transparency is greatly lacking on Hillary's relationship with these donator nations.  Her foundation is widely known to function as a sort of political slush fund, though it does also do some charitable work.  The foundation fits the pattern of being another tool to obscure her activities.

Now most recently we discovered that the reason that the House of Representatives and Judicial Watch could not get her e-mails relating to the Benghazi incident, is because she did not use the State Department e-mail account as she was required for conducting State Department business.  No, she used e-mail addresses operating off of a server in the basement of her home, as did some of her close assistants in the State Department.  Federal law requires that all government e-mails be maintained and preserved.  Hillary had her people examine her e-mails on one of the e-mail addresses operating out of her personal server and turn some set of them over to the State Department, many months after leaving the office.  This is a huge violation of the transparency requirement.  Those and who knows how many other e-mails she has not turned over should have long ago been examined by the State Department to find any that might be relevant to the Freedom of Information Act requests made by Judicial Watch and to the investigation of the House of Representatives.  This is a majority interference with the essential checks and balances We the People must maintain on our government to constrain its tendencies to tyranny and excess.

Hillary was well-aware that her actions were in violation of law and yet she did not step forward with her e-mails until she was caught.  I heard her friend Lanny Davis make the claim that she was not hiding her personal e-mail, because she had sent thousands of e-mails to thousands of people using it.  This does not mean that she was obeying the transparency requirements.  What it does imply is that the many people who were in government positions knew that she was violating the law by using her personal e-mail account for government business.  The extreme and total corruption of the Obama administration is evident in the fact that these people did not bring down an Inspector General investigation of her e-mail use while she was still serving as Secretary of State.  But while the Inspector General did not bother Hillary, nine investigations within the State Department did find that the law-violating use of private e-mails was widespread in the State Department and in many of our embassies around the world.  Such a violation was even used as a reason for sacking one ambassador during Hillary's tenure in the State Department.  But Hillary is always above the law!

As bad as Hillary Clinton's violation of transparency laws and court orders is, it may be even more disturbing that because she did not use the State Department e-mail, she had to have exposed many, many secrets to governments and groups unfriendly to the U.S. and opposed to individual rights.  It is already known that her home server system was not very secure with respect to hackers.  It was only a useful tool to deceive the American People, but not to hide classified State Department business from Qatar, North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China.  I expect many Americans do not understand how much State Department business is classified and do not understand how badly many other nations would want to see the Secretary of State's email and that of the people she corresponded with.  While there are many reasons that her tenure as Secretary of State was not a success, it may very well turn out that one of them was because many nations were hacking her insecure e-mail accounts.  [Ari Fleischer has also said that it is most likely the case that Russia, China, and Iran, among other nations, have read all of Hillary Clinton's e-mails, including everything about State Department business.  Update on 9 March 2015.]

Any thinking American should be horrified by the risk she put U.S. foreign policy and defense in with what for her was a political career convenience.  This was an extremely irresponsible act and one which surely violated the law.  She belongs in prison, not in a campaign to become the next President of the United States and the most powerful leader of the world's most powerful government.

But, who cares why Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans died in Benghazi and who cares if court orders were violated?  Who cares if an essential check on government power and corruption was violated?  Who cares if Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea were reading Hillary's e-mail and that of her correspondents about our foreign and defense policies?  We are about to test the American voter once again.  I hope they will not prove as unthinking as they were when they twice voted for Obama.  If they only prove a wee bit better thinkers, then Hillary Clinton is now toast.

For those of you who do care about why Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans died in Benghazi, Judicial Watch did recently obtain enough e-mails from a number of Hillary Clinton's top State Department aides and advisers to discover that they had immediately recognized that the attack was by a terrorist group.  They did not speculate in those e-mails that it was a "random" mob that was incensed by an obscure Internet video.  Given the strident and angry "Who cares" attitude of their boss, perhaps it is at least possible that they did not inform Hillary that the attack was a terrorist attack.  So which of these are part of the real story?

• Hillary was unable to conclude from the evidence that the attack was a terrorist attack.
• Her aides knew she would not be interested in the cause of the attack.
• Her aides knew that she wanted plausible deniability for her ridiculous claim that a random mob was incensed by an obscure Internet video and spontaneously attacked the Consulate.
• Her aides, knowing her famous furies, were afraid to tell her the real reason for the attack.
• Hillary did know that the attack was by a terrorist group, but it was politically inconvenient to make that public with Obama's re-election campaign underway, so she lied about the cause.

Update on 11 March 2015:  Hillary Clinton destroyed 32,000 e-mails last year which she claimed were personal.  She refused to turn her home server over for any attempt to recover and check the disposed e-mails according to a report in the Washington Times.  We do not know how many other e-mails she has not turned over, but the timing of her destruction of e-mails would have allowed her to destroy the e-mails relating to the Benghazi incident.

Government Centrally Planned Economy Continues to Kill Job Recovery

The July 2012 Bureau of Labor Statistics unemployment report of the Household Survey without any seasonal correction of data, revealed a loss of 76,000 jobs in July compared to June.  This was rarely reported in the mainstream media.  The nominal, though rather meaningless, unemployment rate went up from 8.43% to 8.56%.  The percentage of the population with jobs dropped to 58.81% from 58.89% in June.  The headline statistic reported by the mainstream media was that 163,000 jobs were added in July.  This was based on seasonally adjusted data from the Establishment report, but there are problems with the seasonal adjustments in this unprecedented recession and there are a record number of self-employed people these days since they cannot find jobs otherwise.  Many of those self-employed people decided in July that they were not really effectively employed any longer.  They had tried self-employment in desperation and failed in the uphill struggle with the Obama economy.  To take the fate of these people into account, we need to examine the Household Survey data, as I have been doing all along in this unprecedented and never-ending recession.

The number of missing jobs is calculated based on the employment workforce of January 2000 when many quality jobs were available and the unemployment rate was 4.04%.  The workforce then was 67.49% of the total non-institutional civilian working age population.  The number of missing jobs in July 2012 is slightly lower than it was in July 2011 by 256,000 jobs, but it is higher by 696,000 jobs than it was in the miserable month of July 2010!  In two years of supposed recovery the number of missing jobs has actually increased by almost 700,000.  This is not a real recovery.  It is all smoke and mirrors.  The percentage of missing jobs compared to those wanted went up from 12.74% in June to 12.86% in July.

Biomedical and diagnostics companies such as Medtronic, Boston Scientific, Stryker, Covidien, Abbot Labs, Qiagen, Invacare, GE, SurModics, WorldHeart Corp., the Cordis Div. of Johnson & Johnson, C. R. Bard, BioMerieux, Celera, Cardo Medical, Resetta Genomics, and Care Fusion are all laying off employees, many citing the 2.3% tax on all revenues, not profits, from biomedical devices and on clinical testing in ObamaCare, or more accurately, ObamaUncaringTax.

Defense companies are doing the same in anticipation of the large cut-backs in defense spending brought on by the sequestering of defense funds as the Democrat Senate has failed to produce a budget in the entire presidency of Obama, or over 1203 days or 3.3 years.  This budget is required by law for very good reasons, but this Senate is lawless.  A recent study by George Mason University scholars calculates that the sequester cut-backs in military equipment purchases and R&D will result in the loss of about 1 million jobs.  Because the reduction in funds begins on 2 January 2013 and the WARN Act requires companies making large layoffs to give employees 60 days notice, these reductions will substantially have to occur by 3 November 2012.  Identifying the victims and processing such large numbers of lay-offs takes a massive amount of management time and hurts productivity.  The best way to handle such a process is to begin paring employees early, which many of these companies have been and continue to do.  Most of these cuts have nonetheless not yet been announced or made.

The Obama and EPA war on fossil fuels also is killing jobs.  Coal mines are closing and coal-fired electric power plants are closing.  Some railroad jobs will be lost as a result.  Because electricity costs are going up substantially as a result of losing low-cost coal-fired power plants and the mandates for very expensive wind and solar power, many businesses have higher costs and cannot hire added employees or are losing those they had.  The Obama restrictions on offshore and federal lands drilling and exploration for oil have caused many potential jobs to be lost in those activities.  America has an incredible portion of the world supply of coal, oil, and natural gas.  Feeder and long-distance oil pipelines have also not been built, which would have provided many jobs.  Refinery expansions and new refineries are badly needed, but regulations make such investments very hard to make.  This is another lost opportunity and results in higher fuel costs for transportation and higher plastic costs as well.  These higher costs inhibit the growth of many companies and add to reductions in consumer disposable income.  This senseless Obama vendetta has cost Americans many, many jobs.

Good government does not steal so much money and other resources from the productive private sector.  Good government is minimal government and serves only to protect the sovereign rights of the individual to life, liberty, property, the ownership of one's own mind, body, and labor, and the pursuit of happiness.  Such legitimate government makes way so that a robust private sector can produce a cornucopia of jobs, products, services, and ideas.  The illegitimate Obama government is greatly inhibiting the private sector and preventing the private sector from generating this abundance of wealth.  The role of government in producing jobs is simply to get out of the way.  That is a fact the Democrat Socialists will never understand.  If you want jobs and a healthy economy, this Obama administration and this Democrat Senate must be dismantled as a result of the November election.

Obama will Intuit When to Read General McChrystal's Report

On 20 September 2009, we learned that General McChrystal, the commander in Afghanistan, had given a 66-page report on the deteriorating situation there to Defense Secretary Robert Gates. I saw an interview with Sec. Gates today in which he said he was sitting on the report while Obama decided what the new strategy in Afghanistan would be. He said he would decide when to give it to Obama. Then he corrected himself and said that he would give it to Obama when Obama asked for it.

What is really going on here is this:

• Obama wants to concentrate on taking over the medical services industry and then on taking over the use and control of all energy, and then on union card check.
• He needs all of his remaining energy for telling the world that America is nothing special and is just one among equals. Same, same constitutional representative government, dictatorship, communist oligarchy, and kleptocracy. They are all just peachy, except that the first does not do enough redistribution.
  
• Obama needs to keep his socialist cadres happy while taking over medicine and energy.
• Obama cannot do that if he gives General McChrystal the troops he wants in Afghanistan.
• If Obama does not increase the troop numbers, he is blamed for losing Afghanistan, which he said he would fight for vigorously when he said we should abandon Iraq.
  

Now if I were President (ha, ha, ha), everything would be different! I would be putting constant suggestions before Congress on how to get the government out of all sorts of properly private sector activities so Congress and I could focus on the rational use of the enumerated constitutional powers of the government. In particular, I would note that defense issues are about the foremost issues for a proper President. I would also very much want to read Gen. McChrystal's report before I tried to formulate a new policy for the conflict in Afghanistan.

But this is not the way Obama functions. No, he seeks new, unenumerated powers as his first priority. He claims to be formulating new strategies for Afghanistan without the benefit of reading a report from his top commander on the ground. Somehow, he will intuit when the right time comes to read this report in the future..... after a new political policy is already in place.

There is a clear theme in place with this Democrat administration and Congress. They are not readers, they are talkers. They talk before they study an issue. They talk faster than they can think, hoping that that means they are talking so fast that we, the People, cannot understand how vacuous they are. Frankly, they are simply child-like. I am reminded of the child who pulls the toy out the hands of another child and shouts, "It's mine.", over and over, even though it isn't. But, they think if they shout this assertion enough, it will become theirs.

Yes, Democrats are people who never developed to the stage of adulthood. Sure, some Republicans are stuck in a state of ossified moral ideals, which represents another form of childishness, but this is but a single wing of that party. The problem of arrested development is more uniform in the Democrat party. This is a party which refuses to concern itself with

• individual rights in most human activities, except selected sexual and drug use issues
• whether an action of the government is Constitutional or not
• whether they have read the legislative bills they vote for or the reports of commanders in the field
  
• whether the revenues might ever be available to pay for the new programs they want
• the health of the private sector, which supplies all the goodies the government wants to redistribute to buy votes
• producing conflict among the people based on their age
• producing conflict among the people based on their race
• producing conflict among the people basd on their gender
• producing conflict among the people based on their income
• encouraging the People to be creative and productive
• the health of the people, which requires motivated doctors, modern equipment, improved drugs, a general dissemination of new techniques and procedures, and affordable health insurance tailored to the needs of the individual
  
• whether the People have jobs, though they make great pretense of being concerned
• whether the interests of America are advanced around the world
• whether U.S. companies can compete effectively and trade freely around the world
• whether the People will have the reliable energy they need to produce goods and services, heat their homes and businesses, and can travel to explore America and the world
• whether employers and employees are free of labor union coercion and violence
• whether the intrusions of government upon commerce are so heavy that small businesses cannot cope with them and many larger businesses are at least hurt in international competition
• whether the privacy of the People's financial and medical records is protected
  

Democrats are like a small child how cannot sit still long enough to read a book or even a few pages. They cannot concentrate on a complex issue, which all governing issues are, long enough to think through the consequences of government action. This inability to concentrate and focus on one issue long enough to think it through leads them to substitute their wishes for the real consequences of their actions. So they wish that raising the minimum wage will result in low income people making more money, but mostly it results in few jobs being made available for those with little developed job skills in reality. They wish that appeasing dictators will make them like us, which it does because then the dictators can take advantage of us to better take advantage of their own people. They wish that people with pre-existing health problems can be given health insurance while everyone's health care costs come down without loss of quality, despite the fact that everyone else's health costs must go up or be rationed in reality. Everywhere wishes are substituted for real consequences.

Unfortunately, when great power is put in the hands of a child, mass destruction often results. It is as though we gave the keys to the family car to a five-year-old and told him to get on the beltway around Washington, D.C. and have a ball.

Supplying Eastern Europe with Anti-tank and Antiaircraft Weapons

In view of the brutal and uncalled for Russian attack upon Georgia and the many threats, including nuclear warfare by Russian generals, against Poland, it is important that we should help those countries with borders with Russia or very near those borders to improve their defense capabilities. In my comment on 11 August to Robert Bidinotto's post on the invasion of Georgia of that date called "Russian aggression meets "anticipatory capitulation"", I recommended that we supply Georgia with anti-tank and antiaircraft weapons systems as a part of our response. Now, Senators Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman have made the same recommendation in a Wall Street Journal OpEd on 26 August. Max Boot on 25 August called for our helping to arm the ex-Warsaw Pact and border countries with anti-tank and antiaircraft weapons in this Wall Street Journal OpEd.

Such largely defensive and relatively inexpensive weapon systems would make future Russian invasions a much more expensive proposition for Russia.