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Hillary’s war on individualism - Have you been listening?

By: Neal Boortz

“Fascist ethics begin … with the acknowledgment that it is not the individual who confers a meaning upon society, but it is, instead, the existence of a human society which determines the human character of the individual. According to Fascism, a true, a great spiritual life cannot take place unless the State has risen to a position of pre-eminence in the world of man. The curtailment of liberty thus becomes justified at once, and this need of rising the State to its rightful position.”

[Mario Palmieri, “The Philosophy of Fascism” 1936]

“We must stop thinking of the individual and start thinking about what is best for society.”
[Hillary Clinton, 1993]

“Fairness doesn’t just happen. It requires the right government policies.”

[Hillary Clinton, 2007]

“When will the world learn that a million men are of no importance compared with one man?”
[Henry David Thoreau]

Well .. there you go. A few different opinions on the value of the individual and individualism. This Thoreau character seemed to recognize the primacy of the individual. You really can’t say the same for European fascists and our probable next president of the United States, the smartest woman in the world, Hillary Rodham.

Have you been listening to Hillary? I’m not asking if you’ve been hearing her. The question is have you been listening? Have you taken her words, sat down and absorbed them? Have you looked for the nuances? Have you tried to read between the lines? Remember her “I want to take those profits” rant after Exxon Mobile released their FY 2006 profits? Listen, folks. Hillary .. the real Hillary … is starting emerge from her den. If you listen — really listen — you aren’t going to like what you hear.

Read More…

Hillary Clinton wants to take from rich and give to the middle class

By Jennifer Hunter

Like a modern-day Robin Hood, Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton wants to take from the rich and give to the poor.

She wants to rescue the American middle class.

She charges that the middle class is being eroded by jobs shipped overseas, by falling incomes and rising payments for basic services.

Her proof: Health-care premiums have gone up 87 percent since 2000, college costs have gone up 40 percent in the same time and gas prices have more than doubled. “It’s like our middle class and working-class families are invisible to this president.”

And she has an ambitious, lengthy list of ideas for saving the middle class, including eliminating burdens such as the alternative minimum tax, allowing Medicare to negotiate for better drug prices with pharmaceutical companies and creating incentives for American companies to create domestic jobs.

Calls for new version of Progressive Movement

In a speech Tuesday at the Manchester School of Technology, she harked back to the Progressive Movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when there were too many “haves and have-nots” and efforts were made to bust the robber barons’ monopoly and modernize the workplace, calling for a new Progressive Movement that would give all Americans a chance to compete and prosper in the global economy.

She cited the astonishing statistic that every child born in American has a $29,000 share in the federal deficit.

One of her major concerns is not only to reduce that federal deficit but also to tighten corporate governance and raise corporate taxes, particularly in the oil sector, where companies make huge profits. (She noted no-bid contracts given to Halliburton in Iraq.)

She also wants to reform the tax code so U.S. companies do not get a tax break for “shipping jobs overseas.” And she would provide advantages for companies that create jobs in America.

She also wants to:

• Institute affordable health care.

• Eliminate President Bush’s tax cuts to high-income families while maintaining the cuts for the middle class

• Create universal pre-kindergarten

• Make it easier for college students to get loans

• Help working people earn enough to support their families and save money

• Expand unemployment insurance

• Make it easier to join a union

• Invest in alternative energy resources to create new jobs.

Her plan is wide-ranging and so ambitious it will take the determination of a Robin Hood.

Source: Chicago Sun-Times

Hillary donor returns to U.S. to face charges

By Greg Krikorian and Robin Fields

Abdul Rehman Jinnah, who is charged with illegally funneling funds to Boxer, Clinton campaigns, collapses at a hearing in Los Angeles.

A Pakistani businessman accused of illegally funneling tens of thousands of dollars to the political campaigns of U.S. Sens. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) surrendered to the FBI on a year-old indictment Tuesday, then collapsed in Los Angeles federal court.

Looking tired and disoriented, Abdul Rehman Jinnah, 56, complained of chest pains and began shaking an hour into a contentious bond hearing before U.S. Magistrate Judge Patrick J. Walsh. The judge interrupted the hearing for nearly 30 minutes while paramedics attended to Jinnah.

After Jinnah’s condition was stabilized and he was taken to a local hospital for an examination, Walsh set bond at $300,000.

The drama unfolded shortly after Jinnah, who has a history of heart problems and diabetes, flew back to the U.S. from Pakistan to answer charges by a grand jury that he engineered illicit donations to Clinton’s political action committee and Boxer’s 2004 reelection campaign.

Officials from both campaigns have said they were unaware of the alleged wrongdoing and returned the contributions.

At Tuesday’s hearing, Assistant U.S. Atty. Dennis Mitchell urged the judge to deny Jinnah bond, arguing that he was a “tremendous flight risk” with a long history of financial misconduct that included five bankruptcy filings that had been dismissed by the courts.

Mitchell said authorities suspected that Jinnah returned to the U.S. to face federal charges only because the government had initiated travel restrictions that made it increasingly difficult for the businessman to travel overseas.

“The government’s position is that he is coming back just to test the waters” and could flee again if he believes he will be imprisoned, Mitchell said.

But Jinnah’s attorney, former federal prosecutor Douglas Fuchs, said that was “absurd,” noting that his client had voluntarily surrendered and faced only one to two years in prison if convicted. Fuchs said his client went to Pakistan last year to tend to his ill mother and delayed his return because of his own health problems.

Fuchs said his client did not know the indictment had been returned against him in May 2006 when he flew to Pakistan later the same month.

It was near the close of Tuesday’s hearing, during a discussion of his assets and setting bond, that Jinnah, handcuffed and behind a glass partition, suddenly fell back in his chair. After paramedics whisked Jinnah to a hospital, defense attorneys Fuchs, Thomas Holliday and Robert C. Bonner assured the judge that the proceeding could continue.

The lawyers are with the firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, where one of Jinnah’s sons also is an attorney.

Born in Pakistan, Jinnah immigrated to the U.S. in the late 1980s and settled in Northridge. Over the next decade, he tried his hand at a string of businesses and left a trail of angry creditors and former business partners, many of whom accused him of making grandiose promises he failed to fulfill, court records show.

But by 2004, Jinnah had positioned himself as a point man who could help the Democratic Party tap the increasingly affluent Pakistani American community for campaign funds.

He and his family personally contributed $122,000 to Democratic candidates and organizations that year and held events for Clinton and Boxer at his home.

Jinnah’s legal troubles began when he allegedly attempted to circumvent federal contribution limits by reimbursing friends, business contacts and their family members for contributions made in their names.

From June 2004 to February 2005, according to an indictment, Jinnah solicited nearly $60,000 in political contributions to Clinton and Boxer from more than a dozen “conduits,” reimbursing them with funds from his company, All American Distributing, a cellphone wholesaler.

The scheme the indictment lays out allowed Jinnah to get around limits then in effect on individual donors of $5,000 per year to political action committees and $2,000 per election to candidates, as well as the ban on using corporate money for political donations.

Stuart Schoenburg, 76, a Tarzana television producer charged as Jinnah’s co-conspirator, has pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count and is awaiting sentencing.

Source: LA Times

Does Carl Bernstein know what junior senators want?

Carl Bernstein is a rarity in the American electorate: He’s ambivalent about Hillary Clinton. Recent polls show as little as 3 percent of Americans have no opinion of the former First Lady, and the 97 percent that do split almost evenly between favorable and unfavorable. So what to make of a book that exhaustively (over 600 pages of exhaust) plumbs the depths of the known Hillary record—we learn about her prom dress, her religious beliefs, her endometritis, her fears of indictment—only to conclude, lamely, that she “is neither the demon of the right’s perception, nor a feminist saint, nor is she particularly emblematic of her time,” and, shockingly, “the jury remains out.”

Tell it to the Scaife Foundation, Carl. Or, for that matter, to her passionate supporters, who see her not as a mere leader, but as a symbol of national redemption. If the “jury remains out” on Hillary Clinton, it is only because they’re hung.

Of course, her ability to polarize is what makes writing a mainstream biography of Mrs. Clinton so difficult. The non-hack must provide enough detail about the numerous Clinton scandals to make news, but cannot dim the lights too much on her considerable accomplishments, lest he derail the one thing that’s truly interesting about Hillary Clinton: She might be our next President.

At times, Mr. Bernstein seems self-conscious about the tightrope that he’s walking, taking the time to implicitly distance himself from hatchet jobs like Edward Klein’s The Truth About Hillary (which he describes as “an ideological screed, which contains barely smidgens—and no context—about what the title promises”), but also to judge, primly, in the style of high wingnuttery, such irrelevant details as the fact that “[h]er ankles were thick,” and to harp on both the “entitlement attitude of” and “holier-than-thou attitude of”—attributes that get their own index entries, along with such weirdly psychographic points of interest as “egregious errors and failures of” (10 references), “friendship capacity of” (eight references), “anger, temper, and hurt of” (23 references) and “clothes of” (25 references).

One is tempted to observe that the attention given to these areas says as much about Carl Bernstein as it does Hillary Clinton; though Mr. Bernstein has obvious and strong credentials as a journalist, his skill as an arbiter of what makes a relationship work—or a woman happy—has been rather famously questioned. (Heartburn, a roman à clef by his ex-wife, Nora Ephron, is about Mr. Bernstein leaving her for another woman while Ms. Ephron was pregnant with their child.) Indeed, his investigation of the central mystery of the Clintons’ marriage—what has kept them together—is curiously flat-footed: Apparently, they have some kind of partnership. Or, as he puts it in one of several iterations: “It was obvious that Bill and Hillary could never have achieved what they had without each other.” Not exactly worth a siren on Drudge.

Mr. Bernstein’s solution to wrapping the divergent opinions about Hillary—is she pragmatic or an idealist? Spiritual or hard-edged? Politically savvy or tin-eared?—into one neat (or neat-ish) package is not to clarify which view of Hillary might be true, but to proclaim that one doesn’t have to choose. He tells us, repeatedly, that it is Mrs. Clinton’s “extraordinary capability for change and evolutionary development” that makes sense of the contradictions in her life, “from Goldwater Girl to liberal Democrat, from fashion victim to power-suit sophisticate, from embattled first lady to establishmentarian senator.” In his grand narrative, events unspool like just-so stories, with Hillary learning An Important Lesson from her triumphs and defeats. When Bill loses his first election (to represent Arkansas in Congress) because—argues Mr. Bernstein—Hillary was unwilling to take a shady contribution, Mr. Bernstein writes: “Subsequently, she would be far less committed to the high road, and much more concerned with results.” This is, however, a lesson she also learned at Wellesley, where “[s]he was more interested in the process of achieving victory than in taking a philosophical position that could not lead anywhere.”

And, just to make sure, she learns it again after Bill first loses re-election as governor, upon which she and Dick Morris adopt a strategy of “do[ing] whatever it took to get elected and us[ing] the same philosophy to govern.”

Hillary Clinton was never slow to learn. Mr. Bernstein gets closer to what might be the truth when he observes that her approach is more like “military rigor: reading the landscape, seeing the obstacles, recognizing which ones are malevolent or malign, and taking expedient action accordingly.” She’s less about evolution than adaptation. And as much as Mr. Bernstein wants to talk about “Clinton, Hillary. personal growth and change of” (the index is in many ways more interesting than the book), his portrayal of her is remarkably unsurprising.

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The Jury is still out: Preview of Carl Bernstein’s Bio on Hillary Clinton

The much-awaited biography of Hillary Clinton by Carl Bernstein closes with the observation that the U.S. senator, former First Lady and current candidate for president, “has continued to speak from the protective shell of her own making,” and in doing so, “has misrepresented not just facts but often her essential self …

“Almost always, Hillary has stood for good things. Yet there is a disconnect between her convictions and words, and her actions. That is where Hillary disappoints. But the jury is still out.”

E&P today received a copy of the 628-page book, “A Woman in Charge,” which is to be published by Alfred A. Knopf next week. Bernstein, the famed Watergate reporter and author of several other books, lists nearly 100 interviews conducted for this one.

While Bernstein declares that Clinton is “neither the demon of the right’s perception, nor a feminist saint,” critics of the senator from New York are sure to find plenty to bolster some of their views. Bernstein, for example, writes flatly, “Since her Arkansas years, Hillary Rodham Clinton has always had a difficult relationship with the truth.” Yet he adds: “She is hardly different from most conventional politicians in that regard.”

Bernstein quotes an unnamed former White House aide: “I don’t know how anything in her life can be deep or honest because she’s tied herself in to stay with Bill. … So everything is seen from this kind of warped perspective, in a way. She can no longer be honest about what she actually feels, so it is hard to know if she’s being honest about what she says she thinks.”

The Lewinsky affair does not fully arrive in the book until nearly 500 pages into it. It includes nuggets such as: “In the past, Hillary and Betsey Wright had succeeded in silencing or undermining the claims of many of Bill Clinton’s women, and many who weren’t but claimed to be so.” And: “In spite of the fact she had been lied to, it took Hillary less than two days to correctly figure out how events would proceed.”

The book includes only a handful of pages covering her post-White House years.

Other material:

– Bernstein suggests that future historians will come to describe the White House years of 1993-2000 as a “co-presidency.”

– Hillary Clinton still contends that her vote in favor of the Iraq war resolution in 2002 was nothing but authorization for the president to work through the United Nations, and she claims Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice assured her on that. But Bush aides say Rice gave no such guarantee.

– In the midst of the Lewinsky scandal, the White House screened the movie “The Apostle” with its stars, Robert Duvall and Farrah Fawcett in attendance. The Clinton seemed to enjoy it enormously, “trying, with great difficulty to keep up appearances.”

– On Martha’s Vineyard, visiting novelist Williams Styron, Hillary raised the subject of seeking family counseling or Bill “getting counseling for his sexual compulsions.” Both Hillary and Bill also talked to Styron about right-wing attacks on them, most notably by prosecutor Kenneth Starr and the network of “that Pittsburgh nut,” Richard Mellon Scaife.

One fascinating, if minor episode, involves Hillary Clinton’s mid-1990s plan to “systematically attack the Washington Post” because of its Whitewater coverage.

Bernstein quotes legal aide Mark Fabiani as revealing the idea of a campaign against the Post “went fairly far down the road before some of us succeeded in stopping it.” Bernstein claims that Hillary told her aides: “We have to figure out all the mistakes that the Post has made. We’re going to document it, and then publicizie it somehow or get a journalism review to write an article about it, or go to the Post editors and complain about [reporter] Sue Schmidt with this evidence, this dramatic evidence in hand.”

She called five aides to the White House, including Fabiani and George Stephanopoulos, and she allegedly then said: “You can take it over and meet with [executive editor] Len Downie and … go through this, and then we can publicize it.”

Fabriani cautioned that she was overreacting — the Post’s shortcoming were probably more a matter of tone or placement — but she replied: “No, if you look at it, I’m sure it’s going to be true. Go ahead.”
Bernstein writes that for the next 10 days or so a team compiled a “dossier” on the Post. Finally, “the virtually unanimous opposition of the lawyers and Stephanopolous prevailed.”

One of the aides said that this was an example of Clinton’s ability to organize people for a big fight, but in terms of how to respond “her instincts are just awful.”

Source: Editor & Publisher

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