CAFFERTY: There's a lot of information that voters still don't have about Hillary Clinton, including the White House records from when she was first lady and her tax returns. When asked at this week's debate, a couple of days ago, about those White House records, Clinton said she would absolutely release the documents to show the public what she did and who she met with over the course of those eight years. She said she's, quote, "urged the process be as quick as possible," unquote.
Well, the Bush administration now says it's actually the Clintons who are holding up the release of these records. They say the former President Bill Clinton's representative has not made any move yet to release over 11,000 pages of records. The Clinton campaign says it made two -- may take two more weeks for that representative to decide what to release and then to request the actual release of the documents from the White House. That's convenient. That would be after next Tuesday's primaries in both Texas and Ohio.
As for the tax returns, Hillary Clinton also said at the debate that she would release them once she becomes the nominee or, quote, "even earlier," unquote, but her campaign seems to be backing away from that statement now, suggesting that Clinton won't release the financial information until tax time in April. When Clinton loaned her own campaign $5 million, Barack Obama suggested she should follow his lead, release her tax returns, so the public could see where the money came from.
Here's the question: How important is it for Hillary Clinton to release her tax returns and White House records now? Go to CNN.com/CaffertyFile, you can post a comment there on my blog.
Read more at Media Matters:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200802290001Who is contributing to campaign?
After Mining Deal, Financier Donated to Clinton
By JO BECKER and DON VAN NATTA Jr.
Late on Sept. 6, 2005, a private plane carrying the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra touched down in Almaty, a ruggedly picturesque city in southeast Kazakhstan. Several hundred miles to the west a fortune awaited: highly coveted deposits of uranium that could fuel nuclear reactors around the world. And Mr. Giustra was in hot pursuit of an exclusive deal to tap them.
Unlike more established competitors, Mr. Giustra was a newcomer to uranium mining in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic. But what his fledgling company lacked in experience, it made up for in connections. Accompanying Mr. Giustra on his luxuriously appointed MD-87 jet that day was a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton.
Upon landing on the first stop of a three-country philanthropic tour, the two men were whisked off to share a sumptuous midnight banquet with Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose 19-year stranglehold on the country has all but quashed political dissent.
Mr. Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader’s bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy. Mr. Clinton’s public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.
Within two days, corporate records show that Mr. Giustra also came up a winner when his company signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium agency, Kazatomprom.
The monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers in a transaction ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra, analysts said.
Just months after the Kazakh pact was finalized, Mr. Clinton’s charitable foundation received its own windfall: a $31.3 million donation from Mr. Giustra that had remained a secret until he acknowledged it last month. The gift, combined with Mr. Giustra’s more recent and public pledge to give the William J. Clinton Foundation an additional $100 million, secured Mr. Giustra a place in Mr. Clinton’s inner circle, an exclusive club of wealthy entrepreneurs in which friendship with the former president has its privileges.
Mr. Giustra was invited to accompany the former president to Almaty just as the financier was trying to seal a deal he had been negotiating for months.
In separate written responses, both men said Mr. Giustra traveled with Mr. Clinton to Kazakhstan, India and China to see first-hand the philanthropic work done by his foundation.
A spokesman for Mr. Clinton said the former president knew that Mr. Giustra had mining interests in Kazakhstan but was unaware of “any particular efforts” and did nothing to help. Mr. Giustra said he was there as an “observer only” and there was “no discussion” of the deal with Mr. Nazarbayev or Mr. Clinton.
But Moukhtar Dzhakishev, president of Kazatomprom, said in an interview that Mr. Giustra did discuss it, directly with the Kazakh president, and that his friendship with Mr. Clinton “of course made an impression.” Mr. Dzhakishev added that Kazatomprom chose to form a partnership with Mr. Giustra’s company based solely on the merits of its offer.
After The Times told Mr. Giustra that others said he had discussed the deal with Mr. Nazarbayev, Mr. Giustra responded that he “may well have mentioned my general interest in the Kazakhstan mining business to him, but I did not discuss the ongoing” efforts.
As Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign has intensified, Mr. Clinton has begun severing financial ties with Ronald W. Burkle, the supermarket magnate, and Vinod Gupta, the chairman of InfoUSA, to avoid any conflicts of interest. Those two men have harnessed the former president’s clout to expand their businesses while making the Clintons rich through partnership and consulting arrangements.
*snip*
More: Ny Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html?_r=1&ei=5065&en=6a843530898e147a&ex=1202446800&partner=MYWAY&pagewanted=print&oref=sloginBTW: This is just one of the shady deals done for Clinton, google search reveals many more.
Why is Rush and Ann ( two of the biggest slime buckets of RW) telling voters to vote for Hillary?
First it was ultra-conservative Ann Coulter who said she'd support Hillary Clinton if John McCain won the Republican nomination for the 2008 presidential election. Now, another big-time conservative personality by the name of Rush Limbaugh is also threatening to throw his weight behind Clinton.
On Thursday, Limbaugh said he's considering raising money for Senator Hillary Clinton's campaign to ensure that she's the Democratic party nominee.
Rush's reasoning for wanting to help out Mrs. Clinton are slightly different than that of Ann Coulter's. Ann wants Clinton to be her President - not McCain. Whereas Limbaugh believes that if Clinton gets the Democratic nomination, the Republicans will have an easier time winning the election and getting their guy in the White House.
Limbaugh said earlier this week that he believes if Senator Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, the GOP is "doomed" this coming November.
*snip*
More from Clevland Leader:
http://www.clevelandleader.com/node/4674Why is a Senior Republican toasting Hillary?
Geoff Elliott, Washington correspondent | October 13, 2007
NURSING a beer in a bar not far from the White House, a senior Bush administration official was handicapping the presidential race and it was the usual tale of woe regarding the Republican field, with him lamenting that there was no standout candidate uniting the party.
But then he leant forward -- and this is a lifetime Republican -- and said: "You know, this is going to sound weird coming from me, but I trust Hillary. She might bein the left lane, but at least she's on the same highway."
The comment sums up Hillary Clinton's position as the frontrunning establishment candidate in the presidential race.
She's claiming middle America, much to the consternation of not only the Right but also the anti-war Left, which reached new levels of desperation this week by running a $65,000 advertisement in The New York Times basically pleading with 2000 Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore to enter the race.
At this point, it would look to be a fool's errand. Clinton is running a masterful campaign in which, against all predictions, she has also managed to soften her image with the public over the past six months.
One of the techniques is a default response to laugh off any serious charge on policy or personality, in what's becoming known as the "Clinton chuckle" or the more pejorative "Clinton cackle". In any case, it's worked a treat, although there are occasional lapses, as happened this week.
On the campaign trail in Iowa, there was a flash of Clinton's infamous "vast right-wing conspiracy" view of the world. Only this time it's not so much a right-wing conspiracy as attacks from her own party, as fellow challengers such as Barack Obama and John Edwards try to peg back her lead in the polls.
This week, a local Iowan poll put Clinton in the lead for the first time in that critical state, with the former first lady at 29per cent, Edwards on 23 per cent and Obama on 22 per cent, which makes her apparent sensitivity all the more surprising.
It came during a testy exchange at one of her campaign rallies with audience member Randall Rolph. He challenged her vote in Congress last month to designate Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organisation.
Clinton's opponents, including Obama and Edwards, say such a designation could be interpreted as authorisation from Congress for military force in Iran, and Rolph picked up the same line.
"It appears you haven't learned from your past mistakes," said Rolph, referring to Clinton's vote in October 2002 to authorise the Bush administration's use of force in Iraq.
bold=my emphasis
More from Australian:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,22575682-5013451,00.htmlHillarys praise of George Bush when he hits an all time low from most Americans!
*snip*
Two-thirds of those polled said they had little or no confidence that the Bush White House could end the war successfully, and little more than a third said they believed that the decision to invade Iraq was correct. About two thirds said they did not believe that Bush shared their priorities and that the US was in worse condition today than before Bush came into office.
The poll follows a similar survey done by USA Today/Gallup the day before that also recorded a 31 percent approval rating for the US president. Like the Times/CBS poll, it indicated a sharp drop in support among those considered by the administration to be its base, with little more than half of conservatives giving Bush a positive rating.
It was under these bleak conditions for the White House that the Democratic senator from New York, Hillary Clinton, came forward to praise Bush at a public appearance in Washington. In a speech at the National Archives on her political career, Mrs. Clinton said of Bush: “He is someone who has a lot of charm and charisma, and I think in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I was very grateful to him for his support for New York.”
While asserting that she had “many disagreements about many, many issues” with the Republican president, she added, “He’s been very willing to talk. He’s been affable. He’s been good company.”
Returning to the issue of Bush’s response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City, Clinton claimed that Bush had kept his promise to provide New York City with $20 billion in aid. “He always kept it on track,” she said. “He made sure we got the resources that we needed, and I’m very grateful to him for that.”
It is not likely that “charm and charisma,” “affable” and “good company” are the words that come to mind for the two thirds of Americans who are opposed to the Bush administration’s policies, many of whom loathe the US president for the criminal actions he has taken over the past five years.
What precisely Mrs. Clinton finds charming, affable and good about the American president she failed to say.
A fairly acute description of the president’s personal traits was provided not long ago by a prominent Washington psychoanalyst who diagnosed George W. Bush as a “paranoid megalomaniac.” In his book Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President, Dr. Justin Frank identified in Bush a “lifelong streak of sadism, ranging from childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs) to insulting journalists, gloating over state executions...
pumping his fist gleefully before the bombing of Baghdad.*snip*
More from World Socialist Web Site:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/may2006/hill-m11.shtmlWhy would she choose Mc Cain over Obama?
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/3/3/174218/4966/721/468110The only thing Hillary is a victim of, is her of her own making!
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