Daily Archives: 29 August 2016

What’s Scaring Her So Much?

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Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, with the active support of the State Department which she used to lead, is refusing to release all of her State Department daily schedules until after the elections this fall.  These schedules would reveal with whom she met, for how long, and on what (claimed) subjects.  While some of those schedules have been released already (not voluntarily, but only under court order pursuant to an AP FOIA request that had to be satisfied via AP’s lawsuit), she—and State—are slow walking the release of the rest.  Now why would that be?

Recall that the daily schedules so far released demonstrate that while Secretary of State, Clinton met with or had telephone conversations with thousands of diplomats, other foreign dignitaries, Federal employees, and the like.  The released schedules also demonstrate that Clinton met with 154 private individuals, 85 of whom had given, in aggregate, more than $155 million to her Clinton Foundation.

The Clinton campaign has accused the AP of “cherry picking” schedules by focusing on those 154 individuals, saying that these folks are a tiny per centage of the meetings and telephone calls Clinton had as Secretary of State.

The campaign is correct, as a matter of third grade arithmetic, that those private individuals are a tiny per centage of the total.  What the campaign is carefully ignoring, though, is that Secretary Clinton was obligated to meet or otherwise talk with those thousands of diplomats, other foreign dignitaries, Federal employees, and the like.

What the campaign also is carefully ignoring is that Secretary Clinton was obligated to meet or otherwise talk with zero per cent of those 154 individuals; instead those 154 represent 100% of a population 55% of whom had given her Foundation those $155+ million.

This is of a piece with Clinton’s private email server, on which she conducted official State Department business, and which she had set up for the avowed purpose of concealing her emails from public scrutiny.

What is Clinton so desperate to hide?

Pay to Play, or Slants

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From a Kimberley Strassel column in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal comes this nugget.

…the Associated Press’s extraordinary finding this week that of the 154 outside people Mrs. Clinton met with in the first years of her tenure, more than half were Clinton Foundation donors. Clinton apologists, like Vox’s Matthew Yglesias, are claiming that statistic is overblown, because the 154 doesn’t include thousands of meetings held with foreign diplomats and U.S. officials.

Nice try. As the nation’s top diplomat, Mrs Clinton was obliged to meet with diplomats and officials—not with others. Only a blessed few outsiders scored meetings with the harried secretary of state and, surprise, most of the blessed were Clinton Foundation donors.

What she said.

And yet the NLMSM insists—brags, really—that it’s entirely appropriate to take sides against Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump, not in their opinion pieces, but in their “fact” reporting pieces, also.  Objective journalism be damned.

Here’s Ezra Klein, of JournoList infamy:

The media has felt increasingly free to cover Trump as an alien, dangerous, and dishonest phenomenon[.]

And Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times:

If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?

It’s made starkly clear by Jorge Ramos, of Univision:

…journalists cannot be objective when they are confronted with “racism, discrimination, corruption, public life, dictatorships or violations of human rights.”

These views of Trump, in opinion pieces, are entirely legitimate, but it’s interesting to note that none of this criticism, this assumption of nefariousness, is evident in the same press’ coverage of Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, despite her plain lawlessness and her evident conflicts of interest.

If the press feels free to be this proudly biased against one party, one candidate, it can only feel free to be similarly biased toward any other politician, any other party.  Too much of the Fourth Estate has transformed itself into a fifth column.