Monthly Archives: August 2016

The Non-Ransom Ransom

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As part of the Iran nuclear weapons deal done by President Barack Obama (D) and his Secretary of State John “Motorboat Skipper” Kerry, the US ransomed four prisoners held by Iran.  Of course, Obama denies that the $400 million payment that…coincided…with the prisoner release was a ransom.

In fact, this part of the nuclear weapons deal was a carefully scripted exchange little different from any pirate’s ransom exchange.

US officials wouldn’t let Iranians take control of the money until a Swiss Air Force plane carrying three freed Americans departed from Tehran on Jan 17. Once that happened, an Iranian cargo plane was allowed to bring the cash home from a Geneva airport that day.

And [emphasis added]

One of the Americans released in January as part of the prisoner exchange, a pastor named Saeed Abedini, said he and other American prisoners were kept waiting at Mehrabad airport from Jan 16 to the morning of Jan 17. He said in an interview that he was told by a senior Iranian intelligence official at the time that their departure was contingent upon the movements of a second airplane.

So—who are we to believe, Obama or Abedini’s lying ears?

Clinton State Department and Influence

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Shortly after Hillary Clinton left the Obama administration, the State Department quietly took steps to purchase real estate in Nigeria from a firm whose parent company is owned by a major donor to the Clinton Foundation, records obtained by Fox News show.

This should have been a routine expression of interest and possibly consummated (in the event, it never was) Department real estate transaction, as James Rosen noted in his piece.

However.

The principle in the proposed deal is Ronald Chagoury,

the brother and business partner, in the Chagoury Group, of Gilbert Chagoury, a Lebanese-born businessman whom federal records show has donated between $1 and $5 million to the Clinton Foundation.

The real estate in question is—was (and maybe still is; the exposed records are not all the story)—reclaimed land:

[A] staggeringly ambitious undertaking: the dredging of millions of tons of sand from the sea floor off Victoria Island and the creation of an estimated 3.5 square miles of new land, on which the Chagourys aim to establish what they call a “21st century city…for residential, commercial, financial and tourist development.”

As Citizens United President David Bossie described the thing,

A month after Bill Clinton visits a Gilbert and Ronald Chagoury-run land project in Nigeria, the US State Department wants to buy the same land.  Who could be so lucky?  A major donor to the Clinton Foundation, that’s who.

Hmm….

What’s also interesting about this story is that the rest of the media are spiking it.  Yes, it was a Fox News exclusive, but since Fox News broke the story on Wednesday, none of the rest of the media have picked it up: NBC, CBS, ABC—all are studiously ignoring it.

Again, hmm….

Another Obama/Clinton Outcome

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Russia now is running airstrikes against Syrian targets from an airbase in Iran.  Russia also is making use of these missions to exercise its Cold War military assets in the process, running many of these strikes with one of its long-range bombers, a TU-22 variant.  Other runs are being made with its newer Su-34 tactical bomber, and all of them are being escorted by Russia’s newer Su-30 and Su-35 fighter aircraft, giving all those pilots valuable live fire, combat experience.

This isn’t just the fact of a few runs, either—it’s a broad range of aircraft, with a commensurately broad range of support crews, and with all of that, a broad range of compatibility training with their Iranian hosts.

Of as great importance as that use of Iranian basing facilities is the fact that those Russian striking aircraft have to overfly Iraq or Turkey to get to Syria, and Russia has been working cooperation deals with both of those nations—even after the kerfuffle involving Turkey’s shootdown of a Russian fighter.

President Barack Obama’s (D) and Democratic Party Presidential candidate and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s reset with Russia once again is proving enormously expensive.

What’s in Store

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…for the rest of us.  Kate Vershov Downing is a Liberal who has been mugged by reality.  She is—or was until she resigned—a member of the Palo Alto, CA, Planning and Transportation Commission, the city’s central planning facility for all things a private citizen might want to do.  Here’s an excerpt from her letter of resignation from that Commission, via PJMedia‘s Tom Knighton.  (Unfortunately, she’s not completely learned the mugging lesson; she and her husband are moving to another California city.)

After many years of trying to make it work in Palo Alto, my husband and I cannot see a way to stay in Palo Alto and raise a family here. We rent our current home with another couple for $6200 a month; if we wanted to buy the same home and share it with children and not roommates, it would cost $2.7M and our monthly payment would be $12,177 a month in mortgage, taxes, and insurance. That’s $146,127 per year—an entire professional’s income before taxes. This is unaffordable even for an attorney and a software engineer.

There’s more—much more—in her letter of resignation.

It’s clear that if professionals like me cannot raise a family here, then all of our teachers, first responders, and service workers are in dire straits. We already see openings at our police department that we can’t fill and numerous teacher contracts that we can’t renew because the cost of housing is astronomical not just in Palo Alto but many miles in each direction.

But Palo Alto’s fellow commission members, Liberal Planners all, either don’t care, don’t understand, or perhaps worst of all: they got theirs, and the rest can go hang.

Small steps like allowing 2 floors of housing instead of 1 in mixed use developments, enforcing minimum density requirements so that developers build apartments instead of penthouses, legalizing duplexes, easing restrictions on granny units, leveraging the residential parking permit program to experiment with housing for people who don’t want or need two cars, and allowing single-use areas like the Stanford shopping center to add housing on top of shops (or offices), would go a long way in adding desperately needed housing units while maintaining the character of our neighborhoods and preserving historic structures throughout.

But the P&T Commission as a whole Knows Better and has steadfastly refused to allow private citizens, private enterprises, to do these simple things.

This Council has…charted a course for the next 15 years of this city’s development….

Because the Commission members are fortune tellers and seers; they Know what’s going to happen before it happens.

Downing closed with this bit of irony:

We should take care to remember that Palo Alto is famous the world over for its residents’ accomplishments, but none of those people would be able to live in Palo Alto were they starting out today.

This Know Better attitude is what we can look forward to nation-wide if the Progressive-Democrat Party wins the White House this year and with it the Senate.

Is This Felony Perjury?

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The perjury case officially has been referred to the US attorney for the District of Columbia by the House of Representatives.  In their letter to the DA, House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R, UT) and Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R, VA) pointed out that

[Then-]Secretary [now Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary] Clinton stated “there was nothing marked classified on my emails, either sent or received.”

But

FBI Director James Comey said July 5 that a “very small number of the emails containing classified information bore the markings indicating the presence of classified information.”  At least three emails had a (C) for Confidential which is the lowest level of classification. Fox News first reported in June that classified markings existed, despite Clinton’s public claims.

And

Clinton told [Benghazi Select Committee member Jim (R, OH)] Jordan that her team “went through every single email.”

But

The FBI Director said his investigators found that Clinton’s lawyers did not read all the emails, and relied on a narrow set of search terms to identify which emails were work-related.

“The lawyers doing the sorting for Secretary Clinton in 2014 did not individually read the content of all her e-emails,” Comey said July 5. Instead, they “relied on header information and used search terms.”

And

Clinton also testified to Congress there was only one server.

But

[T]he FBI Director said investigators found “Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department and used numerous mobile devices to review and send e-mail on that personal domain.”

And

“I provided you, with all my work related emails, all that I had.  Approximately 55,000 pages. And they are being publicly released,” Clinton testified.

But

FBI investigators found “several thousand work related emails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014.”

Keep in mind that Clinton’s claims made before those two committees were made under oath.

Second question: will President Barack Obama’s (D) DoJ, which owns the DC District Attorney and the James Comey FBI, do a more thorough job of investigating this than the DoJ and the FBI did of Clinton’s classified email handling gross negligence (which Comey was pleased to call “extreme carelessness”) with her private email server, which she used for official State Department business? Steven Pomerantz, “a retired assistant FBI director and 28-year-veteran of the bureau,” said that

…a perjury review is generally straightforward for agents.

“They look at the transcript of the testimony they provided in light of what they know to be, suspect to be the truth. They investigate both sides and take the aggregate and turn it over to the prosecuting authority for a decision.

“Since the Director (Comey) already established what she (Clinton) said and the investigation is complete, it would be a relatively simple matter to make a decision about perjury…given the history of this, it’s hard to say—it would seem to me a matter of weeks not months in this case.”

We’ll know soon, especially regarding the second question.