Tag Archives: ethics

Then Get Out Of The Way

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President Barack Obama had some choice words about the Loretta Lynch nomination at a press conference with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.

What are we doing here? I have to say, there are times where the dysfunction in the Senate just goes too far. This is an example of it. It’s gone too far. Enough. Enough. … This is embarrassing, a process like this.

It is enough, Mr Obama, and it is embarrassing. When are you going to get your Senate Democrats out of the way and allow a vote on the anti-human tracking bill that your fellow Democrats are holding up? Your fellow Democrats are cynically blocking the bill because they demand that Federal tax dollars be available to pay for abortions, and the bill continues a decades-long prohibition against that misuse of Americans’ money. Your fellow Democrats would rather allow human trafficking to continue apace than not have public funds available for abortions.

It’s also a bill that those same Democrats of yours knew when they voted affirmatively to pass it out of committee onto the Senate floor contained that prohibition.

As soon as your Democrats allow a vote on that bill, the Lynch confirmation will come up.

Get off the dime, Mr Obama.

Naturally

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The board of the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation has decided to continue accepting donations from foreign governments, primarily from six countries, even though Hillary Clinton is running for president….

Other governments will be encouraged to contribute to the Foundation’s Clinton Global Initiative, carefully ignoring the fungibility of money.

Corporate campaign money is bad. But foreign government…money is good. She will, after all, be dealing with those foreign governments as peers (in every sense of that word) if she’s elected, not those corporations.

Oh, and the evils of corporate campaign money? That’s for the little people. Clinton’s campaign organizations, PACs, etc are expected to raise $1-$2 billion this campaign season.

Who’s Protecting Whom?

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The Drug Enforcement Agency has the way of the Secret Service, at least in Colombia: partying with prostitutes. DEA seems to have taken the thing a step further, though: the parties appear to be funded by the drug cartels the partying agents were sent to investigate.

The agents’ punishment? Two weeks of suspension. Naturally, Congress is…dismayed…both with the behavior and with the wrist-slap. How the anger is expressed is instructive, though. DEA Administrator Michelle Leonhart testified in front of the House Oversight Committee that there’s not much more she can do; civil service system law and regulations keep her from doing more. She’s not even allowed to have input on the sanctions to be applied for such misbehavior.

The solution to such impediments is obvious.

However, Congressman Stephen Lynch (D, MA) won’t can’t see that obvious solution. Instead, he’s accusing Leonhart of having a hand in the failure:

You’re protecting the people who solicited prostitutes who had 15 to 20 sex parties, went through this whole operation, and used taxpayer money to do it.

And there’s the Committee’s Ranking Member, Elijah Cummings (D, MD) asking Leonhart

Do you think you’re the right person for this job?

Of course, there’s no thought by the Democrats (and apparently none by the Republicans, either) to changing the civil service laws that Leonhart thinks handcuff her. There’s no thought here to curtailing the power of the various civil service unions so that Agency and Department heads can fire miscreants promptly for misbehavior.

Gotta protect those unions. There’s too much money at stake here.

Whatever Happened

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…to the plaint that Congress’ bill asserting its capacity to approve or disapprove Obama’s coming Executive Agreement with Iran regarding the latter’s nuclear weapons program would fatally imperil those negotiations?

Now the guy who sits in the Secretary of State’s chair, John Kerry, is saying

Yesterday there was a compromise reached in Washington regarding congressional input. We are confident about our ability for the president to negotiate an agreement, and to do so with the ability to make the world safer.

The only change of substance was to withdraw a requirement that President Barack Obama certify every 90 days that Iran was not supporting terrorist organizations anymore.

But the bill no longer imperils negotiations? It never did, of course, that was just Obama’s knee-jerk reaction to anything Republican. The true change, if change it was, was the bill’s passage out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and onto the Senate floor by a unanimous 19-0 vote.

Foreign Policy

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Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy cred.

At a moment when foreign policy figures to loom larger in this presidential race than in recent election cycles, none of Mrs Clinton’s prospective opponents can match her credentials as a four-year secretary of state. Ordinarily that would be a strong selling point. Yet Mrs Clinton also is tied to Obama-era overseas initiatives that have largely proved unpopular and she’ll be hard-pressed to cite concrete achievements that she made happen on her watch, analysts say.

However, not only is she tied to Obama’s foreign policy failures, she has her own…accomplishments…from her stint sitting in the Secretary of State’s chair. Many of you might remember her 2008 Presidential campaign ad about answering the 3 am call. When she got exactly that call from a consulate that was under attack, Clinton’s attitude, as she said so defiantly in front of a House committee hearing, was “What difference, at this point, does it make!?

Then there are all of those emails she exchanged with her staff and Foreign Service officials—on her personally owned, set up, and maintained email server—of which she turned over to State print copies (only) of carefully selected emails and equally carefully and deliberately erased the rest. Which turnover and erasure she did only last fall after the emails were demanded. She is refusing to turn over her server for forensic analysis.

Then there’s her evident disinterest in the details of foreign affairs, details that might seem unimportant but that in their aggregate contribute to the laughingstock nature of State and of the United States on the world stage. Details like a red button she gave Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, a button ostensibly labelled “Reset” in English and in Russian. What the Russian word actually meant was “overcharge.” This carelessness was typical of Clinton’s time in the Secretary’s chair.