Oh what a week it has been in the New America. The New America is ruled by the illegitimate
government that was installed December 12, 2000 that brought us the 911
attacks, the endless wars and the deregulation of banks that led to the
criminal collapse of the world economy by Wall Street Bankers and the “new
normal” of a war based economy.
The demands are loud, shrill and feigning outrage. Hillary must hand over every thought, every
personal moment in her life to Republicans in order to be in compliance with
the nonexistent rules and laws that apply only to a Clinton as Secretary of
State. So, I say “give them what they
want, Hillary.” Let there be light!
MSNBC who colluded with Democrats in the U.S. Senate to
conduct a smear campaign against the Clintons in order to throw the 2008
Democratic Presidential Primary, is leading the pack of wolves to gin up hatred
and suspicion against Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server to
destroy her possible bid for the Presidency.
After all, it won’t be as easy to corrupt the outcome of the 2016
primary as it was in 2008.
There’s probably really good reason that Hillary’s server
was used for her private and government business e-mails. Just like there’s probably good reason why
Colin Powell used his personal e-mail server as Secretary of State in an
administration that came to power after the American government was overthrown
in a coup orchestrated by the United States Supreme Court and Democratic and
Republican Senators.
Both Secretaries of State had to battle to tamp down the war
mongering lunatics in the Vice President’s Office and the dubious personal
handlers of the Presidents they would serve. Both George W. Bush and Barack H. Obama are
merely spokes models, not really in control of anything. It’s
interesting that the same war hawks, with only a tenuous hold on mental
stability, who served Cheney’s White House now serve Biden’s White House.
So when I saw a real
scandal related to the Clinton e-mails, the scandal that Barack Obama’s “Rasputin”
Valarie Jarrett was the source of the leaks, I had to laugh. Jarrett’s taxpayer paid office was used to
leak selective, salacious stories about the former Secretary of State’s e-mail
account in order to try to destroy a Clinton Presidential campaign using taxpayer
funded government assets. From the NewYork Post:
Excerpt:
President Obama’s senior adviser
Valerie Jarrett leaked to the press details of Hillary Clinton’s use of a
private email address during her time as secretary of state, sources tell me.
But she did so through people
outside the administration, so the story couldn’t be traced to her or the
White House.
In addition, at Jarrett’s behest, the State Department was ordered to
launch a series of investigations into Hillary’s conduct at Foggy Bottom,
including the use of her expense account, the disbursement of funds, her
contact with foreign leaders and her possible collusion with the Clinton
Foundation.
Six separate probes into Hillary’s performance have been going on at
the State Department. I’m told that the email scandal was timed to come out
just as Hillary was on the verge of formally announcing that she was running
for president — and that there’s more to
come….
Seems to me the person who should be the subject of an
investigation is Valarie Jarrett and her personal wealth gained in her tenure
in the White House as well as her slumlord past with the Senator from Illinois,
Barack Obama steering government funds into her coffers.
So on the heels of the White House scandal of a staffer
ordering in 6 separate investigations of a former Secretary of State, by the
State Department at taxpayer expense to satisfy a long held grudge on the part
of Jarrett, the White House has decided to claim they are not bound by FOIA
(Freedom of Information Act) requests.
From USA Today:
Excerpt:
WASHINGTON — The White House is removing a federal regulation that subjects its
Office of Administration to the Freedom of Information Act, making official
a policy under Presidents Bush and Obama to reject requests for records to that
office.
The White House said the cleanup of
FOIA regulations is consistent with court rulings that hold that the office is not subject to the
transparency law. The office
handles, among other things, White House record-keeping duties like the
archiving of e-mails….
"It is completely out of step
with the president's supposed commitment to transparency," she said.
"That is a critical office, especially if you want to know, for example,
how the White House is dealing with e-mail."
Maybe we should be looking at all of Valarie Jarrett’s
e-mails particularly when she tried to bring the Olympics to Chicago using the
muscle of the White House. Just think of
the killing she would make when all her slums would be torn down to make room
for the Olympics.
"This is an office that
operated under the FOIA for 30 years, and when it became politically
inconvenient, they decided they weren't subject to the Freedom of Information
Act any more," said Tom Fitton of the conservative Judicial Watch.
That happened late in the Bush administration,
when CREW sued over e-mails deleted by the White House — as many as 22 million
of them, by one accounting. The White House at first began to comply with that
request, but then reversed course.
In 2009, a federal appeals court in
Washington ruled that the Office of Administration was not subject to the FOIA,
"because it performs only operational and administrative tasks in support
of the president and his staff and therefore, under our precedent, lacks
substantial independent authority."
Yep, Bush packed the appeals courts with Jerry Falwell’s
Liberty University lawyers and voila “every” decision is in favor of the
Administration’s secrecy. After all, it’s
a war based economy.
The appeals court ruled that the
White House was required to archive the e-mails, but not release them under the
FOIA. Instead, White House e-mails must be released under the Presidential
Records Act — but not until at least five years after the end of the
administration…
In the notice to be published
Tuesday, the White House said it was not
allowing a 30-day public comment period, and so the rule will be final.
And don’t forget, according to the Presidential Records Act,
Reagan’s Presidential papers were scheduled to be released during the Gore
Presidency. That was another reason that
the staffers and cabinet members from the Reagan and Bush Administrations had
to overthrow the American government.
You know, all that Iran Contra stuff, the
death squads in Columbia and Honduras, overthrowing governments,
assassinations, all the stuff that’s “legal” in a war based economy. From History Commons:
Excerpt:
The standard of the 1978
Presidential Records Act is to make presidential records and documents
available after twelve years, if not voluntarily made available sooner, and
with some obvious exceptions such as classified materials concerning national
security.
The first president to whom the new law applies is Ronald Reagan, and
his vice-president, George H.W. Bush.
My, my, my. I guess
it’s pretty convenient that the son of the Vice President whose papers are
scheduled to be released, who lost the election by over a half million votes
was installed as President just in time.
Bush’s order will declare that not
only can a former president assert executive privilege over his papers against
the will of the incumbent president (a measure Reagan instituted just
before he left office) but that a sitting
president could also block the papers of a predecessor, even if that
predecessor had approved their release.
The implications of this change are
breathtaking. “It’s pretty fishy,” says Anna Nelson, an American University My,history
professor. “The precautions on ‘national security’ are extreme.
So when Valarie Jarrett is able to instruct the State
Department of the United States to conduct a taxpayer funded witch hunt of a
former Secretary of State, a former First Lady and former presidential candidate,
Jarrett is protected because:
“In 2009, a federal appeals court
in Washington ruled that the Office of
Administration was not subject to the FOIA, "because it performs only
operational and administrative tasks in support of the president and his staff
and therefore, under our precedent, lacks substantial independent
authority."
That’s mighty handy.
But back to the Secretary of State and why the secretary would want to
keep their e-mails on a private server.
Case in point, Colin Powell.
A lot of people only voted for George W. Bush because they
trusted Colin Powell and Bush vowed he would make Colin Powell Secretary of
State. And Powell is nothing if not the “good
soldier.” So I remember reading this
article in The Guardian back in 2003.
Excerpt:
Fresh evidence emerged last night
that Colin Powell, the US secretary
of state, was so disturbed about
questionable American intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction that
he assembled a secret team to review the information he was given before he
made a crucial speech to the UN security council on February 5.
Colin Powell was so disturbed about the questionable
intelligence coming from Cheney’s office that he set up a secret team to review
the “bullshit” he was supposed to spread at the United Nations for the Bush
Administration….
Much of the initial information for Mr Powell's speech to the UN was provided
by the Pentagon, where Paul Wolfowitz, the US deputy defence secretary, set up
a special unit, the Office of Special Plans, to counter the uncertainty of the
CIA's intelligence on Iraq.
Mr Powell's team removed dozens of
pages of alleged evidence about Iraq's banned weapons and ties to terrorists
from a draft of his speech, US News and World Report says today. At one point,
he became so angry at the lack of adequate sourcing to intelligence claims that
he declared: "I'm not reading this.
This is bullshit," according to the magazine….
However, a common theme of the
meetings was the failure of the CIA and other intelligence agencies to produce
a convincing case against Saddam. Despite the increasingly belligerent
statements from the administration's hawks, the CIA had disturbingly little
proof.
Oh, and if you want to take a look at the e-mails from that
period of time, you can’t. Unlike Hillary Clinton who turned over 55,000
e-mails, Colin Powell destroyed his e-mail treasure trove. A big win for the Bush Administration. According to Joe Conason:
Excerpt:
It is almost eerie how closely
Hillary Clinton's current email scandal parallels the beginnings of the
Whitewater fiasco that ensnared her and her husband almost 20 years ago. Both
began with tendentious, inaccurate stories published by The New York Times;
both relied upon highly exaggerated suspicions of wrongdoing; both were seized
upon by Republican partisans whose own records were altogether worse; and both
resulted in shrill explosions of outrage among reporters who couldn't be
bothered to learn actual facts….
Hypocritical as they may seem, none
of those examples compare with the truly monumental email scandal of the Bush
years, when millions of emails went missing from White House servers — and many
more were never archived on those servers, as required since 1978 by the
Presidential Records Act, because dozens
of Bush White House staff were using private email accounts provided by the
Republican National Committee…
Various investigations and lawsuits
eventually uncovered the astonishing breadth of the Bush White House email
fiasco, such as the "recycling" of back-up tapes for all of its
archived emails between Inauguration Day 2001 and sometime in 2003.
This meant, for instance, messages
pertaining to the 9/11 terrorist attack went missing of course — along with whatever Rove and his aides
might have communicated on that topic, or weapons of mass destruction in Iraq,
or countless other topics of public concern.
And former Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose office was also
involved in both the Plame and WMD scandals, admitted recently that he used
private emails in office — but that he turned over and retained none of them —
zero. By contrast, Clinton has turned over tens of thousands of her emails
to the department.
I would be nice to have access to those e-mails leading up
to the Iraq War. A lot of people who
were in the administration screaming for a war based economy are now very rich
after peddling lies about mushroom clouds and WMD’s. From the Baltimore Nonviolence Center:
Excerpt:
How the Iraq War Financed a Beltway Real Estate Boom
Back in the DC real estate doldrums
of the mid-1990s, before he helped pave the way for war in Iraq, Stephen
Rademaker owned a modest condo in Arlington, Va.
Then, a few years later, as a House
staffer on the International Relations Committee, Rademaker wrote the Iraq
Liberation Act of 1998, which called for regime change, a phrase that altered
the course of history.
Bill Clinton signed the Act, which
became the basis for the congressional authorization for the use of force
against Saddam Hussein four years later; by
then Rademaker was working at the State Department.
Things soon took a turn for the
better, at least for Rademaker; he left government and went to work as a lobbyist,
eventually joining countless numbers of
retired government officials who cleaned up, directly or indirectly, by leading
the country into war.
It would be nice to have his e-mails from his time in the
State Department.
I wrote the other day about two of
these former senior government officials, who have made a killing in the
post-9/11 era: former CIA director George Tenet and former FBI director Louis
Freeh. But when it comes to those who profited directly from the last thirteen
years of war, Exhibit A perhaps is Rademaker,
a man for whom the Iraq war became a giant piggybank.
Rademaker, who was a strong backer
of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and has generally never met a war he didn’t want,
from Syria to Libya, is now a principal at the Podesta Group–the lobbying and public
affairs firm founded by Tony and John Podesta, two of the worst people in
Washington. At the Podesta group, Rademaker
has advised the firm’s international clients, including the Iraqi government.
That contract was originally signed
in 2013 and was worth close to $1 million; it was renewed last year and paid
the Podesta Group about another $1 million. I’m told by a well-informed source
that Podesta Group lobbyists get a 20
percent cut of business they bring in…
Also worth mentioning is that
Rademaker is married to neocon Danielle Pletka, another former Hill staffer who
is now senior vice president at the American Enterprise Institute, and who
clings by her nails to the cliff’s edge of sanity.
She and her think tank were major
proponents of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and last August, Pletka co-authored a
Wall Street Journal op-ed that called President Obama’s response to ISIS
“inadequate.” She demanded that Obama arm the Syrian opposition, send military
advisers and trainers to Iraq “by the thousands, not hundreds,” and stop
“blocking the delivery of much-needed weapons” to Iraq.
Resuming those shipments—which had
been delayed by annoying human rights concerns, like widespread “politically
motivated sectarian and ethnic killings” in the words of a U.S. government
report—is one of the things that Pletka’s husband gets paid to lobby for, my
source said, so it’s nice she can use the Journal’s op-ed pages to help him
out.
In the meantime, Rademaker has
taken a nice step up from the Arlington, Virginia condo that he sold in 1995
for $148,000. Now he and Pletka live in a 6,138-square-foot 6-bedroom home in
McLean, Va.—big enough to fit a few of the over one million Iraqis who have
been displaced or fled their country since the 2003 invasion. Rademaker and Pletka bought the house,
currently assessed at $1.8 million, a year after the war began.
Nice job if you can get it.
So the Republicans have now rolled out their new budget for the war
based economy. And oh what a budget it
is. There will be celebrations in the
war profiteer households like that of Rademaker and Pletka. From The National Memo:
Excerpt:
WASHINGTON — Republicans in the
U.S. House and Senate say their budget proposals add up. It takes some creative
math and logic to make that true.
The plans unveiled this week call
for the U.S. government to collect more than $1 trillion in taxes in the next
decade that Republicans have little or no intention of collecting. Some of that
revenue comes straight from taxes to pay for Obamacare — which they want to
repeal.
Republicans also gloss over details
of where they’d cut more than $5
trillion to balance the books. Senate Budget Chairman Mike Enzi’s plan cuts $430 billion from Medicare without
saying how. House Budget Chairman Tom
Price’s proposal includes $1 trillion in “other mandatory” reductions that
aren’t laid out.
Well now you’re talking real money. These budget hawks are cutting, cutting,
cutting. $430 billion from Medicare, $1 trillion in “other mandatory”
reductions. That would be school
lunches, food programs, medical programs, social security, etc.
The House proposal includes about
$94 billion for a special war-funding account that isn’t subject to spending
limits set by Congress in 2011. The Senate plan includes $58 billion in war
funding, the same amount requested by President Barack Obama.
Price of Georgia would boost
defense spending through something called the Overseas Contingency Operations
account, which funds military activities in Iraq and Afghanistan, and which
critics call a slush fund.
Such spending is exempt from budget
limits because it is supposed to be for activities related to overseas
conflicts. Price initially set a spending level $36 billion above the
president’s request.
Earlier this month, 70 House Republicans signed a letter saying they
would block the budget if military spending wasn’t increased.
Come on, baby needs a new pair of
war boots. And up and coming Senator Tom Cotton who secured the signatures of
47 Senators to stop peace negotiations with Iran immediately met with Defense
Contractors in celebration of more war. From
The Intercept:
Excerpt:
In an open letter
organized by freshman Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., 47 Senate Republicans today
warned the leaders of Iran that any nuclear deal reached with President Barack
Obama could expire as soon as he leaves office…
The NDIA is
composed of executives from major military businesses such as Northrop Grumman,
L-3 Communications, ManTech International, Boeing, Oshkosh Defense and Booz
Allen Hamilton, among other firms.
Cotton strongly
advocates higher defense spending and a more aggressive foreign policy. As The
New Republic’s David Ramsey noted, “Pick a topic — Syria, Iran, Russia, ISIS,
drones, NSA snooping — and Cotton can be found at the hawkish outer edge of the
debate … During his senate campaign, he told a tele-townhall that ISIS and
Mexican drug cartels joining forces to attack Arkansas was an ‘urgent
problem.’”
On Iran, Cotton
has issued specific calls for military intervention. In December he said Congress should consider supplying Israel with
B-52s and so-called “bunker-buster” bombs — both items manufactured by NDIA
member Boeing — to be used for a possible strike against Iran.
You might be interested in seeing
all of Tom Cotton’s e-mail correspondence with defense contractors, but guess
what, congress excluded itself from FOIA laws.
They don’t have to have their e-mails read by anyone.
So, come on Hillary, Let There Be
Light! Let’s get all the records,
e-mails, correspondence regarding all government officials, especially congress
and the White House. No more bullshit,
we don’t have to comply with the laws we write.
Let’s see Valarie Jarrett’s records from when they were flying around on
taxpayer dollars trying to get the Olympics to come to Chicago.
By Patricia Baeten
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