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Apr 4, 2008, 22:43 GMT
Clintons earned more than 109 million dollars since 2000
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Older Talkback
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SP4 wishes he were smart enough to earn 1% of that; but he's not so that's that, and oh well.
As much good as they have done for the citizens of the world, they should have made twice that much!
you are!
I'd love to earn that kind of money...I could just never do it the way they do and practice the sacraments ever again.
Yes, they have done a lot of good, but mostly for themselves. Let's recap:
Letting Osama Bin Laden walk
Unsolicited Pardon of Puerto Rican Bomber Terrorists
White Water
FBI records scandal (bet there coming in handy now, huh?!)
Russian and Chinese campaign funds scandal
Travel office scandal
Lying to a federal judge
Hirrary's Greasy Commodity trades
Catholic Land Swindle
Questionable 'Loans' and the Clinton Foundation
Bill's accosting girl in Hotel Room, delivered like a Pizza by Ark. State Trooper.
Boy, that's a hell of a Resume' even for me!
Really!
McCain married his millions - got it the easy way. And he is the one who was crying earlier that he was running out of money. LOL
This is what really drives politics. Serving the public or the good of the land my a$$.
'As much good as they have done for the citizens of the world, they should have made twice that much!'
They are only out for themselves..
Ties that Blind
Senator Obama's association with Reverend Jeremiah Wright and the Trinity United Church of Christ has easily become the campaign's biggest vulnerability. The famous fiery indictments and conspiracy theories dealt from the pulpit to a nation watching YouTube are being pinned and repinned to Obama, as he continues to try and brush them off.
Now there's a new and even uglier twist, if you can believe that. Obama is being linked to the radical group International Solidarity Movement (ISM), as reported in the Canada Free Press on Tuesday. Ali Abunimah, Vice President of the Arab American Action Network in Chicago and co-founder of the Electronic Intifada, a website of the ISM, posted an article on Monday in which he outlines why he believes Obama is really very in tune with the Reverend's views on Israel. He even quotes Obama's remarks to a group of Jewish leaders in Cleveland to comfort his fellow anti-Semites that 'Obama implicitly admitted that Wright's views were rooted in opposition to Israel's deep ties to apartheid South Africa, and thus entirely reasonable.'
Of course, you may think it is unfair to link the Senator and the ISM activist, but Kaplan lays out the extensive connections. Just to be clear what we are talking about, the ISM is a movement comprised of Neo-nazis, anarchists, Arab militants, communists, and other radical elements originally set up to support the PLO in efforts toward the ultimate destruction of Israel. In Lee Kaplan's words, they are 'a subversive organization out to destroy western-style democracies.'
In this excerpt from the article Kaplan adds:
'Ali Abunimah is more than just some 'Palestinian activist' based in Chicago, the same location as Reverend Wright and the Trinity United Church of Christ. He is, in fact, one of the founders of the fiercely anti-Semitic ISM Arab group Al Awda, the Palestine Right of Return Coalition. Abunimah is a high level international leader of the ISM for the Arabs who travels extensively between Chicago, Europe and Ramallah.'
Abunimah cites a past working relationship with the Senator in his wink-wink, nudge-nudge to anti-Semites, but Kaplan points out that relationship is not the only connection between the two.
'Obama's association with the ISM through his church and lobbying in Chicago goes even deeper than just his past links to Al Awda and Ali Abunimah. His pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and the Trinity Union Church of Christ in Chicago, are both equally involved with the ISM.'
'Since 2001, the ISM has been tasked by the PLO and other Arab irredentist groups with getting new generations of American college kids to consider democratic Israel as somehow a violator of human rights, all the while as the Palestinian Arabs who practice open anti-Semitism, honor killings, and the murders of their own people as well as Jews, as commendable practices.'
'Now, it has become the ISM's time to deconstruct religious dogma of Israel belonging to the Jews as is preached in US churches and to increase the number of black churches in America that are working in 'solidarity' with this program. Jeremiah Wright's church is one of them. Even though the national synod of the United Church for Christ rescinded a boycott and divestment plan against Israel, a wing of the UCC church keeps trying to get it reinstated. That wing includes Reverend Wright's Trinity UCC Church in Chicago.'
Intifada is rebellion based on the breeding of hatred and the propagating of low-level terrorism. Israel Matzav notes that the ISM has been linked to armed support of Palestinian terrorists, and Gateway Pundit points out that they are even linked to the despicable Easter Sunday 'protest' two weeks ago.
The picture of anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, and zealous conspiracy-theorizing evident from the pulpit and bulletins of Barack Obama's self-proclaimed religious inspiration and spiritual guide is a gruesome tableau. It's a tableau that Barack can't bring himself to disown, and which he believes is so integral to the black community as to be indistinguishable. 'I can no more disown [Reverend Wright] than I can disown the black community,' he professes.
Intifada is rebellion, and Senator Obama has a cozy twenty-year relationship with the rebellious Wright and other intifada bedfellows. The question is whether the American voters are ready to let that relationship become their own.
'As much good as they have done for the citizens of the world...'
By George F. Will
Thursday, March 27, 2008; Page A17
Residents of Austin, home of Texas's government and flagship university, have very refined social consciences, if they do say so themselves, and they do say so, speaking via bumper stickers. Don R. Willett, a justice of the state Supreme Court, has commuted behind bumpers proclaiming 'Better a Bleeding Heart Than None at All,' 'Practice Random Acts of Kindness and Senseless Beauty,' 'The Moral High Ground Is Built on Compassion,' 'Arms Are For Hugging,' 'Will Work (When the Jobs Come Back From India),' 'Jesus Is a Liberal,' 'God Wants Spiritual Fruits, Not Religious Nuts,' 'The Road to Hell Is Paved With Republicans,' 'Republicans Are People Too -- Mean, Selfish, Greedy People' and so on. But Willett thinks Austin subverts a stereotype: 'The belief that liberals care more about the poor may scratch a partisan or ideological itch, but the facts are hostile witnesses.'
Sixteen months ago, Arthur C. Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University, published 'Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism.' The surprise is that liberals are markedly less charitable than conservatives.
If many conservatives are liberals who have been mugged by reality, Brooks, a registered independent, is, as a reviewer of his book said, a social scientist who has been mugged by data. They include these findings:
• Although liberal families' incomes average 6 percent higher than those of conservative families, conservative-headed households give, on average, 30 percent more to charity than the average liberal-headed household ($1,600 per year vs. $1,227).
• Conservatives also donate more time and give more blood.
• Residents of the states that voted for John Kerry in 2004 gave smaller percentages of their incomes to charity than did residents of states that voted for George Bush.
• Bush carried 24 of the 25 states where charitable giving was above average.
• In the 10 reddest states, in which Bush got more than 60 percent majorities, the average percentage of personal income donated to charity was 3.5. Residents of the bluest states, which gave Bush less than 40 percent, donated just 1.9 percent.
• People who reject the idea that 'government has a responsibility to reduce income inequality' give an average of four times more than people who accept that proposition.
Brooks demonstrates a correlation between charitable behavior and 'the values that lie beneath' liberal and conservative labels. Two influences on charitable behavior are religion and attitudes about the proper role of government.
The single biggest predictor of someone's altruism, Willett says, is religion. It increasingly correlates with conservative political affiliations because, as Brooks's book says, 'the percentage of self-described Democrats who say they have 'no religion' has more than quadrupled since the early 1970s.' America is largely divided between religious givers and secular nongivers, and the former are disproportionately conservative. One demonstration that religion is a strong determinant of charitable behavior is that the least charitable cohort is a relatively small one -- secular conservatives.
Reviewing Brooks's book in the Texas Review of Law & Politics, Justice Willett notes that Austin -- it voted 56 percent for Kerry while he was getting just 38 percent statewide -- is ranked by the Chronicle of Philanthropy as 48th out of America's 50 largest cities in per capita charitable giving. Brooks's data about disparities between liberals' and conservatives' charitable giving fit these facts: Democrats represent a majority of the wealthiest congressional districts, and half of America's richest households live in states where both senators are Democrats.
While conservatives tend to regard giving as a personal rather than governmental responsibility, some liberals consider private charity a retrograde phenomenon -- a poor palliative for an inadequate welfare state and a distraction from achieving adequacy by force, by increasing taxes. Ralph Nader, running for president in 2000, said: 'A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.' Brooks, however, warns: 'If support for a policy that does not exist . . . substitutes for private charity, the needy are left worse off than before. It is one of the bitterest ironies of liberal politics today that political opinions are apparently taking the place of help for others.'
In 2000, brows were furrowed in perplexity because Vice President Al Gore's charitable contributions, as a percentage of his income, were below the national average: He gave 0.2 percent of his family income, one-seventh of the average for donating households. But Gore 'gave at the office.' By using public office to give other people's money to government programs, he was being charitable, as liberals increasingly, and conveniently, understand that word.
It just boils down to the Democrats against the Republicans - always has been, always will be. According to the Democrats the other party can't do anything right, and they themselves have all the answers, and vice versa. We all need to agree to disagree and save the name calling and getting your pants all in a bunch. No one is going to sway the other regardless of all the long-winded posts, and people getting worked up to the verge of a stroke - albeit rather entertaining at times!
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, April 4, 2008; Page A23
Hillary Clinton met her Waterloo at Tuzla. She'd been regaling audiences with tales of a dangerous landing under sniper fire in Tuzla 12 years ago and then running for cover. None of this occurred. When CBS provided the tape, she was forced to admit to 'a misstatement.'
Now, confabulation is a fairly common psychological phenomenon. We all have internalized childhood stories so oft repeated by elders that we come to falsely 'remember' the actual experience. Adult memories are less susceptible to such unconscious inventions, but past experiences embellished over time by repeated recounting can reach the point where we actually believe the elaborate trappings of our own retellings.
Clinton's problem, however, is that a corkscrew landing under sniper fire is the kind of thing that is hard to forget and harder still for memory to invent. This is confabulation on a pathological scale.
A Clintonian scale. And that's the problem. Barack Obama has been gaining on Hillary in Pennsylvania in part because Tuzla reminds Democrats what they had largely succeeded in banishing from consciousness: the Clintons' rather arm's-length relationship with truth. The great New York Times columnist William Safire once called Hillary Clinton 'a congenital liar' and made it stick. And that was more than a decade before snipergate.
The revulsion at the Clintons' lack of scruples remained latent as long as the focus was on her relatively unknown opponent, a blank slate being filled in with Tony Rezko's shady dealings and Jeremiah Wright's racist rants. Tuzla not only provided a distraction from Obama's problem with the raving reverend, it created the perfect setting for the press to pronounce the Wright affair closed.
In his swoon-inducing Philadelphia speech, Obama had instructed the nation from on high that America was greatly in need of a national conversation on race -- a need curiously absent before his pastor's words sent his campaign into a tailspin -- and that he, Barack Obama, was ready to lead it. Everything was now on the table, except his association with Wright. Because to 'play Rev. Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election' would simply be a 'distraction' from the suffering of the American people, which, of course, is the work of the usual suspects: corporate outsourcing and 'the special interests in Washington.'
This invitation to move on, as it were, has been widely accepted. After the speech it became an article of faith that even referring to Wright's comments was somehow illegitimate, the new 'Swift-boating.'
It is not just that Obama surrogate Rep. George Miller denounced the Clinton campaign for bringing up Wright when talking to superdelegates as trying to 'work the low road.' You expect that from a campaign. Or that Andrew Sullivan called Hillary's commenting on Wright 'a new low.' You expect that from Andrew Sullivan.
But from the mainstream media? As National Review's Byron York has pointed out, when Clinton supporter Lanny Davis said on CNN that it is 'legitimate' for her to have remarked 'that she personally would not put up with somebody who says that 9/11 are chickens who come home to roost' or the kind of 'generic comments [Wright] made about white America,' Anderson Cooper, the show's host and alleged moderator, interjected that since 'we all know what the [Wright] comments were,' he found it 'amazing' and 'funny' that Davis should 'feel the need to repeat them over and over again.'
Davis protested, 'It's appropriate.' Time magazine's Joe Klein promptly smacked Davis down with 'Lanny, Lanny, you're spreading the -- you're spreading the poison right now,' and then suggested that an 'honorable person' would 'stay away from this stuff.'
Amazing. We've gone beyond moral equivalence to moral inversion. It is now dishonorable to even make note of Wright's bigotry and ask how any man -- let alone a man on the threshold of the presidency -- could associate himself for 20 years with the purveyor of such hate.
Watching such a display, you get a full appreciation of Hillary's challenge. The mainstream media are back in the tank. The 'Saturday Night Live' skits parodying media obsequiousness toward Obama, followed closely by the revelation of the Wright tapes, temporarily forced the media to subject Obama to normal scrutiny. But after the 'speech' and Tuzla, they have reverted to form as protectors of the myth of Obama.
The hagiographic treatment of a newly emerged Democratic leader is a recurring theme in American journalism. At the dawning of the age of Clinton 15 years ago, the cover of the New York Times Magazine featured a woman dressed entirely in white. The heading read: 'Hillary Rodham Clinton and the Politics of Virtue.'
Inside, under the title 'Saint Hillary,' the late Michael Kelly wrote a brilliantly detached, coolly ironic deconstruction of his celestial subject. Saint Obama awaits his Michael Kelly.
is the way to go. He's even better than sp4 by gum!
Ron Paul took your money and quit.
well stated, sir.
...we're starting to see folks expose this democratic primary for the empty political gesture that it is.
The whole trio did well!!! HA! HA! HA!
Although the Clintons made a lot of money, they had given back through charitable donations ($10.5 million) and in taxes ($33.8 million). Senator Clinton has said that they should be paying more in taxes and should not benefit from President Bush's tax credit to the wealthiest. Since leaving office, President Clinton has done much to raise money for victims of the Tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. He uses his foundation to improve the lives of the less fortunate. Senator Clinton has worked tirelessly on behalf of those less fortunate. After the attacks on 9/11, she worked to investigate health issues of the first responders and fought to provide compensation for 9/11 families and grants for hard-hit businesses. She has worked to improve health benefits for our veterans and expand health benefits to the National Guard & Reserve. She worked to pass the State Children's Health Insurance Programs that provided state support for children. Senator Clinton will continue to work for the American people.
...she should answer questions about just how she earned this kind of money, the mysterious Mr. Hsu, greasy commodity trades in her past, and, given the lies she's been telling lately, just how seriously we should take any answer by her?
And who is paying for those speeches and buying the books that make a lot of their money? Probably the very ones doing the complaining!
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