Underground Stories 131408

The New York Times takes down the Clinton Foundation. This could be devastating for Bill and Hillary 

Is the New York Times being guest edited by Rush Limbaugh? Today it runs with a fascinating takedown of the Clinton Foundation – that vast vanity project that conservatives are wary of criticising for being seen to attack a body that tries to do good. But the liberal NYT has no such scruples. The killer quote is this:

For all of its successes, the Clinton Foundation had become a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in.

Over a year ago Bill Clinton met with some aides and lawyers to review the Foundation's progress and concluded that it was a mess. Well, many political start-ups can be, especially when their sole selling point is the big name of their founder (the queues are short at the Dan Quayle Vice Presidential Learning Center). But what complicated this review – what made its findings more politically devastating – is that the Clinton Foundation has become about more than just Bill. Now both daughter Chelsea and wife, and likely presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton have taken on major roles and, in the words of the NYT "efforts to insulate the foundation from potential conflicts have highlighted just how difficult it can be to disentangle the Clintons’ charity work from Mr Clinton’s moneymaking ventures and Mrs Clinton’s political future." Oh, they're entangled alright.
The NYT runs the scoop in its usual balanced, inoffensive way – but the problem jumps right off the page. The Clintons have never been able to separate the impulses to help others and to help themselves, turning noble philanthropic ventures into glitzy, costly promos for some future campaign (can you remember a time in human history when a Clinton wasn't running for office?). And their "Ain't I Great?!" ethos attracts the rich and powerful with such naked abandon that it ends up compromising whatever moral crusade they happen to have endorsed that month. That the Clinton Global Initiative is alleged to have bought Natalie Portman a first-class ticket for her and her dog to attend an event in 2009 is the tip of the iceberg. More troubling is that businessmen have been able to expand the profile of their companies by working generously alongside the Clinton Foundation. From the NYT:

Hillary Group Partnered With Company That Laundered $250 Billion For Iran And Violated Sanctions

On July 29, 2009, at a news conference in New Delhi, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proudly announced that “Vital Voices Global Partnership,” an NGO that she said she had “founded”, had partnered with Standard Chartered Bank to promote women’s causes throughout Asia.
Unfortunately, Standard Chartered, which also donated generously to the Clinton Foundation Global Initiative, was charged by federal and New York State prosecutors of laundering over $250 billion for Iran and “deliberately” helping Iran circumvent sanctions imposed to cripple its nuclear program. In August and December, 2012 — Standard Chartered paid a total $667 million in fines to settle the cases and admitted its criminal activity.
First, the New York State Department of Financial Services fined Standard Chartered $340 million and, several months later, the Department of Justice negotiated a fine of $327 million in December of last year. Jaspal Bindra, the CEO of Asia Standard Bank, serves on the board of Vital Voices.
According to the New York State Department of Financial Services the ten years of illegal activity by Standard Chartered “left the US financial system vulnerable to terrorists, weapons dealers, drug kingpins, and corrupt regimes and deprived law enforcement investigators of crucial information used to track all manner of criminal activity.”
And all the while, Standard Chartered was funding programs related to the Clintons. The ties among former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Global Initiative and Standard Chartered run long and deep:
• On September 26, 2007, former President Bill Clinton announced that Standard Chartered had committed to underwrite $4-5 billion in debt over the next five years to renewable energy organizations in Asia, Africa and Middle East.
• In 2008, Standard Chartered agreed with the Clinton Global Initiative to invest $20 million over five years to help 20 million people in less advantaged areas of twenty cities worldwide.

Obama skirts Congress, funds pre-K through Obamacare

With congressional Republicans refusing to finance an expensive universal preschool proposal, President Obama is seeking an alternate funding source: Obamacare.
Universal pre-K is one of Obama’s favorite “big ideas” — and one he has mentioned repeatedly in the past few months. But his proposal to bulk up federal and state pre-K programs by raising tobacco taxes is unlikely to pass the Republican House of Representatives.
Instead, Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have turned to discretionary funding allocations in Race to The Top, a federal education grant to the states, and even Obamacare.  

Obama Pushes Cell Phone Rate Hike, without Congress

If you like your ridiculously high cell phone bill, there’s good news: President Obama wants to make it even higher! The president is pushing a plan to raise money by hiking cell phone fees and use the revenue generated to wire up local schools with high-speed Internet access. The idea of allowing states and towns to figure out how to pay for their own Internet access is evidently anathema to this administration, as is the idea that government should stay within its constitutional boundaries.
He’s also planning to do this without input from Congress, via the Federal Communications Commission, according to the Washington Post. Congress, not the executive branch, is empowered by the Constitution with the ability to levy or reject taxes.

Trinity Church members reveal Obama shocker!

After nearly four years in office, many Americans still express frustration that much about Barack Obama remains a mystery as establishment media remain incurious about the Democratic president, while seemingly ready to dispatch crack investigative teams at a moment’s notice to probe into the personal lives of Republican figures such as Sarah Palin. Largely ignored in 2008 was research by the Hillary Clinton campaign based on contacts developed with members of the church Obama attended for two decades, Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. This is the first of a series of articles WND has developed from months of in-person interviews with church members who have known Barack and Michelle Obama over many years. The sources requested that their identities not be published because they believe their disclosures would put their security at risk.
NEW YORK – Ten years ago, the New York Times reported on a growing underground subculture in the black community known as Down Low, comprised largely of men who secretly engage in homosexual activity while living “straight” lives in public.

It’s within that subtext that opposition researchers for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign began investigating rumors that Rev. Jeremiah Wright was running a “matchmaking service” for members of his Trinity United Church of Christ known as the Down Low Club, which included Barack Obama.
Over the past several months, WND investigators have interviewed a number of members of the church who claim the president benefited from Wright’s efforts to help black men who engage in homosexual activity appear respectable in black society by finding them a wife.
The 2003 New York Times story, “Double Lives on the Down Low,” said that though many black men reject “a gay culture they perceive as white and effeminate,” they “have settled on a new identity, with its own vocabulary and customs and its own name: Down Low.”
The Times said that while “there are black men who are openly gay, it seems that the majority of those having sex with men still lead secret lives, products of a black culture that deems masculinity and fatherhood as a black man’s primary responsibility – and homosexuality as a white man’s perversion.”

Bush rodeo clown allowed in ’94, Obama clown banned forever

While there is no written law, we may have finally reached a place in America where it’s forbidden to publicly mock the president of the United States — assuming the president is an African-American and a member of the Democratic Party.

The outcry over a rodeo clown donning a mask resembling President Obama reached a new level of absurdity when it was reported Monday that the man behind the mask has been permanently banned from performing at the fair ever again, as reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Missouri State Fair officials barred the rodeo clown from ever performing at the fair again and are requiring that “all officials and subcontractors associated with the association must participate in “sensitivity training,” the Post-Dispatch noted.
In addition, the president of the Missouri Rodeo Cowboy Association, who served as the announcer at the event, resigned on Monday.
Several state lawmakers are also demanding an investigation after threatening to cut funding for the fair, an annual event that receives state tax dollars.
Politicians and the national media jumped all over the incident, deeming it to be inappropriate and disrespectful. However, very few are acknowledging that what took place in Sedalia, Mo., on Saturday night was a duplication of a stunt that has been performed many times before.
In fact, it was documented back in 1994 that a dummy wearing a President George H.W. Bush mask, propped up by a broomstick, was employed as a decoy during a bull riding riding contest.

Court rules Obama acted illegally; Harry Reid says it ‘means nothing’

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid doesn’t think he’s above the law.

He’s just indifferent to it.

A federal appeals court ruled Tuesday that President Obama acted illegally in 2010 when he closed down the efforts to use a Nevada mountain as a national nuclear dumping site, according to The Hill.
And the conclusion was pretty clear.
“The president may not decline to follow a statutory mandate or prohibition simply because of policy objections,” the ruling stated.

Reid’s shrugging response was classic Democrat in the Age of Obama.
“We’ve had some problems with that court for years,” Reid said, according to the Las Vegas Review Journal. “It really doesn’t mean much. … This, without being disrespectful to the court, means nothing.”

Unfortunately, Reid has a point.

Way back in the year 2008, the Department of Energy had more or less decided that Nevada’s Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas, would be a good place to set up a permanent storage site for spent nuclear fuels from power plants around the country.

But that was before Obama was elected to the presidency. And before he used the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2010 to shut down the process of opening up Yucca Mountain that had been approved by Congress. That action was a big help to Reid, who was in a tight re-election fight at the time with tea party Republican Sharron Angle.
In doing that, the court ruled, Obama was breaking the law.

“Unless and until Congress authoritatively says otherwise, or there are no appropriated funds remaining, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission must promptly continue with the legally mandated licensing process,” the decision stated.

At this point, according to the Review Journal, the NRC is about out of the money it can use to go forward with the project and Congress isn’t likely to approve move any time soon. So when Reid said the ruling “really doesn’t mean much” he might well have been right.
But the ruling means a lot in another way — that the president cannot simply disregard the law for policy reasons — and he’s making a habit of doing exactly that, with illegal immigration, with Obamacare and so on.
With every passing day, the law in the Obama administration becomes more like the vocabulary of Humpty Dumpty in “Alice in Wonderland.”

Muslim Brotherhood claim: We've got 'goods on Obama'

NEW YORK – The son of a jailed Muslim Brotherhood leader in Egypt is claiming his father has evidence that will land President Obama in prison.

The claim came as the Obama administration, with the assistance of Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and the open involvement of the No. 2 man at the U.S. State Department, made a concerted effort to see Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Egypt released.
In an interview with the News Agency Anatolia in Turkey, Saad Al-Shater, the son of imprisoned Muslim Brotherhood leader Khairat Al-Shater, said his father “had in his hand” evidence that will put Obama in prison.
In a thinly veiled threat, Saad Al-Shater said a U.S. delegation was sent to Cairo by Obama to press for the release of the imprisoned Muslim Brotherhood leaders, including his father to prevent the release of explosive information.
Arabic-speaking former PLO member Walid Shoebat has translated the report by the Turkish News Agency Anatolia as follows:

In an interview with the Anatolia News Agency, Saad Al-Shater, the son of a Muslim Brotherhood leader, the detained Khairat Al-Shater, said that his father had in his hand evidence that will land the head of United States of America, President Obama, in prison. He stressed that the senior U.S. delegation currently visiting Egypt, knows full well that the fate, future, interests and reputation of their country is in the hands of his father, and they know that he owns the information, documents and recordings that incriminate and would condemn their country. Such documents, he says, were placed in the hands of people who were entrusted inside and outside Egypt, and that the release of his father is the only way for them to prevent a great catastrophe. He stated that a warning was sent threatening to show how the U.S. administration was directly connected. The evidence was sent through intermediaries which caused them to change their attitude and corrected their position, and that they have taken serious steps to prove good faith. Saad also said that his father’s safety is more important to the Americans than is the safety of Mohamed Morsi.

Writing in his blog, Shoebat noted that six different Arabic sources confirmed the interview with Saad Al-Shater and the report of Al-Shater’s claims.

 Obama pushes to give Muslim Brotherhood another chance in elections
The White House Wednesday pushed multiple statements calling for elections in Egypt, as the country’s military-backed government cracked down on violent Islamist protesters in Cairo.
“When the interim government took power [in July], we expressed our concern about the need for a prompt transition back to a democratically elected civilian government,” deputy press secretary Josh Earnest said Aug. 14.
“We made clear to them that the [financial] aid we offer to Egyptians is something we review regularly, and that is something that continues to be true today,” he emphasized, at the press briefing in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., where Obama is taking a vacation.

Valerie Jarrett’s Stand Down Order

According to the Conservative Report and as reported on by Rush Limbaugh, when Obama disappeared for eight hours during the September 11, 2012 attack on the Benghazi consulate, Valerie Jarrett took charge and may actually have given the stand down order.

We know that an email was sent at 6:07 p.m. Washington time to the White House Situation Room stating that the al-Qaeda-linked group Ansar al-Sharia was taking credit for the attack.

Shortly after this Ansar al-Sharia email came in, and some time before the CIA Annex came under attack, the stand down order was given. It is presumed that Valerie Jarrett gave the stand down order in order to protect Obama from a Jimmy Carter-like military debacle in the event the rescue effort turned out to be a failure.

Keep in mind that a stand down order can only be authorized by the President of the United States. Neither the Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta, or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey (also present in the White House Situation Room), were authorized to give this stand down order.

Caught Red-handed: Eric Holder Lies To American Public About Fraud Program 

Eric Holder touted Obama administration successes in uncovering and prosecuting mortgage fraud, but reporters trying to confirm the statistics found that they were grossly inflated, and the Department of Justice stalled to hide the duplicity.
From Bloomberg News:

Originally the Justice Department said 530 people were charged criminally as part of a year-long initiative by the multi-agency Mortgage Fraud Working Group. It now says the actual figure was 107 — or 80 percent less. Holder originally said the defendants had victimized more than 73,000 American homeowners. That number was revised to 17,185, while estimates of homeowner losses associated with the frauds dropped to $95 million from $1 billion.

How shameless can this administration be? While this won’t come as a surprise to those who criticize the administration, or know anything about Benghazi, what is shocking is that the press actually did their job once and caught them! Hallelujah!

The government restated the statistics because it got caught red-handed by a couple of nosy reporters. Last October, two days after Holder first publicized the numbers, Phil Mattingly and Tom Schoenberg of Bloomberg News broke the story that some of the cases included in the Justice Department’s tally occurred before the initiative began in October 2011.

The rest of the article outlines how more reporters jumped into the fray and uncovered the ridiculous lies Holder and Obama foisted on the American public, including attempts by the Department of Justice to delay and stall the press from pursuing the story:

After their initial story, I asked a Justice Department spokeswoman, Adora Andy, several times over the course of a month for a list of the people charged and their case details so I could look them up myself. She promised repeatedly to provide one, until she finally stopped responding to my requests.

Her e-mails to me were priceless. On Oct. 19, Andy said: “We’ll have a list to you — it will take some time to pull it together.” On Oct. 26, she said: “You will get a list,” explaining that “this is a labor-intensive process.” On Nov. 5, she said: “It looks like we should have the list to you by the end of the week if not sooner.” On Nov. 13: “Hold tight. Finalizing things on this end. Should have something to you tonight.” Again, no list. “I assure you I’m working as hard as I can to get this to you along with the lead agency on this matter, FBI,” she said later that same day. “It’s just very laborious with so much going on and so little staff.”
This is the “most transparent” administration in history? Incredible.

OFA Gets Zero Attendance for Climate Change Rally

Not a single person showed up at the Georgetown waterfront Tuesday for a climate change agenda event put on by Organizing for Action, the shadowy nonprofit advocacy group born out of President Obama’s 2012 campaign, the NRCC wrote in its blog.
The event page for the “Climate Change Day of Action Rally” disappeared after rainy weather appeared to drive away whatever people planned to attend. The embarrassing showing follows the news that only one volunteer stayed for an OFA Obamacare event in Centreville, Va., last week to work the phones:
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