Hillary Clinton: Classic or Dud?

What do folks make of the Clinton Foundation stuff, and is there anything especially good to read on it? It continues to smell fishy to me even where many of their other "scandals" don't.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8oAQOvOEXY

Is that a redaction or the monolith from 2001 (or are you just happy to see me)?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/foreign-governments-gave-millions-to-foundation-while-clinton-was-at-state-dept/2015/02/25/31937c1e-bc3f-11e4-8668-4e7ba8439ca6_story.html

maybe?

https://www.byline.com/project/27/article/520

This is a decent overview of some of it:

http://www.ibtimes.com/clinton-foundation-donors-got-weapons-deals-hillary-clintons-state-department-1934187

Doesn't really cover the big pharma / oil industry / uranium mining elements, though.

also worth looking at this imo http://www.factcheck.org/2015/06/where-does-clinton-foundation-money-go/

since that byline.com article repeats a lot of the more fallacious arguments that factcheck parses

eg

We spoke by phone with Sandra Minuitti at Charity Navigator, and she told us Charity Navigator decided not to rate the Clinton Foundation because the foundation spun off some entities (chiefly the Health Access Initiative) and then later brought some, like the Clinton Global Initiative, back into the fold. Charity Navigator looks at a charity’s performance over time, she said, and those spin-offs could result in a skewed picture using its analysis model. If the foundation maintains its current structure for several years, she said, Charity Navigator will be able to rate it again.

The decision to withhold a rating had nothing to do with concerns about the Clinton Foundation’s charitable work. Further, Minuitti said citing only the 6 percent of the budget spent on grants as the sum total spent on charity by the foundation — as Willis and Fiorina did — is inaccurate.

She referred us to page 10 of the 2013 990 form for the Clinton Foundation. When considering the amount spent on “charitable work,” she said, one would look not just at the amount in grants given to other charities, but all of the expenses in Column B for program services. That comes to 80.6 percent of spending. (The higher 89 percent figure we cited earlier comes from a CharityWatch analysis of the Clinton Foundation and its affiliates.)

How they're spending it is less of a problem than how they're getting it.

The most charitable interpretation is that US political-arms nexus is such a moral cesspit that the decision to sell cluster munitions to the people supplying al-Qaeda, etc, would have happened anyway. There was no undue influence brought to bear because there were no contrary opinions for the money to sway. Donors weren't buying privileged access to lobby Clinton, they were buying privileged access to lobby each other.

also it's been a while since i checked into this but state is just one group of a few that discuss + approve arms deals. not saying that means that they couldn't have been trying to buy influence with state by donating to the foundation but that if they were it wasn't sufficient. they have to consult w/ sec of defense, all arms deals get approved by congress, etc. and also iirc the link between donations and arms sales were mostly bogus? like some countries that donated funds got reductions in arms sales (like jamaica and ireland). it could be there was some v soft influence peddling but it def wasn't sufficient + it seems to like SV says assume that they wouldn't have made those sales anyway. which we had done before clinton and continued to do after clinton.

it seems silly to me bc of what SV says - they would have made those sales anyway* - sorry, syntax got weird there

Like many things with the Clintons, it seems hard to believe that there's is an explicit, 1:1 quid pro quo here, but it's also hard to believe that there isn't a lot of influence peddling and enriching the circle of cronies going on with the foundation and the global initiative.

Something weird is happening with YouTube embeds on here this week

god thank you i thought it was just me

everything has turned into a quarter of a black flag tattoo ime

"Donald Trump says America doesn't win anymore... Well, tell that to THE CAVALIERS!"

I guess she dint kno other team from Murrica too

srsly, just GO THE FUCK AWAY, NOW.

did she kill someone again?

she gave an interview: "I accept total responsibility for my loss, and here's whose fault it was..."

eye on the prize, Morbz

you're right she should refrain from ever appearing in public or answering questions for the rest of her time on Earth.

she had to wait an entire 100 days before she could blame everyone. that takes presidential fortitude.

YES, and it's for our own good... bcz the next step is she runs again. HEED MY WARNING. xp

no scott, she's been doing it for weeks now

i think there's zero chance she runs, i mean i cannot imagine the DNC letting her anywhere near the nomination process whatsoever, they're not that du--well, ok maybe.

Hillary Clinton says she won't run for public office again

she's not going to run again unless she wants to endure the humiliation of not even winning the nomination.

like Hubert Humphrey in '72 and '76? check

she's not going to run again gimme a break

ok, cancer kept him from running in '76, mea culpa

xp

it's much more likely that Chelsea would run, which would at least offer the lulz of causing the dirtbag left to commit seppuku.

Will put money on HRC running again in 2020. Don't think she would get nominated though.

Who else is there? Warren, and... um, uhhh....

Classic

flappy, i'd bet $500 that she doesn't run in 2020. i'm sure there's some escrow website we can use or something to enforce the terms.

Classic

Buncha senators (booker, gillibrand, warren, etc) wanna run. Plus Cuomo. At least! Dems are gonna have a big field.

Also, she'll be 73 in 2020. Of course she's not going to run.

probably a decent person, bad politician with moderately bad policies. gave us donald trump.

Gillibrand said today she will not run for prez, which i find ~2% more believable than HRC

gillibrand said she wouldn't yesterday fwiw (probably not much)

Glad we're finally having this discussion. It's been too long.

the emails were classic

i'll extend that bet to anyone who thinks hillary running in 2020 is easy money

shameless co-opter/panderer. good debater. very hard worker. knows policy as well as anyone. voted for iraq war and learned pretty much zero lessons from it. married to bill. overall admirable response to decades-long smear campaign.

Hillary Clinton did not give us Donald Trump. People who voted for Donald Trump gave us Donald Trump; I am not willing to delegate that responsibility away from the people who marked his name on their ballots.

i will say that 10 years ago it would have been a lot more fashionable to hate hillary on the left. i personally find the reclamation efforts pretty transparently disingenuous but i understand that that's how the current left-of-center political zeitgeist wants to see things

Anyone as wealthy as the Clintons is overwhelmingly likely to be a dud.

http://i.huffpost.com/gen/387201/BILL-CLINTON-AL-GORE-SHORTS.jpg

thanks djp

Would say automatically but Dirk Nowitzki and Lebron seem pretty cool. I wouldn't want either to be President, though.

i will say that 10 years ago it would have been a lot more fashionable to hate hillary on the left

is it not incredibly fashionable now

75 today. (Which I know because I looked up someone to talk about with a 4/5 class for Today in History.)