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News

State Department Inspector General: Clinton e-mail use violated Federal Records Act

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Hillary Clinton look bored about the deaths of 4 Americans who asked for her help
Hillary Clinton look bored about the deaths of 4 Americans who asked for her help

The Weekly Standard reports:

A State Department watchdog denounced Hillary Clinton’s lax use of a private email server Wednesday, writing that Clinton did not properly preserve correspondence and subjected herself to security risks without seeking counsel.

The report revealed that the former secretary of state did not comply with the Federal Records Act.

[…]”Secretary Clinton should have preserved any Federal records she created and received on her personal account by printing and filing those records with the related files in the Office of the Secretary,” the report said, according to Politico. “At a minimum, Secretary Clinton should have surrendered all emails dealing with Department business before leaving government service and, because she did not do so, she did not comply with the Department’s policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act.”

[…]The IG also condemned Clinton for not seeking counsel on whether to handle work-related emails on her cell phone. Information officers “would have refused the request because of security risks,” according to the Associated Press.

NBC’s Ken Dilanian said that the IG report shows that “key information technology officials” were “not aware” of Clinton’s use of the server, though the former secretary of state’s office has claimed otherwise.

“They had never approved it, she never asked them. And they’re saying that she should have gotten approval from them, they probably wouldn’t have granted it actually,” Dilanian said.

Another Weekly Standard article lists EIGHT TIMES where Clinton said everyone knew about her private e-mail server.

And her “fact sheet” on her campaign web site says this:

“Her usage was widely known to the over 100 State Department and U.S. government colleagues she emailed, consistent with the practice of prior Secretaries of State and permitted at the time. […] The laws, regulations, and State Department policy in place during her tenure permitted her to use a non-government email for work.”

Whenever a politician says that “everyone” knows something, or “everyone” believes something, it’s a good idea to ask them for one name. Because once they give you a name, they are opening themselves up to fact-checking. This also works when you’re discussion the Christian worldview with a skeptic. Skeptic: “I have read so many smart people with so many arguments against Christianity that I can’t believe in it”. You: “OK, go ahead and name your best argument and tell me who wrote it”.

Now, the obvious question is this – why did Hillary want to have a private e-mail server? All of my e-mails are on my company’s corporate server, and if I leave, they keep them. Why? Because it is important to company business that a record be kept, in case I was taking bribes, or exchanging favors for money. Clinton decided not to let her employers see her e-mails, or have records of them. Why do you think she did that? Remember that all the time that she was Secretary of State, she was taking donations to her “Clinton Foundation” from foreign donors. Do you think that maybe she was exchanging political favors for donations, and didn’t want anyone else to have a record of her communication about that?

What difference does national security make?
What difference does national security make?

Look at this article from the leftist Washington Post, of all places.

They write:

The Clinton Foundation accepted millions of dollars from seven foreign governments during Hillary Rodham Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, including one donation that violated its ethics agreement with the Obama administration, foundation officials disclosed Wednesday.

[…]In one instance, foundation officials acknowledged they should have sought approval in 2010 from the State Department ethics office, as required by the agreement for new government donors, before accepting a $500,000 donation from the Algerian government.

[…]Some of the donations came from countries with complicated diplomatic, military and financial relationships with the U.S. government, including Kuwait, Qatar and Oman.

[…]The Washington Post reported last week that foreign sources, including governments, made up a third of those who have given the foundation more than $1 million over time. The Post found that the foundation, begun by former president Bill Clinton, has raised nearly $2 billion since its creation in 2001.

[…]Foreign governments and individuals are prohibited from giving money to U.S. political candidates, to prevent outside influence over national leaders. But the foundation has given donors a way to potentially gain favor with the Clintons outside the traditional political limits.

[…]Foreign governments had been major donors to the foundation before President Obama nominated Clinton to become secretary of state in 2009. When the foundation released a list of its donors for the first time in 2008, as a result of the agreement with the Obama administration, it disclosed, for instance, that Saudi Arabia had given between $10 million and $25 million.

[…]Qatar, for instance, spent more than $5.3 million on registered lobbyists while Clinton was secretary of state, according to the Sunlight Foundation.The country’s lobbyists were reported monitoring anti-terrorism activities and efforts to combat violence in Sudan’s Darfur region. Qatar has also come under criticism from some U.S. allies in the region that have accused it of supporting Hamas and other militant groups. Qatar has denied the allegations.

Now I know that Hillary Clinton says that she is very concerned about women’s rights, but then one has to wonder how well she translates those happy sounding words in her speeches into actions with these nations like Saudi Arabia. I don’t think that the women in these countries saw much help from Hillary when she was Secretary of State.

News

New study: father absence is a strong predictor of depression for young girls

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Does government provide incentives for people to get married?
If you want your children to grow up happy, commit yourself to marriage

The study is here on PubMed.

And here’s an article about it posted at The Family in America, a public policy journal.

Excerpt:

Who has benefitted from the war radical feminists have waged against marriage? Certainly not young women. A very large new Canadian study concludes that one of the strongest predictors of depression among young women is the loss of a biological parent. And it is the easy divorces that feminists have pushed for that have typically occasioned such a loss.

Conducted by researchers at the University of Northern British Columbia, this new study isolates the factors predicting depression among Canadians ages 16 to 20. The researchers limn these factors by scrutinizing data collected between 1994 and 2007 from a nationally representative sample of 1,715 individuals tracked during this 13-year period.

Predictably, the researchers adduce evidence that such things as parental rejection and childhood anxiety predict depression between a young person’s 16th birthday and his or her 21st.  But gender makes a difference: consistent with other inquiries, this study finds that “girls reported more [depression] than boys.” However, not all girls are equally vulnerable: the data reveal that “The loss of a parent by the ages of 4 to 8 years predicted depression at ages 16 to 20 years for girls [p = 0.008] but not for boys.”

Of course, a girl can lose a parent through death. But the researchers realize that such tragedy occurs far less often than the trauma of parental divorce. Consequently, they know how to interpret parental loss as a predictor of girls’ depression at the threshold between adolescence and young adulthood. This is a finding, they realize, that fits hand-in-glove with the results of a 2008 study establishing that “the effects of parental divorce . . . differ between genders in respect to the development of depression with risk increasing for girls but not for boys.” They further realize that their study harmonizes with a 1997 study concluding that “young women whose parents had divorced reported higher levels of depression compared to young men from divorced families.”

Given the paralyzing effects of depression as “a leading cause of disability worldwide,” the researchers hope their study will lead to “targeted, specific and personalized intervention” that will curb such depression. More particularly, they hope that “girls may benefit from interventions designed to address parental loss due to death, divorce, and other causes.”

But since nothing takes a parent away from a daughter more often in the 21st century than does parental divorce, it is very clear that the kind of intervention girls most need is the kind that will keep their parents together. Just how quickly that intervention comes will depend heavily on how much reality can puncture feminist ideology.

This study makes me think of the problems that we have these days getting married and staying married. I think that there are three kinds of challenges. The first challenge is ideology, e.g. – radical feminism. The second challenge is cultural, e.g. – the hook-up culture on campus. The third challenge is political, e.g. – no-fault divorce. It seems likes the odds are really stacked against marriage-minded people.

Most people like the idea of having someone of the opposite sex commit to them for life. I write a lot about what people should be looking for in a mate. Factors that predict a person’s ability to commit, what their worldview should be, etc. But we also have to remember that we have to be turning ourselves into people who are suited to a lifetime commitment, involving self-denial and self-sacrifice.

A lot of people seem to think that if they meet the right person – the person who makes them feel good – then they won’t have to do any self-denying or any self-sacrificing. But that’s not true. Feelings change. It’s possible for two serial killers to feel good about each other, and to having things in common, but marriage isn’t about whether you “like” the other person and whether they “like” you. Marriage works when you have two people who are comfortable making commitments. Two people who are comfortable with responsibilities, expectations and obligations.

The point I am trying to make here is that not only must we be looking for someone who can be faithful, loyal, commitment through thick and thin, but we must also prepare to become a person like that. If we make choices for our own happiness every day – fun and thrills – then we are not making ourselves into the kind of people who take responsibility and make commitments.

The strange thing is that those who choose fun over and over and over again seem to make the worst decisions when it comes to choosing mates. Of course it’s easier to pick someone who is not too moral and not too religious. Then they won’t be able to judge you. They’ll just let you do whatever you want and never shame you for anything.

The problem is that marriage works best when two people are comfortable with moral obligations to others. You have to be someone who is comfortable with obligations over the long term. And you have to choose someone who has a strong sense of morality, otherwise they won’t honor their moral obligations to others. Commitment means doing what is right regardless of how you feel about it, It means giving up on the pursuit of fun, in order to build something strong that will take you into your old age.

News

Texas and Oklahoma sue Obama administration over transgender public school decree

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Obama speaks to the Human Rights Campaign
Obama speaks to the Human Rights Campaign

The Daily Signal reports:

Texas, joined by eight other states and officials from two other states, sued President Barack Obama’s administration on Wednesday over the president’s national school bathroom directive that threatens to take away federal school funding for districts that do not follow new transgender student guidance.

“This is an overreach of the federal government,” Harrold Independent School District Superintendent David Thweatt told The Daily Signal in a phone call Wednesday afternoon.

Texas and the Harrold Independent School District in Texas were joined by the states of Alabama, Wisconsin, West Virginia, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Utah, and Georgia, as well as the Arizona Department of Education, Heber-Overgaard Unified School District in Arizona, and Maine Governor Paul LePage, a Republican, in the lawsuit filed in the Northern District of Texas, Wichita Falls Division U.S. district court.

“This federal money obviously is our money to start with,” Thweatt said. “It’s coming from income taxes, et cetera and [the Obama administration] is taking this and using our own money against us to try to blackmail us into some kind of social engineering and social experimentation in public schools.”

[…]Superintendent Thweatt expressed concern to The Daily Signal that Obama administration’s directive creates security and safety issues for the “privacy and dignity” of the approximately one hundred kindergarten through 12th grade students that attend and use restrooms at Harrold Independent School District.

“Not only do we have students in these restrooms, but we are also having visitors to our schools at programs and sporting events,” Thweatt said. “If we open our restrooms, we could very well have grown men in our restrooms with young girls.”

If you live in Texas or Oklahoma, then congratulations – your states are actually doing something about the problem:

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, along with Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt and West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, sent a letter on May 17 to the Obama administration expressing legal concern over the transgender student directive.

“The president of United States has no authority under the Constitution to change the law,” Paxton told The Daily Signal in a phone call Wednesday afternoon.

Paxton says that his state will wait to hear if there is a response from the Obama administration and “hopefully they’ll back off.”

“If not, we’ll go to the court and we’ll put our case in front of a judge and we’ll let the court decide,” Paxton said.

The lawsuit is filed against the Education and Justice Departments, the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Department of Labor, and officials at the respective agencies.

I doubt that people who voted for Obama are bright enough to explain what the concept of federalism is, or why it is responsible for our special success as a nation.  People don’t seem to care much for the Constitutional limits on power any more. They just vote for the party that hands them goodies, and to Hell with morality and protecting the vulnerable.