Tag Archives: 2016

News

Scott Walker and Jeb Bush meet GOP voters in New Hampshire

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Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker

This is from left-leaning ABC News.

Excerpt:

Jeb Bush and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker are two possible presidential candidates who were in New Hampshire this weekend for the same reason: to introduce themselves to voters. Though there were some similarities in the schedules of the two would-be front-runners, the men received starkly different reactions.

The former Florida governor faced the challenge of not only using his family name to his advantage but adapting his issues on hot-button topics like the Common Core and immigration to appeal to the Granite State’s conservative voters. The Wisconsin governor simply had to tell his personal story to motivate his audience.

The enthusiasm that Walker earned at his address to the 2016 Kickoff Grassroots Training Session hosted by the New Hampshire GOP Saturday was missing at the house party held for Bush Friday night. At the house party, the crowd of roughly 100 invited guests and upward of 60 media attendees packed the home of Fergus Cullen, the state’s former GOP chairman, forcing everyone to stand throughout because there was simply no room to sit down.

On Saturday, the high school auditorium filled with volunteer activists for Walker’s speech all had a seat but chose to get on their feet multiple times throughout his nearly 45-minute speech.

Another show of support at Walker’s event that was lacking at Bush’s was a smattering of “hallelujah” affirmations throughout his talk.

“I think he’s a man of great courage,” Denis Cronin told ABC News after Walker’s speech. “I thought he was great. Very articulate.”

Walker generated more passion – on both sides – because of his fight against unions in Wisconsin. There were several dozen union workers protesting outside the high school where Walker held his event Saturday, though they dispersed when it started lightly snowing an hour before the governor arrived.

There were no such protests at either public Bush function, only interest in seeing the next member of the political family try to win over Granite State voters.

“He’s somebody you have to see and listen to him, but I don’t agree with a lot of his immigration stuff,” said Ken Hawkins, a former state representative who spoke to ABC News before Walker’s speech at the New Hampshire GOP event.

“I think that people are tired of Bushes just like they’re tired of Clinton’s just like they were tired of Kennedy’s,” Hawkins said.

The son and brother of former presidents is going to have a tougher time portraying himself as an “everyman” than the son of a preacher who flipped burgers growing up and whose sons went to public school. Walker talked about his love of Kohl’s cash, boasting that he bought the sweater he was wearing for $1 Friday, while Bush talked about a conversation he had with the founder of Uber and how new self-serve soda machines at his movie theater in South Coral Gables, Florida, will lead to fewer low-income jobs.

When it comes to policy, Bush has the hurdle of reaffirming himself as a conservative in spite of his support for immigration overhaul and Common Core education standards.

“Immigration overhaul” is ABC News language meaning amnesty.

More:

In tackling those particular issues, he won the support of moderate Republicans or self-proclaimed independents — like Brian Lenzi, who attended the party at Cullen’s house and thought Bush “presented himself very well” – but will lose conservatives at the same time.

“I think based on what I am hearing, he’s trying to appeal to the center and that’s not what I’m looking for,” fellow Cullen party attendee Fenton Groen told ABC News.

A new poll of GOP voters finds Rubio in first place, Walker second. But Rubio has much higher negatives than Walker – probably because Rubio supported an amnesty deal.

The Washington Times explains:

Potential Republican primary voters appear most open to supporting Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker for president in a new poll that shows overall voters are clamoring for “change” even more than they were in 2008.

Fifty-six percent of Republicans said they could see themselves supporting Mr. Rubio, and 53 percent said the same for Mr. Walker, according to the NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Twenty-six percent said they could not see themselves supporting Mr. Rubio, and 17 percent said the same of Mr. Walker.

Fifty-two percent said they could see themselves supporting former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, but four in 10 say they could not see themselves supporting him.

Forty-nine percent said they could see supporting former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, with 42 percent saying they could not see themselves supporting Mr. Bush and 40 percent saying the same of Mr. Paul.

I think right now it’s pretty clear that Walker is the most electable conservative candidate although I am hoping to see more from Bobby Jindal and Ted Cruz in the future.

News

Clinton Foundation: all eight of the highest paid executives are men

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Previously, I blogged about how Hillary Clinton pays the women on her staff 72 cents for every dollar she pays the men on her staff.

This is from The Weekly Standard.

They write:

In late February, Hillary Clinton, a self-proclaimed champion of women’s rights and gender equity, came under fire for a Washington Free Beacon analysis that showed women on Mrs. Clinton’s staff during her tenure in the Senate were paid an average of 72 cents on the dollar compared to male staff. Now, an analysis of the latest IRS filing for the foundation that bears her name, the Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, shows a similar compensation disparity between men and women employees. Although compensation figures are available for only a limited number of Foundation personnel, the 2013 Form 990 filed with the IRS shows that out of eleven highly compensated individuals listed, the top eight are all men.

[…]A further analysis of the four most recent 990 filings shows that a “gender gap” among highly compensated employees at the Clinton Foundation has been relatively consistent over time, with the gap actually widening for the years considered in this analysis. The number of women represented in the highly compensated group has seen a decrease over the same time period.

The data is summarized below showing the year, the average compensation of the highly compensated men versus that of the highly compensated women, the number of men versus women in the highly compensated group of individuals listed on the 990s, and the percentage on the dollar that those men were paid versus the women:

2010 – $210,000 vs. $149,000 (four men vs. five women) – 71%

2011 – $190,000 vs. $147,000 (five men vs. four women) – 77%

2012 – $257,000 vs. $166,000 (five men vs. three women) – 65%

2013 – $294,000 vs. $185,000 (eight men vs. three women) – 63%

Again, this analysis does not consider all employees of the Clinton Foundation, but only those required to be listed on the 990 IRS tax form. The total pay of the highly compensated employees for 2013 totals only $2.9 million versus total salaries and compensation for all employees of $29 million.

We don’t have the numbers for all the employees, but I would expect it would be comparable to the 72 cents on the dollar she pays her female staffers.

You can read all about what the Clinton Foundation does in my previous post, but a one-line summary is that they take millions of dollars from foreign countries. While Hillary is Secretary of State. It’s the Clinton Foundation. Taking money from foreign countries. And she wants to run for President.

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Hillary Clinton used her private e-mail account to conduct State Department business

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Wow. The ultra leftist New York Times just dropped a bomb on Hillary’s 2016 hopes.

Read it:

Hillary Rodham Clinton exclusively used a personal email account to conduct government business as secretary of state, State Department officials said, and may have violated federal requirements that officials’ correspondence be retained as part of the agency’s record.

Mrs. Clinton did not have a government email address during her four-year tenure at the State Department. Her aides took no actions to have her personal emails preserved on department servers at the time, as required by the Federal Records Act.

It was only two months ago, in response to a new State Department effort to comply with federal record-keeping practices, that Mrs. Clinton’s advisers reviewed tens of thousands of pages of her personal emails and decided which ones to turn over to the State Department. All told, 55,000 pages of emails were given to the department. Mrs. Clinton stepped down from the secretary’s post in early 2013.

Her expansive use of the private account was alarming to current and former National Archives and Records Administration officials and government watchdogs, who called it a serious breach.

“It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business,” said Jason R. Baron, a lawyer at Drinker Biddle & Reath who is a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration.

[…]Under federal law, however, letters and emails written and received by federal officials, such as the secretary of state, are considered government records and are supposed to be retained so that congressional committees, historians and members of the news media can find them. There are exceptions to the law for certain classified and sensitive materials.

The problem is, of course, that personal e-mails are not securely transmitted or securely stored. This is an incredible blunder that put our national security at risk.

Why did she do it? The leftist Washington Post has the answer:

The New York Times reported Monday night that, during her tenure at the State Department, Hillary Clinton never used her official email account to conduct communications, relying instead on a private email account. As the Times notes, only official accounts are automatically retained under the Federal Records Act, meaning that none of Clinton’s email communication was preserved.

She did it so that there would be no record of her e-mail communications should there be any investigations or inquiries. It’s sort of like Lois Lerner claiming that the dog ate her hard drive, and the hard drives of all her friends in the IRS. Only this is worse than that. At least we could get the Lois Lerner e-mails back from back-ups.

Ed Morrissey of Hot Air reacts:

According to the New York Times, Hillary Clinton never used the official e-mail system at all. When the time came to produce e-mails for the Benghazi probe, her aides “found” 300 or so that they chose to reveal years after the event — with no guarantee that these represent the entire record, or even a significant portion of it.

Clearly, Hillary had contempt for the mechanisms that provide transparency and accountability for government operations and officials. If any of her communications involved sensitive or classified material, Hillary may have broken more laws than just those dealing with archival of official records. This could very well be huge, and not just in relation to the 2016 election. Just what may have been gleaned by hostile intelligence services? What else may Hillary have been doing while at State? Congress needs to get to the bottom of this ASAP — and the Benghazi select committee should put Hillary Clinton under oath to demand answers about this.

Morrissey notes that the personal e-mail was set up the day of her Senate confirmation hearings for Secretary of State. This was not an accident, this was intentional. Planned. Deliberate. She did not want her e-mails to be on record. And we would never know about this except because Republicans set up a select committee to investigate. We are only finding these things out because of Trey Gowdy’s ongoing Benghazi investigation. Give the man credit. He was the right man for the job, and we are finally getting the answers we sought… a little bit at a time.

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