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Are there any candidates Christians can get excited about in 2016?

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Iowa Republican Primary Poll
Iowa Republican Primary Poll

Well, at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” conference, four candidates shined – according to the left-wing Politico, no less.

Intro:

At the latest GOP cattle call, about a dozen presidential contenders rolled through a Washington, D.C. ballroom over a three-day period to tout their socially conservative bona fides at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” conference. Most of the 2016 hopefuls managed to impress evangelical and other conservative Christian voters by championing religious freedom, highlighting support for traditional marriage and stressing the importance of family and family values.

Here’s their summary of the 4 winners:

Ted Cruz

Cruz flat-out owned this event, firing up the crowd like no other candidate did — attendees were still talking about him two days after he spoke. The Texas senator delivered a rousing call to action aimed at the evangelical community, saying that 50 million of them sat home in 2012 but could make the difference in 2016. “If people of faith show up, if we stand for our faith and our liberty and the Constitution, we will win and turn the country around,” he said. To a rapt crowd, Cruz did his best Reagan impression when he promised “Morning is coming. Morning is coming.” And he tore into what he framed as the Obama administration’s assault on religious liberty — a prominent theme at the conference. When Cruz finished, the crowd mobbed him.

Bobby Jindal

The Louisiana governor, who is expected to announce his presidential bid next week, is trailing badly in the polls but his appearance Friday was a chance to impress evangelicals — and he seized the moment. More than just about any other candidate, Jindal is a champion of religious liberty, and at the Faith and Freedom conference, he came out swinging. He blasted big business for making an “unnatural alliance” with liberals who opposed controversial religious freedom measures in Indiana and Arkansas. He tweaked Obama and Clinton for, in his view, “evolving” to support same-sex marriage only when the polls suggested it was safe — something Jindal pledged he would never do. He warned darkly that freedom, particularly religious freedom, is under assault, a stance that went over well with the crowd.

Scott Walker

The Wisconsin governor, the son of a preacher, met an enthusiastic crowd as he keynoted the closing session on Saturday night. The audience greeted him with a standing ovation after the president of Concerned Women for America introduced him by ticking through his record of opposition to abortion rights, and the speech itself was punctuated by attendees standing up to applaud. He reiterated his support for religious liberty, and his recitation of his confrontation with unions was well-received. But the biggest and most sustained applause of the night came as the governor offered a hawkish riff on foreign policy, tearing into the Obama administration for its approach to ISIS, Syria and Iran. Walker, who has been seeking to burnish his national security credentials ahead of an all-but-certain presidential run, appeared most energized during that portion of the speech — and the audience responded.

Carly Fiorina

The former Hewlett-Packard executive, who has shined at other GOP cattle calls, did it again Saturday. Attendees, particularly female attendees, were buzzing about her morning speech on the final day of the conference. Some noted that they had gone in knowing little about her, but had come out impressed with her resume and her energetic speech, praising her delivery as clear and direct. For Fiorina, who is known as her party’s most frequent and vigorous critic of Hillary Clinton, raising her standing in the polls is essential — her long-shot bid all but depends on qualifying for the primary debate in August, an event she nodded to in her remarks.

My first choices are Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal and Ted Cruz. I like Walker the best, though, because he has more accomplishments than Cruz (who is not able to build consensus to get legislation moved forward) and his state is doing better financially than Bobby Jindal’s Louisiana (Louisiana is struggling with a huge budget deficit).

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Clinton Foundation fundraising branch in Sweden lobbied State Department for sanction relief

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Hillary Clinton: secretive, entitled, hypoctritical
Hillary Clinton: secretive, entitled, hypoctritical

More bad news for the Clinton machine, this time reported in the Washington Times.

Excerpt:

Bill Clinton’s foundation set up a fundraising arm in Sweden that collected $26 million in donations at the same time that country was lobbying Hillary Rodham Clinton’s State Department to forgo sanctions that threatened its thriving business with Iran, according to interviews and documents obtained by The Washington Times.

The Swedish entity, called the William J. Clinton FoundationInsamlingsstiftelse, was never disclosed to or cleared by State Department ethics officials, even though one of its largest sources of donations was a Swedish government-sanctioned lottery.

As the money flowed to the foundation from Sweden, Mrs. Clinton’s team in Washington declined to blacklist any Swedish firms despite warnings from career officials at the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm that Sweden was growing its economic ties with Iran and potentially undercutting Western efforts to end Tehran’s rogue nuclear program, diplomatic cables show.

“Sweden does not support implementing tighter financial sanctions on Iran” and believes “more stringent financial standards could hurt Swedish exports,” one such cable from 2009 alerted Mrs. Clinton’s office in Washington.

Separately, U.S. intelligence was reporting that Sweden’s second-largest employer, telecommunications giant Ericsson AB, was pitching cellphone tracking technology to Iran that could be used by the country’s security services, officials told The Times.

By the time Mrs. Clinton left office in 2013, the Clinton Foundation Insamlingsstiftelse had collected millions of dollars inside Sweden for his global charitable efforts and Mr. Clinton personally pocketed a record $750,000 speech fee from Ericsson, one of the firms at the center of the sanctions debate.

Now the last time I blogged about these issues, I think what was said was that if a company had offices in America, as Ericsson does, then they would be subject to sanctions from America for dealing with Iran, depending on what they were doing.

What’s interesting is that the responses to inquiries from the media:

The foundation, however, declined repeated requests to identify the names of the specific donors that passed through the Swedish arm.

A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign offered no comment or explanation despite two weeks of requests.

When Mrs. Clinton became President Obama’s secretary of state in 2009, she vowed to set up a transparent review system that would ensure any of her husband’s fundraising or lucrative speaking activities were reviewed for possible ties to foreign countries doing business with her agency, insisting she wanted to eliminate even the “appearance” of conflicts of interests.

But there is growing evidence that the Clintons did not run certain financial activities involving foreign entities by the State Department, such as the Swedish fundraising arm and the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative based in Canada, or disclose on her annual ethics form the existence of a limited liability corporation that Mr. Clinton set up for his personal consulting work.

The Washington Times article is a must-read, and please do share it. We have to make sure that we do not elect another Democrat who will take our country even further away from its conservative roots. If exposing Clinton Foundation finances stops the Democrats from getting more pro-abortion, anti-marriage Supreme Court picks, then that’s what we have to talk about.

By the way, this is not the first story to come out on dealings like this… we already had one from Canadian allies of the Clinton Foundation, and another from a Ukrainian donor who was dealing with Iran.

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Clinton shell corporation “WJC, LLC” allowed non-disclosure of speaking fee revenue amounts

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Hillary Clinton: secretive, entitled, hypocritical
Hillary Clinton: secretive, entitled, hypocritical

This is from James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal.

First, about the “pass-through” / “shell” corporation:

If the Clintons had any wit, they’d have called it Everyday Americans LLC. The Associated Press reports that last week’s financial disclosures by inevitable Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton “omit a company with no apparent employees or assets that the former president [the candidate’s husband] has legally used to provide consulting and other services, but which demonstrates the complexity of the family’s finances.”

The company is known as WJC LLC. The first set of initials stand for William Jefferson Clinton, the second for limited liability company. As the Small Business Administration website explains, an LLC “is a hybrid type of legal structure that provides the limited liability features of a corporation and the tax efficiencies and operational flexibility of a partnership.” An LLC doesn’t pay corporate income tax but rather passes profits along to its “members” (owners) as personal income.

There’s no evidence the Clintons failed to comply with the applicable laws in this matter. “Under federal ethics disclosure rules, declared candidates do not have to report assets worth less than $1,000,” the AP reports. Since WJC LLC is a “shell” or “pass-through,” which holds no assets, it falls short of that threshold by roughly a grand. The rules require Mrs. Clinton only “to identify the source of her spouse’s income and confirm that he received more than $1,000,” which she did in at least one case that “surfaced in emails from Bill Clinton’s aides to the [State] department’s ethics officials.”

But because there is no obligation to disclose how much money the spouse earned, “the precise amounts of Bill Clinton’s earned income from consulting have not been disclosed, and it’s not known how much was routed through WJC, LLC.” More is known about the Clintons’ extravagant speaking fees—“as much as $50 million” for him during her tenure as secretary of state—which went directly to them or the Clinton Foundation.

But that’s not all! When Hillary was Secretary of State, her department approved arms deals (SALE OF WEAPONS) to parties who made donations to her Clinton Foundation.

Amazing:

Graver for the Clintons is a report yesterday from David Sirota and Andrew Perez of the International Business Times. (Sirota is the left-wing author who enjoyed a dubious 15 minutes of fame in 2013 when he penned a piece for Salon titled “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American.”)

Sirota and Perez report that they found “dozens of arms sales,” worth $165 billion, that were “approved by Hillary Clinton’s State Department” and “placed weapons in the hands of governments that had also donated money to the Clinton family philanthropic empire.” In some cases, the sellers of the armaments were also Clinton Foundation donors. The report opens with this example:

Even by the standards of arms deals between the United States and Saudi Arabia, this one was enormous. A consortium of American defense contractors led by Boeing would deliver $29 billion worth of advanced fighter jets to the United States’ oil-rich ally in the Middle East.

Israeli officials were agitated, reportedly complaining to the Obama administration that this substantial enhancement to Saudi air power risked disrupting the region’s fragile balance of power. The deal appeared to collide with the State Department’s documented concerns about the repressive policies of the Saudi royal family.

But now, in late 2011, Hillary Clinton’s State Department was formally clearing the sale, asserting that it was in the national interest. At a press conference in Washington to announce the department’s approval, an assistant secretary of state, Andrew Shapiro, declared that the deal had been “a top priority” for [Mrs.] Clinton personally. Shapiro, a longtime aide to Clinton since her Senate days, added that the “U.S. Air Force and U.S. Army have excellent relationships in Saudi Arabia.”

These were not the only relationships bridging leaders of the two nations. In the years before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia contributed at least $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, the philanthropic enterprise she has overseen with her husband, former president Bill Clinton. Just two months before the deal was finalized, Boeing—the defense contractor that manufactures one of the fighter jets the Saudis were especially keen to acquire, the F-15—contributed $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to a company press release.

Sirota and Perez also cite fishy-looking speaking fees to Mr. Clinton, such as $175,000 from the Kuwait America Foundation “paid in the same time frame as a series of deals Hillary Clinton’s State Department was approving between the Kuwaiti government and Boeing.”

And now, there are connections between the Clinton Foundation and the FIFA scandal that’s now in the news.

The radically leftist Daily Beast:

Both Bill Clinton and his family’s charity have been tied to soccer’s governing body, as well as Qatar’s disastrous World Cup bid.

And just like that, another Clinton Foundation donor is in the news.

The Clinton global charity has received between $50,000 and $100,000 from soccer’s governing body and has partnered with the Fédération Internationale de Football Association on several occasions, according to donor listings on the foundation’s website.

Several top FIFA executives were arrested Wednesday in Zurich and face corruption charges stretching back two decades, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Involvement with the embattled body extends beyond the foundation to Bill Clinton himself. The former president was an honorary chairman of the bid committee put together to promote the United States as a possible host nation for the 2018 or 2022 World Cup.

When the U.S. lost the 2022 bid to Qatar, Clinton was rumored to be so upset he shattered a mirror.

But apparently Qatar tried to make it up to him.

The Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee, partnering with the State of Qatar, “committed to utilizing its research and development for sustainable infrastructure at the 2022 FIFA World Cup to improve food security in Qatar, the Middle East, and other arid and water-stressed regions throughout the world,” according to the Clinton Foundation website.

The cost of the two-year project is not listed on the Clinton Foundation website, but the Qatar 2022 committee gave the foundation between $250,000 and $500,000 in 2014 and the State of Qatar gave between $1 million and $5 million in previous, unspecified years.

FIFA, which has never been a bastion of ethics, was heavily criticized for awarding the 2018 and 2022 World Cup to Russia and Qatar, respectively, in part because of their abysmal human-rights records.

The Guardian reported in 2013 about “appalling labor abuses,” including possible forced labor and worker death on Qatar’s World Cup infrastructure projects. It is also considered to be too hot to play soccer in Qatar in the summer.

Seriously, is Hillary Clinton the kind of person we want to sent to the White House?

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