You might call this a transition day in rock music history. For instance, one year to the day after the Rolling Stones released “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” …
… Brian Jones left the Stones, to be replaced by Mick Taylor.
Salon, no fan of conservatives:
In the wake of Bill Clinton’s refusal to take responsibility for Monica Lewinsky’s #MeToo experience with him, a number of articles have suggested that he paved the way for Donald Trump. The logic is fairly clear: If Bill Clinton isn’t responsible for what he did to Monica Lewinsky or any of the various women who have accused him of sexual assault, then how exactly do we blame Trump for his own version of the same types of behavior?
It isn’t just the pattern match on how these men treated women; it is also the fact that they have used similar tactics to deflect responsibility for their actions. When Lewinsky was mentioned during Bill Clinton’s recent interview with NBC’s “Today,” he was immediately irritated and dismissive. “Do you think President Kennedy should have resigned?” Clinton asked the interviewer. “Do you think President Johnson should have resigned?”
The unspoken question that hung in the air was, “Do you think President Trump should resign?” Because by Clinton’s logic, if he isn’t to be judged for what he did, since others did it before him, then why should Trump? Clinton also suggested that the news was biased and had not reported all the relevant facts – a move we see Trump do every day. Clinton then cast himself as a victim who had had to pay millions in legal fees. Sound familiar?
But it gets worse. Because this is not just a story about a president who was lecherous, predating a current president who is lecherous. This is a story about the Democrats’ culture of impunity — one where they assert the moral high ground as they go after Trump while also claiming that they have no accountability whatsoever for their own ethical failings. This twisted logic has created a real ethical quagmire.The harsh reality is that Bill and Hillary Clinton, along with the leadership of the Democratic National Committee, have long engaged in moral double-speak, where they are quick to blame their opponents for a lack of integrity but unwilling to practice integrity themselves.
Think about it. The Bill Clinton story simply reminds us of how he too was a disgrace to the office of the president, not only in the way he treated women but also in his unethical behavior. This isn’t just about sex and lies; it is about sex, lies and corruption.The examples of the ways the Clintons engaged in unethical business dealings abound. Remember that they suggested that it was completely normal for entities related to the secretary of state to engage in fundraising from countries with foreign-policy interests before the United States.
As Josh Barro explained in Business Insider, “Years before Trump started taking policy advice from friends at Mar-a-Lago, Hillary Clinton was forwarding freelance intelligence memos about Libya from Clinton Foundation consultant Sidney Blumenthal around the State Department as Blumenthal pursued business interests in Libya with other Clinton associates.” He also points out that well before Jared Kushner was making private business deals while serving as a top White House adviser, Hillary Clinton’s longtime aide Huma Abedin was doing it.
And there is clearly no better example of a lack of integrity than a presidential candidate who accepts huge speaking fees from Wall Street firms and then tells the public that they shouldn’t worry that her ties to Wall Street might limit her ability to defend the public interest. When questioned about these activities by her opponent, Bernie Sanders, Clinton accused him of sexism. Later, he was one of the many culprits she blamed for losing the election. At no time did it seem to occur to Clinton that maybe voters didn’t trust someone who would take that sort of money from Wall Street firms.
As if all this weren’t enough, we now know that the DNC was biased towards Hillary Clinton in the 2016 race. Former interim DNC chair Donna Brazile, who was herself fired from CNN for passing debate questions to the Clinton camp during the primaries, later admitted that Clinton had controlled DNC funds that should have been for the party nominee. And don’t forget that after Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to step down as DNC chair in the wake of the enormous email leaks, Hillary Clinton immediately hired her for her campaign.
When Sanders supporters filed a class action lawsuit alleging that the DNC and Schultz had violated the DNC charter by rigging the primary system in Clinton’s favor, the suit was dropped. Not because the argument was without merit, but because the court found that it was essentially OK for the party to rig its primary process however it wished.
That’s right. The suit wasn’t dropped because there was no bias; it was dropped because the DNC argued that they had no real obligation to treat the candidates in an impartial fashion. As the court document puts it, the DNC charter’s promise of “impartiality and evenhandedness” is effectively meaningless — “political rhetoric that is not enforceable in federal courts.”It really isn’t possible in the short space here to list all the ways the DNC oligarchy has lost the trust of Democratic voters or the public in general. There are simply too many examples of corruption, cronyism, financial scandals, sexual misconduct and more to detail here.
Perhaps even more disturbingly, the cadre of DNC party insiders has not only refused to own up to what they did but have shamed anyone who called them out and have continued to demand blind loyalty from supporters. “Democrats, believing that it was necessary to defend the Clintons at all costs, not only excused their extensive financial conflicts of interests,” argues Barro, “but insisted that people who found them to be lacking in the ethics department did not understand that this is how politics works, and has always worked.”These arguments, as Will Rahn explains, put Hillary Clinton in a weird spot as she tried to run as an ethical counter to Trump. He argues that the “Democrats realized too late that Hillary Clinton was not the best person they had to make the moralistic case against him.”
The point is this: If what the Clintons and DNC insiders did was just politics as usual, that makes it difficult to claim that the more brazen and extreme version we see in the Trump administration must be opposed on moral grounds.It may be tempting to argue that Trump is vastly worse than both the Clintons and the DNC put together. But this is not a competition to determine which camp is more morally bankrupt.
Another tack, as Rahn put it, is to wonder why Bill Clinton can’t just go away? But his disappearance wouldn’t help. He is only one small part of the story.
The only fix to the way that our political process has normalized oligarchy, cronyism, scandal and impunity across both major parties is for those of us who are sick of it to call it out and demand better. As we head into the next cycle of elections, our nation may be less divided between blue and red than between those of us who demand integrity from our politicians and those of us who no longer care.
Several of the groups that make up the Koch network are getting ready for a long-haul push against the Trump administration’s tariffs and to promote the cause of free trade between the United States and other countries.
Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, Americans for Prosperity, and The LIBRE Initiative today announced a multi-year, multimillion-dollar initiative to champion the far-reaching benefits of trade and the consequences of tariffs.
The campaign will include “paid media, activist education and grassroots mobilization, lobbying and policy analysis — all intended to transform the way Washington and the rest of the country consider and value trade with other nations.”
“This campaign makes a clear statement: Trade is a major priority for our network,” said James Davis, executive vice president of Freedom Partners. “We will work aggressively to educate policymakers and others about the facts. Trade lifts people out of poverty and improves lives. It is critical to America’s future prosperity and our consumers, workers and companies. Tariffs and other trade barriers make us poorer. They raise prices for those who can least afford it. That’s why this issue is so important. This announcement is a demonstration of our long-term commitment to advance common-sense trade policies that will ensure America’s brightest days are ahead, and to directly confront the protectionist ideas that would hold us back.”
The Koch network remained neutral in the 2016 presidential election, but by January 2018 was largely pleased with what it had seen in the first year of the Trump administration.
“The Trump administration has taken some incredibly positive steps for the American economy, but tariffs will undercut that progress and needlessly hamstring our full economic potential,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity. “There are better ways to negotiate trade deals than by punishing American consumers and businesses with higher costs. Instead of pursuing protectionist policies that we already know don’t work, let’s help everyone win by expanding trade, opening new markets and lowering costs.”
“The taxes and trade barriers imposed by our government on U.S. consumers raise their cost of living and impose unnecessary costs on American firms in competition with others based abroad,” said Daniel Garza, president of the LIBRE Initiative. “Hispanics and low-income workers are among the most badly hurt by this drag on economic growth and government-mandated price increases. We are pleased to stand with those who understand how greatly America benefits from trade — and how badly hurt we are by tariffs and other barriers.”
The good news for the Koch network effort is that, at least in the abstract, Americans think well of free trade. A March Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that among both “party Republicans” and “Trump Republicans,” “more than half of those in each group see trade as a potentially good thing rather than an economic threat.” Of course, the Trump administration would argue it doesn’t oppose free trade in theory, merely bad agreements signed in the past.
The Koch brothers are correct, and Republican opponents of free trade are wrong. Wisconsin, as has been reported in numerous places, overwhelmingly benefits from free trade.
The Rolling Stones had a big day today in 1963: They made their first TV appearance and released their first single:
The number one song today in 1975:
Five years later, Gary Numan drove his way to number nine:
The Associated Press:
The Obama administration secretly sought to give Iran access — albeit briefly — to the U.S. financial system by sidestepping sanctions kept in place after the 2015 nuclear deal, despite repeatedly telling Congress and the public it had no plans to do so.
An investigation by Senate Republicans released Wednesday sheds light on the delicate balance the Obama administration sought to strike after the deal, as it worked to ensure Iran received its promised benefits without playing into the hands of the deal’s opponents. Amid a tense political climate, Iran hawks in the U.S., Israel and elsewhere argued that the United States was giving far too much to Tehran and that the windfall would be used to fund extremism and other troubling Iranian activity.
The report by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations revealed that under President Barack Obama, the Treasury Department issued a license in February 2016, never previously disclosed, that would have allowed Iran to convert $5.7 billion it held at a bank in Oman from Omani rials into euros by exchanging them first into U.S. dollars. If the Omani bank had allowed the exchange without such a license, it would have violated sanctions that bar Iran from transactions that touch the U.S. financial system.
The effort was unsuccessful because American banks — themselves afraid of running afoul of U.S. sanctions — declined to participate. The Obama administration approached two U.S. banks to facilitate the conversion, the report said, but both refused, citing the reputational risk of doing business with or for Iran.
“The Obama administration misled the American people and Congress because they were desperate to get a deal with Iran,” said Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, the subcommittee’s chairman.
Issuing the license was not illegal. Still, it went above and beyond what the Obama administration was required to do under the terms of the nuclear agreement. Under that deal, the U.S. and world powers gave Iran billions of dollars in sanctions relief in exchange for curbing its nuclear program. Last month, President Donald Trumpdeclared the U.S. was pulling out of what he described as a “disastrous deal.”
The license issued to Bank Muscat stood in stark contrast to repeated public statements from the Obama White House, the Treasury, and the State department, all of which denied that the administration was contemplating allowing Iran access to the U.S. financial system.
Shortly after the nuclear deal was sealed in July 2015, then-Treasury Secretary Jack Lew testified that even with the sanctions relief, Iran “will continue to be denied access to the world’s largest financial and commercial market.” A month later, one of Lew’s top deputies, Adam Szubin, testified that despite the nuclear deal “Iran will be denied access to the world’s most important market and unable to deal in the world’s most important currency.”
Yet almost immediately after the sanctions relief took effect in January 2016, Iran began to complain that it wasn’t reaping the benefits it had envisioned. Iran argued that other sanctions — such as those linked to human rights, terrorism, and missile development — were scaring off potential investors and banks who feared any business with Iran would lead to punishment. The global financial system is heavily intertwined with U.S. banks, making it nearly impossible to conduct many international transactions without touching New York in one way or another.
Former Obama administration officials declined to comment for the record.
However, they said the decision to grant the license had been made in line with the spirit of the deal, which included allowing Iran to regain access to foreign reserves that had been off-limits because of the sanctions. They said public comments made by the Obama administration at the time were intended to dispel incorrect reports about nonexistent proposals that would have gone much farther by letting Iran actually buy or sell things in dollars.
The former officials spoke on condition of anonymity because many are still involved in national security issues.
As the Obama administration pondered how to address Iran’s complaints in 2016, reports in The Associated Press and other media outlets revealed that the U.S. was considering additional sanctions relief, including issuing licenses that would allow Iran limited transactions in dollars. Democratic and Republican lawmakers argued against it throughout the late winter, spring and summer of 2016. They warned that unless Tehran was willing to give up more, the U.S. shouldn’t give Iran anything more than it already had.
At the time, the Obama administration downplayed those concerns while speaking in general terms about the need for the U.S. to live up to its part of the deal. Secretary of State John Kerry and other top aides fanned out across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East trying to convince banks and businesses they could do business with Iran without violating sanctions and facing steep fines.
“Since Iran has kept its end of the deal, it is our responsibility to uphold ours, in both letter and spirit,” Lew said at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in March 2016, without offering details.
That same week, the AP reported that the Treasury had prepared a draft of a license that would have given Iran much broader permission to convert its assets from foreign currencies into easier-to-spend currencies like euros, yen or rupees, by first exchanging them for dollars at offshore financial institutions.
The draft involved a general license, a blanket go-ahead that allows all transactions of a certain type, rather than a specific license like the one given to Oman’s Bank Muscat, which only covers specific transactions and institutions. The proposal would have allowed dollars to be used in currency exchanges provided that no Iranian banks, no Iranian rials and no sanctioned Iranian individuals or businesses were involved, and that the transaction did not begin or end in U.S. dollars.
Obama administration officials at the time assured concerned lawmakers that a general license wouldn’t be coming. But the report from the Republican members of the Senate panel showed that a draft of the license was indeed prepared, though it was never published.
And when questioned by lawmakers about the possibility of granting Iran any kind of access to the U.S. financial system, Obama-era officials never volunteered that the specific license for Bank Muscat in Oman had been issued two months earlier.
According to the report, Iran is believed to have found other ways to access its money, possibly by exchanging it in smaller quantities through another currency.
The situation resulted from the fact that Iran had stored billions in Omani rials, a currency that’s notoriously hard to convert. The U.S. dollar is the world’s dominant currency, so allowing it to be used as a conversion instrument for Iranian assets was the easiest and most efficient way to speed up Iran’s access to its own funds.
For example: If the Iranians want to sell oil to India, they would likely want to be paid in euros instead of rupees, so they could more easily use the proceeds to purchase European goods. That process commonly starts with the rupees being converted into dollars, just for a moment, before being converted once again into euros.
U.S. sanctions block Iran from exchanging the money on its own. And Asian and European banks are wary because U.S. regulators have levied billions of dollars in fines in recent years and threatened transgressors with a cutoff from the far more lucrative American market.
Only the fact that U.S. banks didn’t want to violate American law prevented Iran from getting its hands on $5.7 billion more in U.S. dollars. As Senator Rob Portman (R-OH) explained, “The Obama administration misled the American people and Congress because they were desperate to get a deal with Iran.” The Obama administration repeatedly lied — over and over again — about their supposed unwillingness to allow Iran “access to the US financial system.” Obama’s Treasury Secretary Jack Lew even testified to that effect.
So, what did Team Obama have to say about all of this? Unnamed Obama officials told the AP that they were acting “in line with the spirit of the deal,” and that the lies were justified because they were attempting to debunk arguments that Team Obama wanted to give even more concessions to the Iranians. Which is somewhat like arguing that Bill Clinton didn’t lie about Monica Lewinsky, he just wanted to debunk rumors that he had sex with an intern. …
This is the second story this week demonstrating that Team Obama lied to Americans about the Iran deal, which Obama treasured so dearly.
On Tuesday, the Iranian government announced that they had completed a new centrifuge assembly at their Natanz facility — just a month after President Trump killed the Iran nuclear deal. This is deeply suspicious, given their supposed acquiescence to disarmament under that deal. Here’s how Obama fanboys at The New York Times reported that odd development:
While Iran said it would keep enrichment within limits set by the 2015 nuclear accord, the center’s opening seemed to signal that it could swing to industrial-level enrichment if that agreement, which the United States withdrew from last month, should further unravel. … Under the 2015 nuclear deal, Iran stopped enriching uranium to the 20 percent level that would allow for rapid development of a nuclear weapon and agreed to a limit of under 5 percent. It will adhere to that limit, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said in a speech on Monday.
Yes, surely the mullahs who lied about their nuclear program for well over a decade would never have lied to us, facilitated by the obsequious Obama administration.
And, of course, the Obama administration lied constantly during the Iran negotiations about the supposedly “moderate” Iranian regime that had opened the door to those negotiations, with serial confabulator Ben Rhodes taking the lead. Rhodes later bragged about his “echo chamber” strategy to anyone who would listen.
We keep hearing that the Trump administration is historically dishonest. But the same press saying so largely overlooked and in many cases actively covered for Team Obama’s dishonesty on the Iran deal, beyond even covering for Team Obama’s rampant dishonesty on issues ranging from Libya to Obamacare. Obama goes around bragging that his administration was scandal-free. That’s factually untrue. But his administration was largely criticism-free thanks to a media replete with his supporters.
Left-wing activists committed to doing whatever it takes to stop Foxconn Technology Group’s massive manufacturing campus in southeast Wisconsin are planning to rain on the tech giant’s ground-breaking picnic.
Organizers held a conference call Sunday evening to talk about their plans for a rally and demonstration on June 28, the day Foxconn is scheduled to hold its ground-breaking ceremony on its proposed $10 billion plant in Mount Pleasant. MacIver News Service obtained the call-in information and covered the planning session.
The idea, organizers say, is to assemble a coalition of diverse progressive groups – from environmental organizations to civil rights leaders to Foxconn-hating politicians. While each group will bring its own social and environmental complaints to the table, they will all rally around their abhorrence of the Foxconn economic development plan, according to the coalition-building plan.
“We want to stop it in any way we can,” a coalition member told participants on the call. “If we can’t stop it, we want to give them bad publicity. We want to be able to, like, make them aware that the community is aware. We want to show that, ‘Hey, we’re not going to give you an easy fight here.”
“Take a stand against Foxconn. For our fellow Wisconsinites, join the effort and help us SHUT FOXCONN DOWN,” a progressive coalition Facebook alert states.
The short-term goal is to stop Foxconn. The long-term mission is to fire up the liberal base to take out Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican-controlled Legislature that championed the largest development deal of its kind in U.S. history.
“We want this to not only be against Foxconn … but also be against those things that are happening due to the corruption of Walker being in office. But it will mainly focus on Foxconn,” one of the leaders of the campaign said during the call.
The anti-Foxconn group plans to bring into the coalition representatives from indigenous rights organizations, social justice groups, lawmakers and someone who represents the “youth voice.”
“We’re contacting some of the high school students that are speaking out against the NRA right now because they have a huge crowd of those in Milwaukee,” the lead organizer said. …
Group members talked about making the focal point of their resistance movement the Mount Pleasant-area residents facing the loss of their properties to make room for the Foxconn factory, but it was clear by Sunday’s conference call that the left-wing activists have broader objectives in mind.
“Beyond the immediate need for citizens to show up in support of the victims of Scottconn (the group’s portmanteau combining Gov. Scott Walker and Foxconn),we will also be discussing the planned Action for the 28th,” the group’s email urged. The email also seeks “volunteers to help with Voter Registration.”
“Additionally we will need volunteers and eager helpers willing to be trained by MKE Street Protectors to assist in facilitating and monitoring our action to ensure the safety of attendees as well as creative writers to submit LTE’s not only to the news outlets in the affected area but also our hometowns throughout the state,” the email stated. …
Foxconn’s manufacturing campus in Racine County is expected to ultimately employ 13,000 people at the plant itself, and many more thousands to construct the facility and to serve it. The production plant will make liquid crystal display panels. It comes with a hefty state incentives package based in large part on job-creation goals.
Extreme environmentalists in particular hate the development plan, predicting that the production facility will destroy southeast Wisconsin’s air and waterways. While they have blasted Walker’s administration for softening permitting standards, Foxconn has and will face rigorous state and federal requirements that demand substantial mitigation and other environmental safeguards.
The anti-Foxconn coalition campaign is brimming with liberal politics. One participant on the conference call said he attended the Democratic Party of Wisconsin’s state convention in Oshkosh over the weekend, where there was plenty of anti-Foxconn talk by the crowded field of Democrat contenders for governor.
“There was universal disdain for Foxconn,” he said. “I’m sure they (the candidates) would welcome any kind of demonstration that would take place that would kind of help their credibility as well and maybe get some of them to actually show up.”
The Rolling Stones had a big day today in 1963: They made their first TV appearance and released their first single:
The number one song today in 1975:
Five years later, Gary Numan drove his way to number nine:
Bill Clinton assures us that he was the hero during the impeachment and scandal relating to his affair with Monica Lewinsky: “Former President Bill Clinton spoke out about the MeToo movement and the Monica Lewinsky scandal as NBC’s Craig Melvin sat down with him and author James Patterson, saying, “If the facts were the same, I wouldn’t” act differently today than he did at the time. “A lot of the facts have been conveniently omitted,” he says. “I defended the Constitution.”
Rarely do you see such a symphony of hypocrisy and not-so-suppressed rage.
“I think partly they’re frustrated that they’ve got all of these serious allegations against the current occupant of the Oval Office, and his voters don’t seem to care,” Clinton says in the interview.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. There are a lot of people in this world who can complain about Donald Trump and the numerous allegations of gross sexual harassment and abuse surrounding him, and the fact that a significant portion of the presidents’ supporters either refuse to believe the allegations or dismiss them as unimportant. But Bill Clinton doesn’t get to make the complaint about the public not taking allegations of presidential sexual misconduct seriously enough. Dear God, have some self-awareness, man.
Clinton also has the audacity to declare, “I like the MeToo movement; it’s way overdue.”
Clinton gets surprisingly combative with NBC’s Melvin: “You, typically, have ignored gaping facts in describing this, and I’ll bet you don’t even know them. This was litigated 20 years ago. Two-thirds of the American people sided with me. They were not interested in that. I had a sexual-harassment policy when I was governor in the Eighties. I had two women chiefs of staff when I was governor. Women were over-represented in the attorney general’s office in the Seventies. You are giving one side and omitting facts.”
Do facts gape?
Clinton really fumes about being asked about this. “You think President Kennedy should have resigned? Do you believe President Johnson should have resigned? Someone should ask you these questions, because of the way you formulate the questions. I dealt with this 20 years ago, plus, and two-thirds of the American people stayed with me.”
I don’t know, do you think that if the American people had learned in 1962 that 45-year-old John F. Kennedy had sex with a 19-year-old White House intern on her fourth day on the job in the bed where he slept with Jackie? You think the public would have shrugged at that?
Clinton was on The Today Show to promote his new book, a thriller co-written with one-man-publishing-machine James Patterson, entitled “The President Is Missing.” The New York Times finds some . . . odd plot choices:
Readers may wonder why the authors decide early on to kill off the first lady, who was a brilliant law student when she first dazzled Duncan, and why some of her last words were: “Promise me you’ll meet someone else, Jonathan. Promise me.”
Wonder how Hillary Clinton felt about that passage.
Not that my parents were paying attention, but the number one song two days into my life was:
Twenty-eight years later, the number one song was by a group that sang about aging nearly two decades earlier:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 