The Clinton Foundation’s finances are so messy that the nation’s most influential charity watchdog put it on its “watch list” of problematic nonprofits last month.
The Clinton family’s mega-charity took in more than $140 million in grants and pledges in 2013 but spent just $9 million on direct aid.
The group spent the bulk of its windfall on administration, travel, and salaries and bonuses, with the fattest payouts going to family friends.
On its 2013 tax forms, the most recent available, the foundation claimed it spent $30 million on payroll and employee benefits; $8.7 million in rent and office expenses; $9.2 million on “conferences, conventions and meetings”; $8 million on fund-raising; and nearly $8.5 million on travel. None of the Clintons are on the payroll, but they do enjoy first-class flights paid for by the Foundation.
In all, the group reported $84.6 million in “functional expenses” on its 2013 tax return and had more than $64 million left over — money the organization has said represents pledges rather than actual cash on hand.
Some of the tens of millions in administrative costs finance more than 2,000 employees, including aid workers and health professionals around the world.
Ted Cruz, like Senator Barry Goldwater in the sixties has ignited a return to conservative policies and values. He is perfect for the GOP now….and even a shill for all Democratic candidates like Jeff Toobin recognizes it…..rsk
Ted Cruz, the Republican junior senator from Texas, has heard the line about how the Party needs to become more moderate to win Presidential elections. “It is amazing that the wisdom of the chattering class to the Republicans is always, always, always ‘Surrender your principles and agree with the Democrats,’ ” he told me. “That’s been true for my entire lifetime. The chattering classes have consistently said, ‘You crazy Republicans have to give up on what you believe and become more like Democrats.’ And, I would note, every time Republicans do that we lose.” Cruz then offered a short history of recent Presidential politics. Richard Nixon ran as a conservative, twice a winner; Gerald Ford, moderate, loser; Ronald Reagan, also twice a winner. “President George Herbert Walker Bush ran as a strong conservative, ran to continue the third term of Ronald Reagan, continue the Ronald Reagan revolution,” Cruz went on. “Then he raised taxes and in ’92 ran as an establishment moderate—same candidate, two very different campaigns. First one won, second one lost. In 1996, you got Bob Dole; 2000 and 2004, you have George W. Bush; 2008, John McCain; 2012, Mitt Romney. And what does the entire D.C. Republican consulting class say? ‘In 2016, we need another establishment moderate!’ Hasn’t worked in four decades. ‘But next time will be the time!’ ”
FROM: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11561629/Top-scientists-start-to-examine-fiddled-global-warming-figures.html
Top scientists start to examine fiddled global warming figuresThe Global Warming Policy Foundation has enlisted an international team of five distinguished scientists to carry out a full inquiry….Should be titled TOP SCIENTISTS WAKE UP….RSK Paul Schnee, my e-pal wrote this in 2009
Global Warming or Hot Air? by Paul Schnee:
When many of the supplicants, on the way to their devotions at the Global Warming summit in Copenhagen, were delayed by a heavy snow storm it struck several of us as being hilariously ironic. The faithful who made it all the way to freezing Denmark were able to hear Barack Obama declare : “The time for talk is over….”. This is an old liberal tactic. If you can’t prove your point then just end the discussion. There would be a benefit to this, of course, if talking ceased in the White House thereby drastically reducing the amount of C02 constantly belching forth from its portals and polluting the atmosphere on an hourly basis. Within days the carbon footprint of the United States would shrink to the extent that the only thing we would have to worry about would be how to control the amount of toxic air spewing indiscriminately from Hugo Chavez. Resolving this one vexed issue could well be the subject of many more inconclusive summits or the task of just one strategically aimed cruise missile. But I digress.
The Islamic State militants kidnapped around 30 women from neighbourhoods of Mosul on April 20th.
Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) official from Mosul Saed Mamuzini told BasNews that the militants kidnapped the women because they refused temporary marriage (Nikah) with the jihadists.
The women are from the Wadi Ikab, Hail Tanak and Tamouz 17 neighbourhoods of Mosul and their current whereabouts is unknown.
Mamuzini explained, “IS insurgents had selected the women for temporary marriage with the jihadists, and kidnapped them when they refused.”
“The women are aged between 20 and 35, single and married.”
IS militants used their women’s brigade, al-Khansa, to investigate, arrest and kidnap women under their authority.
The jihadists have kidnapped thousands of young girls and women since they took control of areas in Syria and Iraq, forcing them into temporary marriage .
Reports from IS strongholds in Iraq confirm that the militants regularly use women as sex slaves and sell them in markets.
IS is also responsible for the kidnap of over 5,000 Yazidi women when they attacked Sinjar, northern Iraq last year
The genocide of Armenian Christians by Ottoman Muslims was very real, so was the appalling torture. Women were raped and crucified, people had horseshoes nailed to their feet as they were marched through the streets. Unspeakable atrocities were perpetrated. Yet almost no-one in the Islamic world, and too few in the West will acknowledge it even happened.
As the world continues to look on in dismay at the barbaric atrocities committed against Christian minorities by the Islamic State — the self-proclaimed new “caliphate” — today, April 24, marks the genocide of Armenian and other Christian minorities by Turkey’s Islamic Ottoman Empire, the last caliphate.
While Barack Obama is busy telling Americans that Islam has been “woven into the fabric” of America since its founding, police in Spain have just arrested eleven members of a jihadist cell that, woven into the fabric of Spain, was plotting to bring ISIS-style beheadings to a western city near you.
As Soeren Kern notes in an important and depressing post at the Gatestone Institute web site, police have accused the cell of planning to bomb various public and private buildings in and around Barcelona and of—this is especially nice—plotting to kidnap and behead a random person. I’m not sure that the Muslim presence in Spain has gotten the attention it deserves here, but as Kern points out Catalonia not only has the largest Muslim population in Spain, it also has the largest concentration of radical Islamists in Europe. “The cell’s primary objective,” Kern reports, “was to show that terrorist attacks such as those perpetrated by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria could be carried out in the West.”
As always, Winston Churchill said it best. Here he is on March 24, 1938, less than two weeks after the Anschluss, the Nazi annexation of Austria:
For five years I have talked to the House on these matters—not with very great success. I have watched this famous island descending incontinently, fecklessly, the stairway which leads to a dark gulf. It is a fine broad stairway at the beginning, but after a bit the carpet ends. A little farther on there are only flagstones, and a little farther on still these break beneath your feet. . . . That is the position—that is the terrible transformation that has taken place bit by bit.
Churchill didn’t resign himself to this transformation: “Now is the time at last to rouse the nation. Perhaps it is the last time it can be roused with a chance of preventing war.” But the nation was not roused. Six months later was Munich. A year later, war.
This week, for the first time since President Obama abandoned the bipartisan and international policy of pressuring Iran to give up its nuclear weapons program, the Senate will have a sustained debate on the administration’s Iran policy. For the first time! The op-ed pages and the journals have been full of arguments about the path the administration has gone down. A remarkable number of serious observers, including many sympathetic to the notion of a negotiated deal with Iran, have been critical of the administration’s repeated cascades of concessions.
The Left discovers the value of fake hate crimes. When tyranny arrives on these shores, it isn’t going to start off looking like something out of George Orwell — it’s going to look a lot like college, which is why the sort of people who twice made Barack Obama president of these United States will welcome it. George Washington University (“the Harvard of safety schools,” as alumnus Dan Foster calls it) has a swastika problem. This goes back a ways. In 2007, a Jewish student, Sarah Marshak, reported that her dorm-room door had been defaced with swastikas, and she complained that the university was doing too little to investigate. But the university was in fact investigating thoroughly — it had, ridiculously enough, gone as far as consulting the FBI — and its sneakily hidden surveillance cameras recorded the vandal in action. No points for guessing that the malefactor was Sarah Marshak.
Recently, somebody drew swastikas on the wall of a GWU dormitory. Whether that is the work of another hoax artist or a genuine free-range national-socialist graffitist is unknown, but the school’s students have an unproud history of faking hate crimes. A group of left-wing students some years back drew up a phony anti-Muslim flier that was falsely attributed to a conservative group, the Young America’s Foundation, in an attempt to smear the organization as racist. (If you’re wondering what these jackasses grow up to become, consider that Matthew Bruenig of The American Prospect and Salon similarly manufactured out of whole cloth a quotation he attributed to me, expressing sympathy for Donald Sterling during the controversy over his racist comments. I’d never even heard of Sterling at the time and assumed everybody was talking about a character on Mad Men. Purportedly respectable institutions still publish Bruenig.)
Voting to confirm an attorney general who won’t uphold the Constitution isn’t a way to inspire confidence among conservatives.
Hillary Clinton didn’t have such a bad week after all. Sure, she’s reeling from the latest unseemly revelations about the Clinton Foundation family piggy bank. But they’re only marginally worse than earlier unseemly revelations about the Clinton Foundation.
They are roughly on par with the revelations about how Mrs. Clinton obstructed Congress’s Benghazi investigations by purging her unlawful private e-mail system, which was worse than her obstruction of the State Department’s Benghazi investigation. Yet it may not have been as bad as the obstruction of justice that was a staple of her husband’s administration. Those obstructions, in turn, were on par with her husband’s selling of a pardon to a fugitive fraudster on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List . . . which itself was not quite as bad as his awarding pardons to FALN terrorists — to ingratiate Hillary! with the New York Puerto Rican community (or at least the radicals therein) in preparation for her Senate campaign.
We could go on corruptio ad absurdum. But you get the point: Reeling is not so bad. Reeling is what Clintons do. The way they operate, it’s what they have to do. They should change the Clinton Foundation’s name to Reel Clear Politics.
Clinton Charities Review Tax Returns Amid Scrutiny of Foreign Grants
The Clinton family’s namesake foundation and signature health initiative are reviewing several years of tax returns after questions were raised about the charities’ reporting of tens of millions of dollars in grants from foreign governments, foundation officials said Friday.
The review comes amid intense scrutiny of the foundation’s donors and their political and business relationships with Hillary Rodham Clinton, a Democratic presidential candidate, and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.
Much of that scrutiny has focused on Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state, a period during which the foundation had pledged to restrict donations from foreign governments, seek State Department clearance for new foreign donations, and disclose all its donors. In at least some instances, the foundation appears to have ignored those voluntary agreements.
But like all nonprofit organizations, the foundation is also required by law to file publicly available tax returns detailing broad categories of revenue and expenses, including the total financing it received from government entities. The Clinton Foundation and its work are heavily financed by grants from foreign governments, and the foundation reported substantial income from government entities as recently as 2009, when tax returns indicate it took in more than $122 million in government grants.
For the next three tax years, however, the foundation reported no government financing at all. Craig Minassian, a foundation spokesman, said the foreign grants had accidentally been lumped into a different category, listing other grants, gifts and large contributions.
