RUTHFULLY YOURS

I can’t decide what’s more infuriating: Those e-mails suggesting inappropriate links between Hillary Clinton’s State Department and the Clinton Foundation, or her campaign’s explanation of those e-mails suggesting that they think I’m a total, complete moron.

At the same time that Cheryl Mills was working as chief of staff in the secretary of state’s office, she was also conducting interviews for the secretary of state’s foundation. That is a textbook example of a situation that, at the very least, looks like someone using her public resources for personal gain. Any reasonable person can recognize that.

But the Clinton campaign — apparently hoping that voters completely lack critical-thinking skills – has released a statement in response insisting that all suspicions are completely ridiculous, that Mills was just doing “volunteer work for a charitable foundation,” and that “the idea that this poses a conflict of interest is absurd.”

That’s right . . . Mills was just doing it for fun! She was just like, “Hey I’ve got some time off . . . you know what my favorite thing to do in the whole world is? Watch TV? Drink wine? Nahhhhh, I want to go interview potential candidates for the Clinton Foundation! And she definitely chose that specific foundation solely because it was so great and fun, and definitely not because it was one that was run by her boss. How “absurd” to think that someone spending her free time doing work for her boss’ foundation might possibly indicate she was receiving anything from her boss for doing so. In fact, I’m sure they never even talked about it! And if you think otherwise, then you are the one who is being “absurd!”

Does anyone else hear how ridiculous that sounds?

When Hillary Clinton took office as secretary of state, she and her foundation agreed to conduct their affairs in a way that would not “create conflicts or the appearance of conflicts for Senator Clinton as Secretary of State.” Got that? Not even the appearance of conflict — and regardless of what you think about what actually happened, you still can’t deny that this is a situation where that “appearance” is definitely, glaringly, blatantly present.

Of course, Hillary Clinton knows all of this, and she knew it at the time. She’s a career politician. Not only was she well aware of how it would look, but she also knew enough about political media to have predicted that people would find out about it when she ran for president. But guess what? She did it anyway, which suggests that she believes that she doesn’t have to worry about what she does or how it will look. She just does what she thinks is best for herself, no matter how glaringly inappropriate, because she is confident that no matter what, she will never, ever have to suffer any real consequences for her behavior.

What’s even worse is that this attitude is par for the course for the Clintons. Whether it’s this kind of shady business with her slush fund foundation, or her husband Bill having a private chat with Loretta Lynch as the Department of Justice was deciding whether or not to indict her, it’s clear that the Clintons are so confident in their total power that they are certain they will never, ever have to answer for anything.

Investigations and indictments aside, we already know that the way Hillary Clinton conducted herself as secretary of state was dishonest, inadequate, and fueled by her own self-interest. Scandal surrounds this woman, and for her campaign to claim that it’s “absurd” — not even understandable but incorrect, but actually “absurd” — to be suspicious about the objectively suspicious behavior of a woman with an objectively suspicious track record is, objectively, insulting.

— Katherine Timpf is a reporter for National Review Online.

The media’s outrage over the latest thing Trump said is not just bias, it’s ridiculous hypocrisy. After all much of the time Democrats have said the same things that Trump did. Including Dems like Hillary.

Trump called Obama and Hillary the founders of ISIS. The media swarmed. It’s apparently inappropriate to use such a figure of speech. Except that they had no problem with it when Hillary Clinton called Trump an ISIS recruiter.

“We have seen how Donald Trump is being used to essentially be a recruiter for more people to join the cause of terrorism,” Hillary insisted on CNN.

Her campaign and the media blamed Trump for ISIS terror attacks.

Then in an interview with Business Insider, she quoted Hayden’s claim that Trump was a recruiting sergeant for ISIS.

“I think it was said just this week that the way Donald Trump talks about terrorism and his very insulting language towards Muslims is making him the ‘recruiting sergeant’ for ISIS.”

The media had no problem with this. Its problem with Trump’s founder comments has nothing to do with anything objective, but is entirely a function of their bias.

The one percent of the one percent.

Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, released their tax returns on Friday.

For a person who left the White House “dead broke and deeply in debt” (in spite of stealing White House furniture and artwork), the Clintons have done very well in the succeeding years. For fiscal 2015, they reported an income over $10.6 million, significantly down from the $28.5 million they earned in 2014.

Yeah, running for president doesn’t leave people time for other income-generating activities. Either way, they are the 1% of the 1%!

Slightly over a third of their income went for income taxes, while another 10% went to charity. How thoughtful! How generous! Not really! Actually, how selfish!

Of the the $1,042,000 the Clintons gave to charity as listed on their return, $1 million of that went to the Clinton Family Foundation. The other $42,000 went to Desert Classic Charities.

In other words, the Clintons donated – tax-free, no less! – to themselves. The Saudis, the Algerians, and other wealthy and not so wealthy Muslim human rights-abusing countries and prominent Wall Street firms and individuals associated with them also donated to the Clinton Family Foundation.

Not that the donors expected any favors or such, of course – they just are as generous and concerned about the less fortunate as the Clintons. Yeah.

Oh, and not so by the way, and I know this will come as a shock, shock, shock!, the Desert Classic Charities partners with the Clinton Family Foundation. Boom!

Desert Classic Charities, the local non-profit entity that has organized the Humana Challenge in partnership with the Clinton Foundation (formerly the Bob Hope Classic) for 53 years, today presented 40 Coachella Valley charities with more than $2 million in donations[.]

And as for the Clinton Foundation itself, well, it has been called a “giant slush fund,” with such high overhead and such little charity that it was placed on a watch list by a charity watchdog group last year.

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. (snip)

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. (snip)

None of the Clintons is on the payroll, but they do enjoy first-class flights paid for by the foundation. (snip)

According to tax returns for 2015 released by the Clinton campaign, 96% of the candidate’s charitable donations went to the Clinton Foundation.

Daily Caller:

The documents show that the power couple earned $10,745,378 last year, mostly on income earned from giving public speeches.

Of that, they gave just over a million to charity. But the contributions can hardly be seen as altruistic, since the money flowed back to an entity they control.

The other $42,000 contribution was to Desert Classic Charities. That group hosts an annual PGA golf event. Doug Band, a Clinton Foundation adviser and Bill Clinton’s longtime assistant, was on the board of directors of that organization through 2014, according to its IRS filings.

Desert Classic Charities effectively returned that donation back into the Clinton orbit. Its 2015 tax filing shows that it contributed $700,000 to the Clinton Foundation for work on obesity programs. The group handed out $1.6 million in grants that whole year.

The Clinton Foundation dispenses contracts to Clinton cronies like Doug Band while also paying for the non-political travel of the Clintons and staffers. It’s all perfectly legal — and disgustingly unethical. The Foundation is used as a slush fund that enriches friends of the Clintons while allowing foreign businesses and governments to purchase influence.

I doubt this story will get much play beyond the conservative net. It might cast Hillary in a bad light, and we can’t have that when the press now sees that it has a holy quest to keep Donald Trump from winning. CONTINUE AT SITE

The number of associations is large and creepy.

Unless you had taken a course in advanced agitprop, you would not have recognized that Seddique Mateen, the father of the Orlando nightclub shooter, was a plant. He was part of the propaganda show for Hillary Clinton, now playing to sparse audiences from coast to coast. The show is produced and directed by radical “let it all hang out” leftists, in coordination with misogynistic Islamic supremacists, who believe in forced marriage of children under 13 and clitorectomies.

The purpose of Mateen in Florida, a state Hillary needs to win, was to change the narrative, since Khizr Khan was so successful in changing the narrative at the Democratic National Convention. Those “selected” for front- or second-row status at a presidential candidate’s event are hand-picked for ideology, gender, race, or ethnicity. There is no chance that the Clinton show did not know of and approve of his appearance.

Clinton needed to change the narrative for two reasons. First, her poll numbers are not really up as Pat Caddell, a professional pollster, has attested to, especially if you look at the abracadabra methodology. It’s a classic case of disinformation.

What if you give a candidate event, and very few voters show up? You change the narrative, as the Clinton campaign has done, PhotoShop the audience of the event to downplay the numbers, get fire marshals to close down overflowing events of the opponent, or whip up interest in the campaign events via “walk-ons” like Khan and Mateen.

Second, and more important, there are continuing photos of Hillary tripping on and off stage with Broadway lights flashing “brain freeze,” “conquers the stairs,” and more. There are numerous documented events, that is, that even the producers cannot hide.

Pakistani-born Khizr Khan published writings in support of sharia, the enemy of the U.S. Constitution. And the choice between these two is the issue of this election. To understand the importance of sharia in today’s threat to America, here is a quote from Stephen Coughlin, who formerly briefed the Pentagon and other U.S. officials on the threat of Islam:

Hillary Rodham Clinton gave a speech on economic policy in Michigan, just after Donald Trump had laid out his own economic agenda. Mrs. Clinton’s presentation was an exercise not in economics, but in mythology.

A seemingly trivial but nonetheless illuminating example of her fundamental intellectual unseriousness on economic questions was her repetition of the ancient, repeatedly discredited myth that Henry Ford raised his workers’ wages on the theory that doing so would enable them to buy Ford cars, thus increasing his company’s profit. Nothing of the sort ever happened, in reality, and the economic assumptions behind this myth — that one can spend one’s way to prosperity — is preposterous. Economically speaking, this is flat-Earth stuff, pure hokum from a woman who likes to smugly proclaim: “I believe in science!”

It is economically illiterate, but Mrs. Clinton sincerely believes it, arguing that, in the same vein, raising the federal minimum wage would actually help U.S. employers by giving consumers more money to spend at their businesses. That money of course must come from somewhere, and where it comes from is businesses (who, of course, pass on some of those costs in a variety of ways). Some consumers would have more to spend, and businesses would have less to spend. Mrs. Clinton, who does not know very much about any business other than charging $10,000 a minute for speeches (which is, to be sure, an excellent business model) perhaps has never been informed that the biggest customer of the typical small American business is — pay attention here — another business, small and family-owned firms making the majority of their sales to commercial operations rather than to individual consumers.

Her policy isn’t bootstrapping — it’s pure magical thinking.