2008 US Presidential Election - Page 33

On March 05 2008 03:36 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
I think you might be concerning conservatism vs liberalism which was rampant on these boards not too long ago. The fact of matter is this, Clinton has changed her positions several times in her campaign this far. You think she has a chance versus McCain if she wins the nomination? I don't think so. She won't be able to pull the gender card, which she has done already, she can't pull the race card, and she sure as hell can't argue experience.

On March 05 2008 02:31 Clutch3 wrote:
It's really a very telling sign that even a fairly international, liberal community of young, educated people such as TL can still be so thoroughly and virulently anti-Hillary. I could expect it from the United States as a whole, and certainly from cable news, but I'm surprised at how universally accepted (and encouraged) it is to slander her on these forums.

Pretty much the worst thing that you can accuse her of (and be justified) is that she's a political opportunist who will go to great lengths to get elected. Yes, this is true. But it's equally true of a lot of other people, none of whom are the target of even a small fraction of the same ire.

Now, I'm not saying that anyone needs to vote for her (I'm voting for Obama today, but I think they are both strong candidates), but I just think people need to calm down with the bashing.

ok i'm done, going to go check out the thread where people are laughing at someone calling Hillary a "cunt" on wikipedia....

On March 05 2008 03:53 fusionsdf wrote:


Those other people aren't running for president.
Edwards was a trial lawyer, so he does have that against him, but he didnt abuse spin, he didnt use dishonest campaign tactics, etc.

So to say there are politicians that do that stuff, then yes you are right. But if its obama vs clinton, its pretty obvious who the bad guy is just from the campaign tactics used. It's obvious who is in the pockets of the lobbyists. And its obvious who goes to control groups to determine their speeches.

The funny thing is clinton is upset about the media being biased against her....In just about any other democratic country, the media wouldnt let her get away with non-answers...You see today, every major network running the rezko/nafta thing (despite the denial from the canadian embassy), but no mention of bill and dubai or any of the other shady clinton deals.

If you pay attention to the campaign maneuvers, its pretty much impossible to call hillary an honest politician.

On March 05 2008 01:55 fusionsdf wrote:


yeah. It's bullshit that they sit on a story like that for a week until it becomes really important, completely ignore that the canadian embassy said they never discussed it, and start calling obama "defensive"

I don't know if its just to get more voters, but I cant forget how stupid the American media is.

"Although Obama was certainly grilled about Louis Farrakhan, who he doesn't associate with, while Hillary was able to skate on her endorsement from Ann Coulter. And compare the coverage of Tony Rezko with the lack of interest the press has shown in that Dubai-related investment deal that stands to net Bill -- and therefore Hillary -- a cool $20 million."

On March 05 2008 04:31 Clutch3 wrote:


Oh, I have no problem with the conclusion that in Obama vs. Clinton, that she is far more manipulative, more in the pockets of lobbyists, and more dishonest. But compared to anyone else who's been in the limelight recently (McCain, Giuliani, Romney), she really takes a lot more criticism than is warranted. Romney is way more in the pockets of big business than Hillary, yet he took less flack on that point. McCain, as I've said in a previous post, is at least as "two-faced", yet he takes far less flack. Giuliani had wayyy more personall baggage than Hillary, and yet took less flack.

And I wouldn't say that the Rezko/NAFTA coverage (though it is clearly poltically timed) means that Obama is getting it as bad as Hillary. People have been tearing her apart for FIFTEEN YEARS on every little thing, and he's just now getting his first real vetting. So to think that there will be more bad news coming out about her than about him is ludicrous. I mean, it's not like the press is going to bring up Whitewater again (that lasted just about as long as a non-story can in the national press).

Plus, if you ignore the last two days, Obama's gotten a whole lot less bad press than she has in general. Part of this is because she's more prone to resort to dirty tricks, but part is because she's already been irrevocably tied to a number of unfavorable personal traits in the national mindset.

As far as the press letting Hillary get away with non-answers, I'm not sure if you're talking about policy or personal issues here. On policy, there's no way you can argue that Obama has come up with fewer answers than Hillary has. Even the biggest Hillary-basher admits that she's talked more about the substance of policy than he has. I'm not saying that's a good or a bad thing, but I find it hard to see how she can be accused of avoiding any issues. I'd love to hear about any specific areas where there's credible evidence of "shadiness" where she's dodged questions. And I'm talking about things where she was involved. Any issues solely related to Bill Clinton's administration aren't really fair game for her (unless you want to start grilling George H. W. Bush about his son's administration).

What did you find out?

We found that both Senator Clinton and Senator McCain have top fundraisers who are also lobbyists for foreign countries, and that those lobbyists help their clients gain access to those senators.

Can you give some examples for Clinton and McCain?

Clinton has two top fundraisers [John Merrigan and Matthew “Mac” Bernstein] who have raised at least $100,000 each, and they both work for clients such as the government of Turkey, which is trying to kill the Armenian Genocide resolution and also the government of Dubai, which is trying to defend against accusations of child slavery. Their firm [DLA Piper] arranged meetings with Clinton and her staff on both of those issues.

On the McCain side, you have his national finance chair Thomas Loeffler. He is a long-time lobbyist for Saudi Arabia, and his firm has collected millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia. Loeffler personally set up a meeting between McCain and then Saudi ambassador to the United States [Prince Turki al-Faisal] in 2006.

What about the fundraisers for Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee?

Obama has a policy against accepting money from registered lobbyists or having any registered lobbyists as his bundlers. We went through the entire list of his fundraisers anyway and didn’t find anyone.

Mike Huckabee—there is not as much known about his top fundraisers because he does not disclose. We went through what we knew and couldn’t find anything. Mitt Romney—we found one fundraiser who was a lobbyists for a foreign country. [Rudy] Giuliani—we found two. [John] Edwards—we did not find any. Even though they are all out of the race, it gives you a sense that McCain and Clinton had the most. Clinton had six. McCain had five.

-- http://niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=Showcase.view&showcaseid=0071
(Niemen Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University)

Clinton Gets Most Lobbyist Money, McCain Most Help (Update1)

By Jonathan D. Salant
Enlarge Image/Details

Feb. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Democrat Hillary Clinton has raised more money from lobbyists than any other presidential candidate while Republican John McCain has more of them assisting his campaign.

Clinton took in $823,087 from registered lobbyists and members of their firms in 2007 and the second-biggest recipient was McCain, who took in $416,321, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based group which tracks political giving. Barack Obama, Clinton's rival for the Democratic nomination, doesn't take money from registered lobbyists, although he received $86,282 from employees of firms that lobby, according to the center.
McCain has 26 registered lobbyists as campaign advisers or fundraisers compared with 11 for Clinton and none for Obama, according to review of records compiled by Public Citizen, a Washington-based group that favors stronger disclosure laws for lobbyists.

Even as they pledge to rein in special interests, the leading Democratic and Republican candidates are relying on lobbyists to bring in campaign cash by raising money from other donors, a technique known as bundling.

``These bundlers and advisers are central to the financial success of top presidential candidates,'' said Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for Responsive Politics. ``As such, they will essentially carry with them an IOU from the campaign.''

Lobbyist Bundlers

Clinton's total from lobbyists is a fraction of what they raise on her behalf; her campaign doesn't disclose which donations are brought in by lobbyist bundlers.

Heather Podesta, a Washington lobbyist, donated $4,600 to Clinton, FEC records show. She's raised more than $250,000 for Clinton by tapping her network of contacts and holding fundraisers.

``Most of my attention is focused on raising money and new supporters,'' Podesta, sister-in-law to President Bill Clinton's Chief of Staff John Podesta, said in an interview. ``That's the best way for me to make a contribution.''

Like Podesta, former White House Deputy Chief of Staff Steve Ricchetti has also signed on to be a so-called Hillraiser. Ricchetti's firm was paid $1.7 million during the first six months of 2007 to lobby on behalf of Amgen Inc. and Sirius Satellite Radio, among others.
-- http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601070&sid=aPnPwl7XNJik&refer=home

Strategic and tactical fault-finding, however, miss the key point. Clinton's Mark Penn problem does not lie in the strategist's advice and counsel -- it lies in Penn himself.

As the CEO of powerhouse PR giant Burson-Marsteller, Penn heads a bipartisan corporate conglomerate specializing in influence peddling, lobbying, phony front groups, and manufactured hype. Penn, the network of companies that he oversees, and the corporations to which he answers, represent precisely what voters have come to dislike most violently about Washington: the relentless cultivation and manipulation of political connections to generate wealth for a handful of operatives, all at taxpayer expense and in blatant defiance of the public will.

There is no one in politics today who has ascended the special interest ladder as steeply as Penn. He's no Jack Abramoff, but in the public mind Penn, and the corporate structure that supports him, are an integral part of the same lucrative and corrupt system that produced Abramoff.

...

* An equally controversial list of foreign clients including the Pakistan People's Party, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Colombia, Armenia, and Greece.

From the point of view of any news organization, Mark Penn, who has evolved from a relatively obscure Bill Clinton pollster into the helmsman of the Hillary Clinton campaign, is a walking, talking target -- an over-the-top example of the seductions of Washington, a lethal combination of political opportunism and corporate profiteering.
-- http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/02/29/mark-penn-ties-drag-clint_n_89243.html

A Few Degrees of Separation From Hillary Clinton's Top Adviser
Mark J. Penn is a man who wears many hats: high-paid political and corporate pollster, chief executive of an international communications and lobbying company, and chief strategist to New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.

...

To be more precise, Penn's parent company employs as lobbyists and advisers an ex-chairman of the Republican National Committee (Edward W. Gillespie), a former House GOP leader (Robert S. Walker), a top GOP fundraiser (Wayne L. Berman), and the former media adviser to President Bush (Mark McKinnon).

...

The range of interests represented by these people is a staggering list of corporate America's who's who, with Penn himself a longtime adviser to Microsoft.

"This is a classic example of how big money has inextricably intertwined the campaign advising and lobbying worlds of modern-day Washington with potential conflicts of interest all over the place," said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, a watchdog group.

-- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2007/02/20/GR2007022000447.html
-- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/19/AR2007021900972.html

With the Hillary Clinton campaign in disarray, it’s obvious that her strategy of “kitchen-sink” attacks on Barack Obama is not helping the cause. But there may be another agenda to explain it. Mark Penn, Clinton’s top political guru who has pushed her to “go negative” while other advisers have not, is the C.E.O. of a consulting firm whose D.C. lobbying subsidiary is run by Charlie Black (the top political adviser to John McCain.) Penn may have concluded that his client’s prospects are toast, and he knows that a President McCain would better serve his company’s interests than a President Obama. He may be simply looking past the primaries, and that slinging mud at Obama now could hurt him in the general election. Democrats who support Clinton should be outraged, but it’s too simple to conclude that Mark Penn is just taking Hillary for a ride. The Clintons have been using Penn for 12 years, and know exactly what he’s about. Will Clinton end her campaign on a high note by firing Penn, or will she keep letting herself be a pawn in his game?

-- http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=5412

If Clinton really wanted to curtail the influence of the powerful, she might start with the advisers to her own campaign, who represent some of the weightiest interests in corporate America. Her chief strategist, Mark Penn, not only polls for America's biggest companies but also runs one of the world's premier PR agencies. A bevy of current and former Hillary advisers, including her communications guru, Howard Wolfson, are linked to a prominent lobbying and PR firm--the Glover Park Group--that has cozied up to the pharmaceutical industry and Rupert Murdoch. Her fundraiser in chief, Terry McAuliffe, has the priciest Rolodex in Washington, luring high-rolling contributors to Clinton's campaign. Her husband, since leaving the presidency, has made millions giving speeches and counsel to investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. They house, in addition to other Wall Street firms, the Clintons' closest economic advisers, such as Bob Rubin and Roger Altman, whose DC brain trust, the Hamilton Project, is Clinton's economic team in waiting. Even the liberal in her camp, former deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes, has lobbied for the telecom and healthcare industries, including a for-profit nursing home association indicted in Texas for improperly funneling money to disgraced former House majority leader Tom DeLay. "She's got a deeper bench of big money and corporate supporters than her competitors," says Eli Attie, a former speechwriter to Vice President Al Gore. Not only is Hillary more reliant on large donations and corporate money than her Democratic rivals, but advisers in her inner circle are closely affiliated with unionbusters, GOP operatives, conservative media and other Democratic Party antagonists.

...

The massive PR empire WPP Group acquired Penn's polling firm for an undisclosed sum in 2001 and four years later named him worldwide CEO of one of its most prized properties, the PR firm Burson-Marsteller (B-M). A key player in the decision to hire Penn was Howard Paster, President Clinton's chief lobbyist to Capitol Hill and an influential presence inside WPP.

...

Burson-Marsteller is hardly a natural fit for a prominent Democrat. The firm has represented everyone from the Argentine military junta to Union Carbide after the 1984 Bhopal disaster in India, in which thousands were killed when toxic fumes were released by one of its plants, to Royal Dutch Shell, which has been accused of colluding with the Nigerian government in committing major human rights violations. B-M pioneered the use of pseudo-grassroots front groups, known as "astroturfing," to wage stealth corporate attacks against environmental and consumer groups. It set up the National Smokers Alliance on behalf of Philip Morris to fight tobacco regulation in the early 1990s. Its current clients include major players in the finance, pharmaceutical and energy industries. In 2006, with Penn at the helm, the company gave 57 percent of its campaign contributions to Republican candidates.

...

As expected with such a lineup, B-M has a highly confrontational relationship with organized labor. "Companies cannot be caught unprepared by Organized Labor's coordinated campaigns," read the "Labor Relations" section of its website, describing that branch of the company (the section was altered after The American Prospect quoted it in March).

...

Yet despite his outsized role in the corporate world, his company's close ties to GOP operatives and questions about his polling techniques, Penn remains a leading figure in Hillary's campaign, pitching the inevitability of her nomination to donors and party bigwigs. According to the New York Times, "[Hillary] Clinton responds to Penn's points with exclamations like, Oh, Mark, what a smart thing to say!" His presence means that triangulation is alive and well inside the campaign and that despite her populist forays, Hillary won't stray far from the center or think too big. "Penn has a lot of influence on her, no doubt about it," says New York political consultant Hank Sheinkopf, who worked with Penn in '96. "He's not going to let her drift too far left."

...

Penn's not the only major player in Hillary's corporate orbit. There's also the Glover Park Group, a fast-rising lobbying and PR firm known as the "White House in Exile" because it's packed with former Clintonites. Its roster includes former Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart and deputy chief of staff Joel Johnson. From Hillary's orbit come Peter Kauffman, her former press secretary, and Gigi Georges, her New York director. Campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle used to work there, and until recently so did Howard Wolfson.

Wolfson, a pugnacious operative who's said he admires Karl Rove's skills, took a leave of absence in March (unlike Penn), though he still has a stake in the firm. Partners at Glover Park downplay connections to Hill and Bill, but the association--along with the Democratic takeover of Congress--has been good for business. Glover Park was Washington's fastest-growing private company in 2005. The day before the 2006 election it got a huge infusion of private-equity cash from a firm in Chicago, Svoboda, Collins. Business has doubled since then. No one at Glover Park is now officially part of the Clinton campaign, yet there are plenty of unofficial relationships. Johnson, for example, is giving to and raising money for Hillary. The firm still lobbies her office, as it presumably would a Clinton II White House.

...

Glover Park's clients have included standard liberal groups like the United Federation of Teachers and the ACLU. Yet the Clinton ties have also helped the firm make an alliance with Rupert Murdoch. Hillary started cozying up to Murdoch after her 2000 Senate victory, in a calculated attempt to defang his conservative media empire, News Corp. In 2004 the billionaire required a favor of his own: Nielsen was preparing to change the way it measured viewership in US TV markets, a plan that Murdoch's Fox network feared would cost it millions in ad revenue. So Murdoch called on Glover Park. Wolfson secured a $200,000 contract and unveiled a PR blitz under the guise of a supposedly independent minority front group called Don't Count Us Out. The group played on fears of voter disenfranchisement, arguing that minorities would be undercounted in the new system. Don't Count Us Out ran more than 100 ads in two days, and Nielsen was deluged with hate mail. Letters of support came in from politicians, including Senator Clinton, who warned, "Nielsen would be remiss in pushing forward with its rollout plan." The campaign eventually fizzled when influential supporters, including Jesse Jackson, realized that Glover Park's claims were bogus and viewers were simply moving from broadcast channels like Fox to cable. Yet Murdoch kept Glover Park on retainer and held a $60,000 fundraiser for Clinton last July. News Corp. executive Peter Chernin is hosting a top-dollar shindig for her in LA in late May. Asked what she thought of Murdoch, Clinton spokesman Phillippe Reines told The New Yorker, "Senator Clinton respects him and thinks he's smart and effective."

...

Murdoch and PhRMA aren't the only odd couples to enlist the Clintonites. There's also the government of Dubai, which has paid Bill handsomely for speeches and strategic advice. Around the time of the furor over the proposed management of US ports by Dubai Ports World, Glover Park launched a lobbying drive to broker the sale of two US military plants to the government-owned Dubai International Capital. The two New York senators led opposition to the ports deal but didn't raise objections to the plant takeover. According to Newsday, the $100,000 contract was routed through the LA law firm of Raj Tanden, brother of Hillary's top domestic policy adviser, Neera Tanden.

Glover Park has also fronted for Verizon to kill "net neutrality" and allow telecom companies to charge more for certain Internet content, for the insurance industry on asbestos claims, for Ernst & Young on immunity from shareholder lawsuits and for the Swift banking coalition's collaboration with the Bush Administration on "antiterror" financial records.

...

It's hard to see how her advisers' corporate work doesn't reflect poorly on Clinton's progressive claims or create a liability for her with Democratic voters. There's no evidence that she has taken a position specifically to benefit one of her advisers' clients or a top supporter. More likely, the ties to corporate America, along with the bruises of past defeats, have limited what she believes is possible and will fight to achieve. "If you surround yourself by people who live off of big corporations, that's going to affect the advice they give you and your own worldview," says a former Clinton adviser.

Clinton has a consistently liberal Senate voting record, earning near-perfect scores from Americans for Democratic Action. She's fought to get New York its fair share of federal money after 9/11 and has advocated for long-neglected, though politically safe, issues like children's health and veterans care. Yet voting records capture only so much. Since the healthcare reform disaster of 1993-94, she has rarely stuck her neck out on contentious issues. "She votes the issues that come up, rather than take the leadership role," says Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen. "We tried to do too much, too fast twelve years ago," Clinton told the Federation of American Hospitals last year, "and I still have the scars to show for it." She's now the number-one Congressional recipient of donations from the healthcare industry.

...

Clinton's rarely been the threat to the business community that many on the right typically allege. She's often partnered with Republicans like Newt Gingrich and Bill Frist. In 2002 she backed a harsh position on welfare reform reauthorization that put her at odds even with conservative Republicans like Orrin Hatch. She persuaded her husband to veto the bankruptcy bill in 1997, voted for a similar version in 2001 and missed the vote in 2005, when Bill was in the hospital. She advocated weakening the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law, telling Feingold to "live in the real world." Unlike Edwards and Obama, she accepts campaign contributions from lobbyists and corporate PACs. "Ask them why they don't take money from lobbyists," Wolfson retorts. "We're proud of our support."

-- http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070604/berman

That’s why she has been losing battle after battle by double digits in every corner of the country ever since. And no matter how much bad stuff happened, she kept to the Bush playbook, stubbornly clinging to her own Rumsfeld, her chief strategist, Mark Penn. Like his prototype, Mr. Penn is bigger on loyalty and arrogance than strategic brilliance. But he’s actually not even all that loyal. Mr. Penn, whose operation has billed several million dollars in fees to the Clinton campaign so far, has never given up his day job as chief executive of the public relations behemoth Burson-Marsteller. His top client there, Microsoft, is simultaneously engaged in a demanding campaign of its own to acquire Yahoo.

Clinton fans don’t see their standard-bearer’s troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid. Or as Mrs. Clinton frames it, Senator Obama is all about empty words while she is all about action and hard work.

But it’s the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate’s message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating.

The gap in hard work between the two campaigns was clear well before Feb. 5. Mrs. Clinton threw as much as $25 million at the Iowa caucuses without ever matching Mr. Obama’s organizational strength. In South Carolina, where last fall she was up 20 percentage points in the polls, she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of inevitability, while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning organization from scratch at the grass roots. In Kansas, three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3.

In the last battleground, Wisconsin, the Clinton campaign was six days behind Mr. Obama in putting up ads and had only four campaign offices to his 11. Even as Mrs. Clinton clings to her latest firewall — the March 4 contests — she is still being outhustled. Last week she told reporters that she “had no idea” that the Texas primary system was “so bizarre” (it’s a primary-caucus hybrid), adding that she had “people trying to understand it as we speak.” Perhaps her people can borrow the road map from Obama’s people. In Vermont, another March 4 contest, The Burlington Free Press reported that there were four Obama offices and no Clinton offices as of five days ago. For what will no doubt be the next firewall after March 4, Pennsylvania on April 22, the Clinton campaign is sufficiently disorganized that it couldn’t file a complete slate of delegates by even an extended ballot deadline.

This is the candidate who keeps telling us she’s so competent that she’ll be ready to govern from Day 1. Mrs. Clinton may be right that Mr. Obama has a thin résumé, but her disheveled campaign keeps reminding us that the biggest item on her thicker résumé is the health care task force that was as botched as her presidential bid.

Given that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama offer marginally different policy prescriptions — laid out in voluminous detail by both, by the way, on their Web sites — it’s not clear what her added-value message is. The “experience” mantra has been compromised not only by her failure on the signal issue of Iraq but also by the deadening lingua franca of her particular experience, Washingtonese. No matter what the problem, she keeps rolling out another commission to solve it: a commission for infrastructure, a Financial Product Safety Commission, a Corporate Subsidy Commission, a Katrina/Rita Commission and, to deal with drought, a water summit.

-- http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/opinion/24rich.html?ex=1361509200&en=2cd3859281b77be7&ei=5124

Clinton’s Efforts on Ethanol Overlap Her Husband’s Interests
Several months earlier, Mrs. Clinton had sponsored legislation to provide billions in new federal incentives for ethanol, and, especially in her home state of New York, she has worked to foster a business climate that favors the sort of ethanol investments pursued by her husband’s friends and her political supporters.

One potential beneficiary is the Yucaipa Companies, a private equity firm where Mr. Clinton has been a senior adviser and whose founder, Mr. Burkle, has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for Mrs. Clinton’s campaigns. Yucaipa has invested millions in Cilion Inc. — a start-up venture also backed by Mr. Branson, the British entrepreneur, and Mr. Khosla, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist — that is building seven ethanol plants around the country. Two are in upstate New York.

A Cilion executive said Mrs. Clinton’s office had been helpful to the company as it pursued its New York projects. More broadly, by steering federal money, organizing investor forums and offering the services of her staff, she has helped turn the upstate region into an incubator for ventures like Cilion’s, while providing a useful showcase for her energy proposals on the campaign trail.

-- http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/politics/28ethanol.html

On March 05 2008 05:05 Servolisk wrote:


What were the issues w/ the Dubai deal? I haven't heard of it myself.

Over the last six years, Mr Clinton has struck lucrative consultancy and advisory contracts with a playboy billionaire and done business with a Gulf emir.

He also courted figures ranging from a Central Asian autocrat to Arab sheikhs, as he built his charitable foundation and financed his glitzy presidential library in Little Rock, Arkansas.

In the process he has developed one of the world’s leading philanthropic organisations and made himself and his wife Hillary rich - just six years after they were so saddled in debts from investigations into the Whitewater land deal and Monica Lewinsky affair that they had to borrow money from Democratic fund-raising chief Terry McAuliffe to buy a home near New York.

The colourful cast of friends, donors and business partners accrued by Mr Clinton is now raising questions about potential conflicts of interest as the former First Lady aims to become the next Democratic president.

Mr Clinton has already started to disentangle himself from two high-profile deals.

Most notably, he is expected to receive about $20 million when he severs his ties with the Yucaipa investment funds headed by his friend Ron Burkle, a famously eligible bachelor who appears in the gossip columns as often as the business pages.

The Wall Street Journal reported that one of his partners in the global investment fund is an entity connected to Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai, also believed to be a major donor to the Clinton presidential library.

Mr Clinton’s ties to the sheikh have already put him at odds with political stances adopted by his wife.

Two years ago, she was outspoken in her denunciation of the Bush administration’s plan to sell control of six major US ports to Dubai Ports World, but it later emerged that her husband was advising the Arab emirate how to handle the furore.

Last month, The New York Times reported that Mr Clinton flew to Kazakhstan on the executive jet of Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining financier and multi-million dollar backer of the Clinton Foundation who was also seeking a contract with the Kazakh government.

Mr Clinton was there to see the work of his Foundation on an Aids project, but also praised President Nursultan Nazarbayev, who has been widely criticised for human rights violations, for “opening up the social and political life of your country”.

Mr Giustra, who organised a lavish charity dinner for Mr Clinton’s 60th birthday, was subsequently awarded a lucrative uranium mining deal in Kazakhstan ahead of more experienced industry competitors.

Mr Clinton’s aides have denied that he influenced the deal or behaved improperly.

Mr Clinton has also resisted pressure to name donors to his presidential library.

But newspaper investigations have uncovered many foreign contributors, led by Saudi Arabia, and an overlap between library benefactors and Hillary Clinton campaign donors, The New York Times reported.

“The vast scale of these secret fund-raising operations presents enormous opportunities for abuse,” said Representative Henry Waxman, the California Democrat, who has introduced legislation requiring the disclosure of donors to presidential libraries.

Dick Morris, the former Clinton strategist who is now a fierce critic of the couple, recently accused Mrs Clinton of facing “a massive conflict of interest” for her family’s financial ties to Dubai and Saudi Arabia.

“The Clintons should be required to divulge the extent of their involvement with foreign interests and exactly how much money their personal bank accounts and their Library/Foundation have received,” he said.

--http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/09/wus609.xml

Late on Sept. 6, 2005, a private plane carrying the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra touched down in Almaty, a ruggedly picturesque city in southeast Kazakhstan. Several hundred miles to the west a fortune awaited: highly coveted deposits of uranium that could fuel nuclear reactors around the world. And Mr. Giustra was in hot pursuit of an exclusive deal to tap them.


Unlike more established competitors, Mr. Giustra was a newcomer to uranium mining in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic. But what his fledgling company lacked in experience, it made up for in connections. Accompanying Mr. Giustra on his luxuriously appointed MD-87 jet that day was a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton.

Upon landing on the first stop of a three-country philanthropic tour, the two men were whisked off to share a sumptuous midnight banquet with Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose 19-year stranglehold on the country has all but quashed political dissent.

Mr. Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader’s bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy. Mr. Clinton’s public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Within two days, corporate records show that Mr. Giustra also came up a winner when his company signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium agency, Kazatomprom.

The monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers in a transaction ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra, analysts said.

Just months after the Kazakh pact was finalized, Mr. Clinton’s charitable foundation received its own windfall: a $31.3 million donation from Mr. Giustra that had remained a secret until he acknowledged it last month. The gift, combined with Mr. Giustra’s more recent and public pledge to give the William J. Clinton Foundation an additional $100 million, secured Mr. Giustra a place in Mr. Clinton’s inner circle, an exclusive club of wealthy entrepreneurs in which friendship with the former president has its privileges.

Mr. Giustra was invited to accompany the former president to Almaty just as the financier was trying to seal a deal he had been negotiating for months.

In separate written responses, both men said Mr. Giustra traveled with Mr. Clinton to Kazakhstan, India and China to see first-hand the philanthropic work done by his foundation.

A spokesman for Mr. Clinton said the former president knew that Mr. Giustra had mining interests in Kazakhstan but was unaware of “any particular efforts” and did nothing to help. Mr. Giustra said he was there as an “observer only” and there was “no discussion” of the deal with Mr. Nazarbayev or Mr. Clinton.

But Moukhtar Dzhakishev, president of Kazatomprom, said in an interview that Mr. Giustra did discuss it, directly with the Kazakh president, and that his friendship with Mr. Clinton “of course made an impression.” Mr. Dzhakishev added that Kazatomprom chose to form a partnership with Mr. Giustra’s company based solely on the merits of its offer.

After The Times told Mr. Giustra that others said he had discussed the deal with Mr. Nazarbayev, Mr. Giustra responded that he “may well have mentioned my general interest in the Kazakhstan mining business to him, but I did not discuss the ongoing” efforts.

As Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign has intensified, Mr. Clinton has begun severing financial ties with Ronald W. Burkle, the supermarket magnate, and Vinod Gupta, the chairman of InfoUSA, to avoid any conflicts of interest. Those two men have harnessed the former president’s clout to expand their businesses while making the Clintons rich through partnership and consulting arrangements.

Mr. Clinton has vowed to continue raising money for his foundation if Mrs. Clinton is elected president, maintaining his connections with a wide network of philanthropic partners.

Mr. Giustra said that while his friendship with the former president “may have elevated my profile in the news media, it has not directly affected any of my business transactions.”

Mining colleagues and analysts agree it has not hurt. Neil MacDonald, the chief executive of a Canadian merchant bank that specializes in mining deals, said Mr. Giustra’s financial success was partly due to a “fantastic network” crowned by Mr. Clinton. “That’s a very solid relationship for him,” Mr. MacDonald said. “I’m sure it’s very much a two-way relationship because that’s the way Frank operates.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html

On March 05 2008 06:18 fusionsdf wrote:
http://www.americablog.com/2008/03/why-is-obamas-skin-blacker-than-normal.html
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/3/4/21311/85811/447/468408

hahaha

oh wow

Note: They may have just darkened the picture to make him look evil rather than black, but with all the racial baggage the clinton's have on this campaign, not at all a smart move

One other example I just noted today: remember how Hillary got pressed during the debate to release her tax returns (she already promised to).

On March 05 2008 06:29 Unforgiven_ve wrote:
i was reading about Bill Clinton's administration, but i want to hear it from someone living on the states, please?

On March 05 2008 06:38 Obama wrote:
as much as i would want a black president, it just aint gonna happen, america wont let a black guy to be president, the highest a black person can go is secretary of state maybe vice president

On March 05 2008 06:20 Clutch3 wrote:
I'm not going to refute all of this (it'd take 30 pages, not to mention that a lot of it is probably true). I will just note three points:

1. The ease with which you found all of this negative PR on Hillary underscores my point. There's no way there'd be all this dirt on Romney because he hasn't been in the White House or the Senate for over a dozen years. (and I didn't notice anything on Romney, btw, wasn't that the comparison???)

2. Any politician as connected to national office as she has been for 15 years is going to have a lot of ties of these kinds. To compare Clinton's past record with what might happen in a future administration isn't exactly a level playing field. A better comparison might be to compare Bush's corporate ties.

3. A more important criteria other than where the money comes from, is where Hillary stands on issues related to corporate regulation, etc. On that count, at least according to what they both say, she's clearly more willing to support policies unfriendly to big business than was Romney. Can you honestly argue a Romney administration would have been more unfriendly to big business than a Hillary one?

4. If you go to the FEC website and look at the contributions to Hillary and Romney, it's clear he has more big corporate backers per capita. Both on distribution of contributions by amount and by parsing the actual data by employment.

5. According to your own data, Hillary and McCain aren't all that different in terms of how much influence lobbyists have on their campaigns. Yet Hillary has taken a lot more press heat due to her lobbyists connections than has McCain. McCain came out recently and declared that he takes no special interest money, and the media wouldn't even say that wasn't true until the Dem campaigns and lefty blogs goaded them into it.

One other example I just noted today: remember how Hillary got pressed during the debate to release her tax returns (she already promised to). McCain hasn't even agreed to release his tax return. Any media pressure on that one?

Edit: Ok, I can't count... 5 points.

"The picture, sent to the Drudge Report website, shows Mr Obama wearing traditional Somali dress during a visit to Kenya in 2006.

The website said it was circulated by Mrs Clinton's staff but her team denied they had sanctioned its release.
...

The photograph published on Monday shows Mr Obama - whose father came from Kenya - wearing a white turban and a white robe presented to him by elders in the north-east of the country.

The Drudge Report said the image had been circulated by "Clinton staffers" as a smear."

The same campaign has "tried in the past to suggest to Democrats that the Illinois senator's background might be off-putting to mainstream voters.

A campaign volunteer was sacked last year after circulating an email suggesting, falsely, that Mr Obama was a Muslim."

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, 60, has contrasted his experience running a business and a state government with McCain's tenure in Washington, and has vowed to rein in the influence of lobbyists.

Like former President Ronald Reagan, ``I'd go to Washington as an outsider -- not owing favors, not lobbyists on every elbow,'' Romney said at a Jan. 30 debate.

And Romney, too, has registered lobbyists in campaign posts.

Former U.S. Representative Vin Weber, whose firm was paid $3.6 million by such clients as EBay Inc. and General Dynamics Corp., is Romney's policy chairman. Other advisers include Ron Kaufman, chairman of Washington-based Dutko Worldwide, which was paid $11.2 million by such companies as Allstate Corp. and Target Corp.

`Extra-Curricular Activities'

``Among my many extra-curricular activities, I love public policy,'' Weber said. ``I try to be helpful to candidates.''