Hillary Clinton Focus of GOP for Decades
(just like Salem, DC)
Opinions and Views on Talk Radio and TV Are Not Sufficient
(Except on Fox News)
Major Update from
here on the following story and post that follows below (original post was August 23, 2016):
Many people and agencies
(working on behalf of the GOP mostly) continue to pile on Hillary Clinton.
Well, now it’s time for critical-thinking people to return those piles (FYI: fill-in
the blank with your own pile name: ____).
This latest is just for headlines and red meat attention.
The basic question is
simple: Who do you believe and trust
on this story that keeps seeking more legs: – a press that uses social media
stark red meat headlines to gain attention and then offers basically misinformation
or worse, false, misleading and disinformation? Or do you trust a variety of
others who have done excellent and in depth analysis of the whole picture for
fair and accurate reporting, and your own research?
The answer is self-evident –
that is for rational thinking and logical people who are not simply seeking
political gain in this nasty ugly presidential race.
From this recent aspect: The
AP blasted out a 114-character breaking news alert (Tweet actually) this week with
“a hot scoop” – an analysis of publicly available data showed that while
Secretary of State, more than half of Hillary Clinton’s meetings were with
individuals who also donated to the Clinton Foundation. One huge problem: their statistic and report is false.
The implication, though never
stated, was that in order to get an audience with Hillary Clinton, you had to
pay up first. That Tweet sought their audience with this:
BREAKING: AP analysis: More than half those who met Clinton as Cabinet
secretary gave money to Clinton Foundation.
3:24 PM - 23
Aug 2016 – 6,952 re-tweets and 5,109 likes
Tweets that over-promise in
the service of stories that then under-deliver is par for the course in
journalism these days, but even if a reader wanted to get more details, the
tweet has no link to be clicked.
The article they did publish is a lot less flashy than the
tweet suggested. As Matt Yglesias outlines in Vox (see my next post below that
heads up this overall issue). The actual numbers used by the AP to arrive at
their widely shared claim of “more than half” of Clinton’s meetings are
cherry-picked down to almost nothing.
The Clinton campaign brought
their objections to the AP, and asked them to remove the false tweet. According
to the campaign, the AP refused, arguing
that even if the tweet is inaccurate, they stood by their reporting and the
story that it links to. (My note: I still
can’t decide to laugh or throw up … if the AP tweet was false? Wow – what an
admission, sort of).
Continue with this update and
the original story which starts below. Thanks for stopping by.
Misleading
headlines from ABC News (my emphasis and key
parts are in RED):
New Docs Show Clinton
Foundation Donors “Sought Access” to State
Department
Note the key word: “Sought” but not
necessarily mean access was given, or it were, that it was not for official
state department business and NOT Clinton foundation business (see update and analysis below).
Thus, it is inaccurate to
talk about the “Clinton emails in relation to the latest related to Hillary
Clinton's tenure at State” at least without proof possible of some sort of quid pro quo, which seems very unlikely.
That aspect is here from Crooks
and Liars.com: The latest emails are
actually those to and from Huma Abedin, i.e., internal mail and not outside
distribution.
In the last 24 hours, CNN, the Washington Post, and ABC News have all published emails released by Judicial Watch. They show that Clinton is in under fire because of her troubling connections between State and the Clinton Foundation donors. NBC News called for an investigation of the Clinton Foundation.
How many pundits and journalists have actually read the Emails? If they
had, they would have noticed, as Kevin
Drum has and pointed out how absurd the whole thing is.
If some of the efforts had succeeded, that would hardly be noteworthy.
It's the kind of thing that happens all the time. What's really noteworthy
about the most recent Email releases is that they demonstrate a surprisingly
high level of integrity from Hillary Clinton's shop at Foggy Bottom. Huma
Abedin for example was tasked with running interference on favor seekers, and
she seems to have done exactly that.
MAJOR UPDATE: There's no evidence at all that being a donor to the Clinton Foundation helped anyone out.
Not only was there absolutely
no demonstration of “pay-to-play” in the Clinton Foundation communications with
Abedin, but it seems the news media seems to have forgotten that the Clinton
Foundation is a charitable organization.
Among other things, it provides low-cost access to HIV drugs for over 8
million people a year. That's in addition to the work it does creating schools,
helping farmers, and its various clean energy and environmental efforts.
The media also has done a poor job of noting that none of the Clintons
financially benefit from the Foundation (see their financial
filing). Yes,
Chelsea Clinton is on the board and payroll, but she only get a salary of
exactly $0.00 (yep, zero).
That's $15 dollars less, an hour, than what the Democrats want to
implement as a minimum wage. The media has a problem with math. Case in point,
there is a handful of emails between the Clinton Foundation and Abedin. A
handful of emails, in four years. There's not a mathematician in the world
who could deduce a pattern of behavior with that small a sampling.
But that doesn't stop there. NBC News reported on Donald Trump demanding
a special prosecutor be set up to investigate the Emails, plus his demand to
shut down the Clinton Foundation down.
Donald Trump is the man who
will not release his IRS tax forms. The man who will not create a blind trust
for his businesses. The man who would leave his children in charge of the
businesses. His children who have been deeply involved in his Presidency. The
man whose only act of charity is that he used his Trump
Foundation money to bid on a Tim Tebow autographed helmet, which evidently he
kept.
Of course, the smart thing to do would be to file a FOIA with State
Department under Kerry, to see if the Clinton Foundation also contacted State
Department employees during his tenure. A look at international foundation contacts during Clinton's
tenure would reveal that the Abedin Emails are not unusual, and pretty standard
for the State Department, as the State Department has stated.
Judicial Watch and its 100+ FOIA lawsuits are helpful to show that
Federal judges seem to think that the State Department can magically create
more FOIA workers, and have the State Department's FOIA processes so tied up that
none of us will be able to get any request through for the next four years.
So, shy aren’t CNN, ABC, NBC, the Washington Post, and the others covering
this? (Oh, some are, but in a slanted fashion and that is the problem – fair and
accurate reporting).
Thanks for stopping by. Stay tuned - it’s apt to get far worse.
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