Dogon Village News Alerts

Clinton adviser quits over China rhetoric by Lisa Lerer

A top expert on China has resigned as an informal adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign in the wake of the candidate's increasingly harsh anti-China rhetoric.

Richard Baum, a political science professor at the Center for Chinese Studies at UCLA, resigned in light of what he called “grossly misguided accusations” made by Clinton about China.

“As a lifelong Democrat, it saddens me that Senator Clinton has chosen to take the low road in her effort to gain our party’s presidential nomination,” Baum said in an e-mail to Politico.

The Clinton campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment by Politico.

Clinton recently has ratcheted up her anti-China sentiments, criticizing the country on everything from its human rights violations to its undervalued currency.

“I’m the only candidate who isn’t just talking about cracking down on China but I have a specific plan on how to do it,” she told union members at the AFL-CIO’s Building Trades National Legislative Conference on Wednesday.

“China should be our trade partner not our trade master.” Read the full story here

Clinton Slams Democratic Activists At Private Fundraiser by Celeste Fremon, Huffington Post

At a small closed-door fundraiser after Super Tuesday, Sen. Hillary Clinton blamed what she called the "activist base" of the Democratic Party -- and MoveOn.org in particular -- for many of her electoral defeats, saying activists had "flooded" state caucuses and "intimidated" her supporters, according to an audio recording of the event obtained by The Huffington Post.

"Moveon.org endorsed [Sen. Barack Obama] -- which is like a gusher of money that never seems to slow down," Clinton said to a meeting of donors. "We have been less successful in caucuses because it brings out the activist base of the Democratic Party. MoveOn didn't even want us to go into Afghanistan. I mean, that's what we're dealing with. And you know they turn out in great numbers. And they are very driven by their view of our positions, and it's primarily national security and foreign policy that drives them. I don't agree with them. They know I don't agree with them. So they flood into these caucuses and dominate them and really intimidate people who actually show up to support me."

Listen to the audio at the Huffington Post

Don’t You Dare Follow The Money! by Joan Swirsky

It’s been 34 years since “Deep Throat” advised Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein (as documented in their book, “All the Presidents Men”) to “follow the money” in the Watergate case that resulted in President Nixon’s ignominious resignation.

In rooting out political corruption, that advice still holds, one of the latest examples being the payment schedule that Democrat New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was caught on tape trying to negotiate with his prostitute of choice.

But Spitzer’s self-destructive, career-destroying behavior, like Nixon’s, is small potatoes compared to the filthy-lucre trail of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

In reviewing only a small number of the shady deals both Bill and Hillary have made over the years, it should be clear to any sane American that entrusting Hillary with the U.S. presidency will:

--Threaten our national security.
--Bankrupt our domestic policies.
--Contaminate every treaty and trade deal with questions about their legality.
--Mire our system in four or eight more years of sleazy scandals.

As Grace Vuoto of The Washington Times reminds us: “Mrs. Clinton is not the innocent victim of Mr. Clinton's excesses that she pretends to be…[she] is and always has been Mr. Clinton's willing accomplice in his scandals." Follow the Clinton trail here

I've been having a ball reading some of the stories about Hillary and Bill Clinton. It's sad they've sunk so low, but they are good for a few laughs these days. There were so many funny stories on Hillary's imaginary near death experience in Bosnia, her tall tales about bringing peace to Ireland, Bills philandering, and his recent tirade, I had to put a few of them in one post.

Horrigan: Stop the sniping - Hillary was there!Kevin Horrigan, ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

God, what bravery. Chelsea was with her, and Hill grabbed her, carrying her in her arms as we ran for shelter. Everyone dived under the Air Bosnia ticket counter, but not Hillary. She grabbed an M-16 from one of the soldiers, right before she slapped him and called him a coward. She said, "Follow me!" and ran back outside.

She rallied everyone, Sinbad the comedian, the Secret Service guys, the Army guys, the mayor of Tuzla, the guy from the Tuzla Chamber of Commerce, some 8-year-old kid who wanted to read her a poem. She got them behind a pile of sandbags. She told the kid, "Feed me!" while she cleared the M-240. Hill opened up, 750 rounds a minute, the kid passing her belts of ammo, sweeping the rooftops 'til the barrel darn near melted. If it hadn't been for Hillary Clinton that day, I wouldn't be here.

Same thing when we went to France that year. Bill took Air Force One to Lyon for a G-7 meeting, but Hill, she insisted on going in with the troops at Omaha Beach. The Germans had us pinned down, but Hillary told everyone to get out from behind the hedgehogs and keep moving. She and Sinbad the comedian shoved a Bangalore torpedo under the wire so we could get up the bluffs. Read the story here

Of snipes and snipers

For so many Hillary supporters, the Bosnia foray, in all its corkscrew landing, belly-crawling, sniper-dodging, derring-do glory, had become the counterpoint to Barack Obama's infuriatingly character-building life story.

Sure, he may have been abandoned by his black father, raised by a single mother and white grandparents, lived in that whatsitsname foreign country and suffered all the indignities of living as a black man in America, but Hillary was a Kunoichi; a First Lady ninja dispatched to the world's hottest spots to do America's stealthiest dirty work.

The old Bosnia story was always prefaced by that bit about how they used to say in the White House that "if a place was too small, too dangerous or too poor, send Hillary," which (despite the triple-barrelled insult to every country she visited without the president) not only gave her an aura of Delta Force bad-guy fighting prowess, it created the sense that while her husband was bimbo-trolling the West Wing and primping for photo-ops, she was doing the really important stuff of secret statecraft. Read the full story here

Watergate-Era Judiciary Chief of Staff: Hillary Clinton Fired For Lies, Unethical Behavior By Dan Calabrese

As Hillary Clinton came under increasing scrutiny for her story about facing sniper fire in Bosnia, one question that arose was whether she has engaged in a pattern of lying.

The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes.

Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career.

Why?

“Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.” Read the full story here

What’s Hillary Clinton’s Problem? Joan Swirsky

Newspaper articles and TV specials have made most people familiar with the psychiatric disorder called Munchausen-By-Proxy, in which a person (usually a woman) or a parent (usually the mother) makes herself or her child sick – by poison, overmedication, smothering, etc. – and then reports the dire symptoms to authorities, thereby garnering the attention and sympathy she craves, as well as heroine status for “saving” herself or her child.

When this bizarre pattern of behavior is observed over time – by family members, friends, psychiatric professionals – and they confront her with evidence of her pathological behavior, she invariably has one response: They are lying! Sound familiar?

Then there is the psychiatric disorder known as pathological lying, which is the compulsion of disturbed people to resort to lies rather than truth, the better to compensate for their feelings of inferiority. Some of the stories they make up may have a grain of truth, which allows them – or in the case of politicians, their surrogates or the media – to “spin” them to advantage. Their lies are always designed to put them in a good light and to resonate with people who also feel like victims. Sound familiar? Read it here

On race, Clinton misses the callDerrick Z. Jackson

It was not 3 a.m., but Hillary Clinton heard the red phone ringing on racism. Without prompting, she began a teleconference interview Thursday with the Trotter Group of African-American newspaper columnists by saying, "There is an ugly perception which has developed that my campaign has tried to or used race as a tactic. And I want to categorically reject that." Read the full story here

Bill Clinton's tirade stunned some delegates

...But as the group moved together for the perfunctory photo, Rachel Binah, a former Richardson delegate who now supports Hillary Clinton, told Bill how "sorry" she was to have heard former Clinton campaign manager James Carville call Richardson a "Judas" for backing Obama.

It was as if someone pulled the pin from a grenade.

"Five times to my face (Richardson) said that he would never do that," a red-faced, finger-pointing Clinton erupted.

The former president then went on a tirade that ran from the media's unfair treatment of Hillary to questions about the fairness of the votes in state caucuses that voted for Obama. Read the full story

Clinton Releases Her Own Delegates

Two Texas callers to Rush Limbaugh’s radio show in recent days identified themselves as Republicans who, in accord with Limbaugh’s cunning “Operation Chaos” effort to prolong Democratic nomination battle bloodletting, caucused for Hillary Clinton. Both callers said they have been selected as Clinton state convention delegates who might become Clinton delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Read the full story here

Conservative radio host Shelley Wynter talks presidential politics on CNN. Wynter is the host of "The Right Side With Shelley Wynter" on WAOK in Atlanta.