Category: folly

The Shadow of Incompetence and Racism

Post author By CS Admin
Post date January 12, 2017
4 Comments on The Shadow of Incompetence and Racism

Hillary Clinton, Podesta, list, quota, illustration

Just when you thought it was safe to ignore Hillary Clinton …

Out from the Land of Might Have Been blurps the “news from nowhere” as to what Mrs. Clinton’s cabinet would have been. Some are calling it the “ghost cabinet,” the sadder version of a shadow cabinet.

And top on the list? Secretary of State John Podesta!

Mrs. Clinton’s own recklessness regarding secrets and security protocols while she was Secretary of State was apparently not enough. It turns out she aspires to insecurity, for she had planned to give her old job to the man who protected his computer with the immortal, hard-to-guess password “p@ssw0rd.”

The sheer effrontery here — or is it just witless, callous incompetence? — is astounding.

And the insanity* gets better. At least, if the public source for this information, former Politico chief political reporter Mike Allen (now of start-up news source Axios) can be trusted, “The Environmental Protection Agency and/or the Department of Education were to go to an African-American candidate.…”

Ah, tokenism!

Notice what is not mentioned: who. Just the what. The only admitted qualification being: skin-color.

Democrats are obsessed with racism these days. They never tire of charging anyone they disagree with as racist. And yet selecting someone because of their race is … suspiciously close to being racist.

Of course, Democrats do not see it that way.

They live in a race-based bubble. But like the Podesta-Clinton security measures, it may have just been hacked — er, compromised.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Other names have been leaked. Here is a list courtesy of The Daily Caller:

Attorney General — Current AG Loretta Lynch

Treasury Department — Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg

Labor Department — Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz

Defense Department — Michèle Flournoy, a former Defense Department official

Health and Human Services — Center for American Progress executive director Neera Tanden

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Tags Hillary Clinton, illustration, list, Podesta, quota

Accountability crime and punishment folly government transparency insider corruption local leaders porkbarrel politics responsibility

Hog-Wild Corruption

Arkansas State Rep. Micah Neal, Independent Citizens Commission, Senator Jon Woods

Former Arkansas State Rep. Micah Neal pled guilty last week to a felony charge of conspiring “with an Arkansas state senator to use their official positions to appropriate government money to certain nonprofits in exchange for bribes.”

Neal, who embraced graft his first month in office, received $38,000 in “legislating-around” money between 2013, when he entered the House, and 2015.

Court documents mention a number of seasoned conspirators, though not by name. There’s mysterious Senator A, who took Rep. Neal under his crooked wing.

Their scheme, reported Arkansas Business, “direct[ed] $600,000 in state GIF funds to the Northwest Arkansas Economic Development District, which then distributed it to two nonprofit entities.” Those two outfits — Entities A and B — then kicked back dough to Rep. Neal and Senator A through bagmen.*

Arkansas Business sorted out “the alphabet soup of unindicted people and entities.” It turns out Senator A, the ringleader, is someone we’ve encountered before: former State Senator Jon Woods.

Remember Issue 3, the dishonestly-worded 2014 constitutional amendment that weakened term limits (while telling voters it “established term limits”), imposed a gift ban so “tough” that now all legislators can get free meals from lobbyists anytime, and created an “Independent Citizens Commission” (a majority appointed by legislators) that gave legislators a 148 percent pay raise?

That was Woods’s.

His indictment appears imminent.

Meanwhile, Neal’s attorney extends to us his client’s wish that “this case does not overshadow all the good he did while serving as [a] representative.”

What good? The term limits scam.

Neal’s corruption doesn’t overshadow all he did as a legislator — it illuminates it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Three additional conspirators were engaged in delivering the bribe money to Rep. Neal and Sen. Woods. In court papers, these bagmen were referred to as Person A (a lobbyist for Entity A), Person B (“the president of Entity B and a friend of Senator A”) and Person C (“a friend of Senator A and Person B”).

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