"Socialists can be crooks, too!"

Andrew Kerr reports in the Daily Caller that the above three members of "the Squad" are in serious criminal and/or civil trouble. Read it here.

Quid Pro Quo

In the Conservative Treehouse, Sundance links to a video in which Steve Hilton of Fox News talks about the corrupt activities of Joe Biden and John Kerry.

Hypocrites!

In the American Thinker, Daniel John Sobieski writes,

Democratic senators took campaign cash from Ukrainian interests while begging Ukraine for help in removing a duly elected President from office. And these are the people who would participate in a Senate impeachment trial. The inmates are indeed running the asylum.

Read the details here.

Government isn't the only place where there is corruption

Matt Hart writes in The Atlantic about the corruption in the sport of bike racing.

Floyd Landis at the peak of his cycling career (Doug Pensinger / Getty)

Web of corruption

hat tip waltherppk

"Americans are willing to accept flaws, not rank dishonesty and corruption."

Bookworm addresses the angry Left:

Your media hid from you what an utterly appalling candidate Hillary was. On the Right, we acknowledged that Trump is not an exemplary human being, and we made our peace with that because he promised to tackle serious issues such as border control, terrorism, and the economy in ways consistent with American law and values.

Meanwhile, your media was composing Hillary hagiographies. You never squared up to the fact that she was morally and personally a disaster. Moreover, you’re incredibly shocked to discover that, to a lot of Americans, those things still matter. They’re willing to accept flaws, not rank dishonesty and corruption.

Read more here.

Grifters

Victor Davis Hanson writes,

The Hillary/Bill fortune — generated by pay-for-play influence peddling on the proposition that Bill would return to the White House under Hillary’s aegis and reward friends while punishing enemies — hit a reported $150 million some time ago, a fortune built not on farming, mining, insurance, finance, high-tech, or manufacturing, but on skimming off money. The Clintons are simply grifters whose insider access to government gave them the power to make rich people richer.

Long gone was the Scrooge-like need to write off used underwear as charitable tax deductions or to play 4-trillion-to-one odds in rigging a $100,000 cattle-futures profit on a $1,000 “investment,” or Hillary’s decade-and-a-half as a corporate lawyer masquerading as a children’s advocate. How pathetic the minor league Whitewater cons must seem now to the multimillionaire Clintons — such a tawdry ancient example of amateurish shakedowns when compared with the sophistication of real profiteering through the humanitarian-sounding, high-brow, corrupt Clinton Foundation.

Why did multimillionaire Hillary charge UCLA, in the era of thousands of indebted students, $300,000 (rather than, say, $149,999.99) for a brief, platitudinous speech? Why did multimillionaire Bill need more than $17 million for being honorary “chancellor” of the financially for-profit but tottering Laureate University (whose spin-off associate organization was a recipient of State Department largesse)? Did he think the extra millions were worth the embarrassment of being the highest-paid and least-busy college executive in U.S. history?

Apparently, the good life did not drive the Clintons so much as the quest for the supposed best life. Even though they had finally “made it” among the multimillionaire set, the Clintons always saw others (no doubt, deemed by them less deserving) with far, far more — whether Jeffery Epstein, with his ability to jet wherever and with whomever he pleased, or green half-a-billionaire Al Gore, who ran even more successful cons, such as rapidly selling a worthless cable TV station to beat impending capital-gains taxes, and selling it to none other than the anti-Semitic Al Jazeera, whose carbon-generated profits come from autocratic Qatar. (The media never audited Gore’s attempt to become a cable mogul, unlike their current concerns about a potential Trump media outlet).

The Clintons suffer from greed, as defined by Aristotle: endless acquisition solely for the benefit of self. With their insatiable appetites, they resented the limits that multimillionaire status put on them, boundaries they could bypass only by accumulating ever greater riches. The billion-dollar foundation squared the circle of progressive politicians profiting from the public purse by offering a veneer of “doing good” while offering free luxury travel commensurate with the style of the global rich, by offering sinecures for their loyal but otherwise unemployable cronies, and by spinning off lobbying and speaking fees (the original font of their $100-million-plus personal fortune and the likely reason for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s decision to put all her communications, mercantile included, on a private server safe from government scrutiny). Acquiring money to the extent that money would become superfluous was certainly a Clinton telos — and the subtext of the entire Podesta trove and the disclosures about the Clinton Foundation.

For the Clintons, power is the narcotic of being sought out, of being surrounded by retainers, of bringing enemies to heel and enticing sycophants with benefits. Liberalism and progressivism are mere social and cultural furniture, the “correct” politics of their background that one mouths and exploits to obtain and maintain political clout — and to get really, really rich without guilt or apology.

As in the quest for lucre, the Clintons’ appetite for high-profile authority is endless. Just as $150 million seemed as nothing compared with the billions and billions raked in by their friends and associates, so too eight years in the White House, tenure as governor, senator, or secretary of state were never enough. In between such tenures, the Clintons suffered droughts when they were not on center stage and in no position to wield absolute power, as they watched less deserving folk (the Obamas perhaps in particular) gain inordinate attention. A Hillary presidency would give the Clintons unprecedented Peronist-like power, in a manner unlike any couple in American history.

Of course, the Clintons are not only corrupt but cynical as well. They accept that the progressive media, the foundations, the universities, the bureaucracies, Hollywood, and Silicon Valley honor power more than trendy left-wing politics; they well understand that their fans will, for them, make the necessary adjustments to contextualize Clinton criminality or amorality. Sexual predations, the demonization of women, graft, and unequal protection under the law are also of no consequence to the inbred, conflicted, and morally challenged media – who will always check in with the Clinton team, like errant dogs who scratch the backdoor of their master after a periodic runaway.

The Clintons have contempt for the media precisely because the media are so obsequious. They smile, that, like themselves, the media are easily manipulated and compromised — to the extent of offering their articles, before publication, for Clinton approval (as the New York Times’ Mark Leibovich did; leaking debate questions to the Clinton campaign (as Donna Brazile did); or saying (as Politico’s chief political correspondent did), “I have become a hack. . . . Please don’t share or tell anyone I did this Tell me if I f**ked up anything.” The Clintons view such sycophants not with affection, but with disdain, given that they are moochers no better than the Clintons, with the same base desires, albeit better camouflaged by their pretense of objectivity.
Read more here.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441637/hillary-bill-clinton-greed-corruption-power-cynicism-endlesslyRead more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441637/hillary-bill-clinton-greed-corruption-power-cynicism-endlesslyRead more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441637/hillary-bill-clinton-greed-corruption-power-cynicism-endlessly

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441637/hillary-bill-clinton-greed-corruption-power-cynicism-endlesslyRead more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441637/hillary-bill-clinton-greed-corruption-power-cynicism-endlesslyRead more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441637/hillary-bill-clinton-greed-corruption-power-cynicism-endlessly

Corrupt? Who cares?

Bookworm writes,

Hillary supporters, both Left and Right, know exactly how corrupt Hillary is. They don’t care. They support her because they support her ideology about the government’s central role in every aspect of America life. They support her because they want open borders, whether for cheap labor or to create a permanent Democrat governing class. They support her because she envisions a one world government (no borders) run by an elite. On on the Left (as opposed to the #NeverTrumpers) they support her because the one thing she’ll go to the wall for, no matter what, is abortion. And so they don’t care that she is quite possibly the most corrupt person in American political history.

Three ways the election is rigged

The Donald articulated a three-point critique of the system that its defenders have not even tried to answer. Instead, all we got was fake outrage over Trump’s perfectly legitimate rejection of the default legitimacy of our illegitimate system.

His first point was that the media is not merely biased but an active partisan player for the Democrats.

Then there is electoral integrity. We’ve seen numerous investigations of voter fraud and no one cares. We have one party refusing to clear voter rolls of ineligible voters, while also on a quest to ensure that no one need prove his identity to vote. Sure, Democrats have good reason to believe their voters are too lazy and/or stupid to obtain ID cards, but we all know why they really oppose voter ID: it makes it harder to cheat. And then there’s Project Veritas. We have a Democrat party operative and the husband of a sitting Democrat congressbeing caught on tape proving Democrat catspaws paid to cause violence at a Trump rally, violence which the media covered and blamed on Trump to damaging effect. And this guy went to the White House hundreds of times and frequently met with President Faily McWorsethancarter.

Hey Pearl Clutchers, read that again and tell me how this isn’t a thousand times worse than Watergate. Then tell me how this is getting only a millionth of the outrage and coverage if the system isn’t rigged.

And then there’s the corruption of the rule of law. Trump was right – Hillary should not even be running because if we had a single justice system – instead of one for the powerful and connected and another for everyone else – her unhealthy carcass would be in federal prison. That’s not hyperbole – that’s literal truth understood by anyone who worked with classified materials and/or actually passed a bar exam. Then there is the IRS persecution of conservative organizations that has gone totally unpunished. And, of course, the Wikileaks treasure trove has shown that the Democrats simply ignore the law in their campaigns, secure in the knowledge that they will never be held accountable while their opponents will see a weaponized FBI and DOJ turned upon them.

The system is rigged.

...The solution is to demand the system do its damn job and root out corruption and earn back the default acceptance we would love nothing more than to be able to offer again, confident that the system is unrigged. Too bad if our refusal to simply acquiesce to your scam is inconvenient.

Read more here.

"Bribes sound so much nicer when you call them speaking fees!"

Who is more corrupt, Hillary or Obama?

Bookworm alleges,

Barack Obama is as corrupt as Hillary Clinton. One of the things Leftists love to tout is how “corruption free” the Obama administration has been. Certainly, there haven’t been indictments or firings, but that’s because (a) the Obama administration refuses to fire malfeasors (loyalty among thieves); (b) the Obama administration’s foot-dragging in investigations means they die on the vine because the media can bury these attenuated nothings; and (c) as a fish rots from the head, Obama’s corruption has infected those entities that are supposed to guard the people’s interests (e.g., the FBI and the DOJ). In other words, there’s lots of corruption out there. It’s just that Obama and his allies within and outside of the administration prevent any action on it.

A case in point is the curious case of Hillary’s illegal emails and Obama’s knowledge. Obama, from Day 1, disclaimed knowledge. That seemed like a lie, but one that couldn’t be proved — except it turned out that the lie was known months (even years) ago to the FBI. It knew that Obama was using a fake email address to correspond with Hillary on her home-brewed, unsecured server. This fact became public knowledge when the FBI informed Huma Abedin, when she didn’t recognize a name in an email thread, that it was Obama’s nom de cyber.

That knowledge, says Andrew McCarthy, explains the FBI’s bizarre approach to the investigation, from the freely given (and unnecessary) grants of immunity, to the failure to swear in Hillary during her examination, to allowing her to be represented by attorneys who were themselves under investigation, to Comey’s bizarre statement accusing Hillary of every security violation under the sun, only to conclude that she should not be prosecuted. With Obama’s rot as the top, and a politicized FBI and DOJ, the fix was always in. The FBI investigation was just more Kabuki theater to mislead and calm people who think the American government should abide by its own laws and that no person in America should be above the law.

Forecast dujour

Thanks to Mostly Cajun, All American and Opinionated

“I did not have fiscal relations with that government”

Sean Davis shows us at The Federalist that the US Constitution actually bans Hillary's foreign government payola.

The Washington Post reported last week that the tax-exempt foundation run by Bill and Hillary Clinton accepted money from seven foreign governments while Hillary served as U.S. Secretary of State (it’s unclear how much foreign money the organization accepted while Hillary was a U.S. Senator). Super shady, right? It’s worse than that, though, because Article I, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution actually bans foreign payola for U.S. officials.

The constitutional ban on foreign cash payments to U.S. officials is known as the Emoluments Clause and originated from Article VI of the Articles of Confederation. The purpose of the clause was to prevent foreign governments from buying influence in the U.S. by paying off U.S. government officials. Here’s the text of the clause:

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

Davis concludes,

“I did not have fiscal relations with that government” isn’t going to fly this time. There is most definitely a controlling legal authority here, and it’s the U.S. Constitution.

The latest foreign payola scandal is just the latest chapter in the Clinton corruption novel. They played games with dirty cash in Arkansas. They played games with dirty cash literally in the White House. And now we know they were playing games with foreign cash while Hillary Clinton was serving as Secretary of State. The Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution knew what could happen if U.S. officials put cash before their own country, so they banned the practice.

In other words, the Founders were Ready for Hillary.

Read more here.

Police state

Kevin Williamson points out that Democrat gestapo-like tactics are not just being implemented in Wisconsin, but also in Texas and Washington D.C.

When a governor can be indicted for vetoing a bill, when a university regent can be threatened with criminal prosecution for exposing corruption, and when you have armed men kicking down your door because you signed the wrong petition, you don’t live in a free society—you live in a police state. And that is what Democrats are building, from Austin to Milwaukee to Washington.

Read more here.

"When you've got a corrupt attorney-general and a corrupt revenue collector, you don't really need much else."

Mark Steyn comments on Obama's Easter prayer breakfast, held several days after Easter:

At a so-called Easter "prayer breakfast", President Obama, as is his wont, took another swipe at Christians:

On Easter, I do reflect on the fact that, as a Christian, I am supposed to love. And I have to say that sometimes, when I listen to less than loving expressions by Christians, I get concerned.

Each to his own. I get concerned that, as the President was lecturing those Christians less perfect than him, some 150 students were slaughtered at Garissa University in Kenya for no other reason than that they were Christian. Had I been at that prayer breakfast, I would have walked out in protest.

Oh, wait, you can't do that with the President of the United States. The joint's in lockdown. So, okay, I'd be stuck in there until the 40-car motorcade had left and it's safe to reopen the public thoroughfares. But I would have booed. Is it too much to expect freeborn Americans occasionally to show a little irritation at both the President's condescension and, given that some of the oldest Christian communities on earth are currently being exterminated, his ghastly bad taste?

Steyn also notes that various candidates are announcing that they are running for president:

~For myself, I'd like a candidate who's serious about ending the corruption. A republic has by definition to be virtuous - or it's a banana republic. This country has a chief law enforcement officer who prosecutes Senator Menendez, a Democrat senator who made the mistake of crossing the President, but won't prosecute Lois Lerner, a member of the supposedly "non-partisan" civil service who used the bureaucracy to target the President's enemies. When you've got a corrupt attorney-general and a corrupt revenue collector, you don't really need much else.

Celebrate! We are not yet the most corrupt country!

OMMAG (One More Middle Age Guy) links to an article in Business Insider. BI in turn links to Transparency International's 2013 Corruptions Perceptions Index. There are several interesting graphs. The most corrupt countries are no surprise: North Korea, Iran, Somalia, Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Syria, Yemen, and Haiti.

The least corrupt are New Zealand, Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway.

Where does the United States stand? Number 19, below Japan, Belgium and Hong Kong, but above Uruguay, Ireland, and Bahamas.