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Does the Buck Ever Stop with Hillary Clinton?

Photo Credit: Linda Davidson/The Washington Post

Photo Credit: Linda Davidson/The Washington Post

Mainstream pundits have many excuses for Hillary Clinton’s Benghazi, Libya, performance. The most common being trotted out was that Benghazi was below her radar screen, and she can’t be expected to know everything going on in her shop. Let’s count the ways this is unconvincing, if not downright wrong.

First, of course, every politician (ahem, a Northeastern governor) is held responsible for what goes on by underlings. The head of an organization must be held accountable for the people she hires. And, yes, leaders need to take ownership of the “culture” around them.

The Clinton culture is simple: Deny, insulate, deny. This is how Hillary and Bill Clinton have kept scandal from enveloping them again and again. (The Rose law firm documents were in a closet?!) They have loyalists, Cheryl Miller is among the closest, who clear up messes, as she apparently was seeking to do when she cautioned State Department personnel against talking to members of Congress. Clinton can keep trotting out the excuse that every scandal is someone else’s doing, but at some point the lady who knows so little about what is going on around her ceases to be seen as a competent leader.

Journalists who’ve never worked in a big company, served in the military or held an executive post may not have a good grasp on how information gets to the person at the top. It begins with the person at the top and/or her chief of staff setting up procedures and understandings about what is urgent, what gets elevated and what should never be a surprise for the boss. If this doesn’t exist, it is because the boss wants plausible deniability (that Clinton culture again) or because the boss is so caught up in minutiae and/or is out of the office so much (Clinton, to a tee) that the organization is chaotic and slow to react.

Read more from this story HERE.

Rep. Trey Gowdy Wants A Subpoena for Hillary Clinton (+video)

Photo Credit: Right Wing News

Photo Credit: Right Wing News

By Janeen Capizola.

South Carolina Congressman Trey Gowdy slammed the State Department Friday night over its slow response in finally naming the suspected terrorist groups responsible for the attack in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012.

“I think tomorrow [the State Dept.] is going to announce that we put a man on the moon, that the Berlin Wall fell and that we discovered this neat little drug called penicillin,” Gowdy told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren. “That’s about how far behind the intelligence our State Department is.”

The “shocking part,” Gowdy said, was that one day after the terrorist attack, members of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s inner circle – including Clinton’s Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills and Under Secretary of ManagementPatrick Kennedy – “admitted” that it was Ansar al-Sharia who was responsible.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

Congressman: Hillary Busted in Monster ‘Lie’

By Garth Kant.

President Obama has problems with credibility, as the world well knows after he disingenuously insisted, “If you like your health-care plan, you can keep your health-care plan” about two dozen times in public.

Now, it turns out, the Democrat most political observers believe will try to replace Obama as president apparently also has problems telling the truth.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lied to the American people about Benghazi, a congressman who recently returned from a fact-finding trip to Libya told WND.

He said she also lied to Congress.

Read more from this story HERE.

Hillary Clinton Ranks Dead-Last on U.S. ‘Most Admired’ List, Behind Rush Limbaugh, Bush

Photo Credit: Washington Examiner

Photo Credit: Washington Examiner

Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state who leads all 2016 presidential polls, ranks dead last on a new top 10 poll of who Americans admire most, and at the bottom of who the world admires most, behind celebs like Angelina Jolie and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

According to the new YouGov.com poll conducted for the Times of London, Microsoft’s Bill Gates is the most admired person in the world, ahead of Pope Francis and President Obama, the runner-up on that list. Clinton ranks 27th on YouGov’s world list.

On the U.S. list, she does even worse, coming in 10th of 10 listed and most named. Among Americans, Pope Francis is the most admired, followed by the president, evangelist Billy Graham and former President George W. Bush. Even Rush Limbaugh, the nation’s most popular conservative talk radio host, beat Clinton. He came in ninth.

Read more from this story HERE.

Benghazi: Betrayal that Whitewash Won’t Cover

Photo Credit: Jacquelyn Martin

Photo Credit: Jacquelyn Martin

By Wesley Pruden.

Transparency, the current vogue word for truth-telling, is usually a good thing, unless you’re trying to fool all the people some of the time, like spending 7,000 words to resurrect a fairy tale in Benghazi, all to give a helping hand to a lady in distress.

The New York Times understands that Hillary Clinton is likely to be the only credible hope the Democrats have for 2016 and that she already needs lots of remedial help. The Times huffed and puffed to deliver an excuse for betrayal in Benghazi, meant to second Mrs. Clinton’s famous alibi for her tortured misfeasance as secretary of state — “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

The right response might have made a lot of difference to an American ambassador who lay dead, slain at the hands of Islamic terrorists, and three other Americans who had to give up their lives because nobody at the White House could be bothered to ride to the rescue. President Obama and his frightened and timid acolytes, including Mrs. Clinton, insisted that this was not Islamic terror or the perfidy of al Qaeda, but merely the reaction of innocent Muslims offended by a video posted on YouTube mocking the religion of the Prophet Muhammad.

Even after the White House dispatched Susan Rice, who was then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, to push the confection about the video as revealed truth, almost nobody believed it. The White House couldn’t even find anybody else who would say he believed it.

Read more about the Benghazi betrayal HERE.

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NYT editor defiant on Benghazi report amid lawmaker criticism

By Fox News.

A New York Times editor on Monday staunchly defended a controversial report on the Benghazi attack which largely backed the State Department’s narrative, amid withering criticism from congressional Republicans and others.

The State Department, as might be expected, also spoke in defense of the New York Times article.

“Much of what’s in this in-depth investigation … tracks with what the [internal review board] found and with our understanding of the facts,” spokeswoman Marie Harf said Monday.

The lengthy Times report and the subsequent fallout represent the latest battle over the public narrative of what happened the night of Sept. 11, 2012. Even the State Department’s internal review did not offer a definitive explanation of what caused the attack and who was behind it.

The Times investigation, though, aggravated some of the department’s toughest critics by concluding there was no involvement from Al Qaeda or any other international terror group and that an anti-Islam film played a role in inciting the initial wave of attacks.

Read more from this story HERE.

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Senate Intel panel to release Benghazi report in early 2014

By Susan Crabtree.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has concluded its Benghazi investigation and is set to release its report in early 2014, a move that will only intensify the debate over the administration’s handling of the deadly terror attack.

On Sunday, the New York Times published a six-part article on the attack that concluded that al Qaeda played virtually no role in the September 11, 2012 attacks on the U.S. consulate and nearby CIA annex in Benghazi that left Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans dead.

The piece also bolstered the argument that at least part of the attack was prompted by anger over an anti-Islamic video, as the Obama administration originally claimed.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., has yet to weigh in on the New York Times’ Benghazi report. A spokesman said she was traveling on Monday and didn’t plan to comment but also noted that the committee plans to release its Benghazi review “very early in 2014.”

What that report says about al Qaeda’s role, the security lapses surrounding the attack and the motivation behind it will reshape the debate yet again, likely keeping Benghazi in the headlines for weeks to come.

Read more from this story HERE.

Fox News Poll: Clinton, Christie on Top in 2016 Preference Test

Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

Is it WAY too early to talk about the 2016 presidential primaries? Yes. Are we going to do it anyway? Yes!

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie — at the moment — are the top picks among party faithful to receive their respective party’s presidential nomination.

That’s according to a Fox News national poll released Thursday.

Clinton is miles ahead of the other possible Democratic candidates tested. The new poll finds she leads the pack with 68 percent support among Democrats. Vice President Joe Biden is a distant second with 12 percent. No other candidate garners double-digit support.

Next is Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren at seven percent and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo at four percent. Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick each register one percent support.

Read more from this story HERE.

Hillary and John Kerry’s State Department Boozing it Up: Spent Hundreds of Thousands of our Tax Dollars on Liquor (+video)

Photo Credit: Foreign PolicyWhile the rest of the government prepared to shut down this fall, the State Department was busy stocking up on embassy liquor supplies.

In September, the final month of the fiscal year, the State Department spent about $180,000 — and racked up a total of more than $400,000 for the whole year, three times the entire liquor tab for all of 2008.

The liquor bill, split among purchase orders placed at embassies around the world, included some major last-minute pre-shutdown splurges:

• $5,625 in “gratuity wine” at the embassy in Rio de Janeiro on Sept. 29, followed by $5,925 in “gratuity whiskey” on the day the shutdown began.

• $22,416 in wine at the embassy in Tokyo.

Read more about booze in John Kerry’s State Department HERE.

Soros Donates Big Bucks, Joins Ready for Hillary National Finance Council

Photo Credit: Fox NewsBillionaire investor and hedge fund titan George Soros is backing an effort to lure Hillary Clinton into a 2016 White House bid.

Soros signed on to be a co-chair for Ready for Hillary, a super PAC trying to trump up support for a presidential run by Clinton.

“We are proud to welcome George Soros as one of the co-chairs of @ReadyForHillary’s national finance council,” the organization tweeted Thursday afternoon.

Soros’ political director, Michael Vachon, said in a statement that the 83-year-old is “delighted to join more than 1 million Americans in supporting Ready for Hillary.”

“His support for Ready for Hillary is an extension of his long-held belief in the power of grassroots organizing,” the statement said.

Read more from this story HERE.

Hillary Clinton Stumps for Terry McAuliffe

Photo Credit: APHillary Clinton made her first campaign appearance in nearly five years on Saturday to support Terry McAuliffe, her old friend who’s running as the Democratic nominee for governor in Virginia.

But for the media and the majority of attendees packed into The State Theatre here for the event, it was all about her.

She laid out a case for him that rested strongly on women’s equality, gay marriage and rejecting the “scorched earth” politics that have defined Washington over the past several months. Though she didn’t directly call out Republicans, it was clear who she was talking about when she said some politicians have been operating in an “evidence-free zone”, “do not believe in America’s progress” and are trying to “hijack” the future.

“There are times when none of us can sit on the sidelines,” Clinton told the crowd of more than 700 people. “And right now, here in Virginia, is one of those times. … The whole country is watching this election. Watching to see whether the voters of Virginia lead the way of turning from divisive politics [and] getting back to common sense and common ground.”

The crowd chanted “Hillary! Hillary! Hillary!” before she even started speaking. McAuliffe served as her warm-up act, describing Clinton as an “inspiration to men and women all across Virginia and all across the globe.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Clinton Ally Pens E-Book: ‘The Benghazi Hoax’

Photo Credit: ReutersMedia Matters founder and Hillary Clinton ally David Brock has co-authored a 90-page e-book called “The Benghazi Hoax,” a tome intended as a counterweight of sorts to criticisms of the former Secretary of State and President Barack Obama over the 2012 attacks in Libya.

Brock previewed the book in an interview with POLITICO last week in the liberal group’s Washington offices. He described it as an important and necessary resource on the Benghazi attacks that left four Americans dead last Sept. 11 — and which some congressional Republicans have shown continued interest in probing.

Brock insisted the book is not intended as a de facto defense of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as she comes under scrutiny ahead of a likely 2016 presidential bid. Supporting the Clintons is a fraction of Media Matters’ mission, he said, and her role in the Benghazi attacks is not the sole focus of the book.

But the mere fact of the book’s existence is an acknowledgement that Benghazi will remain a topic of debate, and one that could harm Clinton with independent and center-right Republicans. And it comes as Brock-affiliated groups could fill an organizational void for Clinton, who has no machinery of her own beyond a handful of staffers since leaving the State Department.

The book, which comes out Tuesday, is as much about pushing back against criticisms by the right that Obama is a weak president who has hurt America in the world, Brock said.

Read more from this story HERE.

RNC Chair: Hillary Should Return Donations from Mcauliffe’s Convicted Pal

Photo Credit: APOn Sunday RNC Chairman Reince Priebus called on Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, and the Democratic National Committee to return political contributions made to their political campaign committees by Joseph Caramadre, a friend and business associate of Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe.

Breitbart News reported on Wednesday that Caramadre, who recently pled guilty to stealing the identities of terminally ill people, donated $25,000 to McAuliffe’s 2009 gubernatorial campaign and that McAuliffe had invested $47,000 in his illegal business venture.

Also on Wednesday, McAuliffe said he would donate the $25,000 he received in contributions from Caramadre and the $47,000 he invested in Caramadre’s business venture—offered and managed by Estate Planning Resources, Caramadre’s Rhode Island-based business—to charity.

Priebus told Breitbart News exclusively on Sunday that “Terry McAuliffe has already given back part of his ill-gotten gains from Joseph Caramadre. It is now up to Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, and the DNC, to decide where they stand.”

Priebus called on Clinton and Reid to return the substantial contributions they have received from Caramadre. “Will they continue to keep the hundreds of thousands of dollars they received from a convicted fraudster who illegally profited off terminally ill patients?” he asked.

Read more from this story HERE.