A Rainy Day at Clinton.com

A rainy day here in Slower Maryland. I would be tempted to skip this issue of reports from Clinton for lack of material, but there's not much else happening. Even the dog is content indoors for now.

CIA leaker: Clinton 'given a pass' for emails

A former CIA officer serving jail time for leaking documents to the New York Times accused federal officials of setting a double standard by apparently refusing to aggressively prosecute Hillary Clinton.

Clinton was “a high ranking official who should know better, but completely given a pass, and almost an apologetic pass,” Jeffrey Sterling, who was found guilty of leaking classified information to Times reporter James Risen last year, said in an interview with the Washington Post published on Monday.

“So how should us regular citizens feel, especially with heightened concerns about national security?”

Sterling released classified information to Risen about Iran's nuclear program, so there's no doubt he broke the law, and deserves the punishment. But, yeah, Hillary put far more secrets at risk than Sterling. It's almost mathematically certain that Hillary's server was hacked early and often by unfriendly and friendly powers, and nothing that passed through escaped their clutches. And I don't hear Hillary defending Sterling on the grounds of "over classification."

Victor David Hanson discusses the Clintons in Weimar America.

Mrs. Clinton is now like a tottering third-world caudillo—she can’t really continue on in politics and she can’t quit trying if she wants to stay out of jail. Her possible indictment depends entirely on her political viability and utility. She and the once disbarred Bill Clinton might appear like tired, tragic dinosaurs, bewildered that politics have left them behind in their late sixties—were it not for these aging egoists’ routine petulance and sense of entitlement.

Can Democrats’ love for Bill Clinton carry over to his wife? The Magic 8 Ball says "no". RNC ad brings back race-related criticism of Clinton. You mean the Clinton who's campaign first suggested that Barack Obama was not born in the US, that Clinton?

Newsbusters  debunks Canine Hillary:Hillary's Barking Episode and the Great Clinton Recession

I want to figure out how we can do that with Republicans. We need to get that dog and follow them around and every time they say these things like, "Oh, the Great Recession was caused by too much regulation," arh, arh, arh, arh!

But the truth?

“More Americans should own their own homes, for reasons that are economic and tangible, and reasons that are emotional and intangible, but go to the heart of what it means to expand the American Dream.”

William Jefferson Clinton, Forty second president of the United States, November 1994
. . .

The president of the United States was preaching to the choir when he made that proclamation in 1994, just two years into his first term. Facing an enthusiastic crowd at the National Association of Realtors’ annual meeting in Washington, D.C., Clinton launched the National Partners in Homeownership, a private-public cooperative with one goal: raising the numbers of homeowners across America.
Determined to reverse what some in Washington saw as a troubling decline of homeownership during the previous decade, Clinton urged private enterprise to join with public agencies to ensure that by the year 2000, some 70 percent of the populace would own their own homes.
An owner in every home. It was the prosperous, 1990s version of the Depression-era ‘A Chicken in Every Pot.’
With homeownership standing at around 64 percent, Clinton’s program was ambitious….
….the (Clinton) government enlisted help in 1995 from a wide swath of American industry. Banks, home builders, securities firms, Realtors - all were asked to pull together in a partnership made up of 65 top national organizations and 131 smaller groups.
The partnership would achieve its goals by ‘making homeownership more affordable, expanding creative financing, simplifying the home buying process, reducing transaction costs, changing conventional methods of design and building less expensive houses, among other means.’
Amid the hoopla surrounding the partnership announcement, little attention was paid to its unique and most troubling aspect: It was unheard of for regulators to team up this closely with those they were charged with policing….
…in just a few short years, all of the venerable rules governing the relationship between borrower and lender went out the window, starting with the elimination of requirements that a borrower put down a substantial amount of cash in a property, verify his income, and demonstrate an ability to service his debts.

Got that? As the book goes on to explain in detail, it was Bill Clinton who threw out “all of the venerable rules” that regulated the financing of homeownership. And while he wasn’t alone - Morgenson and Rosner list the entire seamy cast of characters, almost all associated with Clinton, Obama and the Democrats’ lobbying-industrial complex - it is a stark, documented truth that the Great Recession has Bill Clinton’s fingerprints all over it.

One throws out the intricately evolved rules and guidelines that govern entire industries at one's own risk. While it may seem a good idea, most the those rules and guidelines survived years because they helped. We are finding the same lesson in Obamacare.