ONLY THE OBOMBS AND
GRIFTERS HILLARY AND BILLARY HAVE LOOTED THE COUNTRY AS MUCH AS THE BUSH CRIME
FAMILY!
The perilous ramifications of the September 11 attacks on the
United States are only now beginning to unfold. They will undoubtedly be felt
for generations to come. This is one of many sad conclusions readers will draw
from Craig Unger's exceptional book House of Bush House of Saud: The Secret Relationship
Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties. As Unger claims in this incisive study, the seeds for the
"Age of Terrorism" and September 11 were planted nearly 30 years ago
in what, at the time, appeared to be savvy business transactions that
subsequently translated into political currency and the union between the Saudi
royal family and the extended political family of George H. W. Bush.
Ben Freeman: Foreign Money Flowing into Washington Keeps U.S. in Prolonged Wars
6:53
The Committee for Responsible Foreign Policy (CRFP) sponsored the following post.
Foreign money flowing into Washington is keeping the United States in prolonged wars, and most Americans are not even aware of it, according to Dr. Ben Freeman, director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for International Policy.
“Right now, U.S. foreign policy is for sale — not to the lowest bidder, but to the highest bidder. War is a business. And our wars are not our own. They never have been,” he said Wednesday at an event in Washington, DC, sponsored by the Committee for a Responsible Foreign Policy.
Freeman and his team researched for six months Saudi Arabia’s 2017 lobbying activities in Washington, DC, including meetings, emails, contacts with journalists, and political campaign contributions, and the potential effect those activities had on foreign policy.
They found that Saudi Arabia had hired more than two dozen firms in that year with more than a hundred agents working on their behalf. In 2017, those agents had more than 2,500 contacts during this time, the majority of them with members of the Senate, news media, and the House–in that order.
Freeman said many of the contacts were related to arms sales, foreign military sales, and some of the votes that were held to stymie those arms sales. He said sometimes the lobbying is done by former members of Congress who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby former colleagues.
“Every time there is a vote on arms sales or anything related to Yemen, this lobby goes bananas,” he said. “And we can see the activity on the days that there are these votes. In some cases, they visit almost every single office on the day of those votes.”
Freeman said they also found more than $2.2 million in 2017 campaign contributions to both Democrats and Republicans. The list was a “who’s who” in the Democrat and Republican Party, he said.
The top Saudi campaign contributions were to then-presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, totaling $94,496 because some donations in late 2016 were included, he said. He said Trump got “a little over $10,000” from Saudi Arabia.
And they found 12 instances where contact with a lobbyist pushing for or against a vote and a campaign contribution happened on the same day.
“In other words, a lobbying firm walks into a member of Congress’s office and says, ‘I need you to vote a certain way on this upcoming vote on an arms sale,’ and then later that day … they say, ‘Oh, by the way, here’s a $2,000 check to your campaign. Good luck on re-election, buddy,'” Freeman said.
He said the number of contacts expands exponentially if the time window is expanded, for example, to two weeks before a vote.
“The influence is absolutely pervasive, [and] there’s a lot more influence that we’re not even capturing,” he said.
To test how contacts and campaign contributions influenced a vote, Freeman and his team looked at the November 2018 Senate vote on the resolution to end the war in Yemen, which passed 63 to 37.
Freeman said 30 of those 37 who voted against ending the war had received campaign contributions from Saudi Arabia in 2017, with some receiving as much as tens of thousands of dollars. He said even more money went to them in 2018, close to certain votes.
“There’s a strong correlation between the way these folks vote and the money that’s coming in, and it’s directly tied to our issues of war and peace,” he said.
He said they also found that a “big crux” of Saudi Arabia’s lobbying effort was public relations.
They found 744 times that lobbyists, or “foreign agents,” for Saudi Arabia contacted media organizations in 2017.
“This is something that flies under the radar for a lot of folks that are looking at foreign influence,” he said. “And the interesting thing about these 744 contacts is that they don’t pick and choose. … They contact left-wing media and right-wing media.”
He stated that they also contact local media to shape stories at the local level, that they even contacted ESPN six times.
Freeman said they would begin looking at the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
He said Saudi Arabia and the UAE are “often working to the same purpose — to promote U.S. involvement in the war in Yemen. They’re lobbying against Iran. They’re lobbying for arms sales for their countries, more U.S. military equipment, more U.S. militarization in the Middle East, more of us propping up their defense at our expense in a lot of cases.”
But Freeman asserted that foreign lobbying efforts were not unique to Saudi Arabia or the UAE. In fact, he said, the countries where the U.S. has foreign bases spend most of the money to lobby the U.S. to keep them there — almost half-a-billion dollars each year, not including unregistered foreign agents.
Those countries, which include Germany, South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Canada, and Bermuda, want to make sure American troops stay on their soil to ensure that America continues to subsidize their security, he said.
Think tanks and universities are also top recipients of foreign contributions, he said.
“There is so much foreign money pouring in to think tanks in America,” and “there’s no disclosure” over how much a think-tank expert may be paid by a foreign country to promote a certain point of view, he said.
“It’s a dark space in terms of transparency,” he said.
At American universities all over the country, China has set up “Confucius Institutes” in exchange for agreements not to criticize China, he said. China has spent more than $486 million in contributions to universities since 2012.
“We need a lot more transparency there so we know when our sons and daughters are going to university, what they’re getting, and is that coming from a foreign government or not?” he added.
He appealed to Americans to help “flip the iceberg” of foreign influence in America.
“We know very little about foreign influence in America. What we do know is that it leads to greater U.S. militarization in the world, it keeps involved in wars longer than it probably should, it leads to more military bases abroad, [and] increases the likelihood of our involvement in all these ongoing conflicts in the world,” he said.
“And it just generally increases the amount of spending to the American taxpayer–in many cases, in ways that are decidedly not in the American interest, that are in foreign interests,” he said. “We need to flip the iceberg.”
The Committee for Responsible Foreign Policy is a 501(c)(4) organization with the mission of pursuing a more restrained foreign policy that adheres to the Constitution. The organization aims to increase awareness of Congress’ Article I responsibility to oversee war. For more information on CRFP, please visit http://responsibleforeignpolicy.org.
Images
of 9/11: A Visual Remembrance
https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/09/11/images-911-visual-remembrance/
11 Sep 20184,056
The whole world experienced the attacks of September 11, 2001, in real
time. Videos, photos, and audio captured the horror wreaked that day by Islamic
jihadists and the heroism of ordinary Americans. In our effort to never
forget, Breitbart News provides you a visual remembrance of that fateful
day when the world changed.
The Islamic hijackers on
American Airlines Flight 11 crash it into the north tower of the World Trade
Center (1 WTC) at 8:46am.
The first five minutes of
cable coverage.
And over the years, the country rebuilt and the memorials arose…
Bill
And Hillary Tour Underwhelms In Ticket Sales, Attendance
https://hotair.com/archives/2018/12/01/bill-hillary-tour-underwhelms-ticket-sales-attendance/
Bill
and Hillary Clinton have taken their show on the road. Ticket sales for “An
Evening with the Clintons” are not what they once might have been, according to
all reports. With stops deliberately booked in what are assumed to be
Clinton-friendly cities, the aging power couple seems to be having trouble
filling seats.
It’s
not exactly a whirlwind tour. The schedule is downright lethargic in the
beginning. The first stop on November 27 was in Toronto, Canada with a stop the
next night in Montreal. The next stop on
the schedule is
Houston on December 4. In light of the passing of former President George H.W.
Bush, that date may be canceled or changed. But, that’s all there is to the
tour until 2019. They start back up in April 2019 in New York City and continue
through May, ending in Las Vegas on May 5. Does anyone else think it’s odd
that a former U.S. president and a former Secretary of State began a
self-promoting tour in Canada? Maybe it’s just me.
The
venue in Toronto only sold 3,300 tickets. Whole sections of the arena were
empty. I checked the website for ticket prices and for
the Houston stop, the cheap seats go for $15.00 and the most expensive ticket
price I could find was $1146.00. That’s a real bargain, especially
compared to the book tour events (it’s not just a book tour, they are events)
scheduled for former First Lady Michelle Obama. The high-end prices for the Michelle tour go for $10,000. That is
what I found and it’s not a stop in Houston but in Dallas at the American
Airlines Center. The Clinton venue in Houston is smaller.
Anyway,
you won’t be surprised to read that a good bit of the Clinton question and
answer conversation centers around her bitterness toward President Trump. He
lives rent-free in her head.
And
the former secretary of state was prepared to mock Trump’s interview with the
Washington Post just hours after it published, shaking her head at Trump
telling the paper “my gut tells me more sometimes than anybody else’s brain can
ever tell me.”
You “literally you can’t make
this stuff up,” she said. “A dozen times a day your head is spinning.”< And
near the end of the event, Hillary Clinton returned to Trump's gut, criticizing
him for saying he does not "believe" a recently released dire
government report on climate change. "It just riles me up," she said.
"If you won't listen to people who actually spend time over decades
studying problems, my goodness, your gut is not the answer to everything that
is important in the world, I'm sorry."
The
tour comes at a time when speculation is strong on whether or not Hillary will
actually make another attempt at a presidential run. She joked about standing
for Parliament in Canada when asked about any plans to run but you know she’s
thinking about. I don’t think she ever stops thinking about it. She’s consumed
with anger that Donald Trump won. While the next generation of Democrats is
ready to move up, the Clintons (especially Hillary) refuse to leave the stage.
It’s no wonder ticket sales are slow. Why would anyone pay money to listen to
them when almost any day an interview or quote is available in print or on
television? It’s not like either of them are saying anything new.
Also,
there’s the re-emergence of Monica Lewinsky. She’s been telling her story after
all these years. Don’t expect either Clinton to be asked about that whole
scandal, though. It’s not happening. The former horndog-in-chief
still gets a pass on the difficult questions.
But the kickoff comes at a
tenuous time for the Clintons: Not only is their standing in the Democratic
Party in question after neither was particularly prolific during the midterms,
but the event comes amid a renewed focus on Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica
Lewinsky, a moment in history that has gained more attention recently because
of a multi-part series on the affair on A&E and other retrospectives. The
Lewinsky affair and other allegations against of sexual impropriety Bill
Clinton are also being re-examined in the light of the #MeToo era.
One topic that Hillary is quick
to criticize President Trump on is his relationship with Saudia Arabia. It’s
ironic given the Clinton Foundation’s refusal to state that they will no longer
accept financial donations from
The Kingdom as others have.
“We
have a president who is part of the cover-up as to what happened in that
consulate or embassy when Mr. Khashoggi was murdered,” Clinton said. “And we
have a president and those closest to him who have their own personal
commercial interests.”
But the Clinton Foundation, to
which donations declined dramatically after Clinton’s 2016 defeat, has taken
multi-million dollar contributions from Saudi Arabia in the past and isn’t
ruling out continuing to accept them.
The
Clinton Foundation accepted between
$10 and $25 million from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with donations coming as
late as 2014. A now-defunct group named “Friends of Saudi Arabia,” which was
reportedly co-founded by a Saudi Prince and often worked as a PR front for the
kingdom, also donated between $1 and $5 million.
Implying
corruption about the sitting president in business dealings is probably not the
best idea. She and her husband have a legacy
of corruption. She
should just sit that conversation out.
Harry Reid Exposes Greatest Liberal Scam of All-Time
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall.com.
What's in the news day and night? The wall.
It's all anyone talks about or thinks about or debates. Have you heard? The U.S. government is partially shut down over the wall.
But it's all a massive liberal scam. A Ponzi scheme. Pure fraud. Bernie Madoff couldn't come up with a better scam.
Because the same liberal politicians and donors who scream about the "racism" and "immorality" and "ineffectiveness" of a wall all live behind walls.
President Trump needs to buy TV infomercial time and run a 30-minute TV show in a Ross Perot fashion -- featuring aerial views of the mansions and estates of liberals, protected by walls, gates, and armed guards. You know, the exact same protections they don't want you and me or our children to have.
Exhibit A is Harry Reid, the Democratic former Senate Majority Leader from my home state of Nevada.
Please ignore the advertising slogan "What happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas." It's not true. Las Vegas is the crossroads of America. What happens here is happening everywhere. And I've uncovered the biggest liberal scam in America -- going on right here in Las Vegas.
It revolves around my home community in Henderson. I live in the exclusive Anthem Country Club. There are about 1,500 beautiful homes behind the gates of Anthem. Together, these homes are worth around $1 billion -- in just one country club in one Las Vegas suburb.
What's the amazing appeal of Anthem Country Club? It's got a big beautiful wall around it. And thick iron gates in front are protected by armed guards. The result? There is virtually no crime inside walled, gated, armed Anthem.
Life is good behind the gates of Anthem.
In the rest of Las Vegas ... not so much. In the rest of Vegas ... lots of crime, gang bangers, drugs, car-jackings, and home invasion robberies. Proving walls and gates and lots of armed guards are a good thing if you want your family to be safe.
But wait. My Anthem community recently added yet another feature to keep our residents safe. Every vehicle entering our gates must show a government-issued photo ID or they will be denied entry.
Guess who's my neighbor, just steps away from my home? Former Sen. Harry Reid. The one and only. He could have chosen anywhere in Nevada or America to retire. But he didn't. He chose the protection of fortress Anthem for his family.
There are many lessons we can learn from studying Anthem Country Club.
Lesson No. 1: If you want your family and children to be safe, BUILD A WALL -- preferably a wall that is also surrounded by armed guards. The Vatican understands this lesson. Every celebrity in Hollywood understands. All the wealthy politicians in Washington, D.C., understand. All the big-shot media executives understand. Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and George Soros all understand. Barbara Streisand, George Clooney, Sean Penn, and Madonna all understand. They are protected by big walls, sturdy gates, and armed guards.
Lesson No. 2: Liberal Democrats are hypocrites. All the liberal bigmouths who denigrate the wall live behind walls and gates. None is a better example than Reid, former chief water carrier and bottle washer of President Barack Obama. Reid spent his entire Senate career fighting viciously against a wall. Reid argued walls were terrible and unnecessary things.
So, why did Harry choose Anthem? Because he loves his family. That's why we all want a wall at America's southern border. To protect our country and our children from bad people, drugs, disease, and violent crime. Welcome to the neighborhood, Harry. Can I bring a cake by?
Lesson No. 3: Liberals lie about everything. Liberals don't just use walls to separate themselves from the very poor and illegal alien voters they count on to elect them. They use limos and private jets and send their children to lily-white private schools where they'll never be around gangbangers or illegal aliens or Muslim refugees or disease.
Lesson No. 4: Guns must not be as bad as liberals claim. Because liberals may argue against gun ownership, but at the same time, they have armed guards protect them.
Lesson No. 5: The argument against voter identification is a total scam. How do all those gardeners, maids and pool cleaners drive through the gates of Anthem every day? The answer: They all already have a government-issued photo ID. So I guess it's a lie when liberal politicians claim that poor people and minorities don't have a photo ID or that it's too difficult for them to get or that it's "racist" to ask them for it.
Voter ID is an issue because liberals want election fraud. They can't win without it. They want illegals to be able to vote by the millions for Democrats.
Folks, we're being scammed. But not just any scam. This is the greatest scam of all time. Anthem, my beautiful, safe community, is the proof. What happens here in the suburbs of Vegas, is happening everywhere.
My advice? BUILD THE WALL.
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