American intelligence officers are asking not 'if' but 'when' the Kremlin will dip into its arsenal of Clinton collateral

RUMINT (Rumor Intelligence) is rife with reports that Russian intelligence agencies are preparing to release emails “hacked” from Hillary Clinton’s rogue Internet email server.

Agreed, this sounds a bit like a blackmail plot in a 1940s radio detective thriller or a soap opera. Except it isn’t. We live in a world where blood gets spilled.

...

Russian blackmail classifies as a potential threat, and another reason I believe a full and complete investigation of Hillary Clinton’s national security crime requires a special prosecutor. By the way, on June 14 U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan referred to the FBI investigation as a “criminal investigation,” confirming what White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said June 9. The executive and judicial branches are now in agreement.

So. Will Vlad blackmail Hillary? Or, “When Will Vlad blackmail Hillary?” Sure, it’s speculation. It’s a scenario. It’s like a radio-era detective serial.

Stay tuned for the next episode.

http://observer.com/2016/06/vladimir-putin-has-everything-he-needs-to-blackmail-hillary-clinton/

Hot on the campaign trail in South Carolina last week, Bernie Sanders attacked Hillary Clinton for her role in pushing to overhaul the welfare system in 1996. “I spoke out against so-called welfare reform because I thought it was scapegoating people who were helpless, people who were very, very vulnerable. Secretary Clinton at that time had a very different position on welfare reform—strongly supported it and worked hard to round up votes for its passage.” A day later, former President Bill Clinton swiped back. “There’s no question that (welfare reform) did far more good than harm,” he said, but added that “subsequent events showed it needs some improvement.”

The Clintons have championed welfare reform for over 20 years—even as study after study has shown that it has severely harmed poor families, and driven a historic number of black and Latino children into deep poverty. In the early 1990s, they designed a strategy to lure white voters back to the Democratic Party: capitalize on white disgust toward “dependent” black and Latina mothers on welfare within a liberal veneer that promised them a “hand-up, rather than a handout.” As first lady, she not only cheered her husband’s goal to “end welfare as we know it,” but she also helped whip up support for the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), the legislation that remade the welfare system: “I agreed that he should sign it and worked hard to round up votes for its passage,” she recounted in her 2003 memoir Living History. Later, as senator, she continued to applaud it, referring in one 2002 interview to people who had left welfare as “no longer deadbeats—they’re actually out there being productive.” Even as recently as her 2008 run for president, she defended the welfare-to-work legislation as “enormously successful,” while lamenting that “people who are more vulnerable” would suffer more during the recession.

“They don’t acknowledge the number of people who were hurt. It’s just not in their lens,” Peter Edelman, a friend of Hillary’s since law school and former assistant secretary of social services at the Department of Health and Human Services, said of the Clintons in 2008.

But in her current campaign for president, Clinton, who is running as a “pragmatic progressive,” has publicly avoided the issue. At a time when many Americans are outraged over economic and racial injustice, she is quiet on the subject of welfare reform, because it tells a story of how she betrayed poor people of color and undermines her image as a feminist candidate who has been a lifelong champion for women and children.


(More at link)

http://www.thenation.com/article/why-it-matters-that-hillary-clinton-championed-welfare-reform/

The 5 Worst Excuses for Hillary Clinton’s Vote To Invade Iraq
Clinton supporters want Democratic voters to forgive their candidate’s support for the most disastrous foreign policy decision in decades. They shouldn’t.

1. “Hillary Clinton’s vote wasn’t for war, but simply to pressure Saddam Hussein to allow UN weapons inspectors back into Iraq.”
At the time of vote, Saddam Hussein had already agreed in principle to a return of the weapons inspectors. His government was negotiating with the United Nations Monitoring and Verification Commission on the details, which were formally institutionalized a few weeks later. (Indeed, it would have been resolved earlier had the United States not repeatedly postponed a UN Security Council resolution in the hopes of inserting language that would have allowed Washington to unilaterally interpret the level of compliance.)

Furthermore, if then-Senator Clinton’s desire was simply to push Saddam into complying with the inspection process, she wouldn’t have voted against the substitute Levin amendment, which would have also granted President Bush authority to use force, but only if Iraq defied subsequent UN demands regarding the inspections process. Instead, Clinton voted for a Republican-sponsored resolution to give Bush the authority to invade Iraq at the time and circumstances of his own choosing.

In fact, unfettered large-scale weapons inspections had been going on in Iraq for nearly four months at the time the Bush administration launched the March 2003 invasion. Despite the UN weapons inspectors having not found any evidence of WMDs or active WMD programs after months of searching, Clinton made clear that the United States should invade Iraq anyway. Indeed, she asserted that even though Saddam was in full compliance with the UN Security Council, he nevertheless needed to resign as president, leave the country, and allow U.S. troops to occupy the country. “The president gave Saddam Hussein one last chance to avoid war,” Clinton said in a statement, “and the world hopes that Saddam Hussein will finally hear this ultimatum, understand the severity of those words, and act accordingly.”

When Saddam refused to resign and the Bush administration launched the invasion, Clinton went on record calling for “unequivocal support” for Bush’s “firm leadership and decisive action” as “part of the ongoing Global War on Terrorism.” She insisted that Iraq was somehow still “in material breach of the relevant United Nations resolutions” and, despite the fact that weapons inspectors had produced evidence to the contrary, claimed the invasion was necessary to “neutralize Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.”

(more at link)

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18813/the-five-lamest-excuses-for-hillary-clintons-vote-to-invade-iraq