"US budget strikes grant program that saved historic treasures; Effort a favorite of first ladies Clinton and Bush" by Brett Zongker, Associated Press | March 8, 2010
WASHINGTON - As Hillary Rodham Clinton was leaving the White House, she asked Laura Bush, first lady to first lady, to continue one program if nothing else - the historic preservation program Save America’s Treasures.
Bush said she knew about the project and pledged to see it through.
Why not?
There hubbies are best buddies and the father views them both as sons.
Sort of makes that political rhetoric seem like, well, you know, readers.
Now the grant program Clinton created that helped restore the original star-spangled banner, Rosa Parks’s bus, President Lincoln’s summer cottage in Washington, and hundreds of sites across the country is on the current administration’s chopping block.
Not that I don't love history (I was fool enough to major it), but anybody tell these people we are bankrupt?
“The unfortunate thing is we had no warning’’ the program was being wiped out of President Obama’s budget, said Bobbie Greene McCarthy, who has overseen the program at the National Trust for Historic Preservation and was Clinton’s deputy chief of staff. “It was like being hit by a truck.’’
The program has provided nearly $294 million during the past decade to more than 1,100 different sites and generated at least $377 million more in matching funds, according to the National Trust. The National Park Service administers the program, but the nonprofit trust is its chief advocate and helps coordinate applicants.
Hey, that's chump change, right, American?
Historic preservation advocates argue that the program, with its relatively meager federal funding of $30 million annually, has created more than 16,000 jobs across the country at a cost of about $14,000 each. They point out the White House’s federal stimulus package is creating jobs at a cost of $248,000 each.
Yeah, that is why we are calling it Stimuloot here.
And I'm not disagreeable; I would MORE THAN AGREE to PRESERVATION MONEY if the WARS and OCCUPATIONS ENDED and we RECALLED the EMPIRE! Then we would have PLENTY of $$$$!!
At the same time, the program has become a favorite pot of money for members of Congress to fund pet projects through earmarks.
Of course. THAT is why I DO NOT WANT ANY FUNDING for this at all!
Because it is WASTED TAX LOOT that is TRULY BETTER OFF in YOUR POCKET, American!!!
Or it is BORROWED MONEY upon which YOU must PAY INTEREST -- an EVEN WORSE DEAL!
Beggining to understand me now?
GOVERNMENT -- sorry to say it, Americans -- is NOT FOR YOU!!!
Lawmakers have sent home money to restore small-town movie houses and county courthouses.
National Park Service spokesman David Barna said the Interior Department is simply facing a tight budget and wants to reclaim the program’s $30 million for priorities in national parks, which face a $9 billion maintenance backlog.
WTF?
So WHO is STEALING THAT $$$?!!
WTF?!!!!!
“I don’t think it’s fallen out of favor. It’s just a matter of priorities,’’ he said.
Isn't EVERYTHING?!
WAR is the PRIORITY here in AmeriKa, world!
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And the priority for politician$?
I'll give you one gue$$.
NEW YORK — A wealthy Manhattan investment banker who was once a top fund-raiser for Hillary Rodham Clinton and other big-name Democrats pleaded guilty yesterday to bank fraud.
Hassan Nemazee, 60, was arrested last year on charges that he used fake collateral to obtain more than $290 million in loans from major banks.
AS TAXPAYERS were BAILING THEM OUT?
What a SCAM, America!!!
So the BAILOUT FUNDED CAMPAIGNS, too!!!
An indictment accused him of forging signatures, concocting bogus account statements, and establishing “virtual offices’’ to conceal a scam in which he was using proceeds from new loans to pay older ones — a maneuver prosecutors called a Ponzi scheme. He entered his guilty plea at a federal courthouse in Manhattan....
Nemazee was the national finance chairman of Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. He also raised money for President Obama and a long list of other prominent Democrats. He was John F. Kerry’s New York finance chairman during the Massachusetts senator’s failed 2004 presidential run.
Oh, I TOLD YOU THEY STANK as much as Repuglicans!
In 1999, President Clinton nominated Nemazee to be US ambassador to Argentina, but the appointment was never confirmed by the Senate, in part because of concerns about Nemazee’s business dealings.
So EVERYONE KNEW he was a corrupt PoS but he worked the system all through last year, 'eh?
Nemazee, who had been under house arrest in Manhattan while awaiting trial, told the court that the seeds of his crime were planted when he ran into severe financial difficulties in the 1990s and tried to borrow his way out. “As my investments went bad, the hole I dug for myself grew larger,’’ he said.
You would think that the U.S. government would learn, wouldn't you?
Prosecutors suggested a more corrupt motive.
I love a corrupt government casting corruption aspersions, don't you?
Investigators said he used some proceeds of the fraud to buy property in Italy and New York and to make sizable donations to charities, political action committees, and election campaigns.
And you thought you were giving to the candidate!
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FLASHBACKS:
"Clinton boosts chances of US presence at Shanghai Expo; Fund-raising effort has netted $54m for pavilion" by Mark Landler and David Barboza, New York Times | January 3, 2010
WASHINGTON - This time, the cash-starved beneficiary was not her own campaign but the United States, which needed $61 million to finance the construction of a national pavilion at a world’s fair in Shanghai....
She turned to her well-established network of Clinton fund-raisers, and after negotiating with the State Department’s lawyers about what she could legally do herself to support the project, she mounted an ambitious fund-raising campaign that has netted nearly $54 million in barely nine months.
As America's economy goes down the dumper!!!!
With multimillion-dollar pledges from
Despite those restrictions, and a dismal economy, Clinton is closing in on her $61 million goal. She is clearly proud of the effort, which staved off what could have been a rupture in American-Chinese relations.
That's all it took with all the other issues?
Chinese seem a bit naive and easy to please (as well as sensitive), 'eh, America?
So says your racist, divisive, Zionist War Daily anyway.
In a year in which she has mostly worked to prove herself a loyal member of the Obama team, the campaign also showcases her enduring political drawing power....
I assume there will not be a women's rights booth?
By all accounts, the effort to build a national pavilion was near death at the end of the Bush administration. The near-collapse of the global economy, the proximity of the expo to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, and the general ambivalence of the State Department toward these events had left USA Pavilion, the nonprofit group in charge of the project, with little money.
“There is a sense in the US that Americans got disenchanted’’ with world’s fairs, said Nick Winslow, a former Warner Bros. theme park executive who is the president of USA Pavilion.
With deadlines passing, the Chinese advanced the Americans money to conduct technical work for the pavilion. They raised the issue with former president Jimmy Carter when he visited China last January, pressing him to get a message to President Obama. Enter Clinton, who made her first trip as secretary of state to Beijing in February and was eager to talk about trade, climate change, and the North Korean nuclear threat. Instead, she got an earful about how bad it would be if the United States did not have a presence at the expo.
Also see: Clinton's Asian Excursion
I didn't see that reported at the time, NYT.
For the Chinese, the expo is a bookend to the Olympics. Shanghai is spending $45 billion to transform the city, even more than Beijing spent preparing for the games. Nearly 200 countries have signed on to take part, leaving only the United States and Andorra as potential no-shows.
Then we BETTER GO!! That would be a COLOSSAL INSULT to the Chinese!
“I was dumbfounded that so little attention had been paid to it,’’ Clinton said. “Everyone knows China is going to be an enormously powerful player in the 21st century. They have an expo, which is a kind of rite of passage that countries like to do to show they have arrived. We’re not there? What does that say? I mean, it would have been a terrible message.’’
Related: America is losing the free world
The US and China: One Side is Losing, the Other is Winning
China resets terms of engagement in Central Asia
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The last time the United States took part in a world’s fair, in Aichi, Japan, in 2005, half the cost of the national pavilion was underwritten by
Fred Wertheimer, a political fund-raising specialist, said he was satisfied that a difficult situation was handled properly.
“This appears to be an effort by the State Department to deal with a complicated diplomatic problem rather than some kind of inappropriate conduct,’’ he said. “It would have been far better if the US government was able to pay for the activity involved, but that does not appear to have been the case.’’
Why should OVERBURDENED and TAPPED OUT U.S TAXPAYERS pay for this?
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She's working real hard at it, too!!!!
"Barred Indonesian tycoon makes his way back into US; Ties to Clinton scandal had kept him from visiting" by Andrew Higgins, Washington Post | January 10, 2010
JAKARTA, Indonesia - In March 2004, James Riady, an Indonesian tycoon and devout Christian, received an honorary doctorate from Ouachita Baptist University in Arkansas. The university - which has a scholarship program funded by the Indonesian - didn’t announce the honor.
Nor did Riady pick up the degree in person: He’d been barred from America after pleading guilty in 2001 to a “conspiracy to defraud the United States’’ through illegal contributions to the campaigns of Bill Clinton and other Democrats. Last year, however, he finally made it to Arkansas, during the first of two previously unreported trips he made in 2009 to the United States. He was allowed in only after receiving a waiver from a rule forbidding entry to foreigners guilty of “a crime involving moral turpitude.’’
Oh, ISN'T THAT INTERESTING?
Riady’s return poses a prickly question for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s State Department: How and why did a foreign billionaire stained by Clinton-era scandals get a visa after being kept out under the Bush administration?
Here's a clue: $$$$$$
And let's GRIND that WAR AXE again!!
The ethnic Chinese magnate’s ties to the Clintons have been a source of controversy since the late 1990s, when Riady became embroiled in one of the murkiest episodes of the Clinton presidency: a campaign fund-raising scandal that caused a ruckus in Washington amid Republican Party allegations, never proven, of meddling by China’s intelligence services in US politics....
There was a LOT of MURK then, and ABOUT the SPY SCANDAL the Zionist newspaper mentions?
See: Israeli spy ring
Yeah, I NEVER SEE a WORD in my Boston Globe -- and NEVER WILL for as long as that rotting, hulking, diseased and putrid carcass continues to show up on the newsstands.
What articles like this are meant to do is REMIND the GLOBALISTS who has their balls in their pockets. I mean, this is China, the Clintons, and Christians, right -- not Israel, Congress, and AIPAC -- appearing in my Zionist War Daily?
Also see: U.S., Media Settle With Wen Ho Lee
Oh, so it isn't even China, huh, MSM?
Riady, 52, declined to be interviewed but, in an e-mailed response to written questions, said the teachings of Christ “inform all that I do.’’ He said he hadn’t seen the Clintons during his 2009 trips to America but did pay $20,000 to become a member of the Clinton Global Initiative, an annual gathering of prominent figures in politics, business, and philanthropy sponsored by Bill Clinton.
The more I see the terms globalist and new (world) order phrases in the Zionist AmeriKan MSM, the MORE I AM CONVINCED they are ANOTHER LAYER of COVER! First it's the puppet politicians, then it is controlled-opposition that makes the paper, then it is this layer of cover (the NWO) that is a dodge for what appears to have been written in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Weird how that all works out, huh?
A senior State Department official said Hillary Clinton had no knowledge of the decision to let Riady enter the country. He said the embassy in Jakarta issued the visa after Riady asked to travel to America to attend family graduation ceremonies....
So she DOESN'T EVEN KNOW what is happening in her OWN DEPARTMENT, 'eh?
And SO MUCH for WATCH LISTS, 'eh, America?
On his second visit, he went to a September business forum in Boston of Indonesian and American executives. He also registered for a New York meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative. Riady’s e-mail said he wanted to attend because “educational issues were on the agenda’’ but didn’t “because I was unable to fit it into my schedule.’’
Riady’s wide range of activities didn’t violate the terms of his visa, American officials say, but nonetheless caused consternation in the State Department.
No the GETTING CAUGHT and OUTED NOW(?) part is what is bugging them.
Those globalists trying to move away from the Zionist plan?
ANY DEVIATION will do it!! Why this story NOW, huh?
The tycoon, one State Department official said, is free to apply to visit again but “the reality of his past remains a significant obstacle for future travel to the United States.’’
Oooooh, the damage done!
Riady, who trained as an investment banker in New York, met Bill Clinton in 1978 when the Indonesian spent four months in Little Rock, where Riady's conglomerate, Lippo Group, bought a local bank, according to court documents.
Yup, ALWAYS comes back to BANKS, doesn't it?
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