Early Onset Clinton Fatigue

By Charles Krauthammer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions
March 12, 2015

She burned the tapes.

Had Richard Nixon burned his tapes, he would have survived Watergate. Sure, there would have been a major firestorm, but no smoking gun. Hillary Rodham was a young staffer on the House Judiciary Committee investigating Nixon. She saw. She learned.

Today you don’t burn tapes. You delete e-mails. Hillary Clinton deleted 30,000, dismissing their destruction with the brilliantly casual: “I didn’t see any reason to keep them.” After all, they were private and personal, she assured everyone.

How do we know that? She says so. Were, say,Clinton Foundation contributions considered personal? No one asked. It’s unlikely we’ll ever know. We have to trust her.

That’s not easy. Not just because of her history — William Safire wrote in 1996 that “Americans of all political persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our first lady . . . is a congenital liar” — but because of what she said in her emergency news conference on Tuesday. Among the things she listed as private were “personal communications from my husband and me.” Except that, as the Wall Street Journal reported the very same day, Bill Clinton’s spokesman said the former president has sent exactly two e-mails in his life, one to John Glenn, the other to U.S. troops in the Adriatic.

Mrs. Clinton’s other major declaration was that the server containing the e-mails — owned, controlled and housed by her — “will remain private.” Meaning: No one will get near them.

This she learned not from Watergate but from Whitewater. Her husband acquiesced to the appointment of a Whitewater special prosecutor. Hillary objected strenuously. Her fear was that once someone is empowered to search, the searcher can roam freely. In the Clintons’ case, it led to impeachment because when the Lewinsky scandal broke, the special prosecutor added that to his portfolio.

Hillary was determined never to permit another open-ended investigation. Which is why she decided even before being confirmed as secretary of state that only she would control her e-mail.

Her pretense for keeping just a single private e-mail account was “convenience.” She doesn’t like to carry around two devices.

But two weeks ago she said she now carries two phones and a total of four devices. Moreover, it takes about a minute to create two accounts on one device. Ray LaHood, while transportation secretary, did exactly that.

Her answers are farcical. Everyone knows she kept the e-mail private for purposes of concealment and, above all, control. For other State Department employees, their e-mails belong to the government. The records officers decide to return to you what’s personal. For Hillary Clinton, she decides.

The point of regulations is to ensure government transparency. The point of owning the server is to ensure opacity. Because she holds the e-mails, all document requests by Congress, by subpoena, by Freedom of Information Act inquiries have ultimately to go through her lawyers, who will stonewall until the end of time — or Election Day 2016, whichever comes first.

It’s a smart political calculation. Taking a few weeks of heat now — it’s only March 2015 — is far less risky than being blown up by some future e-mail discovery. Moreover, around April 1, the Clinton apologists will begin dismissing the whole story as “old news.”

But even if nothing further is found, the damage is done. After all, what is Hillary running on? Her experience and record, say her supporters.

What record? She’s had three major jobs. Secretary of state: Can you name a single achievement in four years? U.S. senator: Can you name a single achievement in eight years? First lady: her one achievement in eight years? Hillarycare, a shipwreck.

In reality, Hillary Clinton is running on two things: gender and name. Gender is not to be underestimated. It will make her the Democratic nominee. The name is equally valuable. It evokes the warm memory of the golden 1990s, a decade of peace and prosperity during our holiday from history.

Now breaking through, however, is a stark reminder of the underside of that Clinton decade: the chicanery, the sleaze, the dodging, the parsing, the wordplay. It’s a dual legacy that Hillary Clinton cannot escape and that will be a permanent drag on her candidacy.

You can feel it. It’s a recurrence of an old ailment. It was bound to set in, but not this soon. What you’re feeling now is Early Onset Clinton Fatigue. The CDC is recommending elaborate precautions. Forget it. The only known cure is Elizabeth Warren.

Read more from Charles Krauthammer’s archive, follow him on Twitter orsubscribe to his updates on Facebook.

Read more on this topic:

The Post’s View: Hillary Clinton’s use of private e-mail reflects poor judgment

E.J. Dionne Jr.: Lessons from Hillary Clinton’s e-mail saga

Ruth Marcus: Hillary Clinton is yet again her own worst enemy

The Post’s View: The public deserves answers, not stonewalling, from Hillary Clinton

Charles Krauthammer: How to do the Benghazi hearings right

Take Daylight Saving Time. Please

Jeff Jacoby | Mar 11, 2015
http://townhall.com/

As a card-carrying American exceptionalist, I don't share the presumption that a US policy should be changed just because it puts America at odds with the prevailing world view. From ultra-free speech to capital punishment to birthright citizenship, America frequently marches to the beat of its own drummer — and that's OK with me.

But that doesn't mean we never err, or that there aren't times when good sense requires pulling the plug on an obsolete practice, and admitting that other nations may have a better approach.

Take Daylight Saving Time. Please.

Last weekend most Americans set their clocks forward, losing an hour and groggily perpetuating a tradition that dates back to the Woodrow Wilson administration — a tradition that should have gone the way of spats and silent movies. Far from a universal custom, Daylight Saving Time is unknown in most of the world. It isn't even observed throughout the United States: Residents of Arizona and Hawaii don't mess with their clocks; neither do inhabitants of Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and the Virgin Islands. A bill moving through the Alaska legislature would liberate the nation's largest state from Daylight Saving Time beginning in 2017.

The primary justification for shifting the clock has always been to save energy. Benjamin Franklin floated the first germ of the idea in 1784, in a humorous essaywritten when he was an ambassador to France. Force people out of bed earlier, he wrote, and what "an immense sum … the city of Paris might save every year, by the economy of using sunshine instead of candles." The first countries to actually adopt the practice were World War I allies Germany and Austria, which enacted a "summer time" law in 1916 to conserve coal. America followed suit in 1918.

To this day, Daylight Saving Time true believers trumpet the supposed energy savings. In a press release last week, Senator Ed Markey hailed a 2008 Department of Energy report that put the impact of the clock change at "$498 million in electricity savings and reduced oil usage of 2.9 million barrels of oil." Markey, who co-authored legislation moving the start of Daylight Saving Time from April to March, is nothing if not consistent: He has cited the same report, and the same statistics, in nearly identical press releases every year since 2009.

But the savings are illusory. Whatever energy is gained from less artificial lighting during the daylight saving months is more than lost by the increase in evening air-conditioner use, and by the boost in driving as motorists take advantage of post-work daylight to go out. When Indiana adopted statewide Daylight Saving Time in 2006, Yale economist Matthew Kotchen found that the "spring forward" hikedelectricity consumption by as much as 4 percent in late summer/early fall. The cost to Indiana ratepayers: an additional $9 million a year.

"A growing body of evidence reveals that Daylight Saving Time increases rather than decreases energy consumption," writes Kotchen, who served in 2013 as deputy assistant secretary for environment and energy at the Treasury Department. Whatever the benefits, "energy savings is not one of them."

Meanwhile, the more scientists learn about sleep disruption, the clearer it becomes that clock-shifting is bad for people's health and well-being. There are higher rates of workplace injuries, cluster headaches,heart attacks, and evensuicides in the week following the onset of Daylight Saving Time. One lost hour of sleep may seem trivial, but the sluggishness it causes comes with a price tag: In 2013, the health effects and lost productivity were estimated to have cost the economy $434 million.

Enough already: Let's join the majority of countries that don't monkey with their clocks. Dump daylight saving! We'd all be better off. And Ed Markey could finally retire that press release.

Why Did Obama Tolerate Hillary’s Use of Secret E-mail?

Thanks to Clinton’s flouting of record-keeping laws, the substance of her communications with the president — on Benghazi, say — remains a mystery.

By Andrew C. McCarthy — March 10, 2015

http://www.nationalreview.com/

Politico is reporting that President Obama knowingly corresponded with then–Secretary of State Hillary Clinton via the latter’s private e-mail address. That does not necessarily mean Obama knew Clinton was systematically flouting administration rules and federal record-keeping law. It does, however, mean he and administration officials had to know she was conducting official business over non-secure, non-government e-mail — even in communicating with the president of the United States; even though the White House claims Obama, as his top aide Valerie Jarrett puts it, “has a very firm policy that e-mails should be kept on government systems”; and even though the president and the State Department forced the resignation of Obama’s ambassador to Kenya, in part over his use of private e-mail to conduct government business.

Four points bear emphasizing.

1. We are not dealing in this scandal with run-of-the-mill federal officials. As Kevin Williamson pointed out in his excellent column over the weekend, President Obama is the head of the executive branch. As a matter of constitutional law, all executive power is reposed in him; his subordinates exercise power only at his indulgence. Similarly, Clinton was the head of the State Department, answering only to the president. As a department head, she was obliged, as a core part of her duties, to enforce compliance with federal laws and administration policies — a big part of which involves personally following them.

As I related in Faithless Execution, the Framers prioritized presidential accountability in designing the Constitution:

Indeed, the main point of having a unitary executive — vesting awesome powers in one president, rather than in an executive committee or in a minister advised by a privy council — was accountability. Ultimately responsible for all executive conduct and unable to deflect blame for wrongdoing, Alexander Hamilton argued, a single president would be amenable “to censure and to punishment.” The future Supreme Court justice James Iredell concurred: the president would be “personally responsible for any abuse of the great trust reposed in him,” a key ingredient in making him “of a very different nature from a monarch.”

In sum, as the chief executive, the president is responsible for any failures or misconduct by his subordinates.

With the help of a sympathetic media, President Obama studiously strikes the pose of a spectator who has no responsibility for the actions of his underlings (or, for that matter, for the negative consequences of his own policies). Clinton takes an “everybody does it” tack in attempting to explain away her derelictions. Even if it is true that many federal employees occasionally break record-keeping rules, “everybody” in government does not systematically operate outside those rules, as Clinton did. But put that aside. The head of a department is not an “everybody.” Even as the former secretary of state is preparing to ask the country to put her in the ultimate leadership position, we are evidently supposed to overlook the deplorable leadership example she set in her last gig.

2. A theme of Clinton’s coming campaign is to be that she is more realistic and hawkish when it comes to America’s enemies than the hard-left Obama Democrats that are the party’s mainstream. In reality, this is nonsense: There is little if any real daylight between Clinton and Obama on foreign and national-security policy — that’s why she lasted four years as secretary of state. But let’s, as Clinton might say, engage in the “willing suspension of disbelief” on that for the moment. What does it say about Clinton’s purported realism about America’s enemies that she would conduct the highest-level government business — matters of life and death — on an unsecure communication system that could be easily hacked by hostile nations that we know spend prodigious amounts of their energy on cyber-espionage?

3. One of the main things we can confidently deduce from the Obama–Clinton private e-mail communications is that what we’ve been hearing the past several days about the president’s insistence on sound record-keeping practices and transparency is so much hot air. If Obama personally and willingly communicated a number of times with then–secretary Clinton via her private e-mail address, then he had reason to know that she was not complying with stated administration policy (and State Department policy) to conduct government business on government e-mail systems. He also had reason to be concerned — if he really cared — that she was violating government record-keeping laws and procedures. (We can’t say he knew for certain because the record-keeping laws allow a federal official to communicate by private e-mail as long as a record is preserved. But, common sense says, the more often and routinely one observes that a government official is using private e-mail, the more likely it becomes that the laws are being flouted.)

Most tellingly on this score: Secretary Clinton plainly knew that the president was not serious about stringent record-keeping and transparency. Otherwise, she would not have dared communicate with him repeatedly by private e-mail — and, of course, he would not have been sending e-mail to her private address.

4. While the wayward communication procedure followed by Clinton and indulged by Obama tells us a great deal, it is not as important as the substance of their communications. As I’ve previously observed, Obama and Clinton clearly knew, from the first minutes of the Benghazi terrorist attack — in which four American officials were killed, including our ambassador to Libya — that it was, in fact, a terrorist attack. Within two hours, they knew that the local al-Qaeda affiliate had claimed credit. Yet, Secretary Clinton put out a deceptive statement shortly after 10 p.m. that night blaming an anti-Muslim video for the violence. That statement was issued only minutes after a phone call between Clinton and Obama — a phone call the White House initiallysaid never happened, changing its story only after Clinton testified about it.

In the weeks that followed, the Obama administration aggressively promoted the fraudulent narrative that the video caused the Benghazi violence and buried the fact that it was a terrorist attack with involvement by al-Qaeda — the organization Obama was then claiming on the campaign trail to have “decimated.” Obama and Clinton even recorded public-service messages for Muslim audiences overseas, implying that the video had caused the attack. Secretary Clinton told Charles Woods, the father of former Navy SEAL Tyrone Woods, who was killed in the Benghazi attack, that the administration would “make sure that the person who made that film is arrested and prosecuted” . . . and soon after, the Justice Department arrested and prosecuted Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the producer of the video, as if he were the real culprit.

It is difficult to imagine anything more potentially relevant to the investigation of the administration’s actions in connection with Benghazi than to explore the substance of all Clinton’s communications by whatever medium — particularly the Obama–Clinton communications — throughout the evening of September 11, 2012, and in the days and weeks that immediately followed.

How can it be that obtaining Clinton’s private e-mails was not a priority for the governmental bodies that have investigated, or are investigating, the Benghazi affair? Not just the House select committee currently tasked with the probe; how, for example, could the House Intelligence Committee have purported to complete an investigation and issue a report without learning of Secretary Clinton’s private e-mail? And, if (as I suspect) the Intelligence Committee did know about the private e-mails, why were we not told about them? How could the State Department’s Accountability Review Board (ARB) — whose mission was to assess the State Department’s performance in connection with Benghazi — not have discovered or reported the fact that the secretary of state was using private e-mail that was not part of the government records?

Oh, that’s right: Secretary Clinton handpicked the ARB, which conveniently chose not to interview her (it’s not like she was an important witness or anything, right?). Meanwhile, her top aides allegedly removed pertinent documents from the files the State Department delivered to the ARB.

How positively . . . Clintonian.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is a policy fellow at the National Review Institute. His latest book is Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment. 

'Endangered:' A Talk With C.J. Box

By Mark Rubinstein
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/
March 9, 2015

C. J. Box is the bestselling author of 16 Joe Pickett novels, four standalone novels, and a collection of short stories called Shots Fired. He's won multiple awards including theEdgar, the Anthony, the Gumshoe, and the Barry awards. He lives with his family outside Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Endangered begins with Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett learning his 18-year old adopted daughter, April, has disappeared. She's found in a ditch along a highway. April, the victim of blunt force trauma, is in a coma. It's uncertain if she will recover. Dallas Cates, the man April ran off with, denies any responsibility; and evidence begins pointing to another man. Joe cannot conceive of the danger he's about to encounter as he tries to unravel the mystery of what happened to April.

How and why did you begin writing fiction?
I always had an interest in writing. All through high school and college, I was associated with the student newspapers. My first job was working for a small weekly newspaper in Wyoming. That's when I really started thinking about writing fiction. My first novel, which later became Open Season, was hatched while I was a newspaper reporter, covering a story about creatures in Wyoming called black-footed ferrets. They were thought to have been extinct, but were discovered at that time. That story played out in a fascinating way, and I used it as the subject matter for my first book.

Who were your earliest reading influences as a youngster?
The first books I can remember reading were Encyclopedia Brown books, a series featuring a boy detective named Leroy Brown. I would go to my local library in Casper, Wyoming and the librarians would locate those books for me from all over the state. Later on, Catch-22 was one of the first huge books I ever read, and I loved it so much, I read it four times. Thomas McGuane is probably my favorite stylist as a writer.

I've learned that until recently, you had a day job, even though your Joe Picket novels have been bestsellers. Tell us about that.
My wife and I co-owned an international tourism marketing company. We had contracts with state government tourism departments in the West, and marketed five states in the Rocky Mountains to Europe and Australia. We had seven offices overseas. We were extensions of state tourism offices. We operated the business for 24 years, and I wrote fiction on a part-time basis.

At what point over those years, did you write and get your first novel published?
I was writing the entire time we worked in marketing. It took 20 years from my first conceiving a novel to having Open Season published. I hoped to have the novel published someday, but was busy running the business. It took five years after I'd completed the novel to get it published.

So you were no stranger to rejections?
I had some very weird experiences. My first agent had the manuscript--this was in the pre-Internet days. I sent him the entire printed manuscript by snail mail. He had it for four years, and said he couldn't sell it. I even stopped calling him since nothing was happening. I went to a writing conference and learned, to my astonishment, my agent had been dead for six months. I had no idea. To this very day, I've never met an editor who saw that original manuscript. So now, I tell people to make sure their agent is young and vibrant. Anyway, I got another agent and the book was sold very soon afterwards.

You've mentioned your "first readers" in Acknowledgments at the end ofEndangered. You've also talked about them at an event last October. Tell us who they are and the role they play in your writing.
The first reader is my wife, Laurie. She's really a good editor and doesn't pull any punches. She does primarily conceptual editing and tells me where I may have gone astray. I bought my three daughters Kindles, so I could e-mail the manuscripts to them. They provide input, too. They're particularly good when it comes to commenting on child and girl characters. They keep me on track and will tell me something like, 'The kid wouldn't say it like that; she'd say it like this...' In one book, my youngest daughter straightened out the text-messaging I wrote. They also do continuity editing. They'll say, 'You used that phrase in the last book.' So, all told, the entire family participates and it's very valuable.

One can't help but notice Joe Pickett is married and has three daughters, as do you. Any similarities between you and Joe?
Not a lot, other than my having been a state employee for a while. I'm familiar with government bureaucracy and how difficult it is at times to do your job. I'm familiar writing about Joe's family situation, dealing with three daughters. (Laughter).

Joe Picket has been on the mystery-thriller scene for 16 books. How has he evolved over the years?
He's definitely evolved. Part of the reason is the books take place in real time. He gets a year older with each novel. He has a much harder view of things now than he did in the first books when he was kind of naïve. He's been in so many difficult situations and has experienced so many betrayals, he's become a bit more cynical as time has gone by. As a reader, I don't like when a series seems frozen in time. You've got to suspend disbelief for a series to work in the first place, but when a character doesn't age and change, it tips things over the top. It loses all credibility. I like the fact that everyone ages a year with each book, and reflects the experiences they had in the previous one.

What do you think makes Joe Picket so appealing even to people unfamiliar with life in the West? 
I like to think it's his fallibility. He's a very real guy who makes mistakes. He's not a superman, by any means. His biggest attribute is tenacity. When he gets into something, he doesn't let it go. He's like a bulldog. But, he's also a family man and a state employee. Readers can relate to him, which makes him kind of unusual in the mystery genre.

I understand the Joe Pickett series may be adapted for television. Tell us about that.
There's a team of producers, including executive producer Robert Redford, trying to get a series on the air. It was almost done with CMT, but that fell through at the eleventh hour. They're still trying to find the right outlet for it.

You've been a successful novelist for years. What about the writing life has surprised you?
I think the biggest surprise has been the success of the Joe Pickett series. My wife and I have done well beyond our wildest dreams. My initial goal was just to get a book published that would be well-received in the Rocky Mountains. I sometimes marvel at the fact that people want to read what I write.

What do you love about the writing life? 
I really enjoy the life. I love working with the people in publishing. They're intelligent and very literate. I enjoy meeting readers who are really into the books. As a writer, I'm something of an entrepreneur. I can create my own work habits, my own hours. I love writing the first draft of a novel. It's exhilarating.

What about writing that first draft do you love? 
What I love about writing the first draft is that it's done with pure joy, and with all the creative juices flowing. Characters are coming alive and things are happening right in front of me. It must be like what a songwriter feels when a catchy hook comes into his head. He knows he must build a whole song around it, but that initial rush must be wonderful.

What about rewriting and revising?
Editing, revising, and copy-reading aren't nearly as much fun as writing the first draft. There's something inspirational about getting the basic story written.

If you could have dinner with five people from any walk of life, living or dead, who would they be?
I know I would want to sit down with Theodore Roosevelt. Another would be Joseph Heller. Then, I'd invite Raymond Chandler. Winston Churchill would be there. He had a strangely similar life path to Theodore Roosevelt's. And then, there would be the rodeo cowboy Bill Pickett. He's the man for whom Joe Pickett is named. He was the first all-around champion of the Cheyenne Frontier Days Rodeo.

What's coming next from C.J. Box?
Two things. In addition to the Joe Pickett series, I just signed a deal with producer David E. Kelley, who wants to create a TV series based on my standalone novels. And, at the end of July, I've got a standalone novel coming out called Badlands. The story takes place during the oil boom in North Dakota.

Congratulations on penning Endangered, a gripping novel about family, commitment, honesty, duplicity, and extreme danger.

Mark Rubinstein
Author of Mad Dog House and Mad Dog Justice

Follow Mark Rubinstein on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mrubinsteinCT

MORE:

WyomingOpen SeasonRobert RedfordFirst DraftRevisionJoseph HellerTheodore RooseveltWinston ChurchillRaymond ChandlerRodeo

Clinton Inc. is what’s wrong with America

By Mark Cunningham

http://nypost.com/

March 8, 2015

Collateral beneficiaries? Top Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin not only got a private clintonemail.com account, she got a waiver that allowed consulting payments to her and her hubby, former Rep. Anthony Weiner. (AP)

Here’s the bottom line of the latest HillaryWorld scandals: Clinton Inc. embodies what’s wrong with America.

It’s about getting stinking rich from the inside connections forged in a life of public service.

It’s about using your “charity” and your high government office as adjuncts of your political machine.

It’s about refusing to play by the rules even as you want to set the rules for everyone else.

Start with the latest shocker, the email lunacy. You don’t get to keep your government work a secret from the government.

Anyone with a regular job gets it: Your work product belongs to the folks who sign your paycheck. How can that not be even more obvious when the signature is Uncle Sam’s?

That the question never occurred to Hillary is just one more sign of her overinflated sense of entitlement — as is the fact that she set the whole thing up right when she was taking the job.

And that none of her staff at State ever raised a question tells you what a pack of flunkies she gathered ’round herself.

(I mean, she installed the private email server in her home. Who, other than exiled Nigerian princes looking for our help, does that?)

Nor was that the only rule-for-everyone-else that Hillary blew through at State.

The email revelation came atop the news that, despite previous denials, the Clinton Foundation took in countless millions from foreign sources while she ran the State Department.

No one’s even bothered to ask yet about the cash the foundation raised while she served in the Senate.

What, indeed, to make of the entire nonstop flow of corporate and foreign money over all the years since her better half left office, when she’s plainly been the single person in America most likely to someday become president?

The Clinton Foundation doubtless does much good work — but it also serves to shield from public view the transfer of endless cash from around the world to the Clintons’ control.

Fine, plenty of politicians, especially here in New York, use nonprofits to advance their careers. But “legal” nonprofit abuse remains one of the great ongoing scandals of New York government.

And the Clinton Foundation reeks of the same insider dealing — operating on a global scale.

The New York Times, to its credit, outlined more than a year ago how the Clintons have used the foundation to pay their operatives between campaigns — all without any need for those awkward Federal Election Commission filings.

The Times and others have also noted how the foundation blurs with Bill Clinton’s murky business work — the consulting jobs that have made Bill and Hillary rich despite leaving the White House “dead broke.”

Look, the Clintons were going to do fine no matter what after Bill left the White House: Book deals, speaking fees, a few beyond-reproach corporate-board memberships would be enough to cover their legal bills and leave them comfortably in the 1 percent.

They could’ve even set up a charity — Jimmy Carter did great work through Habitat for Humanity after his presidency.

Instead, they just had to set up something new and messy — something that would let them leverage their connections into a whole new machinery of power and influence.

And they couldn’t even be bothered to cut off some of the cash flow to avoid blatant conflicts of interest with her ongoing “public service.”

And we’re still not done with Hillary’s rule-shredding at State. She also selflessly ensured that her protégés didn’t leave their government service dead broke.

Secretary Hillary granted waivers so her top State councilors could work on the side as consultants.

Her closest aide, Huma Abedin, apparently pulled down $135,000 from Uncle Sam for her work at State while “earning” $355,000 as a consultant for outside interests.

Actually, half the 355 grand was paid to Mr. Abedin, a k a Anthony Wiener, a k a Carlos Danger, who was himself making big bucks as a consultant.

Now, maybe some of those payments were “investments” in case Tony recovered from his (first) pervert-Twitter scandal and became New York’s mayor. But “work” sent his way would also help out Huma, and so earn points with Hillary.

Huma, incidentally, was one of the select few also granted a clintonemail.com account. Which means the only official records of Hillary’s on-the-job correspondence with her closest aide are those emails that HillaryWorld now chooses to share.

It’s all just a big, stinking ball of taking care of yourselves while you do the people’s business.

The great irony here is last month’s news from the Washington Post: Hillary’s consultants are busy working out her themes for 2016. Apparently, a big one is going to be “pushing for economic fairness.”

Henhouse, meet fox.

FILED UNDER BILL CLINTON ,  HILLARY CLINTON ,  HUMA ABEDIN

How can Jim Boeheim keep his job?

Christine Brennan, USA TODAY Sports

http://www.usatoday.com/sports/

March 6, 2015

Nate Shron/Getty Images

You look at the laundry list of embarrassing and illegal decisions made by Jim Boeheim's Syracuse men's basketball program for more than a decade, then hear that the NCAA suspended him for nine ACC games next year, and you have to wonder:

How in the world is this man going to keep his job?

He will, of course, because Syracuse loves basketball more than life itself, and Boeheim probably more than basketball, but that doesn't make it right.

What was happening on Boeheim's watch should be appalling to anyone who still cares about the rules in college sports, if any of those people still exist. It also wasn't just one thing, or two. It was more than 10 years of things, lots of things, all of which fall under the umbrella of cheating.

Here are a few of the highlights:

From 2001 to early 2009, Syracuse did not follow its written drug-testing policies as required by the NCAA. You'll love the excuse. Athletics director Daryl Gross admitted they didn't follow the policy, and here's why: "The department followed an 'unwritten policy' because the written policy was confusing."

"Confusing?" How did Lance Armstrong not figure out how to use that excuse?

The confusion led to a result that should stun no one: Players who tested positive for drugs on more than one occasion were allowed to participate in practices and games, which obviously was in direct violation of the drug-testing policy.

Let's move to what we might loosely call academics. In January 2012, two basketball staff members – a receptionist and the director of men's basketball operations – completed coursework for an academically ineligible basketball player in order to restore his eligibility.

Ironically, the NCAA said, Boeheim handpicked the director of basketball operations to address academic matters in the program.

And the receptionist? From 2010-2012, that person and a team tutor "made revisions (and) created or wrote assignments" for three men's basketball players.

There also were illegal benefits given to two basketball players and three football players. After encouragement from the basketball staff, those players developed relationships with a booster who gave $8,335 in cash to the players after they "volunteered" at a local YMCA. The booster also gave money to basketball staff members for appearing at YMCA events which was not reported to the school as outside income or supplemental pay in violation of NCAA rules.

What's more, three of the athletes received academic credit in the same course for internships at the YMCA that they did not complete. Eventually, Syracuse rescinded the credit.

Rescinding the memory of this pathetic charade hopefully will take more time.

All in all, it was a decade of utter embarrassment for 70-year-old Boeheim, one of the most accomplished men's basketball coaches of our time.

"During the 10-year period of violations, the head basketball coach did not promote an atmosphere of compliance within his program and did not monitor the activities of those who reported to him as they related to academics and booster involvement," the NCAA said Friday. "Although the head basketball coach cited NCAA rules meetings with compliance staff and other initiatives, he operated under assumptions and did not follow up with his staff and students to ensure compliance."

We all know many people are disgusted with the NCAA and probably won't pay much attention to what it says, even when it's doing the job it's supposed to do, as in situations such as this.

But when will some of those people feel the same way about this kind of longtime, systemic cheating by someone who way too many people still idolize?