“This May Shock You: Hillary Clinton Is Fundamentally Honest”: It’s A Double Standard To Insist On Her Purity
It’s impossible to miss the “Hillary for Prison” signs at Trump rallies. At one of the Democratic debates, the moderator asked Hillary Clinton whether she would drop out of the race if she were indicted over her private email server. “Oh for goodness – that is not going to happen,” she said. “I’m not even going to answer that question.”
Based on what I know about the emails, the idea of her being indicted or going to prison is nonsensical. Nonetheless, the belief that Clinton is dishonest and untrustworthy is pervasive. A recent New York Times-CBS poll found that 40% of Democrats say she cannot be trusted.
For decades she’s been portrayed as a Lady Macbeth involved in nefarious plots, branded as “a congenital liar” and accused of covering up her husband’s misconduct, from Arkansas to Monica Lewinsky. Some of this is sexist caricature. Some is stoked by the “Hillary is a liar” videos that flood Facebook feeds. Some of it she brings on herself by insisting on a perimeter or “zone of privacy” that she protects too fiercely. It’s a natural impulse, given the level of scrutiny she’s attracted, more than any male politician I can think of.
I would be “dead rich”, to adapt an infamous Clinton phrase, if I could bill for all the hours I’ve spent covering just about every “scandal” that has enveloped the Clintons. As an editor I’ve launched investigations into her business dealings, her fundraising, her foundation and her marriage. As a reporter my stories stretch back to Whitewater. I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland. That makes what I want to say next surprising.
Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy.
The yardsticks I use for measuring a politician’s honesty are pretty simple. Ever since I was an investigative reporter covering the nexus of money and politics, I’ve looked for connections between money (including campaign donations, loans, Super Pac funds, speaking fees, foundation ties) and official actions. I’m on the lookout for lies, scrutinizing statements candidates make in the heat of an election.
The connection between money and action is often fuzzy. Many investigative articles about Clinton end up “raising serious questions” about “potential” conflicts of interest or lapses in her judgment. Of course, she should be held accountable. It was bad judgment, as she has said, to use a private email server. It was colossally stupid to take those hefty speaking fees, but not corrupt. There are no instances I know of where Clinton was doing the bidding of a donor or benefactor.
As for her statements on issues, Politifact, a Pulitzer prize-winning fact-checking organization, gives Clinton the best truth-telling record of any of the 2016 presidential candidates. She beats Sanders and Kasich and crushes Cruz and Trump, who has the biggest “pants on fire” rating and has told whoppers about basic economics that are embarrassing for anyone aiming to be president. (He falsely claimed GDP has dropped the last two quarters and claimed the national unemployment rate was as high as 35%).
I can see why so many voters believe Clinton is hiding something because her instinct is to withhold. As first lady, she refused to turn over Whitewater documents that might have tamped down the controversy. Instead, by not disclosing information, she fueled speculation that she was hiding grave wrongdoing. In his book about his time working in the Clinton White House, All Too Human, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos wrote that failing to convince the first lady to turn over the records of the Arkansas land deal to the Washington Post was his biggest regret.
The same pattern of concealment repeats itself through the current campaign in her refusal to release the transcripts of her highly paid speeches. So the public is left wondering if she made secret promises to Wall Street or is hiding something else. The speeches are probably anodyne (politicians always praise their hosts), so why not release them?
Colin Diersing, a former student of mine who is a leader of Harvard’s Institute of Politics, thinks a gender-related double standard gets applied to Clinton. “We expect purity from women candidates,” he said. When she behaves like other politicians or changes positions, “it’s seen as dishonest”, he adds. CBS anchor Scott Pelley seemed to prove Diersing’s point when he asked Clinton: “Have you always told the truth?” She gave an honest response, “I’ve always tried to, always. Always.” Pelley said she was leaving “wiggle room”. What politician wouldn’t?
Clinton distrusts the press more than any politician I have covered. In her view, journalists breach the perimeter and echo scurrilous claims about her circulated by unreliable rightwing foes. I attended a private gathering in South Carolina a month after Bill Clinton was elected in 1992. Only a few reporters were invited and we sat together at a luncheon where Hillary Clinton spoke. She glared down at us, launching into a diatribe about how the press had invaded the Clintons’ private life. The distrust continues.
These are not new thoughts, but they are fundamental to understanding her. Tough as she can seem, she doesn’t have rhino hide, and during her husband’s first term in the White House, according to Her Way, a critical (and excellent) investigative biography of Clinton by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta, she became very depressed during the Whitewater imbroglio. A few friends and aides have told me that the email controversy has upset her as badly.
Like most politicians, she’s switched some of her positions and sometimes shades the truth. In debates with Sanders, she cites her tough record on Wall Street, but her Senate bills, like one curbing executive pay, went nowhere. She favors ending the carried interest loophole cherished by hedge funds and private equity executives because it taxes their incomes at a lower rate than ordinary income. But, according to an article by Gerth, she did not sign on to bipartisan legislation in 2007 that would have closed it. She voted for a bankruptcy bill favored by big banks that she initially opposed, drawing criticism from Elizabeth Warren. Clinton says she improved the bill before voting for passage. Her earlier opposition to gay marriage, which she later endorsed, has hurt her with young people. Labor worries about her different statements on trade deals.
Still, Clinton has mainly been constant on issues and changing positions over time is not dishonest.
It’s fair to expect more transparency. But it’s a double standard to insist on her purity.
By: Jill Abramson, The Guardian, March 28, 2016
“Leader Of The Leave-Me-The-Hell-Alone Coalition”: Rand Paul Is Fighting For Your Privacy—Unless You’re A Woman
“The right to be left alone is the most cherished of rights,” Kentucky senator and presidential aspirant Rand Paul said over the weekend in San Francisco. He was there to sell himself to the young tech elite as a civil-liberties crusader; the only candidate willing to take an uncompromising stand against government surveillance. He cares so deeply about privacy that he’s planning to filibuster the renewal of parts of the Patriot Act.
But the leader of “the leave-me-the-hell-alone coalition” is simultaneously, albeit more quietly, arguing that women should have little privacy in their healthcare decisions. “The government does have some role in our lives,” Paul said at a summit organized by the anti-choice Susan B Anthony List in April, by which he meant making abortion illegal. Paul describes himself as “100 percent pro-life.” Along with all of the other Republican presidential candidates he supports a bill that resurfaced this week in the House that would ban abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy.
Recently Paul has become something of a champion for anti-abortion groups that are trying to reframe the abortion debate so that pro-choice views seem extreme. Pressed by reporters last month to clarify whether his support for abortion bans includes exceptions, Paul deflected the question by calling up the specter of late-term abortions. “Why don’t we ask the DNC: Is it OK to kill a seven-pound baby in the uterus?” he said to a New Hampshire journalist. No matter that only 1 percent of abortions in the United States occur after 21 weeks of pregnancy; claiming Democrats endorse the “killing” of babies is an easy way not to account for his selective support for personal liberty.
Paul’s hypocrisy isn’t new. Indeed, one of the long-standing ironies of American politics is that the people who decry government meddling in, say, healthcare are the ones calling most vociferously for the government to step in to regulate women’s bodies. As Katha Pollitt noted in Pro, conservatives like Paul never would propose to restrict access to guns, despite the tens of thousands of deaths caused by gun violence in the United States each year. Only when it comes to women does “life” trump individual freedom.
It’s still worth pointing out how inconsistent Paul’s advocacy for civil liberties is (and on issues beyond abortion), since that’s the platform he’s using to distinguish himself. If Paul really believed in “the right to be left alone,” he’d demand that women be allowed as much control over their bodies as their phone records.
By: Zoe Carpenter, The Nation, May 12, 2015
“The Internet Of Every Damn Thing”: Face It, Personal Gadgetry Tied To The Internet Is Selling Data About Your Habits To Businesses
Federal Trade Commission head Edith Ramirez put the matter plainly: “If I’m wearing a fitness band that tracks how many calories I consume, I wouldn’t want to share that data with an insurance company.”
In a study last year, the FTC found that 12 mobile fitness apps shared information with 76 enterprises. Face it; personal gadgetry tied to the Internet is selling data about your habits to businesses — and in ways you have no idea about.
These devices now range from home burglar alerts to apps that turn off the porch light to toothbrushes. As of this year, there will be 25 billion such things.
Hence, the FTC has just suggested some guidelines for neat but sneaky gear. They’re in a new report, titled “Internet of Things: Privacy & Security in a Connected World.”
I’d sort of given up on the privacy part. The choices have become so complex that I apply a simple rule. Anything I absolutely don’t want the world to see, I don’t put online. Period.
My Facebook friends know they will never see a look-what-I-just-bought post. As for my Web surfing, my life is not an open book, but if someone should disclose my interests, I’d be OK. I have an excuse for everything.
The potential problems arise with those very useful apps that need my personal information to do their job. Sure, I want Google Maps to know where I am. And if I had some serious medical condition, I’d want a monitoring device communicating with my doctor. But there’s a dark side: Some evil being could invade this data flow and change the medical settings.
I don’t see why my movie ticket app should always know my whereabouts. Fandango gives us two choices on giving it access to our location. One is “Never,” and the other is “Always. Access to your location will be available even when this app is in the background.”
Fandango thoughtfully provides a five-page privacy policy written in fluent legalese. It includes a discourse on its use of “Pixel Tags,” invisible files on the Web pages you visit. The point is that few consumers wade through these privacy policies, and even fewer have the faintest idea what they’re talking about.
The electric company sends me reports on my energy use and how it compares with that of neighbors. My most virtuous months seem to be those in which I’m not at home. My vacation schedule is unbeknownst to the company, I hope.
The FTC report calls for new rules governing the sort of information Internet-connected devices may collect, how it is used and how secure it is. This is a valiant effort, and I wish the regulators luck. But if hackers can break in to movie stars’ private photo files, what can we realistically do to protect our secret stashes from prying eyes?
Smartphone sensors can already guess a user’s sour mood, aggressive personality, pathetically low level of physical activity, sleeping difficulties and other behavioral patterns. And such snooping is perfectly legal.
In the end, consumers will have to decide: How much is the convenience of turning up the heat at home before leaving the office worth? What drives me nuts is all the thinking and research we have to do in balancing the trade-offs — and the attention that must be paid to various app settings.
The only current solution is to unscrew what you want kept private from the Internet. If you’ve forgotten how to use paper, you can put the information on a device not connected to the Internet — and then trip over the plug. Five minutes spent on some app’s privacy policy may convince you of the wisdom of primitive living.
By: Froma Harrop, The National Memo, February 29, 2015
“Invasive And Humiliating”: Court Deals Blow To Drug Testing Of Florida Welfare Recipients
A federal appeals court on Wednesday upheld a lower federal court ruling that Florida Gov. Rick Scott’s crusade to conduct drug tests on welfare recipients as a condition of their benefits was unconstitutional.
The unanimous ruling came from a bipartisan panel of judges and broadly concluded that people cannot be forced to surrender their constitutional rights as a condition of receiving a government benefit. The decision came just two weeks after the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judges heard arguments in the case.
In an exhaustive, 54-page ruling, Judge Stanley Marcus concluded that “citizens do not abandon all hope of privacy by applying for government assistance.” He said that “the collection and testing of urine intrudes upon expectations of privacy that society has long recognized as reasonable” and that “by virtue of poverty, TANF applicants are not stripped of their legitimate expectations of privacy.”
In 2011, Scott initiated a program to require drug testing as a condition for welfare applicants to receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits. The ACLU sued the state on behalf of Luis Lebron, a Navy veteran and single father.
In a statement, Maria Kayanan, ACLU of Florida associate legal director, said she was “pleased” by the court’s opinion.
“This is a resounding affirmation of the values that the Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects — that none of us can be forced to submit to invasive and humiliating searches at the whim of the government, and that the Constitution protects the poor and the wealthy alike,” she said.
A circuit court judge ruled in 2013 that the program was an unconstitutional violation of the 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, and halted testing. Scott appealed to the federal appeals court and a hearing was held Nov. 20.
The Florida Department of Children and Families had argued that the drug tests were warranted for all TANF recipients because the state had an interest in protecting children of welfare recipients who were using drugs. But Marcus concluded that “the State has presented no evidence that children of TANF parents face a danger or harm from drug use that is different from the general threat to all children in all families. After all, the State acknowledges that drug use harms all individuals and families, but the State does not — and cannot — claim an entitlement to drug test all parents of all children.”
In a separate case, Marcus wrote the opinion that struck down Scott’s attempt to randomly test state workers for drugs. Scott has considered appealing that ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court after removing from the list about half of the state’s classes of workers who would be eligible for drug screening.
By: Mary Ellen Klas, The Miami Herald (TNS); The National Memo, December 3, 2014
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