More Previously Restricted Clinton Documents Coming Out Today

It's a drizzly Friday afternoon in Washington before a three-day weekend, and that means one thing - document dump!

According to the AP:

The 10,000 pages of records from the Clinton administration were expected to be released Friday. They touch on the Whitewater investigation into the Bill and Hillary Clinton's land dealings in Arkansas; Bill Clinton's affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky; the 1993 death of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster; and the pardons Bill Clinton granted in his final hours as president.

Watch this site - Clinton Library, previously restricted documents.

This will be the sixth dump of previously restricted Clinton documents. The best tidbits from the last dump were reported on by the WaPo here, back in June.

This new dump looks like it could be more embarrassing for Hillary than previous ones.

Most Eyebrow-Raising Headline of the Week

"Dwarf given children's colouring book by waitress as he ate dinner with his fiancée"

It was only when the waitress heard James's deep voice that she realised her embarrassing blunder - Evening Standard, 10/10/14

White House Denies Surpressing Scandal Investigation Before 2012 Election

Obama donor, Obama, and Obama aide (UK Mail photo)

The young man on the right is not Napoleon Dynamite, by the way. He's actually the son of an Obama contributor and he currently works in the State Department as a teenage Policy Advisor, but maybe not for much longer, depending on how the latest Washington sex-and-politics scandal develops.

Dach posted this photo on Instagram

I see he uses his big boy name of Jonathan on his business card, but he goes by the more age-appropriate "Jonny" in the State Department phone book, and by "darkwingdach" on his Tumblr account, which is called, I kid you not, Let's Get Dangerous.

Dangerous? Have you ever seen a less dangerous-looking individual? I hope the prostitutes in Cartagena have a Kid’s Menu of reduced rates, because that boy should not have been charged full price.

The WaPo explains how Dach-Darkwing-Danger-Dynamite got his job:

Dach’s father, Leslie Dach, is a prominent Democratic donor who gave $23,900 to the party in 2008 to help elect Obama. In his previous job as a top lobbyist for Wal-Mart, he partnered with the White House on high-profile projects, including Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” campaign.

I've discovered that Dach did some work for Michelle's youth fitness campaign himself, as you can see here.

Don't feel sorry for him. His father can always find him a job at Wal-Mart if the Washington thing doesn't work out.

Lydia, Oh Lydia, That Encyclopedia

I found this photo on Twitter (here), and thought it way too good not to share.

That young lady is following in a long tradition of educational body art, something that was celebrated way back in 1939 in a song written by Harold Arlen and Yip "Brother Can you Spare a Dime" Hapburg.

Most Eyebrow-Raising Headline of the Week

"Coast Guard gives WWII vet a Viking funeral at sea" - Navy Times


 
 
 
It took about 20 minutes to burn, he said. The family said some last words, and one crew member read a nautically themed Alfred Lord Tennyson poem, "Crossing the Bar"

Unlike John Kerry, I Do Not Look Good In A Bunny Suit

SecState Kerry, setting a good example in this time of Ebola 

Shall we ban travelers from West Africa from entry into the United States? It seems the inevitable next step in containing the Ebola outbreak. We would not be alone, not by any means.

Saudi Arabia has already refused visas to "more than 7,000 would-be pilgrims from Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone" as well as to anyone who visited those countries recently, according to the Nigerian embassy in Bern. Air France, British Air, and the airlines of some African nations have suspended flights to West Africa.

Why hasn't the U.S. done likewise? And if we did, would that be enough to prevent the importation of more travelers who have been exposed to Ebola?

The NYT is running an opinion piece today by the director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies who points out that there may be over 13,000 holders of U.S. visas from the most affected countries. How would we ban them from entry?

Here's the key paragraph from the Op-Ed piece: Bar People From Areas Affected by Ebola Until Threat Is Over :

The total number of visas issued to citizens of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone is not large relative to other countries. But it’s a large enough group to worry about. Based on State Department nonimmigrant visa issuance statistics [here], I estimate that there are about 5,000 people in Guinea, 5,000 people in Sierra Leone and 3,500 people in Liberia who possess visas to come to the United States today (or who could be in the U.S. right now). Additional steps need to be taken to protect our communities.

The WaPo has chimed in with an article in its Health section that has a hard-core headline (Why hasn’t the U.S. closed its airports to travelers from Ebola-ravaged countries?) but some squishy soft content:

If someone isn't exhibiting symptoms of Ebola, that person is not infectious. And one of the first symptoms of Ebola is a fever. In airports in all of the affected regions and across the world, passengers coming from flights from West Africa are being screened for elevated temperatures.

So, airline passengers are screened for elevated temperature, and so long as they don't seem to have a fever they can board a flight out of the hot zone? What if an infected traveler has taken acetaminophen (Tylenol) or ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin) to lower his fever, like the U.S. National Institutes of Health says it will?

Unless we get serious with travel restrictions and entry screening, more infectious travelers may very well be coming to a city near you.

Utah Man Advocates Violence On Federal Property

Jason "Overwhelming Force" Chaffetz Action Figure

I was going to write up my reaction to yesterday's Oversight Committee hearing on the White House security breach, but then Salon wrote it for me:

The competition for who could make the grander spectacle of themselves was stiff. Rep. John Mica held up an ADT sign and suggested that the Secret Service buy some “inexpensive vegetation” to bolster White House security. Rep. Trey Gowdy cranked his volume knob all the way to eleven and then broke it off. But the winner has to be committee-chair-in-waiting Jason Chaffetz, who demanded to know why, when it comes to fence jumpers, the Secret Service doesn’t use “overwhelming force.”

Exactly so. If you didn't see it live, you can watch the hearing here, on C-Span.

Representative Mica's helpful suggestion to Secret Service Director Pierson was that she reinforce White House security with Spanish Bayonet, a plant that grows in the desert and on sand dunes and which is used as a landscape accent in his home state of Florida. Okay, yeah, thanks.

Representative Gowdy is still the loudest man in Congress. Still annoying, but that's nothing new.

Representative Jason Chaffetz, however, might have broken new ground with his histrionics about wanting "overwhelming force" exerted against any and all White House intruders (no matter how small?). I think he even teared up a little when he said, more than once, that if any Secret Service agent used lethal force "I will have his back." I don't know what he means by that, but he seemed to think it was a muy macho thing to say.

The only grown-up at the hearing was former Secret Service Director Basham, whose opening statement cautioned that, had this latest fence-jumper been shot, the Committee might very well have been grilling Pierson over why her troops killed a mentally disabled veteran who was displaying no obvious weapon. Of course, had that happened, the agent who fired would be reassured to know that Jason Chaffetz will have his back - what does that mean? - while he goes through the criminal, civil, administrative, and personal consequences of using deadly force.

After all the bloodthirsty shouting at that hearing, it seems awfully mild and mundane to go back to the business of the White House's weak perimeter fence. But, there was this interesting article in the WaPo a few days ago in which a National Park Service spokeswoman said that the Secret Service has never given NPS any security standards or criteria for the fence, or even shown any interest in what NPS does with it:

The fence itself is 7 feet 6 inches tall. It is made of evenly spaced iron bars, mounted in a Virginia sandstone base. At the top of the bars — the last physical obstacle between the public sidewalk and the knob on the White House door — are little spear points, called finials.

“We haven’t done any other work since 1965,” said Jenny Anzelmo-Sarles, a spokeswoman for the National Park Service, which owns the fence (the White House is technically located in a national park).

And Anzelmo-Sarles said the Park Service couldn’t remember anyone — the Secret Service, the White House, anyone — asking for the fence to be changed. In fact, the Park Service is in the middle of a project that will repaint the old fence and remove the rust, without changing anything else.

“There’s no sort of tension or anything like that in recent memory” over the design of the fence, she said.

That article was published September 23. I hope there has been some tension between NPS and the Secret Service since then.