Archive for the ‘Hillary Clinton’ Category

In past speeches, Hillary Clinton talked of figurative glass ceiling, not … – PolitiFact

Clips from two speeches by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appear in a video circulating social media as evidence that Earth is flat and humans live under a glass dome.

In the first speech, from June 2008, when Clinton conceded the Democratic presidential nomination to former President Barack Obama, she said: "Although we werent able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, its got about 18 million cracks in it."

In the second speech, from June 2016, after Clinton clinched that Democratic presidential nomination, she said: "It may be hard to see tonight, but we are all standing under a glass ceiling right now."

"Hilary Clinton mentions the Glass Dome Firmament," reads text flanking the video in an April 2 Instagram post, misspelling Clintons first name.

"Hilary Clinton knows we live under a glass dome," the post says, using hashtags connected to unfounded conspiracy theories like #fakemoonlanding #spaceisfake and #flatearth.

This post was flagged as part of Facebooks efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

First, some helpful background for those unacquainted with flat Earth-speak. Some people who believe that the Earth is flat think its under a dome. In a 2020 interview with Scientific American, Michael Marshall, project director of the Good Thinking Society, a United Kingdom-based charity that aims "to promote science to challenge pseudoscience," said the idea that the Earth is a disc housed under a dome "goes back to the biblical idea of the firmament from and being the roof on top of the world."

But its clear from the context of these video clips that Clinton isnt suggesting Earth is flat, or discussing a glass dome. Shes alluding to challenges women face, often in their professional lives.

The phrase "glass ceiling" was first used by workplace advocate Marilyn Loden at a womens business conference in 1978, and it became a metaphor for the struggles women encounter as they try to progress in their careers.

Loden spoke about how her company had tapped her to explore why more women werent entering management positions, The Washington Post reported in 2018, and "she had gathered enough data that she felt confident the problem extended beyond what her colleagues were wearing or saying."

The paper quoted Loden saying that "it seemed to me there was an invisible barrier to advancement that people didn't recognize" the glass ceiling."

We previously fact-checked another claim that Clinton was discussing a glass dome over Earth iwhen she conceded the 2016 presidential election to former President Donald Trump. She was, of course, still referring to the "glass ceiling" women encounter in society.

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In past speeches, Hillary Clinton talked of figurative glass ceiling, not ... - PolitiFact

Hillary Clinton to honour women who ‘made sacrifices for peace’ in … – The Irish Times

Twenty-five women who made a significant contribution to peace in Northern Ireland and around the world are to be honoured by Hillary Clinton.

The former US secretary of state, who is now the chancellor of Queens University Belfast, will present them with the Chancellors Medal for Civic Leadership as part of events marking the 25th anniversary of the Belfast Agreement.

The awards aim to recognise those who sat at the negotiating table, who broke glass ceilings, who supported the community and who made sacrifices for peace.

Recipients include former presidents Mary McAleese and Mary Robinson; former first minister Arlene Foster; Judith Gillespie, who was the Norths most senior woman police officer; and Northern Irelands first Lady Chief Justice, Siobhan Keegan.

Also recognised is US ambassador Nancy Soderberg, former police ombudsman Nuala OLoan and former minister Liz ODonnell.

Dr Mo Mowlam, Baroness May Blood and Lyra McKee will receive posthumous awards.

The former first lady, who previously visited Northern Ireland with her husband, former US president Bill Clinton, said that for a long time, we saw politics being played out by men, and men only.

When I visited in 1995, I saw at first-hand how the women on the ground were making an indelible mark and helping shape the peace process in a variety of ways.

I am so pleased that these awards fully recognise the commitment, skills and determination of a diverse group of women, from across the political and civic spectrum, who helped secure and drive forward peace on this island.

Congratulating the recipients, she said she was pleased to recognise all of you, I am proud of your impact and I am thankful for what you have done.

Queens University Belfast vice-chancellor, Prof Ian Greer, said the impact of these 25 inspirational women has had and will continue to have a lasting effect on life here.

The university is also to award honorary degrees to a number of women who contributed to the peace process, including Pat Hume and Daphne Trimble.

Former US ambassador-at-large for global womens issues, Melanne Verveer, and Martha Pope, former secretary of the US Senate and deputy to senator George Mitchell during the agreement talks, will also receive honorary degrees during the conference to be held at the university to mark the 25th anniversary of the agreement which will take place from April 17th to 19th.

A number of high-profile current and former politicians, including the Clintons, Mr Mitchell, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, are expected to attend.

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Hillary Clinton to honour women who 'made sacrifices for peace' in ... - The Irish Times

Politicians dont cry in this video, despite the captions promise of … – PolitiFact

A video drawing Facebook views sounds star-studded, politically speaking, if you believe the posts caption.

It promises starring roles from FBI Director Christopher Wray; U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio; Peter Strzok, the former FBI agent who was fired over text messages critical of former President Donald Trump; and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who the caption claims cant quite keep it together.

"CR.O.WED E.R.U.PTS as Jim Jordan drives Wray to SH0CKING charing Strzok decisionClinton cries," the March 25 post says.

It was flagged as part of Facebooks efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

First of all, this video is more than 5 years old.

Its a clip of a December 2017 House Judiciary Committee hearing about FBI oversight. Jordan questioned Wray about Strzok, but the hearing didn't end with Wray deciding to charge Strzok. No crowd erupts. And Clinton is not even there.

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Politicians dont cry in this video, despite the captions promise of ... - PolitiFact

Into the abyss – Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Perhaps the rarest creatures in American politics are those who can accept that our political order might be designed, and reasonably so, to thwart what their hearts desire.

That it is, for instance, possible to support legal access to abortion but also accept that there isn't really a right to it in the Constitution, or to oppose capital punishment but also accept that the Constitution as written clearly permits it, or to support particular gun-control laws but also accept that some of which is proposed in that area is inconsistent with an honest reading of the Second Amendment.

The absence of such conflicted (and thus reasonable) thinking was especially evident in the reaction to the indictment of Donald Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg--most of which has been based on what one thinks of Trump, not the merits of the legal case brought against him, as if that which should matter most matters not at all.

If you opposed Trump, then the indictment was justified, if you support him, it wasn't.

But, again, it is possible to hold two ideas at the same time; in this case, and given the circumstances and facts as we so far know them, perhaps necessary: to both despise Trump and also believe that his indictment constitutes a spectacular abuse of prosecutorial power.

It becomes virtually impossible for those who hate Trump to acknowledge that the case against him in New York is an exceedingly dubious one, because what matters is Trump, not the case.

Since Trump is deplorable, any legal indictment of him must be justified, whatever the particulars. So goes what passes for the logic.

Many of the same folks who (appropriately) condemned "Lock Her Up" when directed at Hillary Clinton (containing as it did the banana-republic suggestion that the law should be used against your political opponents), now seem to have no problem with the concept when directed at Trump (even though an objective observer could plausibly conclude that Clinton's alleged legal transgressions regarding her email server and classified material were of greater consequence than Trump's alleged falsification of business records as part of a hush-money payment).

Charles Lipson, writing in The Spectator U.S., effectively summarizes Bragg's approach when noting, "He had to do it with the thinnest of evidence, the weakest of legal theories. He focused on a misdemeanor for which the statute of limitations has expired. Using a novel legal theory, he wants to tie that misdemeanor to other alleged crimes and package them all as a felony. ... That's not how our justice system is supposed to work. Prosecutors are not supposed to begin with the target and then look for a crime."

Indeed, perhaps the most damning evidence that Bragg's indictment constitutes a case of politicized justice was the fact that an array of far more seasoned federal prosecutors as well as the Federal Election Commission (FEC) examined the same evidence and concluded there were insufficient grounds to justify even one count at the misdemeanor level, but Bragg, who had been elected on a promise to get Trump, lest we forget, was able to somehow find no less than 34 felony counts.

Sheer quantity is thus apparently expected to create the kind of perception of guilt in the public eye that quality and actual legal merit can't.

All of which brings us back to the degree to which an ugly "ends justify the means" dynamic has overtaken our politics in the Trump age, in which the unsavoriness of Trump has provoked a similarly unsavory resistance; to the point where just about any means can be justified in bringing him down, even if it means undermining the integrity of our criminal justice system in the process.

It is possible that the only thing which has threatened our democracy more in recent years than Trump has been the response to him, and Alvin Bragg has now taken that response into genuinely dangerous uncharted territory.

The idea that one party can legally target a former president (and, in Trump's case, also declared candidate for president) of the other party without reciprocity is the epitome of shortsightedness and navete.

The age of hyper-polarization and tribalism thus threatens to bring us a new normal consisting of serial impeachments and criminal indictments of presidents, current and former.

Yes, cleansing the body politic of the menace Trump is important, but how we go about it, and whether those methods preserve the cherished principles of our political order, matters even more.

Trump in that sense isn't so much a threat to the rule of law as a test of our commitment to it.

The great irony in all this is that the Manhattan D.A., having cut in line with the flimsiest of cases, will now make it politically more difficult to prosecute Trump on other, potentially stronger and more significant ones (including possible mishandling of classified documents and encouragement of election fraud in Georgia).

Additional irony is found in the spectacle of a prosecutor with a reputation for being "soft" on crime finally deciding to prosecute someone.

That that someone is Donald Trump is the only thing which explains it all.

Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

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Into the abyss - Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

The Truth That Dare Not Be Uttered About Trump – The New York Sun

The reason the United States reached its present astonishing condition is that a not wholly inadequate but complacent bipartisan consensus was moving the country slowly to the left and appeared to a large number of citizens to be favoring the educated middle-class and the scientifically and financially innovative higher income groups over the traditional working and middle classes and substantial numbers of the traditional minorities.

For some unexplained reason, few of the polls disclosed the vulnerability of the bipartisan governing majority. Donald Trump, long one of Americas most famous and controversial businessmen and celebrities, had been polling comprehensively for many years by 2015. He had developed the theory, after a near-death financial experience, that he could generate a large income by levering on and hyping his own name.

This process was commercially successful, and he suspected that it could be politically successful, also. To this end, he changed his official party designation seven times in 13 years waiting for an opportunity to take an open nomination in a year when the White House would not be defended by an incumbent president.

All will remember the howls of mockery and incredulity that greeted his descent on the escalator at Trump Tower in June 2015 to announce his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. It became clear as soon as the primaries began that he had tapped into an unsuspected vein of electoral resentment.

The bipartisan arrangement that Mr. Trump called the swamp is best illustrated by the fact that in the eight terms, 32 years, ending in 2012, one member or another of the Bush and Clinton families had been president, vice president, or Secretary of State, and a member of each family was seeking the presidency in 2016.

Mr. Trump won almost all of the Republican primaries in every region, but incredulity rose and defied unfolding events. The Republican Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, wrote of dropping him like a hot rock. The Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, was the overwhelming favorite to win even though the polls started fairly close and narrowed steadily toward election day.

As Mr. Trump alleged in his powerful and measured speech on the evening of April 4, after his indictment, Mr. Trumps enemies had begun even before he was inaugurated, the unconstitutional process of using the intelligence agencies, the FBI, and other parts of the Justice Department to persecute and defame him.

We now know that the heads of the national and central intelligence agencies and the FBI lied or dissembled under oath and that senior officials of the Justice Department knowingly signed false affidavits to justify illegal intercepts on the Trump campaign and transition team. We now know that the strenuous effort to pretend that concerns about the Biden familys financial relations with Ukraine and China were unfounded was an outright fraud that was conducted even though a grand jury had been investigating the same matters for many months.

We now know that President Biden has lied repeatedly to the public about his knowledge of these activities. The failure of the United States attorney in Delaware to produce any findings at all on an investigation of more than three years into the Biden familys questionable finances is as disquieting about the failure of justice to operate impartially as is its failure to be roused to any action at all about then candidate Hillary Clintons destruction of subpoenaed evidence.

We now know that neither President Trump nor his organization had any involvement in encouraging illegalities at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. We also know that then-Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and Mayor Bowser of the District of Columbia declined President Trumps urgings that they accept 20,000 national guardsmen that he was prepared to provide as reinforcements because of his concern that hooligans could infiltrate the large crowd of his supporters that he had invited to Washington to object legally to voting irregularities in the late election.

We now know that both of the Trump impeachments were completely unwarranted. We also know that it is unlikely that he would have been defeated in the 2020 election if there were not millions of unverifiable, unsolicited, mailed ballots voted anonymously in drop boxes; or that he would have been defeated if the publics awareness of the proportions of the Bidens overseas financial dealings had not been improperly suppressed by the FBIs partisan collusion with major social media platforms.

We now know how feeble and frivolous is the New York district attorneys spurious indictment of Mr. Trump and we know, because Mr. Trump told us, that the special counsel looking into the preposterous FBI raid at Trumps home in August and the classified document incident that was invoked as the pretext for it, and into the January 6, 2021 events, is engaging in the United States prosecutors customary threat to indict those who do not, with full guarantees against prosecution for perjury, ransack their memories successfully to find inculpatory evidence against the former president.

It is all a disgraceful picture of systematic lawlessness by one of two national political factions of almost equal strength against the other: an act of usurpation and perversion of the institutions of justice accompanied by a total collapse of professionalism and integrity in the national political media, all with no precedent in American history.

His supporters, and the few uncommitted people in the middle, are deeply concerned that this abuse of the justice system and failure of the free press could destroy constitutional government in the United States.

The only positive elements in this crisis are that the vigorous reaction of the old establishment shows that it is not decadent and easily defeated: it has fought tooth and nail with an early and constant recourse to rank illegalities to defend its position. A vigorously abusive governing class is preferable to a defeatist one.

The other positive element is that the forces for change are equally determined; even the most inflamed Trump-hater will acknowledge that he has proved to be a foe of undreamed-of formidability. Nothing in his prior career with its frequent instances of outright hucksterism would have prepared those who did not know him well to expect that Donald Trump would be so indefatigable.

In a phrase of third-party candidate George Wallace, much more accurately applied here, Trump has shaken the American political establishment by the eye-teeth, and he has already received more votes for president than anyone in American history.

Now one of these two protagonists must win. For the sake of all the goals identified by Mr. Trumps opponents, particularly the preservation of the Constitution and the integrity of the American political system, it is Donald Trump that must prevail.

The truth that dare not be uttered, is that he is now leading all the polls. His enemies, in their blind and mindless outlawry, are turning him into the last man standing, the only recourse and salvation for those who believe in the Constitution and in the continued greatness and moral distinction of the United States of America.

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The Truth That Dare Not Be Uttered About Trump - The New York Sun