The Republican National Committee contrasts General David H. Petraeus‘s testimony to Congress with the two democrat candidates’ campaign pledges to withdraw rapidly from Iraq.

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Hillary supporters are fed up with her unfair treatment by the biased and leftwing MSM, and they’re not going to take it anymore.

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David Kahane, at National Review, has lots of fun with those Clinton tax returns.

By now we’ve all had a chance to take a gander at the Clintons’ tax returns, and all I can say is that I’m proud to be a Democrat. Not since that poor Irish immigrant, Richard “Boss” Croker,” left the humble employ of Tammany Hall and retired to his horse farm in Ireland to breed Derby winners has the Party of the Little Guy paid off so spectacularly for a lifetime of “public service.” Talk about a Little Tin Box!

In the old days — say, way back in 1989 — everybody went into full high-dudgeon mode when the Cowboy (no, not Bush; the other one) went to Asia post-presidency and made a couple of speeches for a coupla mil. From the reaction, you would have thought Reagan had just turned over national-security secrets to the Chinese or something. And then Ronnie went back to his ranch, got Alzheimer’s and died.

But the Clintons changed all that. Not only has the Big He made piles of loot for himself, the little woman, the queen of England, the pope in Rome, and their twelve best friends, he’s also kept his big red nose planted firmly in the face of the American people, carping here, criticizing there, meddling to the best of his abilities, all the while trying to get his erstwhile helpmeet elected president of the United States, of all things.

And how did he do it? By inventing something that people want to buy? By coming out of nowhere to write a bestseller or a hot spec script? By putting Microsoft out of business? No, he did it by getting himself twice elected president with less than 50 percent of the popular vote, hanging on tenaciously despite calls from across the country for his resignation during the Starr Inquisition, and basically daring Trent Lott and Chief Justice Rehnquist, in full Gilbert and Sullivan drag, to convict him after the House impeached him. That made him a celebrity, and in this day and age…just spell my name right, baby.

Not for Bubba was Harry Truman’s example, putting on his fedora and going home to Bess in Independence, Mo. Or Ike’s retiring to Gettysburg. Or even Tricky Dick, stalking the beach at San Clemente in a sweaty blue serge suit and muttering darkly about the Jews. Whether gadding about the Middle East, showboating with his buddy Ron Burkle on private jets, or barking and wagging his fingers at reporters in South Carolina, Billy Blythe, the pride of the old gangster mecca of Hot Springs, Ark., has redefined the notion of a kosher post-presidency.

Which is why, out here in post-strike Hollywood, we’re for Obama.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like we’ve changed our minds about Monicagate; if we had to do it again, we’d do it again. Because we weren’t defending Clinton, we were defending, well… us. Our right to do whatever we want whenever we want and suffer absolutely no adverse consequences. Hey — we’re the guys who hate guns and violence and make movies about serial killers and sadistic torturers, but don’t blame us if some impressionable wing-nut yahoo takes us up on our suggestions and starts hanging women from meat hooks. That’s what free speech is all about.

The thing that Clinton established was not, as his wife, Nurse Ratched, would have it, that the personal is political; it was that political is now personal. And thus none of your business: Caught with your pants down in the Oval Office? Personal! Hiring your boy toy for a state job for which he was manifestly unqualified? Personal! Making dubious wire-transfers to your hooker’s prostitution agency? Personal! Using campaign funds to squire mistresses and maybe bed them down in a classy motel on the Upper West Side?

Personal! Personal! Personal!

You can practically feel our contemptuous spittle on your nasty, bigoted, right-wing faces, can’t you?

Read the whole thing.

The New York Times reports that Hillary has finally released her family tax returns, and they demonstrate that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet better start worrying about their spots on the Forbes 400 List of Richest Americans should Hillary win this coming November.

The Clintons’ charitable donations have not always matched their rhetoric, typically going only to their personal foundation, but their foundation’s disbursements have dramatically increased recently for some reason.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and former President Bill Clinton released tax data Friday showing they earned $109 million over the last eight years, an ascent into the uppermost tier of American taxpayers that seemed unimaginable in 2001, when they left the White House with little money and facing millions in legal bills.

The bulk of their wealth has come from speaking and book-writing, which together account for almost $92 million, including a $15 million advance — larger than previously thought — from Mr. Clinton’s 2004 autobiography, “My Life.” The former president’s vigorous lecture schedule, where his speeches command upwards of $250,000, brought in almost $52 million.

During that time, the Clintons paid $33.8 million in federal taxes and claimed deductions for $10.2 million in charitable contributions. The contributions went to a family foundation run by the Clintons that has given away only about half of the money they put into it, and most of that was last year, after Mrs. Clinton declared her candidacy. …

Mr. Clinton has earned $29.6 million from two books, “My Life” and “Giving,” while Mrs. Clinton has collected $10.5 million from two books, “Living History” and “It Takes a Village.” She donated $1.1 million from book proceeds to charity.

Mr. Clinton last year earned $6.3 million from “Giving,” a book on philanthropy, and reported giving $1 million of that to charity. In the book, Mr. Clinton espouses his own formula for charitable donations, recommending that people give away 5 percent of their income to charitable causes. “If giving by the wealthiest Americans even approached these levels,” he wrote, “I’m convinced it would spark an enormous outpouring of contributions from Americans of more modest means.”

The pace of the Clintons’ own charitable giving, which peaked last year at $3 million, has not always kept up with their income, and by at least one measure, has sometimes fallen short of the spirit of the 5 percent goal, which is to get money into the hands of charities that do good works.

In 2002, for instance, they reported income totaling $9.5 million and $115,000 in gifts to charity. In other years, they have given much larger amounts to their family foundation, but it has yet to disburse all of the money.

The Clintons took a tax deduction in 2004 for $2.5 million in charitable gifts, $2 million of which went to their family foundation, which as a tax-exempt nonprofit is considered a charity under the tax code. That same year, the foundation gave away just $221,000 to charitable groups, according to its tax return.

A representative of the Clintons said that when they and their foundation filed their 2007 tax returns, the records would show that all of the $3 million they gave to the foundation last year had been passed on to other charities. That will account for more than half of all the charitable donations that the foundation has made since 2001, according to a review of its tax returns.

And used the same Winner Take All Primary System we do, what would the delegate count look like? Rassmussen Reports’ Wesley Little provides the answer.

Dan Calabrese published the account provided by Hillary Clinton’s former boss.

As Hillary Clinton came under increasing scrutiny for her story about facing sniper fire in Bosnia, one question that arose was whether she has engaged in a pattern of lying.

The now-retired general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary when she worked on the Watergate investigation, says Hillary’s history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes.

Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career.

Why?

“Because she was a liar,” Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.”

How could a 27-year-old House staff member do all that? She couldn’t do it by herself, but Zeifman said she was one of several individuals – including Marshall, special counsel John Doar and senior associate special counsel (and future Clinton White House Counsel) Bernard Nussbaum – who engaged in a seemingly implausible scheme to deny Richard Nixon the right to counsel during the investigation.

Why would they want to do that? Because, according to Zeifman, they feared putting Watergate break-in mastermind E. Howard Hunt on the stand to be cross-examined by counsel to the president. Hunt, Zeifman said, had the goods on nefarious activities in the Kennedy Administration that would have made Watergate look like a day at the beach – including Kennedy’s purported complicity in the attempted assassination of Fidel Castro.

The actions of Hillary and her cohorts went directly against the judgment of top Democrats, up to and including then-House Majority Leader Tip O’Neill, that Nixon clearly had the right to counsel. Zeifman says that Hillary, along with Marshall, Nussbaum and Doar, was determined to gain enough votes on the Judiciary Committee to change House rules and deny counsel to Nixon. And in order to pull this off, Zeifman says Hillary wrote a fraudulent legal brief, and confiscated public documents to hide her deception.

Read the whole thing.

Can Hillary Clinton possibly survive this news story? Tune in for the next episode in Campaign 2008: the Bloodbath.

Via Ed Morrissey.

In Newsweek, Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s political strategist supreme, pitches in to help out the Clinton and Obama campaigns.

It will be a contested convention, Karl predicts.

After the last Democratic primary is held in early June, neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama will have enough votes from delegates elected in caucuses or primaries to be declared the nominee. Obama would have to win 76 percent and Clinton 98 percent of the 535 delegates that are at stake in the final eight contests. Neither will happen.

How do you win one of those?

Control the Convention Mechanism. If you set the rules, decide who votes, organize the event and control what is said, it’s almost impossible to lose. So while Democratic National Committee chief Howard Dean is ostensibly in charge, both candidates would be well advised to gain control of the levers of the convention.

Three committees are key. The Rules Committee is where trouble can begin. Someone will come up with a smooth-sounding rules change that will give one candidate the advantage or the appearance of having a majority of the delegates. There will be an early test vote: the key is to pick what it is and win it. It’s likely to be obscure—the election of a temporary chairman, say—or contrived. But it will establish who’s in charge.

Read the whole thing.

Jules Crittenden thanks the democrats for a lesson in political correctness.

We owe a debt of gratitude to the Democratic Party, its two remaining presidential candidates and their campaigns for the important lessons in sensitivity and political correctness they have offered in recent weeks.

Political correctness is not simply the denial and dispute of facts or subject matter, but more practically the denial of the right to speak them, due to their objectionable or politically inconvenient nature. It’s generally wielded as a weapon against opponents. But it is more fascinating to watch it swung as a cudgel against allies. And in a campaign in which the strongest points … hope, change, experience … have tended to be a little vague or tenuous at best, the most memorable moments turn out to be about what must not be said, when we’ve seen that cudgel come down.

Of course they have platforms. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have attempted to outbid each other with your money. There are subsidies for universal healthcare, giveaways to newborns, that kind of thing. It theoretically gets paid for by taking from the rich, but stopping the war. Though that of course depends on what your definition of rich is, and whether the war can stopped…

Read the whole thing.

Pro-Clinton Kos Kid Alegre declared herself on strike from Daily Kos, frustrated at management’s refusal to enforce standards of civility or factuality with respect to postings attacking Hillary.

Gateway Pundit offers a screen capture of a portion of the flung feces representing the typical negative response the Kos community.

Kos himself was unsympathetic. He told ABC’s Jake Tapper:

First, these people should read up on the definition of ‘strike.’ What they’re doing is a ‘boycott.’ But whatever they call it, I think it’s great. It’s a big Internet, so I hope they find what they’re looking for.”

The conflict between Obama and Clinton supporters has already become bitter and ugly, and there is every reason to expect that things will only grow worse through the convention.

The Wall Street Journal rejoices that the liberal Seth Grahame-Smith, writing in the Huffington Post, is showing signs of recognizing the fact that we were always dead right about the Clintons, the first step in the Recovery Program converting liberals into neocons.

She has no idea how many times I defended her. How many right-leaning friends and relatives I battled with. How many times I played down her shady business deals and penchant for scandals. . . . She has no idea how frequently I dismissed her husband’s serial adultery as an unfortunate trait of an otherwise brilliant man. For sixteen years, I was a proud soldier in the legion of ‘Clinton apologists’. . . . And then she ran for president. She’s proven that she cares more about ‘Hillary’ than ‘unity.’ More about defeating Obama than defeating the Republicans. She’s become a political suicide-bomber, happy to blow herself to bits — as long as she takes everyone else with her. On Friday, one of Barack Obama’s foreign policy advisors, Samantha Power, resigned after calling Senator Clinton ‘a monster’ during an off-the-record exchange. It was an unfortunate slip, but one that echoed the sentiments of many Clinton apologists like me — who’ve watched Hillary’s descent into pettiness and fear-mongering with the heartbreak of a child who grows up to realize that his beloved mother has been a terrible person all along. Are the conservatives right about the Clintons? Will they do and say anything to get elected? I don’t know. All I know is . . . I’m through apologizing.

Linda Hirschman found out the hard way that diversity of opinion is just not the democrat netroots way. If you want to retain your posting privileges, you have to follow the party line. There are no independent perspectives on the left.

Saturday Night Live offers a different version of the famous Hillary 3:00 AM campaign advertisement

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