Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty July 2, 2014 If you had trouble receiving this e-mail newsletter this morning, it's because Team USA goalie Tim Howard blocked it the first 16 times. The Multi-Billion Dollar Institution That Is 'The Clintons, Inc.' Yeah, tell us again how "dead broke" you were, Hillary: Bill and Hillary Clinton helped raise more than $1 billion from U.S. companies and industry donors during two decades on the national stage through campaigns, paid speeches and a network of organizations advancing their political and policy goals, The Wall Street Journal found. Those deep ties potentially give Mrs. Clinton a financial advantage in the 2016 presidential election, if she runs, and could bring industry donors back to the Democratic Party for the first time since Mr. Clinton left the White House . . . The Journal tallied speaking fees and donations to Mr. Clinton's 1992 and 1996 presidential campaigns; the Democratic National Committee during Mr. Clinton's eight years in the White House; Mrs. Clinton's bids for Senate and president; and the family's nonprofit entity — The Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation. The Journal was aided by the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks election contributions. The center provided an industry breakdown of campaign donations. Finding an exact total is difficult because the Clintons aren't required to make public any details about donations to their foundation. They voluntarily report donor names, however, and donation amounts within broad ranges.
In total, the Clintons raised between $2 billion and $3 billion from all sources, including individual donors, corporate contributors and foreign governments, the Journal found. Between $1.3 billion and $2 billion came from industry sources. "Clinton Inc." is a fitting term for the family, and perhaps that's a good way to describe the endeavor to make her the next president. It's a free country, but everyone else is also free to ask what these institutions think they're getting for those donations . . . and why, say, a public university would be paying Hillary Clinton hefty six-figure speaking fees: Some students at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas are upset over Clinton's speaking fee for a school-related fundraising event while members of the state's board of regents are defending the decision. "We're dishing out nearly a quarter million dollars to invite a speaker to our campus and that money could be spent in so many other, better ways for our university," said Elias Benjelloun, student body president. Clinton is scheduled to speak at a fundraiser for the non-profit UNLV Foundation at the Bellagio Hotel in October. The reported speaking fee: $225,000. The university said the fee will be paid for with money raised privately through the school's foundation. While it's not student money, some UNLV students are not happy given a recent approval to hike tuition. "As tuition has consistently gone up, we can't recklessly spend money — whether it's private or public -- there's just no excuse," Benjelloun said. The students have put their complaints in writing and plan to overnight a letter to the Clinton Foundation. Hey, Remember Ukraine? Wasn't That Once a Huge Deal? War between Ukraine and Russia? As Tommy Vietor would put it, "Dude, that's like twenty news cycles ago." Violence in Ukraine escalated sharply Tuesday, as artillery shells and airstrikes pierced the relative calm of a 10-day cease-fire hours after President Petro Poroshenko allowed it to expire. Both sides appeared to be readying for a protracted battle after days in which the fighting diminished but did not disappear. It remained unclear whether the Ukrainian military, which has battled pro-Russian separatists since mid-April, would be able strike a decisive blow against the rebels, who have seized territory in eastern Ukraine. The longer a conflict drags on, the greater the risk of further civilian casualties and the harder it will be for Ukraine's new government to stitch the society back together. Ukraine's economy presented a formidable challenge even without a growing insurgency in the country's industrial heartland. The foreign ministers of Ukraine, Russia, Germany and France planned to meet Wednesday in Berlin in a last-ditch effort to restart negotiations, the Russian Foreign Ministry said late Tuesday. Fareed Zakaria, back in March 27, assuring the rest of us that President Obama was handling this just right: 
Yeah, here's how the Washington Post editorial board sees the state of things today: President Obama and E.U. leaders face the test of delivering on their rhetoric. Mr. Obama said on June 5 that if Mr. Putin "over the next two, three, four weeks . . . remains on the current course," new sanctions would be applied to the Russian economy. Four weeks have passed. Last Thursday Secretary of State John F. Kerry said that "it is critical for Russia to show in the next hours, literally, that they are moving to help disarm the separatists." Many hours have passed with no disarmament. On Friday, E.U. leaders set a Monday deadline for a series of steps, including the evacuation of border posts. These have not been carried out. A failure by the West to act following such explicit rhetoric would be a craven surrender that would provoke only more Russian aggression. Yet so far the signs are not good. Despite promising to respond "without delay" if its ultimatum was not heeded, E.U. leaders on Tuesday reportedly postponed any response until next week. The Obama administration, for its part, is hiding behind the Europeans, saying it cannot move unless and until they do. That makes U.S. credibility contingent on accord among 28 nations, including Cyprus, Greece and several others friendly to Russia. The foreign policy of this presidency requires a chronically disinterested public and an ADD media to survive. Hey, Remember Iraq? Wasn't That Once a Huge Deal Last Week? Of course, Ukraine is the old foreign policy crisis. Iraq is the current foreign policy crisis. President Obama, June 19: "I think we always have to guard against mission creep, so let me repeat what I've said in the past: American combat troops are not going to be fighting in Iraq again." And then this week . . . The United States has sent Apache attack helicopters to Iraq as part of the buildup in U.S. military personnel, the Pentagon said Tuesday. Officials would not say how many of the armed helicopters have been sent to the country, stating only that they will be based in Baghdad and could assist with evacuations of American personnel. The Pentagon also sent over additional surveillance drones. It's totally not mission creep you guys, seriously! A Short Piece to Confirm Your Wariness of Modern Political Reporters Hugh Hewitt discusses why he asks some basic history and current events questions of some of his guests who are widely-cited reporters . . . and why they often don't know the answers: I ask my journalist guests a few standard questions when they first appear on the show. I almost always ask about Alger Hiss because the answer provides a baseline as to the journalist's grasp of both modern American political history and to a crucial fault-line through it. (Don't think so? Don't trust me. Trust President Obama's legal guru Cass Sunstein.) I also ask if they have read some basic texts on the war on terror, the most important of which is The Looming Tower by the New Yorker's Lawrence Wright. It is almost journalistic malpractice to opine on any aspect of the West's conflict with Islamist radicalism without having read Wright's work, which won the Pulitzer Prize and which is the standard text. I'll run through a few less well-known titles but which are familiar to my radio talk show audience and thus help signal to them whether the guest is worth listening to. They are mostly listed at what I call My Necessary Bookshelf. Until colliding with Mr. Carter I had never thought to ask if a young journalist who presumed to comment on the war on terror if he or she had ever heard of A.Q. Kahn. I assumed . . . well, there's the rub. I always assume that young journalists would not dare opine on the war without a basic knowledge of the existential threat at its core, and the origins of that threat. Perhaps a college newspaper editorialist would do so, but not a "senior political economy reporter" for a major political outlet like HuffPo. I was wrong. Ed Driscoll adds a note about historical amnesia of the pre-Internet age: The sweeping rise of broadband Internet and Google in the late 1990s accounts for the fact that for so many on the left, history begins in 2000 — and much of the previous millennia is as blank a slate as any document Winston Smith "revised" in 1984′s Ministry of Truth." I would add one other note to the concept of giant gaps of knowledge about not-so-distant history: Even if you're one of the kids who actually pays attention in American history class in high school, the school year begins with, say, the Jamestown settlement and colonial period and moves through U.S. history . . . but somewhere in mid-to-late Spring the teacher realizes they're at World War Two or perhaps the early Cold War, and there's only a few weeks left in the school year. So the most recent decades — presuming they're even covered in the textbook — get rushed through in an effort to prep for the final exam. ADDENDA: Thanks to everyone who came out to last night's Doublethink happy hour; turnout seemed quite high. I'd like to think that it's me, but it probably had something to do with, you know, happy hour, and the fact that the U.S.-Belgium soccer game was still going on… I'm scheduled to appear on the panel of Greta Van Susteren's On the Record tonight…
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