Clinton to Launch $86.5Million PPP Initiatives Today, Jan 31st.

(MENAFN – Qatar News Agency) US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will Thursday launch four new Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) initiatives valued at up to 86.5 Million, at the US Department of State.

These new initiatives include: efforts to advance women’s clean energy entrepreneurship; a global partnership to promote affordable Internet access in poor communities; a new commitment to the Global Equality Fund which aims to protect the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons worldwide; and new investments in the clean cookstoves sector, the State Department said.

Secretary Clinton will be joined by Ambassador at Large for Global Women’s Issues Melanne Verveer and the Special Representative for Global Partnerships Kris Balderston.

Wanjira Mathai, daughter of Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai and board member of the Wangari Maathai Institute for Peace and Environmental Studies, will deliver remarks.

The State Department has, to date, worked with over 1,100 partners and mobilized more than 650 million in public and private resources to support key foreign policy objectives including climate change mitigation, women’s empowerment, economic growth, and human rights.

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NEW HAMPSHIRE voters contemplate DRAFTING HILLARY CLINTON:

New Hampshire voters should draft Hillary

Taken almost one year ago today- December 23, 2010- GIVE US HILLARY for PRESIDENT in 2012

We are now calling on Democratic voters nationally — particularly in New Hampshire — to organize a write-in campaign for Clinton. This is something that New Hampshire voters have a long history of doing.

YOU’RE GONNA LOVE IT! SIGN THIS PETITION, please.

HILLARY REPLACING OBAMA AS THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE

We advocate this DRAFT HILLARY movement not because of the desire to make political mischief — but to put the country on the right course.

It’s clear that Obama has been unable to build consensus and, with the polarizing campaign he is now running, will be unable to govern effectively even if reelected. Only Clinton can commit the Democratic Party — and, indeed, the nation — to a unification and healing process. This could allow Washington, in a bipartisan manner, to finally address the economic and governmental
crises that now grip America.

We are facing a crisis of national leadership, so citizens should step up and take charge of their country the way demonstrators in the Middle East did earlier this year. And, stunningly, as the people of Russia are now doing.

It’s time to take the decision about America’s leadership out of the hands of the established powers and return it to the citizens of our country. That opportunity to change U.S. politics will appear in the second week of 2012 in New Hampshire.

To seize this moment two things are required:

First, and most important, ordinary Democrats and independents in New Hampshire should mobilize behind a grass-roots effort to write in Clinton’s name during the Jan. 10 Democratic primary.

Second, a committed group of Democrats with resources and stature needs to help facilitate an authentic citizens’ movement — independent of party structure, Clinton and organized interests — to support a massive New Hampshire write-in campaign and put this before a deeply disaffected electorate.

There is already an online petition to draft Clinton, created by Democrats.
“We the undersigned Democrats want a new Democratic nominee for president who can win in 2012. We are convinced that the only person with the national stature, experience … who can win in the general election in 2012 is Hillary Rodham Clinton. We are fully prepared to take matters in to our own hands and launch our own massive write-in campaign,” it reads.

Even if one does not agree with their every argument, we urge everyone who shares our beliefs go to that website now — and to tell their friends to go to there and sign it.

Since 1944, when approval ratings first became reliable, there have been five cases in which the incumbent president had an approval rating below 49 percent a year ahead of the election. Each time, the incumbent party lost.

Obama’s approval rating has dropped to 43 percent — less than Jimmy Carter’s. Obama now has the worst job approval rating of any president at this stage of his term in modern political history. Many, particularly on the left, have begun to demonstrate with signs reading,

“Buyer’s remorse.”

DRAFT HILLARY 2012 ... Hillary Can Fix This: New Hampshire residents Write in Hillary Clinton for President Primary Day!

In a recent Daily Beast piece, “Hillary Told You So,” angry, frustrated liberals were quoted saying, “No one ever had to tell Hillary” that the economy is crucial, and “Hillary is TOUGHER (and 10X SMARTER ).”

Indeed, the most active calls for Clinton to run have come from the left — indicating that there is substantial support for this idea across the board and not just from centrist Democrats.

Certainly, the recent barrage of articles by former Obama allies saying that the White House has lost white, working-class voters — a key part of the Democratic coalition — is cause enough for Clinton, who has been that voting bloc’s champion in the past, to be the Democratic standard-bearer.

Many argue that our approach is impractical and is unlikely to work because Obama will not stand down. But make no mistake, we are political realists.
As political realists, we know that every recent presidential candidate who has emerged — from Obama in 2008 to Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and now Newt Gingrich — has been citizen-driven. The elites have not driven the process; ordinary voters have filled the void.

Such a void exists now.

Clinton pulled off a stunning New Hampshire primary victory over Obama during the 2008 primaries. There is every reason to believe that, as a write-in candidate, she would get a substantial number of votes in the Granite State next year.

NEW HAMPSHIRE is one state where grass-roots politics predominates. As presidential historian Theodore White wrote in 1965, New Hampshire’s primary allows candidates “to appeal directly to people” and “over the heads of the politicians.”
This primary — traditionally well before other primaries — allows independents to cast ballots for either Democrats or Republicans, unlike most other “closed primaries,” in which only registered Democrats and Republicans can vote on their respective parties’ ballots. It’s justly famous for write-in candidates, who often had substantial success.

In 1964, write-in candidate Henry Cabot Lodge had an upset victory over GOP front-runners Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller. In 1968, incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson was not on the ballot, but as a write-in, he received nearly 50 percent of all Democratic votes.

A write-in candidacy in 2012 can send a message that the Democratic Party must stand for something more than Obama’s reelection at all costs.

We are not asking the president or the secretary of state to take action. We ask the people of the United States, Democrats and, especially, New Hampshire voters to exercise their right to be heard by writing Clinton’s name on the primary ballot.

Voters have had enough of the establishment powers dictating who can run.

All that is needed is a spark on the dry tinder of political frustration and anxiety. A few Democratic patriots can provide the means to make it possible — and change the course of U.S. history.

article written by: PATRICK H. CADDELL and DOUGLAS E. SCHOEN

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1211/70623.html

Hillary should be the democratic nominee… Obama should Opt-Out..

If Americans in their infinite wisdom choose to keep a Democrat in the White House through 2016, let it be Hillary Clinton.

Increasingly the question of whether President Obama should be challenged for the 2012 nomination is surfacing among disgruntled Democrats worried about a solid Republican victory next fall.

They’re right to be concerned: the crises facing the United States and the world deserve better than Obama’s oldest established permanent floating re-election campaign.

There’s no doubt Clinton’s tireless and often effective performance as secretary of state demonstrates she would bring more seasoned judgment to the Oval Office than its current resident. Here are a just a few reasons the Democratic Party should bite the bullet and jettison the nation’s one-term Senate orator and try to elect the nation’s first woman president.

Beginning with the political dimension of his conduct of the war in Afghanistan to class war at home, Obama’s priorities seem to be governed more by his re-election timetable than the demands of the national interest and reflective responses to the galloping changes in the global order

Contrary to mainstream opinion, Obama is a mediocre politician. Were it not so, surely he would have known that people get wise to polished repetitive, but empty speeches — and know the difference between bread and butter now and pie in the sky later.

Joblessness and fear of watching retirement savings vanish weigh heavier on the nation’s collective mind than long-range climate change and health care reform. The president’s touted political instincts should have told him all that. But, as James Carville once noted so cogently, “It’s the economy, stupid!”

But while Obama talked jobs and initiated a jobs bill on his sixth day in office, almost all of his mind and determination remained focused on health care — his overriding priority.

There is more. Even a short and substantively fruitless effort in spring 2009 to get agreement on a new U.N. climate change protocol outranked jobs at home on Obama’s must-do list.

Health care came first, no matter what. The president spent a year getting it on the books, while he assured the country that his close to trillion-dollar economic stimulus program was creating jobs.

He lost no time proclaiming the recession over — blind and deaf to the reality that it was a “jobless recovery.” He saw the upticking Gross National Product statistics and forgot or never understood they reflected only record earnings of financial institutions.

Hillary Clinton with her wealth of experience as first lady, a two-term senator from New York and now the world’s leading diplomat would hardly have been so blind.

Obama’s economic stimulus was a bust because, among his many other blunders, he left the writing of the legislation to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats in their veto-proof Congress — without benefit of Republican input. As a result, Congress presented him with a Christmas tree adorned with pork barrels, but bare of jobs with a future.

. Her party — and her country — badly need her services. She’s likely the only potential winner the Democrats can muster.

Bogdan Kipling is a Canadian journalist in Washington.

Secretary Clinton Marks 60th Anniversary of Refugee Convention

 

Courage and Bravery in the interests of Humanity are alive and well.

Libyan opposition leaders to meet with Hillary in Paris today…

Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton arrived in Paris Monday to meet with Libyan opposition figures and European leaders to try and make plans to stop Moammar Gadhafi. She will meet the Libyan opposition figures as the Obama administration makes its first high-level contact with foes of Moammar Gadhafi.

Libya opposition to meet with Clinton in Paris today

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will continue on to Egypt and Tunisia in her first trip to address the Arab revolutions. But the window for foreign assistance to Libya is quickly closing.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is set to meet with Libyan rebel leaders in Paris today in her first overseas trip to address Arab world revolutions since the ousting of former Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Her visit comes as the Obama administration shows wariness about offering support to Libyan rebels and Col. Muammar Qaddafi’s forces make surprising gains.

In Paris, Clinton will meet with Libyan opposition figures and meet several European counterparts to discuss military intervention in Libya, the Associated Press reports. France has already recognized the Libyan opposition interim council and, together with Britain, is drafting a no-fly zone resolution to put forward at the United Nations Security Council. But the US has been more reticent to throw its full support behind the rebels.

AP notes that the US regard for rebels “may well depend” on Clinton’s meetings today, since “the [rebel] council’s composition and aims largely remain a mystery to American officials.”

Clinton is due to visit Tunisia and Egypt after Paris to express support for the ousters of autocratic governments there. “We have an enormous stake in ensuring that Egypt and Tunisia provide models for the kind of democracy that we want to see,” Clinton told lawmakers last week, warning them about Iran’s attempts to gain influence across the region, according to the Agence France-Presse.

Even though the Arab League offered a strongly-worded statement of support this weekend for an internationally backed no-fly zone over Libya, saying that the Libyan government had “lost its sovereignty,” Obama on Sunday showed hesitation in committing the US to military action in Libya.

“Anytime I send United States forces into a potentially hostile situation, there are risks involved and there are consequences. And it is my job as president to make sure that we have considered all those risks,” he told reporters, according to the Associated Press. “It’s also important from a political perspective to, as much as possible, maintain the strong international coalition that we have right now.”

The Obama administration has expressed concern about a military that is already spread thin and about being perceived as meddling in another country’s affairs. It has insisted that any military intervention have UN approval and support from the Arab League.

Meanwhile, Qaddafi’s forces have made surprisingly strong gains against rebels, even advancing toward the opposition “capital” of Benghazi in eastern Libya.

After pummeling the key oil town of Ras Lanuf last week, pro-Qaddafi forces moved east to claim Brega over the weekend. Rebels say the next battle will be in Ajdabiya, a strategic town on a junction that leads to both the oil refineries of Tobruk and the self-made rebel stronghold of Benghazi, the Guardian reports.

Although the rebel forces commander said Qaddafi’s forces will face a difficult fight if they try to reclaim Ajdabiya, some members of the antigovernment forces seemed less confident, bemoaning a lack of assistance from other countries and discussing exit plans to Egypt.

According to the Washington Post, reporting from Tripoli, pro-government forces tout reclaiming of oil town Ras Lanuf and Brega as a significant gain. The rebel forces commanders claims his forces made a “strategic retreat” from Brega.

Col. Milad Hussein, an army spokesman, [said] that he did not anticipate a tough battle in Benghazi. He said that the government hopes to resolve the crisis “through reconciliation” with tribal leaders in eastern Libya but that the rebel movement is not proving to be a potent adversary.

“To deal with them you don’t need full-scale military action,” the Libyan spokesman said. “They are groups of people who, when you come to them, they just raise their hands and go. ”

http://www.csmonitor.com/World/terrorism-security/2011/0314/Libya-opposition-to-meet-with-Clinton-in-Paris-today

Submit a Question to BILL CLINTON:

Now-now, be thoughtful and polite and maybe your question will be chosen.

Clinton Urges Iran to Release Detained Americans

15 August 2009

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged Iran to release all Americans detained in the country, including three hikers arrested last month.

Clinton Saturday called on Iranian authorities to grant consular access to the three hikers, who were detained July 31.

Iranian television has described the three as spies who illegally entered the country.

Clinton said the United States also remains concerned about Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent missing in Iran since 2007. She also called for the release of American scholar Kian Tajbakhsh.

In related news, an American graduate student jailed in Iran for a few weeks and barred from leaving the country for nine months returned this week to Los Angeles. Esha Momeni was arrested last year and charged with acting against national security.

She was researching the Iranian women’s’ rights movement for her master’s thesis at an American university.

Momeni is one of several Iranian-Americans detained in the last year on security-related charges. She says she spent 25 of her 28 days in jail in solitary confinement, and that she was repeatedly interrogated.

Momeni was eventually released on bail, but Iranian authorities confiscated her passports and barred her from leaving the country until this week.

Some information for this report provided by AP and AFP.

Clinton ‘Concerned’ About Americans Held in Iran

BAGHDAD, Aug. 3 — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday that she was “concerned” about three Americans detained in Iran and that the United States had not received any information from Iran about their fate since they crossed into the country from northern Iraq last week.

News reports Tuesday in Iran, meanwhile, said the Americans were under arrest for “illegal entry” and claimed that their case was being used by the U.S. government for propaganda purposes, the Associated Press reported. Iran’s state-controlled media noted that at least two of the Americans are journalists, the wire service said, and questioned reports that the trio were hikers who wandered across the border by mistake.

Officials in northern Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region said the group was lost and entered Iran while on an excursion in a mountainous area along the border. They also said that border guards had warned them not to proceed because the border in that area is not clearly marked.

“Obviously, we are concerned,” Clinton told reporters at the State Department. “We want this matter brought to a resolution as soon as possible. And we call on the Iranian government to help us determine the whereabouts of the three missing Americans and return them as quickly as possible.”

Clinton said that the Swiss ambassador in Iran, who represents American interests there, is seeking information about the three. Tehran and Washington broke off diplomatic ties in 1979.

Kurdish authorities identified the Americans as Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd and Joshua Fattal. The three had called a friend, Shon Meckfessel, who had stayed in a hotel in Sulaymaniyah, the region’s second-largest city, because he was feeling sick. They told him that Iranian border guards were surrounding them. They have not been heard from since.

Kurdish officials said the Americans told them they were journalists. Shourd has written for Brave New Traveler, an online travel magazine. On the magazine’s Web site, she identifies herself as a “teacher-activist-writer from California currently based in the Middle East.” Bauer, of Minnesota, is a Middle East correspondent for New American Media and has written for other publications, including the Nation magazine.

Bauer’s mother, Cindy Hickey of Pine City, Minn., and Fattal’s mother, Laura Fattal of Elkins Park, Pa., both said in brief statements that they were concerned about the group’s welfare and safety.

The Kurdish government said that it would soon meet for a second time with Iranian representatives to discuss the fate of the Americans and to seek their release.

Clinton’s statement Monday came after the head of the Iranian parliament’s foreign policy committee, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, confirmed the arrest of the Americans on Sunday, according to Iranian television.

Iran’s Arabic-language network said in a news bulletin Monday, quoting Iraqi police sources, that the Americans were “CIA agents.” The Iranian government, however, did not immediately endorse that claim.
Link

Clinton in the Congo, and the real message gets lost…

by Nancy Johnston
THE BALTIMORE SUN

August 13, 2009

The UN reports that there have been 200,000 acts of sexual violence in the Congo since 1998, 65 percent against children. Since January, more than half of the thousands of rapes reported were perpetrated by the Congolese army, according to Human Rights Watch. That is to say nothing of the more than 2 million displaced citizens, and 5.4 million who have died in connection with the war waged against rebels backed by Rwanda and Uganda.

An AP report which detailed the $17 million of aid the U.S. has pledge to end such violence described the scene at a refugee camp Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited.

“Residents told Clinton that women and young girls and boys are often victimized by rape when they leave the camp to gather wood or tend to outside gardens. One camp official said a young boy had been raped on Monday.

“One of the two victims Clinton met had been gang-raped after her husband and four children were killed. The other, eight months pregnant at the time, lost her baby and was found by hospital workers in a forest where she had stumbled.”

There are no words for the horrors these people have faced in the past decade.

But if you’ve watched the news those horrific statistics and stories didn’t register. That’s because Secretary Clinton’s umbrage over a question about a Chinese loan offer became the story, instead of the corruption of officials and the sexual warfare being waged throughout the country.

At a news conference, a student in the audience asks Ms. Clinton what Mr. Clinton thinks about a disputed Chinese contract, and she reacted harshly. It’s unclear what the student was thinking — did he misspeak, meaning to ask for President Obama’s opinion, instead of Bill Clinton’s?

Did the translator ask the wrong question? Did one or the other of them think it appropriate to question our top diplomat about her husband’s opinion, rather than her own? But the point is that the narrative has switched from life-and-death issues that everyone should be united against, to another “Shrill Hill” sound bite.

“Poor Hillary,” her detractors and supporters both say, “She was just so tired! And it must be so hard to see Obama light up the world in his travels; and that Bill, saving those journalists from North Korea, stealing her thunder.”

To which I say, give me a break.

Hillary Clinton has been a professional politician, a U.S. senator, a presidential candidate and she is now the secretary of state of the United States of America. She has nothing to prove to the commentators and the pundits; her job is to advise the president on foreign affairs and enforce the policies of the USA.

She was not a petulant child craving recognition, nor does she need your defense. Secretary Clinton had a point to make, and it was this: I am the representative of the most powerful country in the world, and you will respect both my office and me as a human being.

While you’re at it, why don’t you show that same respect to the women of the Congo?

In a country where being female might be a death sentence and rape is used as a weapon against the population, this is not a point to be made lightly. Perhaps it wasn’t diplomatic, but it was entirely appropriate for Clinton to defend her position and her dignity in a place where so many wives and daughters have no defense or recourse.

So don’t pity Hillary, who in your mind has to compete with her powerful husband and boss. Pity the millions of Congolese who are suffering.

And get alongside her, whether as a feminist or a human being: There’s plenty to find offensive in this situation without falling back to either Clinton hatred or misogynistic punchlines.
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Hillary Clinton Grants Equal Benefits To Gay Diplomats

“Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton will soon announce that gay American diplomats will be given benefits similar to those that their heterosexual counterparts enjoy, U.S. officials said Saturday. In a notice to be sent soon to State Department employees, Clinton says regulations that denied same-sex couples and their families the same rights and privileges that straight diplomats enjoyed are ‘unfair and must end,’ as they harm U.S. diplomacy.

‘Providing training, medical care and other benefits to domestic partners promote the cohesiveness, safety and effectiveness of our posts abroad,’ she says in the message, a copy of which was obtained by The Associated Press.” The Associated Press/Matthew Lee

The Obama administration has a lot on its plate: Two interminable wars and an economy on the verge of collapse. Perhaps it’s understandable that gay rights wasn’t the first item on Obama’s agenda, however it’s now high time that the president address the issue of the discrimination that gays suffer on a daily basis.

It’s a shame and a disgrace that Obama shares the same Neanderthal approach to same-sex marriage as Miss California Carrie Prejean. Gay rights advocates should stop cutting Obama so much slack, and demand that he come out if favor of gay marriage.

Obama should move quickly and repeal the discriminatory “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy that has resulted in the dismissal from the armed forces of thousands of gifted, intelligent and patriotic gays and lesbians.

But I commend the work done by Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton for extending to gay diplomats the same benefits enjoyed by heterosexual couples.

This change in policy sends a clear message to the world that Secretary of State Clinton believes in equal rights for everyone, including the dedicated diplomats who serve our country abroad.

US and Ireland share history and friendship..

WASHINGTON -msnbc-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has harsh words for violent opponents of the peace process in Northern Ireland.

Speaking at a press conference with Irish Foreign Minister Micheal Martin, Clinton praised Northern Ireland’s leaders for unity in condemning recent violence.

She called attacks this month that killed two British soldiers and a policeman “an affront to the values of everyone community, every ethnicity, every religion and every nation that seeks peace.”

Clinton responded to a reporter who referred to opponents of the peace process as dissidents, saying “Not dissidents. I’m all in favor of dissidents, I’m not in favor of criminals.”