Tuesday, January 01, 2013 12:21 PM
bless Hil
As of today, 18 former admirals, generals, and senior defense officials are supporting Hillary. In a conference call with reporters on March 2, 2008, Brigadier General John Watkins, Jr, stated:
"As I think about the challenges facing the nation and having been in uniform for almost thirty years, worked with a number of presidents to include the last four, I can't think of a single person - those generals included - who is better qualified to walk into the Oval Office than Hillary Clinton.
"I don't make that statement very lightly. She is more qualified, in my view, than her husband Bill was when he entered the office."
General Wesley Clark said, "She has done her homework on national security and I know from my personal discussions with her and with many other friends that go in and brief her in her role in the Senate Armed Services Committee."
"She knows the facts, she knows the details, plus she has the big picture," he stated. "She is a strategic thinker but she has the building blocks of the strategy in her personal knowledge."
"In this world that we face today," says Admiral William Owens, "experience will be really at a premium, especially at the level of the Commander-in-Chief." He explained that:
"There's not time to learn. The phone rings and you have to be ready. You have to ready with intuition, with experience and with skills."
He pointed out that, "this world will have the complexities that perhaps we've never before seen," and "we need people with great judgment."
Admiral Owens says he thinks Hillary "brings the best of talent, intuition and experience to handle these unknown threats in the future."
According to Lieutenant General Frederick Vollrath, "we absolutely have to have a leader with the proven experience."
"America, in the area of national defense, must be successful and Senator Clinton has that experience to create change, to understand the risk, and to get the job done," he said.
On a personal note, Major General Paul Eaton said, "I have a Special Forces Captain son and a Sergeant Paratrooper both in Afghanistan and I find Senator Clinton the perfect choice to be their Commander-in-Chief and to display the loyalty to command our armed forces and to rebuild them after the conflicts in which we are engaged right now."
Lieutenant General Claudia Kennnedy stated: "I think she'll rebuild relationships with other countries that have been suffering for the last seven or eight years; those relationships have really been strained beyond anything I would have anticipated."
The above testimonials provide enough evidence of her qualifications on military matters for this untrained military mind. Hillary, along with her top foreign policy advisor, former President Bill Clinton, offer the best hope for getting our soldiers out of the killing fields in Iraq in the shortest amount of time possible.
The former President is admired all over the world. He is a natural-born diplomat and we also need him to help repair the damage done to our relationships with world leaders.
As far as the economy, the country was in dire straights when the first President Clinton took office after the first Bush left and the economy was in great shape when the second Bush stepped in
Hillary's experience gained during the first Clinton Administration is verifiable. The country went from a deficit of $290 billion in 1992, to an expected surplus of more than $250 billion for 2001. Eight years earlier, the Congressional Budget Office had projected a $513 billion deficit in 2001. In 2000, the surplus was the largest in US history at over $200 billion.
Economic growth averaged 4% per year, compared to an average 2.8% during the Reagan-Bush presidencies. Inflation was the lowest since the 1960s, averaging 2.5%.
More than 20 million jobs were created and American workers saw double-digit earning growth, and the bottom 20% had the largest increase at more than 16%. Unemployment dropped to the lowest level in 30 years, from close to 7% in 1993, to 4% in November 2000. The country's poverty rates were the lowest in 30 years.
The homeownership rate topped 67% in the third quarter of 2000, the highest rate on record.
With all that said, on February 4, 2008, USA Today warned that the "next president will inherit a deficit of about $400 billion, and maybe more," which means the second Clinton Administration will take office faced the same financial disaster as the first time around.
In fact, the country is now worse off then when the first Bush left. According to Department of Labor Statistics released on January 16, 2008, real weekly earnings increased only 0.9 percent nationally in 2007, but food purchased at the grocery store was 4.2% higher than in 2006. This increase was the highest percentage year-over-year increase since 1990. The price of bread rose 7.4%, eggs 29.2%, and milk increased 13.1%.
The data shows college tuition and expenses increased by 6.2% in 2007, the cost of attending a technical or trade school was up 4%, and the fees for child care and nursery school increased 4.3%.
Health insurance costs rose 10.1% in 2007, medical care increased 5.8%, and the price of medical-care services rose 5.3%. In August 2007, the US Census Bureau reported that the number of Americans without health insurance rose to 15.8% of the population in 2006, or 47 million people.
On December 30, 2007, a report by Sam Zuckerman in the San Francisco Chronicle called 2007, "the year that the greatest housing boom of the post-war era turned into the greatest housing bust," and explained:
"It started with a rising tide of foreclosures among subprime borrowers - those who took out loans with loose documentation requirements or little money down. By the summer, losses among subprime lenders spread to big banks around the world that had invested in securities based on subprime mortgages."
"The result was one of the most severe lending lockdowns of recent decades," according to the report in the Chronicle. "Banks stopped making loans, and when they resumed, they tightened requirements and jacked up rates for all kinds of customers, including other banks."
"As credit dried up," Mr Zuckerman notes, "home price stopped rising and then lurched downward, while the number of sales plummeted."
When introducing former President Clinton for a campaign speech supporting his wife, at a Kirtland, Ohio high school, on March 1, 2008, Ohio's Lt Governor Lee Fisher, summed up the best reason for sending Hillary to the White House in the following concise statement quoted in the Toledo Blade:
"Bill and Hillary Clinton for eight years set this nation on a new course and we have now the best chance we have since then, not only to take that course and set it right again, but to take it to new heights."