Leid Stories

Americans continue to hold the view, according to major polls, that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is “untrustworthy.” Most Haitians—in the United States, Haiti and the Haitian diaspora—would say that characterization is an understatement. For, Hillary and husband Bill have done Haiti grievous wrongs, they’d say, and have done grievous wrongs in Haiti.

Hillary’s all-out campaign to win the U.S. presidency has hit some major bumps, almost all of them pointing to her (and Bill’s) alleged untrustworthiness and unethical conduct and practices. At the center of it all is the recurring question: Where and how did this once-cash-strapped couple get their money?

Journalist, author (most recently We Have Dared to Be Free: Haiti’s Struggle Against Occupation) and academician Dady Chery, who has written extensively on developments in Haiti, explains that Haiti has been, and continues to be, a key element in the Clintons’ personal and political ambitions.

President Barack Obama’s imminent departure from office after eight years will be marked, no doubt, with much pomp and ceremony. He’ll recite a laundry list of his administration’s accomplishments, and point to high-priority items the clock ran out on. Police killings will be on the next president’s to-do list.

The spate of recent killings by police points up not only the persistence of the problem, but the Obama administration’s inability to solve it.

The first of three Q&A sessions (they’re not “debates”) between the duopoly’s presidential candidates takes place tonight at Hofstra University in New York. It’s being hyped like the Muhammad Ali-George Forman superfight of 1974 in Kinshasa, Zaire, but neither Hillary Clinton nor Donald Trump comes to the bout as a true people’s champion; polls consistently show them to be despised and distrusted by voters.

In 42 days, just the same, there’ll be a winner, a new president, and it will be one of the despised and distrusted candidates. Will tonight’s “debate” and the two others to follow fix the fix we’re in?

It’s been a week from hell--a concatenation of catastrophies, it seemed. With your help, we can wade through the thick fog of misinformation, disinformation and no information about what really matters.

Free your mind—and ours, too—by sharing your thoughts about the week’s major issues and news events. It’s “Free Your Mind Friday” on Leid Stories, and your turn at the mic awaits at 888-874-4888.

The day before President Barack Obama delivered his arrogant speech at the Congressional Black Caucus telling black America he’ll consider it an “insult” to him and his legacy if they don’t vote at all or don’t for Hillary Clinton on Nov. 8, Terence Crutcher, a 40-year-old black man, was killed by police on a lonely stretch of Tulsa, Okla., road. Three days later, Keith Lamont Scott, a 43-year-old black man, was cut down by police in Charlotte, N.C., touching off a violent reaction that still rages.

President Obama, obsessed now with his “legacy,” is reminded that it includes a dismal record on “police reform.”

A blistering, just-concluded congressional report on the operations of the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI)—the highest-revenue-generating project of The Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation that was spun off as its own nonprofit in 2010—charges that the former president’s much-vaunted global HIV/AIDS relief program distributed “watered down” and “adulterated” medications to patients in sub-Saharan Africa and in cash-strapped countries where the CHAI program was welcomed as a godsend for treating people with HIV/AIDS.

The 78-page report, initiated by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) and endorsed by 64 members of Congress, was delivered to the inspectors general of the Health and Human Services Department and the Department of State, asking for further probes into CHAI, the Clinton foundation, and how former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the State Department helped to facilitate highly questionable business dealings to benefit the Clinton philanthropic conglomerate.

It’s our weekly gathering for the exchange of information, opinions and ideas. It’s “Free Your Mind Friday” on Leid Stories, and what you have to say—about the news and issues of the day or about anything—is the “star” of the show.

Call 888-874-4888 and free your mind!

The Clinton Global Initiative, the jewel in the crown of The Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation described as an incubator of ideas for tackling major issues and problems all over the world, officially will shut down after its last annual meeting (Sept. 19-21) in Manhattan.

Hillary Clinton, not surprisingly, will not be attending.

Charles Ortel, our expert guide on the CGI, the Clinton Foundation and several offshoot pseudophilanthropic programs, returns to explain the significance of the CGI “voluntary” shutdown and why it may just be a symbolic gesture to keep a massive gathering storm of investigation at bay.  

It’s the third day of “polling” listeners’ attitudes about the 2016 presidential race, the issues driving it, and the combined effect on individual political decisions on Election Day and beyond.

The topic has generated vigorous discussion and more calls than could be accommodated in a single program. Hence, Leid Stories proudly presents Day 3 of peer-to-peer political science.

An avalanche of calls from listeners wanting to participate in yesterday’s discussion leads to Part 2 today. Leid Stories returns to our “poll” tracking attitudes about the 2016 presidential election, the issues driving it, and the combined effect on individual political decisions on Election Day and beyond.

The post-Labor Day campaign push customarily is an all-out effort to lock down votes in the final stretch of a presidential election. But election 2016 has been, and is, no ordinary presidential election. The duopoly’s leading candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, are intensely disliked and distrusted, but have been the mainstay of media coverage as essentially the dominant choices in the race. (They do, after all, account for the lion’s share of pay-to-play advertising dollars flowing into the media’s coffers this political season.)

Leid Stories has been tracking voters’ (and nonvoters’) attitudes about the presidential campaign, the issues driving it, and what their likely choices will be on Election Day. We get current with our “polling” today.