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Hillary Rodham Clinton

March 12, 2012 by · Comments Off on Hillary Rodham Clinton 

Hillary Rodham Clinton, Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton (born October 26, 1947) is the 67th United States Secretary of State, serving in the administration of President Barack Obama. She was a United States Senator for New York from 2001 to 2009. As the wife of the 42nd President of the United States, Bill Clinton, she was the First Lady of the United States from 1993 to 2001. In the 2008 election, Clinton was a leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

A native of Illinois, Hillary Rodham first attracted national attention in 1969 for her remarks as the first student commencement speaker at Wellesley College. She embarked on a career in law after graduating from Yale Law School in 1973. Following a stint as a Congressional legal counsel, she moved to Arkansas in 1974 and married Bill Clinton in 1975. Rodham cofounded the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families in 1977 and became the first female chair of the Legal Services Corporation in 1978. Named the first female partner at Rose Law Firm in 1979, she was twice listed as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in America. First Lady of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981 and 1983 to 1992 with husband Bill as Governor, she successfully led a task force to reform Arkansas’s education system. She sat on the board of directors of Wal-Mart and several other corporations.

In 1994 as First Lady of the United States, her major initiative, the Clinton health care plan, failed to gain approval from the U.S. Congress. However, in 1997 and 1999, Clinton played a role in advocating the creation of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, the Adoption and Safe Families Act, and the Foster Care Independence Act. Her years as First Lady drew a polarized response from the American public. The only First Lady to have been subpoenaed, she testified before a federal grand jury in 1996 due to the Whitewater controversy, but was never charged with wrongdoing in this or several other investigations during her husband’s administration. The state of her marriage was the subject of considerable speculation following the Lewinsky scandal in 1998.

Girl Scouts Promise

March 12, 2012 by · Comments Off on Girl Scouts Promise 

Girl Scouts Promise, The values of the Girl Scout Promise and Law are at the heart of the entire Girl Scout program. Through the values inherent in the Promise & Law, girls form their own beliefs and values, learn to consider ethical aspects of situations, and are committed to social justice and community service and action.

Girl Scout Promise and Law

The Girl Scout Promise and Law are shared by every member of Girl Scouting. The Girl Scout Promise is the way Girl Scouts agree to act every day toward one another and other people, and the Law outlines a way to act towards one another and the world.

The Girl Scout Promise

On my honor, I will try:
To serve God* and my country,
To help people at all times,
And to live by the Girl Scout Law.

The Girl Scout Law

I will do my best to be
honest and fair,
friendly and helpful,
considerate and caring,
courageous and strong, and
responsible for what I say and do,
and to
respect myself and others,
respect authority,
use resources wisely,
make the world a better place, and
be a sister to every Girl Scout.

* The word “God” can be interpreted in a number of ways, depending on one’s spiritual beliefs. When reciting the Girl Scout Promise, it is okay to replace the word “God” with whatever word your spiritual beliefs dictate

U.S. Secretary Of State

March 12, 2012 by · Comments Off on U.S. Secretary Of State 

U.S. Secretary Of State, The United States Secretary of State is the head of the United States Department of State, concerned with foreign affairs. The Secretary is a member of the Cabinet and the highest-ranking cabinet secretary both in line of succession and order of precedence. The current Secretary of State is Hillary Rodham Clinton, the 67th person, and third woman to hold the post. The specific duties of the Secretary of State include:

Organizes and supervises the entire United States Department of State and the United States Foreign Service.
Advises the President on matters relating to U.S. foreign policy, including the appointment of diplomatic representatives to other nations, and on the acceptance or dismissal of representatives from other nations.
Participates in high-level negotiations with other countries, either bilaterally or as part of an international conference or organization, or appoints representatives to do so. This includes the negotiation of international treaties and other agreements.
Responsible for overall direction, coordination, and supervision of interdepartmental activities of the U.S. Government overseas.
Providing information and services to U.S. citizens living or traveling abroad, including providing credentials in the form of passports and visas.
Supervises the United States immigration policy abroad.
Communicates issues relating the United States foreign policy to Congress and to U.S. citizens.
The original duties of the Secretary of State include some domestic duties, such as:

Receipt, publication, distribution, and preservation of the laws of the United States
Preparation, sealing, and recording of the commissions of Presidential appointees
Preparation and authentication of copies of records and authentication of copies under the Department’s seal
Custody of the Great Seal of the United States
Custody of the records of the former Secretary of the Continental Congress, except for those of the Treasury and War Departments
Most of the domestic functions of the Department of State have been transferred to other agencies. Those that remain include storage and use of the Great Seal of the United States, performance of protocol functions for the White House, and the drafting of certain proclamations. The Secretary also negotiates with the individual States over the extradition of fugitives to foreign countries. President Nixon’s resignation, a domestic issue, was also addressed to the Secretary of State.

As the highest-ranking member of the cabinet, the Secretary of State is the third-highest official of the executive branch of the Federal Government of the United States, after the President and Vice President and is fourth in line to succeed the Presidency, coming after the Vice President, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and the President pro tempore of the Senate. Six Secretaries of State have gone on to be elected President.

William Bill Clinton

March 8, 2012 by · Comments Off on William Bill Clinton 

William Bill Clinton, William Jefferson “Bill” Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe III; August 19, 1946) is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation. Clinton has been described as a New Democrat. Many of his policies have been attributed to a centrist Third Way philosophy of governance.

Born and raised in Arkansas, Clinton became both a student leader and a skilled musician. He is an alumnus of Georgetown University where he was Phi Beta Kappa and earned a Rhodes Scholarship to attend the University of Oxford. He is married to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has served as the United States Secretary of State since 2009 and was the Senator from New York from 2001 to 2009. Both Clintons received law degrees from Yale Law School, where they met and began dating. As Governor of Arkansas, Clinton overhauled the state’s education system, and served as Chair of the National Governors Association.

Clinton was elected president in 1992, defeating incumbent president George H.W. Bush. As president, Clinton presided over the longest period of peacetime economic expansion in American history. He signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement. He implemented Don’t ask, don’t tell, a controversial intermediate step to full gay military integration. After a failed health care reform attempt, Republicans won control of Congress in 1994, for the first time in forty years. Two years later, the re-elected Clinton became the first member of the Democratic Party since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win a second full term as president. He successfully passed welfare reform and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, providing health coverage for millions of children. Later, he was impeached for perjury and obstruction of justice in a scandal involving a White House intern, but was acquitted by the U.S. Senate and served his complete term of office. The Congressional Budget Office reported a budget surplus between the years 1998 and 2000, the last three years of Clinton’s presidency.

The Spy Who Jumped Off The Screen Bill Clinton

January 10, 2012 by · Comments Off on The Spy Who Jumped Off The Screen Bill Clinton 

The Spy Who Jumped Off The Screen Bill Clinton, In author Thomas Caplan’s new novel, The Spy Who Jumped Off The Screen, the president asks movie star Ty Hunter to return to action as a secret agent.

Caplan himself is personally acquainted with a former commander in chief. President Clinton and he were once roommates.

“I was a student at Georgetown University. When we arrived as heady freshmen in 1964, because of the alphabet, I was assigned a room next to Bill Clinton,” Caplan tells Morning Edition host Linda Wertheimer. “And we’ve remained friends ever since.”

Such good friends, in fact, that Clinton not only helped edit an earlier draft of Caplan’s novel but also wrote an introduction for it.

“I know he’s a great fan of thrillers and reads them sort of one after the other and knows an awful lot about them, and when I’d done this, which was my first thriller, I asked him to read it and he made some wonderful comments,” Caplan says.

The book is about the world of loose nukes – people trying to negotiate a sale of supposedly decommissioned nuclear weapons to the highest bidder.

“When I showed President Clinton the early draft, the first thing he said to me was, ‘Who told you all this about nuclear weapons?’ ” Caplan recalls, laughing. “I said no one really. I just read all the available books and chatted to people, but obviously I have no access to such things.

“And he said, ‘Well, it’s completely right,’ and including interestingly, which satisfied me in a way, the motivations of the people who might be trying to do this and the rationalizations they have for their own behavior.”

The Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen is Caplan’s third work of fiction. As the title suggests, he attempts to flip conventions. His hero, Ty Hunter, is a movie star. Movies are his second career, however. His first in fictional “real life” was top-secret, Delta Force, Navy Seal sorts of adventures. Caplan says he is almost done with a sequel to the book.

“I very much like the character,” he says. “There may be a bit of fantasy involved because I’m not either a movie star or a covert operative.

“But it’s fine to sit down every day and write about not yourself but your character as though you were putting yourself in the mind of the world’s No. 1 film star who has to fight off every beautiful woman and is staggeringly lucky in his work.”

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