Bill Clinton

Why Puerto Rico's Democratic Primary Won't Matter

dlindorff — Wed, 28 May 2008 16:10:17 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

There are a number of reasons why the Puerto Rican Democratic primary election set for this coming Sunday won’t matter, in terms of Hillary Clinton’s failed bid for the party’s nomination.

The main one is that she’s not going to get the big vote that she has been predicting.

Clinton, trailing Obama by about 400,000 votes nationwide with only three primaries to go, is fantasizing that she will win the lion’s share of one million Puerto Rican votes, which would put her in the lead for the nomination in terms of the popular vote, though not in the delegate count.

The problem with this fantasy is that Puerto Rico, a colonial possession of the US since the 1898 Spanish-American War, while famous for its passionate electorate when it comes to island elections, is not going to have that kind of turnout for a Democratic presidential primary. Indeed, local politicos in Puerto Rico are saying they will be surprised if even 600,000 people turn out to vote.

Clinton may well win the majority of those votes that are cast, but her margin is shrinking as Obama campaigns and runs ads on the island. She’s already down to a 13% lead, with 11% still undecided, and that lead is liable to shrink further, not grow. Even if Clinton kept that lead in the voting, however, if the turnout were just 600,000, she’d only pick up a net 88,000 votes. And Obama is likely to win Montana and South Dakota two days later, by large margins, erasing much of that gain again.

The other thing is, why would Democratic leaders and the all-important remaining undecided so-called superdelegates care what Puerto Rican voters do? Thanks to the continuing colonial status of the island, although its residents are all American citizens, free to travel to and from the US and to carry US passports, they are not allowed to vote in national elections, have no representation in Washington, and don’t even pay federal taxes (only Social Security and Medicare taxes). Puerto Rico has no Electoral College votes.

That in a nutshell is why Puerto Rican voters are so uninterested in this primary—so uninterested that the Democratic Party of Puerto Rico earlier this week requested that the island’s election authorities close 1000 polling stations. It wasn’t that they thought nobody would want to vote in them—they couldn’t find volunteers to staff them!

The other thing is it would not surprise me if the vote this Sunday comes out a lot closer than the polls have been predicting. For the most part, the early advantage held by Clinton has been a matter of name recognition. Clinton’s husband was president for eight years, and moreover, with half of the eight million Puerto Ricans living in the mainland US, most of them in New York, Clinton is familiar as “their” Senator. By rights, she ought to be considered Puerto Rico’s home state senator, as sure to win this primary as she was of winning New York, or as Obama was of winning Illinois.

But in fact, there are reasons for Puerto Ricans, particularly those on the island, to view Clinton negatively. Her husband, after all, helped get rid of corporate tax breaks for American companies doing business on the island—tax breaks that kept a lot of US manufacturing jobs on the island. Doubling the felony, the Clintons, both Bill and Hillary, pushed through the NAFTA treaty that made it easy for those same companies, when their tax breaks were lost, to pack up and move to Mexico, since Puerto Rico also lost its advantage of being inside the US customs zone. Now US companies can make things in Mexico, where labor costs are a fraction of what they are in Puerto Rico, and ship them tariff-free to US consumers.

Puerto Ricans also do not have the same latent hostility towards blacks that some Mexican-Americans may harbor, and which the Clinton campaign so shamelessly tried to stir up in her Texas and California campaigns.

Unlike Mexican-Americans, who are ethnically a mix of white and Indigenous American, Puerto Ricans are much more a mix of white and African—a legacy of the slaves that Spain brought over to the island to replace the native Indians who were slaughtered, worked to death or who died of disease and starvation. Many Puerto Ricans are indistinguishable from African-Americans in appearance, and when they come to America to visit or live are likely to experience the same racism from whites that African Americans experience. They are not going to be easy marks for a campaign that tries to stir up racial fears or animosity.

Obama’s skin color will not be a liability in Puerto Rico. It will more likely be an asset.

Although predicting this kind of thing is always risky, I’m going to bet that Clinton will win a narrow victory in Sunday’s Puerto Rican primary—somewhere between 5-9 percent, with turnout of perhaps 550,000.

If I’m right, she will pick up a net 55,000 votes and 5-6 delegates. There are also 11 Puerto Rican superdelegates, but they will also probably split fairly evenly, at best, for her.

So no big deal—especially since Puerto Rican voters, in the end, simply don’t count.

Until the island is either made a 51st State—an unlikely occurrence since it would be a reliably Democratic state virtually ensuring Democrats of Senate and House majorities for years to come, and thus would never be admitted by Republican members of Congress, and since almost half the island is passionately opposed to such a submerging of their unique culture—or set free as an independent nation, the citizens of Puerto Rico will mean next to nothing to the powerbrokers in Washington.

The Democratic Primary is over, whatever Hillary Clinton may say or do between now and the Democratic Convention in August.

Obama has won it.
___________________
Dave Lindorff is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

digg_url = 'http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/33688'; digg_title = "Why Puerto Rico\'s Democratic Primary Won\'t Matter"; digg_bodytext = "By Dave Lindorff\r\n\r\n\r\n There are a number of reasons why the Puerto Rican Democratic primary election set for this coming Sunday won’t matter, in terms of Hillary Clinton’s failed bid for the party’s nomination.\r\n\r\n The main one is that she’s not going to get the big vote that she has been predicting.\r\n\r\n Clinton, trailing Obama by about 400,000 votes nationwide with only three primaries to go, is fantasizing that she will win the lion’s share of one million Puerto Rican votes, which would put her in the lead for the nomination in terms of the popular vote, though not in the delegate count.\r\n\r"; digg_skin = 'standard';

The New Media (and Clinton) Story Line: Democrats Need to Worry about Obama

dlindorff — Wed, 14 May 2008 11:38:07 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Before the West Virginia primary vote on Tuesday, it was a foregone conclusion that Hillary Clinton would sweep the state, perhaps by over 70 percent. In the event, she came close to that, with 68 percent of the vote. Now that the vote has happened, Clinton and a corporate media anxious to spin out the ratings-boosting contest as long as possible, are arguing that Obama is in trouble.

It is true that twenty percent of those voting for Clinton in this almost lily-white, low-income, low-education state said they voted for her on the basis of race, which is to say they wouldn't vote for a black man. Theirs was a vote Clinton has actively pursued. Forty percent of her backers said they would not vote for Obama in the general election if he were the Democratic candidate.

What was not asked or reported, though, is what percentage of her voters would not vote for Clinton either, if she were to become the nominee. I'm guessing it's a fair number. That is to say, I think that people were voting for Clinton not because they support her, but because they wanted to vote against a black candidate.

You read it here: Hillary Clinton clearly has no more chance to win West Virginia in a general election than does Barack Obama.

So let's move on to a more salient question: Does Obama's poor showing in West Virginia mean he is going to lose in other states where many of the voters are white, working class, and don't have high school diplomas or college degrees?

No. Of course not.

West Virginia is not just Michigan without car companies and pasties. It's Michigan without Motown and Rap music. It is, that is to say, an almost totally white, incredibly insular, racist state--the kind of place that if you're a black person traveling through on the Interstate, you'd best stick to the highway rest stops to get your coffee. It has plenty of fine people living inside its boundaries, but it also has people who'd be just as at home in rural Mississippi--except that then they'd have to live--god forbid!--in the vicinity of "colored people" (West Virginia is only 3% African-American--you can walk around even a city like Wheeling all day and not see one).

Certainly Obama will have his work cut out for him winning over working class Americans. Hillary Clinton and her seemingly pump-headed husband Bill (see my April 28 column Invasion of the Pumpheads) have been hard at work turning them against him for months now, and Republican John McCain, who knows a thing or two about how racist some voters can be (Bush's campaign during the 2000 South Carolina primary, successfully spread the vicious lie that McCain's adopted Indian daughter was the "love child" of an adulterous relationship with a mythical black woman) can be expected to pick up where she left off, probably courtesy of surrogates and 527 campaign groups.

But the reality is that most of the American white working class is not racist. In most states, whites and blacks work together every day, share lunch and after-work beers, and get along fine. Most working-class people know that their real political enemies are the bosses who keep cutting their real wages, shipping their jobs overseas, busting their unions and financing the politicians who help them screw average Americans.

All Obama has to do is make it clear, during the general election campaign, that he understands all this, and is really going to take their side, by restoring labor law to some kind of at least impartiality, so that unions can start to organize the vast unorganized workforce whose members overwhelmingly want a union. All he has to do is say that he will call a halt to unfair trade agreements that encourage American firms to move overseas and sell their crap back to the US instead of making it here. All he has to do is say that he will start taxing the rich again, and corporations, and cut the tax burden on working people.

Racism thrives on irrational fear. Hillary Clinton has been playing to that fear with her evocation of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. McCain will play to that fear too. That's why Obama's "hope" campaign has made sense, but he needs to go further than just hope. He needs to start making concrete what he will be doing for those working people who are the targets of the insidious fear campaigns.

The voters of West Virginia are probably a lost cause. Too many of them, like the Germans of the early 1930s, have been convinced by the fear-mongers that their enemy is a group of "others"--in this case black people. There's not much a candidate like Obama can do about that. But the toxin of racism has been in retreat, thankfully, for years, in most of the nation, and Obama's excellent showings in states like Virginia, Missouri and Wisconsin are solid evidence of that.

The false calculus offered by the Clinton campaign, which argues that no Democratic presidential candidate can win the presidency without winning West Virginia, is based upon races that were won from the middle, leaving working class people with no real reason to vote--the kind of campaign Bill Clinton ran, and that Clinton could be expected to run, should she improbably win the nomination.

What Obama has demonstrated in his primary campaign, is that he can reach beyond the hard core Democratic Party base, and attract the votes of independents (mostly white people) and even Republicans. He now needs to work to replicate his successes in states like Virginia, Wisconsin and Missouri, to expand his reach to those working class voters who have been leaning Republican or to Clinton.

To do that, he needs to make a much more populist case than he has to date.
__________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Pennsylvania-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Invasion of the Pumpheads!

dlindorff — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 11:08:54 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

Is America at the mercy of an invasion of the pumpheads?

The bizarre behavior of Bill Clinton during this campaign season, which has seen this once smooth-talking and politically uber-sophisticated campaigner repeatedly stick a foot in his mouth and undermine his wife’s struggling campaign, raises the issue of whether he is suffering from postperfusion syndrome—a now recognized cognitive impairment common in patients who have undergone heart bypass surgery.

Referred to in hospital jargon as “pumphead syndrome,” the condition, thought to be caused by debris and bubbles that are created and released into the bloodstream by artificial pumps used to circulate blood while hearts are being operated on—material that can block blood flow in smaller vessels in the brain, causing neurological damage--this recognized condition has been demonstrated in some studies to lead to significant cognitive impairment that can show up in as many as 42 percent of heart surgery patients even as long as five years after surgery.

Clinton underwent quadruple bypass surgery on Sept. 6, 2006, and accordiing to his doctors, instead of keeping his heart going during the procedure, they chose the method that involved shutting down his heart temporarily, and putting him temporarily on a heart pump--the method that can cause posperfusion syndrome.

At least in Clinton’s case, if he is a “pumphead,” the only damage he can do is to his wife’s campaign. He is no longer president or commander in chief. (Well, let me take that back. If she were elected, he could create havoc as First Spouse and chief pillow talker, but let’s not even go there!)

But what about Cheney, a man who has had five, count ‘em, five heart surgeries, each of which offered a 42% chance of causing permanent cognitive impairment? No wonder there are reports that this bizarre, eternally snarling, heavy drinking friend shooter is said to hum to himself loudly and tunelessly in the stall of the White House men’s room!

If we consider the likelihood that the man widely seen as the power in this administration is a pumphead, and that Bush himself, who spent a long time as a drunk and a cokehead (talk about the potential for, not to mention the clear evidence of mental impairment!), we are left with the almost inevitable conclusion that we have been led for the past two terms by a pair brain-damaged men—and that’s not even counting the members of the cabinet and National Security Council, the medical histories of whom we know nothing. Given the advanced age of most of the team, it’s a fair bet that a number of them have had heart surgery too.

Call it “Invasion of the Pumpheads!”

Certainly not everyone who undergoes heart surgery and gets put temporarily on a pump ends up mentally deficient, but the prevalence of the problem sounds to me like a pretty good reason to demand full medical disclosure from all candidates for higher office, and not just for president and vice president, but for cabinet posts too—and judgeships.

For starters, Republican presidential presumptive nominee John McCain, 71 and a known cancer survivor, has not released his medical records. That suspicious failure of candor in a man who has already run for president once, should tell us something right away. His behavior places him squarely in the pumphead suspicion category, especially given that the guy repeatedly fails to recognize the difference between Sunnis and Shias in Iraq, and thinks that the Iranians—nearly all Shia—are backing Al Qaeda in Iraq, a Sunni group that is so anti-Iran that they are publicly calling on the US to attack that country! Even if he hasn’t had heart surgery, if he were elected and took office at age 72, he’d be the oldest president in history, and his prognosis for making it through one, much less two terms in one of the world’s most stressful jobs without having a heart attack seem slim.

Not that seemingly intelligent presidents haven’t been disastrous or haven’t made terrible decisions (think Nixon, Kennedy, Hoover and Wilson). But we’ve just endured two terms of a president with some kind of mental impairment with catastrophic results, and we had one in the 1980s with Alzheimer-afflicted Ronald Reagan, which set the nation on its course to bankruptcy. We certainly don’t need yet a third president of limited mental ability. It’s almost like we’re institutionalizing the concept.
_____________
DAVE LINDORFF is an investigative journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006 and now available in paperback edition. His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Duck and Cover(Up): Hillary Under Fire

dlindorff — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 09:43:55 -0400

By Dave Lindorff

So Hillary Clinton, her campaign sagging as it becomes clearer and clearer that she’s not going to get the Democratic nomination unless she can destroy her opponent, insists she would have quit Barack Obama’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago after hearing the allegedly “hateful” words of its pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

But wait a sec. Putting aside the matter of whether what Wright said was even “hateful,” this same Hillary Clinton chose the rabidly anti-semitic Rev. Billy Graham for spiritual mentor in her time of troubles during wayward hubby Bill’s impeachment scandal, and welcomed his offer of support for her senate and presidential bids. This, of course, is the same Billy Graham who was caught on tape telling President Nixon that he thought Jews had a “stranglehold” on the American media, and that if something weren’t “done about it,” the “country’s going down the drain.”

Now that certainly qualifies as hate speech, but it hasn’t bothered candidate Clinton a bit to cozy up to the Rev. Graham.

Well, maybe Clinton just “misspoke” when she said she chose the Rev. Graham as her spiritual mentor. (Isn’t that a lovely euphemism for lying, by the way?)

Misspeaking is her excuse for her latest whopper: the one about her combat experience in war-torn Bosnia.

Clinton, in an Iraq policy speech she gave last week aimed at trying to burnish her claim of 35 years of Washington experience, recalled a 1996 trip to the war-torn former province of Yugoslavia, where Serbs and Croats had been butchering each other and especially Muslims. As she told the tale last week:

"I certainly do remember that trip to Bosnia and ... there was a saying around the White House that if a place was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn't go, so send the first lady. That's where we went. I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."

Brave woman!

Then came an embarrassing CBS news clip of that visit, which showed that there was no sniper fire, and that Clinton, who had brought along her daughter Chelsea and the comic Sinbad (apparently it was too dangerous for Bill, but not too dangerous for her daughter or the commedian!), and that all three of them had made a leisurely stroll from the plane with their military escorts and local hosts, even stopping to greet an 8-year-old girl who was on hand to welcome them.

A red-faced Clinton now claims she was “tired” and that she had “misspoken.”

Except that this isn’t the first time she’s told this particular whopper, as she insisted initially. She’s been a serial liar about the Bosnia visit and the mythic snipers.

All of which should raise grave doubts in the minds of primary voters in Pennsylvania and elsewhere about the veracity of her many other claims of foreign policy and White House executive experience—like her clearly and demonstrably inflated claim of having “helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland,” or her equally inflated claim of having "negotiated open borders to let fleeing refugees into safety from Kosovo," and also about her claim to have opposed the passage of the job-killing NAFTA treaty. (Recently revealed Clinton White House appointment records, pried lose by a public interest group Freedom of Information request, show that she in fact actively pushed for NAFTA passage.)

Now we all know that all politicians bend the truth, exaggerate their records, and yes, lie. But Clinton is now in danger of supplanting Al Gore, who was pilloried for exaggerating his role in “inventing” the Internet during his ill-fated run for the White House, as the season’s ace prevaricator. If she were somehow to manage to gain the Democratic nomination, Republicans and GOP candidate John McCain would have a field day with her at this point.

But we should not be surprised at this turn of events. After all, Hillary’s claim to White House experience and her assertion that she’s ready to assume the role of commander in chief “on day one” rests on her having been Bill’s consort and presidential “twofer.” And it was Bill, never one to be hobbled by the limitations of the truth, who famously claimed that a statement’s veracity depended on “what the meaning of `is’ is.”

Perhaps Hillary will eventually be saying the veracity of her Bosnian tall tale hinges on what the meaning of “snipe” is.

Now I recall that when I was a kid in summer camp, a snipe was a creature that counselors would send us off into the woods to capture in the dark. Like Clinton’s adventure with live fire, we campers eventually learned that the animal didn’t exist.

________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006, and now available in paperback edition). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net

Comparison of Clinton administration and other recent Presidencies

martin flannery — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 12:12:17 -0400

I would like to get a web site that has gathered information regarding a comparison between the acchievments of the 8 year Clinton Presidency; ( national debt, balance of trade, employment figures, level of poverty, dispariity between have and have nots, foreign policy achievments, domestic well being including infrastructure etc.) and the two Bush administrations as well as Reagans.

If some one can direct me to the appropriate website I would be grateful.

Martin Flannery

1988-2004: The Submerging Democratic Majority

Gore4US — Mon, 09 Jul 2007 22:24:26 -0400

1988-2004 Election Analysis: The Submerging Democratic Majority http://www.geocities.com/electionmodel/TruthIsAllFAQResponse.htm#HistoricalElections

The Democrats actually won all FIVE elections by an average 8.9 MILLION vote margin. That’s the True Emerging Democratic Majority. Don't believe it? Run the numbers yourself.

This analysis is based on the 1988-2004 Election Calculator model. The model first estimates the number of returning voters by adjusting prior election recorded vote totals for uncounted votes and mortality. An estimated turnout percentage is applied to this value. As preliminary NEP vote shares were not available for 1988-2000, Final National Exit Poll shares (which were matched to the recorded vote) were assumed for the base case. In 2004, however, preliminary 12:22am "pristine" vote shares were available, so these were used instead.

The model used Census-reported total votes cast as the base case assumption. The pool of potential returning voters was assumed to include all who cast votes, rather than just those whose votes were recorded. Uncounted vote rates based on the Census are much higher than the assumed 3.0% rate in prior models. Another assumption change is the mortality rate. Annual voter mortality, estimated as 1.22-1.30%, is more accurate than prior models which assumed the total US 0.87% mortality rate.

The new base case assumptions had the effect of increasing Democratic vote shares compared to prior models. For example, the Election Calculator indicates that Kerry won by 53.0- 45.9%, a 9 million vote margin. The prior True Vote Model had Kerry winning by 52.6-46.4%.

Following are the key results based on AVERAGE CALCULATED 1988-2004 Vote shares:

- The Dem share was 3.8% HIGHER than the RECORDED share.

- The GOP share was 3.2% LOWER than the RECORDED share.

- The Dem share was 1.4% HIGHER than the PRELIMINARY Exit Poll.

- The GOP share was 0.1% HIGHER than the PRELIMINARY Exit Poll.

Voter turnout of prior election Dem, GOP and Other voters is calculated as:

Turnout = prior election (recorded vote + uncounted votes - voter deaths)* voter turnout percentage

The True vote for the Dem, GOP and Other candidate is calculated as:

True Vote = shares of returning (Dem + GOP + Other + New voters)

Summary Statistics (1988-2004)


	Calculated
	TRUE Vote			Exit Poll		Recorded			Calculated Dem
	Dem	Rep		Dem	Rep	Dem	Rep		Margin (mil)
Average	50.9%	43.0%		49.5%	42.9%	47.1%	46.2%		8.86

2004	53.0%	45.9%		50.8%	48.2%	48.3%	50.7%		8.96
2000	51.1%	46.0%		48.5%	46.2%	48.4%	47.9%		5.66
1996	52.0%	39.3%		52.2%	37.5%	49.9%	41.4%		13.36
1992	47.9%	35.0%		46.0%	33.1%	43.3%	37.7%		14.71
1988	50.2%	48.7%		49.8%	49.3%	45.6%	53.4%		1.61


1988-2004 Avg	Total	Dem	Rep	Other	Margin	Dem	Rep	Other	Margin
Calculated	111.5	56.76	47.90	6.86	8.86	50.9%	43.0%	6.2%	7.9%
Recorded	102.9	48.47	47.66	6.74	0.81	47.1%	46.2%	6.7%	0.9%
Prelim Exit poll	102.9	50.84	44.28	7.93	6.56	49.5%	42.9%	7.9%	6.6%
Discrepancies
Calc - Recorded	8.7	8.29	0.24	0.12	8.05	3.8%	-3.2%	-0.5%	7.0%
Calc - Exit poll		5.92	3.62	-1.07	2.30	1.4%	0.1%	-1.7%	1.3%
Exit - Recorded		2.38	-3.38	1.19	5.76	2.4%	-3.4%	1.2%	5.7%

President Bill Clinton Rocks Milwaukee: "We're Better Than This!"

Chip — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 03:34:56 -0500

President Bill Clinton rocked 4,000 Milwaukeeans in a capacity crowd Friday afternoon, adding Wisconsin as the 29th state he has campaigned in this election season, after rocking Tucson last night with 8,000 in attendance. He was obviously thrilled to be back on the campaign trail, describing it as an "astonishing experience." Looking fit and healthy, he took the stage from Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle, after being introduced by the Governor's sons, Gus and Gabe. Extending thanks to the state's politicians for their support, President Clinton extended special thanks to AFSCME's International President Gerald McEntee, who backed him early on in his race for governor, when he "was running 5th out of 6 candidates" – and, quipped Bill, "Hilary and Chelsea were still undecided."

But then President Clinton turned serious, noting that across the country people know that there is something "profoundly amiss in our national life. That basically we’re not relating to each other as we ought to, and our national government is not working." He pointed out that many Republicans are confused, bewildered and dismayed at the direction that a small segment of the party has lead them, governing "by assertion and attack" so it's "not fair to blame all Republicans." Indeed, he acknowledged, "We all are a little red and blue."

"This is not your grandfather's Republican Party. It is the narrowest, most extreme, most ideological strip of the Republican Party that has run both the White House and the Congress for six years. And they basically favor the concentration of wealth and power as opposed to equal opportunity and empowerment. They favor special interest politics over the common good. And they favor ideological division over evidence and argument."

President Clinton spoke about the drastic differences between Governor Doyle and his Republican challenger, Congressman Mark Green and asked, “Why in the wide world would Wisconsin want to import the radical Washington politics to a civil place?"

He described the difference between a political philosophy, where one subscribes to certain values and then reads, discusses and learns more about that philosophy and how it's applied to real life situations, and that of being an ideologue: when "you already have the answers." And he continued that Democrats don't think of America as an "empire" as do some Republican party elites, who consider Democrats to be "trapped in a reality-based world."

"They refer to people like us as lesser political mortals because we are trapped in the reality-based world . . . Well, I grew up in an alcoholic home. I spent my whole childhood trying to get into the reality-based world. I like it here. I think we should stay right here."

And deal with reality, he did!

Taking Bush to task for turning the surplus he left behind to a deficit, President Clinton explained that money to finance all that debt must be borrowed from other countries, like China, Japan, Saudi Arabia and even Mexico. So, in some cases we are borrowing money for our debt from countries with much lower annual per capita incomes. "Wouldn't it be better for those countries to use that money for their own citizens than to finance our debt?" he asked. And that debt, he noted, would mean our children and grandchildren will be paying interest, let alone prinicipal, for years to come on debts we incurred.

Certainly gives a new definition to the phrase: "Paying it forward!"

On Iraq, President Clinton praised our troops, saying we can all be proud of those who served, including a friend's son who received a Bronze Star in the Battle of Fallujah and described himself as "the only liberal Democrat Jewish Marine captain" there. But he also berated the Bush administration's policy as creating more terrorists than they have killed or captured, wryly noting: "Stop and think is not the same as cut and run!"

And he listed more reality checks, too: $9 Billion of Iraqi funding missing without a trace; that the number of Washington lobbyists has doubled in 4 years; a seniors' drug benefit that "Einstein couldn't understand" with a donut hole to pass profits to the drug companies; and the Abramoff deal when the White House initially said officials, including Karl Rove, had no contacts with Abramoff – later a congressional report disclosed 485 contacts".

“Why would you replace a governor that raised the minimum wage with someone who preferred to raise his pay instead of the minimum wage?” Clinton asked, referring to Doyle's Republican challenger, Congressman Mark Green, a regular Bush agenda supporter.

Clinton also praised Governor Jim Doyle for balancing the budget in Wisconsin (after inheriting a $3.2 billion dollar deficit from his Republican predecessor, Tommy Thompson) while still funding education and social programs, holding it up as an example Washington should follow.

“If you have the right priorities, you can get rid of the deficit and invest in education. That’s what Jim Doyle did here in Wisconsin,” Clinton said.

Despite all the failings of the past six years, President Clinton chided those Republicans who claim to voters: "You still have to vote for us! The Democrats will tax you to death! There will terrorists on every corner! And immigrants, too!"

President Clinton ended with "we're better than this," and remarked that Republicans "know the wheels are runoff." He asked that we Democrats not "give up on anybody." Just what you'd expect someone to say from a place called Hope.

Clinton Schools Chris Wallace

BushFlash — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 21:52:04 -0400

Click for video

The now-famous exchange. What got me, was later in the program, they said that Clinton was just trying to whitewash his legacy...

The Disney/ABC Battle Is Lexington and Concord

Fri, 08 Sep 2006 08:20:01 -0400

From MakeThemAccountable.com:

The Disney/ABC Battle Is The Lexington and Concord for Air America, New Media, and Grassroots Democracy

by Brent Budowsky

In real time, the battle over the abusive and dishonest ABC and Disney production is an epic and seminal moment in media and political history. For the first time in memory we are fully mobilized and active from progressive radio to the blogs, from political leaders to independent news sites, from Democratic leaders to truth-telling advocates and we are winning the battle of ideas.

MORE MORE MORE

We have already won a partial victory with Scholastic parting company with Disney and saving our children from a polluted and partisan corruption of history. Today the battle rages again, and we should keep up the pressure full blast, including a willingness to boycott Disney and ABC if they refuse to conform their product with the truth.

(more…)

Carolyn Kay
MakeThemAccountable.com

Bill Clinton Smacks Lieberman

Bob Fertik — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 10:57:36 -0400

ABC News reports on Bill Clinton's Lieberman smackdown:

Lieberman has characterized his loss -- and the need for his subsequent independent run -- as liberals in the party purging those with the Lieberman-Clinton position of progressiveness in domestic politics and strong national security credentials.

"Well, if I were Joe and I was running as an independent, that's what I'd say, too," Clinton said.

"But that's not quite right. That is, there were almost no Democrats who agreed with his position, which was, 'I want to attack Iraq whether or not they have weapons of mass destruction.'"

"His position is the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld position, which was, 'Does it matter if they have weapons? None of this matters. … This is a big, important priority, and 9/11 gives us the way of attacking and deposing Saddam.'"

Clinton said that a vote for Lamont was not, as Lieberman had implied, a vote against the country's security.

So much for Holy Joe, who is on his way to the ashheap of history.

But this is interesting too:

Clinton said other Senate Democrats who had voted to give Bush the authority to go to war -- including his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York -- who may be weighing a 2008 presidential run, had hoped that the threat of war would force former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to comply with U.N. inspections.

"They [Democrats] felt, frankly, let down that the U.N. inspectors were not permitted to finish, and they were worried that we were devoting attention away from Afghanistan and the hunt for [Osama] bin Laden and al Qaeda, which was a huge, immediate threat to our security in the aftermath of 9/11, as we saw [with] this foiled British plot continues to be," Clinton said.

If this is true, then why the hell don't the Democrats who voted for the Iraq War - including Hillary Clinton - come out and say exactly what Bill Clinton said?

And why don't they go one step further and say George Bush lied to them - and to the world - about Iraq?

Is that such a hard thing to say 15 months after the publication of the Downing Street Memos?