Posted by Vince Foster

From Captains Quarters - bookmark this GREAT site!

A blurb in the Taipei Times may telegraph a shakeup in the Democratic primary race, which has settled into a contest for the second spot already. Hillary Clinton may have a tougher fight on her hands, as a cancellation in Al Gore’s schedule portends a presidential bid by the former Vice President (via Power Line and The Corner):

ENVIRONMENT Al Gore visit postponed Former US vice president Al Gore will not be able to make it to Taiwan this September to address the issue of global warming, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Tien Chiu-chin (田秋堇) said yesterday. Tien, who invited Gore to visit Taiwan to promote awareness on global warming, told reporters yesterday that she received an e-mail from the Harry Walker Agency, which has the exclusive right to arrange Gore’s speeches, saying that Gore had canceled all his scheduled events in the next six months. The visit to Taiwan had been postponed to next year, she added. Tien said the reason for the cancelation was that Gore was considering a presidential bid.

If this is accurate, it’s the best indication that Gore will challenge Hillary for the top spot on the ticket. He has made it his mission to campaign worldwide against global warming, as well as making a living from at least some of his appearances. Cancelling six months of commitments clears him throught at least the start of the primary elections next year.

Of course, this could just be Gore’s way of dumping the Taiwan appearance in a way that doesn’t burn bridges. He could have decided not to irritate backers who want to concentrate on wheedling Beijing into changes, and a Taiwan appearance by Gore may have bruised some feelings in mainland China. The politics in that region have become very strained, and Beijing may have resented a challenge from Gore from the disputed island.

We should keep our eyes and ears open for other cancellations. If a rash of them suddenly appears, I think we will have our answer. Given the mood of the activists in the Democratic Party, Gore could give Hillary a real problem in the primaries — and she might wind up at the bottom of the ticket.

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Hillary Clinton called Bill into her office one day and said, "Bill, I have a great idea!  I know how we can win back Middle America and secure my presidential victory in 2008."

"Great, but how do you propose we go about that?" asked Bill.

"Well, Hillary responds, we’ll go down to a local Wal-Mart, get some cheesy clothes and shoes, like most middle Americans wear and then we’ll stop at the pound and pick up a Labrador."

"When we look the part we’ll go to a nice old country bar in Middle America, and we’ll show them that we really enjoy the countryside and show admiration and respect for the hard working people living there."

A few days later, all decked out and with the requisite Labrador at heel, they set off from New York in a westerly direction. Eventually they arrived at just the place they were looking for.

With dog in tow they walk into the bar. They step up to the bar and the bartender takes a step back and say’s, "Aren’t you Bill and Hillary Clinton?"

Hillary answers, "Yes we are, and what a lovely town you have here.  We were just passing through and Bill suggested that we stop and take in some local color."

They then order a couple of cocktails from the bartender and proceed to drink them down, all the while chatting up a storm with anyone who would listen.

All of a sudden, the bar room door opens and a grizzled old farmer comes in. He walked up to the Labrador , lifted its tail and looked underneath, shrugged his shoulders and walks out the door.  A few moments later, in came another old farmer. He walked up to the dog, lifted its tail, looked underneath, scratched his head and then left the bar.

Over the course of the next hour or so, another four or five farmers came in, lifted the dog’s tail, and went away looking puzzled. Eventually Hillary and Bill could stand it no longer and called the bartender over.

"Tell me, said Hillary, why did all those old farmers come in and look under the dog’s tail like that?  Is it some sort of old custom?"

"’Good Lord no.", said the bartender, "It’s just that someone told them that there was a Labrador in this bar with two assholes!"

Posted by Vince Foster

From World Net Daily - Read them daily!
By Jack Cashill

Last week I documented some of the consequences of what Sen. Fred Thompson called "the most corrupt political campaign in modern history," namely the Clinton re-election campaign of 1996.

In 1997, Thompson chaired the Senate committee that investigated the campaign. Here is how that campaign began.

Following the Democratic electoral debacle in November 1994, President Clinton’s approval rating dipped to an unnervingly low 45 percent. The rating of his most likely Republican opponent, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, was cresting at 62 percent. Bill Clinton was staring down the barrel of a one-term presidency.

"I can tell you," DNC finance chair Terry McAuliffe would later testify, "the political mood at the time clearly was that he had no chance of winning again."

The Clintons had few options but to fight on. In early December 1994, in the White House treaty room, Bill and Hillary Clinton held a secret meeting with the one man who could possibly turn the tide of battle, political consultant Dick Morris.

More than a decade earlier, Morris had helped Clinton regain the governor’s office after an embarrassing post-first term defeat. In 1990, however, Morris and the Clintons split over an incident that reveals both Bill Clinton’s capacity for violence and Hillary’s for covering it up.

To date, Hillary Clinton has shown no inclination to share unpleasant truths. "Living History," her autobiography, is almost as free of conflict as her book on Socks the cat. She casually attributes Morris’ refusal to work on the disastrous 1994 congressional campaign to his problems with their staff.

In an open letter to Hillary Clinton in National Review Online, Morris offered a more vivid accounting of the events of 1990 that caused their split.

Worried he was falling behind his opponent in a primary campaign, Clinton "verbally assaulted" Morris for not giving the campaign more time. When the offended Morris turned and stalked out of the room, Clinton followed.

"Bill ran after me," Morris writes, "tackled me, threw me to the floor of the kitchen in the mansion and cocked his fist back to punch me. You [Hillary] grabbed his arm and, yelling at him to stop and get control of himself, pulled him off me."

Read the rest of this entry »

Anyways, on page 453 of the book, Fabiani is quoted as saying there was a "serious fear" that Hillary would be indicted. Bernstein than goes on to quote "one of her lawyers" making a pretty explosive accusation: that Hillary, contrary to sworn testimony from many White House staffers, had …

… run everything" in the hours after Vince Foster’s death … . "Then she had denied it. You could see her … getting so intimately involved in … how you handle his office, and what are you going to do with the documents, and who’s going to search the office. You can see her jumping into this."

Which lawyer for the woman with a decent chance of being the next president called her a liar? I can’t know. But I did Google "Mark Fabiani" and "intimately involved" to see if it might be a pet phrase of his and didn’t find anything.

More Fabiani dish on Hillary, page 459:

When some of us stood up to her, she generally would back down. But the kind of people that were around here were yes people. She had never surrounded herself with people who could stand up to her, who were of a different mind.

Read it all here

Listen to info on the Death of Vince Foster

Posted by Vince Foster

Helen Thomas

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., has great political skills, but her war-and-peace compass leaves something to be desired. Clinton has blown hot and cold on Middle East issues, including Iraq and the Palestinian-Israeli dispute. She is at best pragmatic. Principles? Well, that’s another story. Before and during her early years in the White House, she supported Palestinian statehood, but she apparently forgot this after successfully running for senator from New York as a Democrat.

The rest is history. She obviously had to cater to a new constituency, make the ritual trip to Israel and forget any sympathy she once had for the Palestinians. But is her 180-degree flip-flop on that festering issue a portent of her leadership if she attains the White House? As for Iraq, she voted in October 2002 to authorize President Bush to do what was necessary to unseat Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Unlike former Democratic Sen. John Edwards, she has refused to say she made a mistake when she voted for the war. She cannot claim she was misled.

During the lead up to the war when she was briefed on the latest U.S. intelligence about Iraq, Bush was shouting from the housetops that he was going to attack Iraq. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld often strutted before reporters at the Pentagon two years before the invasion and bragged about the attack the U.S. would wage against Iraq. Clinton is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, a post that will allow her to embellish her credentials as a possible future commander-in-chief to show she would not hesitate to make tough military decisions. As a member of that committee, she visited Iraq in 2005 and said U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would be a mistake. But she also criticized the administration for making poor decisions about the war. In 2007, she voted in favor of a war-spending bill that required Bush to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq within a certain deadline; the president vetoed the measure. But Clinton then voted against a compromise war-spending bill that tied funding to progress by Iraq in meeting certain benchmarks.

Posted by Vince Foster

From The Progressive

I can’t help asking women I know what they think about Hillary Clinton. Here is the historic, first viable woman candidate for President of the United States, and yet . . . ho-hum. I listened to a group of accomplished women of about the same age as Hillary argue about her candidacy the other night. A fellow Wellesley alumna (she graduated before the Presidential candidate and didn’t know her) said she can’t stand Hillary’s overbearing, dorm-monitor persona. A businesswoman laughed at the style criticisms—"Is that really important?"–and said she’d vote for Clinton because she’s "really, really smart." And a filmmaker and an art curator both said they thought Hillary was OK.

All in all, enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton is not that high among women I know–certainly no match for the outright hatred for her that has been brewing for more than a decade on the right.

Lakshmi Chaudhry describes it in the July 2 cover story of The Nation as a "feminist problem." She corrects Anna Quindlen, who wrote in Newsweek that "Senator Clinton has a woman problem." In fact, Chaudhry observes, Clinton polls the highest of all the candidates among likely women voters in the Democratic primary, and gets 21 points more among independent women than independent men. The criticisms of Hillary she quotes are mainly from progressives, like Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin and Bitch magazine’s Lisa Jervis.

Read it all

Posted by Vince Foster

MSNBC is reporting that Bill Clinton has begun the first stage of his campaign on behalf of his better half with a curious email fundraising pitch:

“She’s also the best candidate to beat the Republican machine. You know Hillary will never let a swift boat-style attack go unanswered.”

The Clintons have enough in their collective skeleton closets to keep any number of would-be muckrakers busy for the next 20 years. So, what is it that has the former President’s panties in a wad? The typical Carville-Begala play would be to try and get out in front of any damaging information, and try to frame the issue as a “personal attack”, claiming the victim’s mantle at the hands of the evil vast right wing conspiracy.

It’s just a hunch, but I think the Paul v. Clinton lawsuit is starting to worry the Clinton machine. Not familiar with this case? Not surprisingly, it has been largely ignored by the major media.

A website called the Hillary Clinton Accountability Project purports to document the “largest campaign finance fraud in America’s history.” Just last week, a “smoking gun” video was introduced as evidence in the lawsuit. According to HILLCAP,

This tape was withheld by the U.S. Attorney in New York from 2001 until April 11, 2007, when it was released to Paul’s attorneys at the US Justice Foundation, depriving three federal investigations of this evidence of Hillary Clinton’s role in the campaign finance frauds for which her finance director David Rosen was indicted in 2005.

In the last Presidential election, the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth began a shoestring effort to reveal the truth about Lt. John F. Kerry’s record of service during the Vietnam War. Largely ignored by the major media, the internet based crusade ultimately had a devastating effect on the Kerry campaign, in a way that only the truth can.

Posted by Vince Foster

By Glen Thrush

June 27, 2007

WASHINGTON - Hillary Rodham Clinton has publicly disdained going negative on fellow Democrats, but her pollster is apparently probing primary opponents’ vulnerabilities in calls to voters in New Hampshire and Iowa.

A field office working for Clinton pollster Mark Penn has been testing Democrats’ responses to attacks on John Edwards and Barack Obama, according to three voters who say they received calls in recent weeks.

Iowa voter Jason Eness-Potter told Newsday a pollster called him last month asking if he’d be less or more likely to back Edwards knowing the former senator "proudly promotes himself as a champion of the poor, and yet he went and got a $400 haircut."

Another Democrat told Talking Points Memo, a left-leaning Web site, she had received a similar call.

News of the negative "test" polling comes as Obama and Edwards have stepped up criticism of front-runner Clinton. On Monday, Obama told reporters, "The only person who would probably be prepared to be our president on Day 1 would be Bill Clinton - not Hillary Clinton."

The polling worker asked Eness-Porter if he thought Obama should be elected president despite serving only two years in the Senate. "It was a 40-minute interview," said Eness-Porter. "For the first 35 minutes they asked me basic poll questions and then it turned negative."

A Clinton spokesman declined to comment last night.

Read the rest