Bill: “We Just Have to Slow Down Our Economy” to Fight Global Warming

January 31, 2008

Jake Tapper

Former President Bill Clinton was in Denver, Colorado, stumping for his wife yesterday.

In a long, and interesting speech, he characterized what the U.S. and other industrialized nations need to do to combat global warming this way: “We just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions ’cause we have to save the planet for our grandchildren.”

At a time that the nation is worried about a recession is that really the characterization his wife would want him making? “Slow down our economy”?

I don’t really think there’s much debate that, at least initially, a full commitment to reduce greenhouse gases would slow down the economy….So was this a moment of candor?

He went on to say that his the U.S. — and those countries that have committed to reducing greenhouse gases — could ultimately increase jobs and raise wages with a good energy plan.

So there was something of a contradiction there.

Or perhaps he mis-spoke.

Read the rest of this entry »

"For his part, Obama appears to view Hillary as a thug who will say anything to win." — ABC’s Dan Harris, GMA, 01-31-08.

Gangsta rappers for Hillary? Could be. After all, Barack Obama apparently sees her as a "thug." At least that’s what ABC’s Dan Harris said on today’s Good Morning America.

ROBIN ROBERTS: And that brings us now to the Democrats. It’s their turn tonight. Whatever your political feelings, it’s an historic moment in American history. A woman, an African-American man, one will shatter 200 years of history and win the nomination. The stakes could not be any higher. Dan Harris is here with the story.

DAN HARRIS: High stakes, high tension, high drama. The showdown with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama has become increasingly acidic. And their positions on the issues are essentially identical but their personalities and personal philosophies are very different.

View video here.

Read the rest at Newsbusters

Of all the arguments against Hillary Clinton’s nomination, her tenure on the board of Wal-Mart may be the most ironically damaging. Democrats survive on the money that labor unions generate, and they have a passionate hatred for the nation’s largest retailer, which has successfully kept unions from organizing their workers. John Edwards and Barack Obama have repeatedly demonized Wal-Mart, even though most analysts agree that its low prices and job opportunities represent a net benefit to lower-income communities.

Hillary has attempted to parry criticism of her Wal-Mart connection by claiming that she did what she could to press for positive change while on the board. ABC News has reviewed hours of stockholder meeting videotapes and finds no evidence that she ever pushed Wal-Mart to be more union friendly:

In six years as a member of the Wal-Mart board of directors, between 1986 and 1992, Hillary Clinton remained silent as the world’s largest retailer waged a major campaign against labor unions seeking to represent store workers.

Clinton has been endorsed for president by more than a dozen unions, according to her campaign Web site, which omits any reference to her role at Wal-Mart in its detailed biography of her. …

An ABC News analysis of the videotapes of at least four stockholder meetings where Clinton appeared shows she never once rose to defend the role of American labor unions.

The tapes, broadcast this morning on "Good Morning America," were provided to ABC News from the archives of Flagler Productions, a Lenexa, Kan., company hired by Wal-Mart to record its meetings and events.

Republicans will likely laugh at this line of attack. It’s not one voters will see in a general election, should she win the nomination. The Right sees this obsessive focus on Wal-Mart as a strange passion indeed. People don’t have to shop or work at Wal-Mart, and I don’t do either, but they certainly have the right to argue against unionization if they desire, as long as they follow the law in doing so. They also can offer whatever wages they desire; they have to compete for labor in what has been for years a very tight market, and so they have to be able to beat other retailers to get the best workers.

Read the rest of this entry »

By John Brummett

The Clinton cultists are out in full force, making it apparent that their fealty to those famously self-indulgent political creatures - Bill and Hillary - exceeds any ideology or principle.

These are the same fervent apologists who said it was all right to lie under oath because the question was nobody’s business. People lie under oath all the time, they explained.

We have a disproportionate number of these Clinton cultists in Arkansas. That’s because some people choose to embrace this man and woman no matter what, and do so simply on the basis that they have a personal acquaintance.

As political thinkers, these Clinton cultists are the equivalent of Razorback football fans.

And, believe me, I hear from them.

Lately they defend the Clintons’ blatant distortions of Barack Obama’s simple historical observations a couple of weeks ago. You recall what Obama said: Ronald Reagan’s presidency was transformational in that it changed American politics, and the Republicans have dominated in recent years in the arena of ideas.

Bill, Hillary and their people claimed that Obama had praised Reagan, even expressed love for him, and had embraced what he called "better" Republican ideas.

Obama had done none of that.

The Clinton cultists say Obama knew what he was doing when he took an implicit shot at Bill Clinton in those remarks. They say Obama knew what he was doing when he threw Clinton and Richard Nixon into the same sentence as presidents not transformative like Reagan.

Obama was asking for it, and he got it, they say.

Read the rest of this entry »

Democrats in 22 states across America go to the polls next Tuesday to pick between two presidential prospects: Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

We urge them to choose Obama - an untried candidate, to be sure, but preferable to the junior senator from New York.

Obama represents a fresh start.

His opponent, and her husband, stand for déjà vu all over again - a return to the opportunistic, scandal-scarred, morally muddled years of the almost infinitely self-indulgent Clinton co-presidency.

Does America really want to go through all that once again?

It will - if Sen. Clinton becomes president.

That much has become painfully apparent.

Bill Clinton’s thuggishly self-centered campaign antics conjure so many bad, sad memories that it’s hard to know where to begin.

Suffice it to say that his Peck’s-Bad-Boy smirk - the Clinton trademark - wore thin a very long time ago.

Far more to the point, Sen. Clinton could have reined him in at any time. But she chose not to - which tells the nation all it needs to know about what a Clinton II presidency would be like.

Now, Obama is not without flaws.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Michael Zeldin

Beginning with the South Carolina debate, and continuing as an applause line in many stump speeches thereafter, Hillary Clinton has accused Barack Obama of representing an inner-city slum lord while practicing law in Chicago. Of all people, Sen. Clinton should know better.

During the Whitewater investigation, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr investigated the legal work performed by Mrs. Clinton, then a partner in the Rose law firm, on behalf of Jim McDougal and his bank, Madison Guaranty. Mr. Starr believed that Mrs. Clinton helped orchestrate the fraudulent land deal known as Castle Grande. He subpoenaed her billing records, hauled her before a grand jury, and relentlessly pursued her.
[Hillary Clinton]

In her defense, Mrs. Clinton and her attorneys asserted that her involvement in the matter was de minimus. As one of independent counsels who preceded Mr. Starr, I was interviewed repeatedly on the subject. I wholeheartedly defended Mrs. Clinton.

I believed that the evidence revealed that Mrs. Clinton, who spent a total of only 60 hours of work on the case over a 15-month period, was not substantially involved in the matter and did nothing improper in her work on behalf of Madison Guaranty. In the end, no charges were brought against Mrs. Clinton because there was insufficient evidence to prove that she knowingly assisted anyone in the perpetration of a fraud.

Yet, when an opportunity presented itself in the debate, Mrs. Clinton, without so much as a blink of an eye or the slightest blush, denounced Sen. Obama for representing "Tony Rezko in his slum landlord business in inner-city Chicago." Her accusation invites scrutiny. Not so much for the truth of the accusation (the facts are quite straightforward and completely benign) but as a window into Mrs. Clinton’s character and as a lens with which to see whether a Clinton presidency will be a vehicle for change.

The facts are well documented: Upon graduation from Harvard Law School in 1991, Mr. Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law review, could have named his job at any law firm or corporate legal department in America. Instead, he selected a boutique civil rights law firm, Miner Barnhill & Galland, where he represented community organizers, discrimination victims and black voters trying to force a redrawing of city ward boundaries.

Read the rest of this entry »

In six years as a member of the Wal-Mart board of directors, between 1986 and 1992, Hillary Clinton remained silent as the world’s largest retailer waged a major campaign against labor unions seeking to represent store workers.

Clinton has been endorsed for president by more than a dozen unions, according to her campaign Web site, which omits any reference to her role at Wal-Mart in its detailed biography of her.

Wal-Mart’s anti-union efforts were headed by one of Clinton’s fellow board members, John Tate, a Wal-Mart executive vice president who also served on the board with Clinton for four of her six years.

Tate was fond of repeating, as he did at a managers meeting in 2004 after his retirement, what he said was his favorite phrase, "Labor unions are nothing but blood-sucking parasites living off the productive labor of people who work for a living."

Wal-Mart says Tate’s comments "were his own and do not reflect Wal-Mart’s views."

But Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton and other company officials often recounted how they relied on Tate to lead the company’s successful anti-union efforts.

An ABC News analysis of the videotapes of at least four stockholder meetings where Clinton appeared shows she never once rose to defend the role of American labor unions.

The tapes, broadcast this morning on "Good Morning America," were provided to ABC News from the archives of Flagler Productions, a Lenexa, Kan., company hired by Wal-Mart to record its meetings and events.

Read the rest of this entry »

Late on Sept. 6, 2005, a private plane carrying the Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra touched down in Almaty, a ruggedly picturesque city in southeast Kazakhstan. Several hundred miles to the west a fortune awaited: highly coveted deposits of uranium that could fuel nuclear reactors around the world. And Mr. Giustra was in hot pursuit of an exclusive deal to tap them.

Unlike more established competitors, Mr. Giustra was a newcomer to uranium mining in Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic. But what his fledgling company lacked in experience, it made up for in connections. Accompanying Mr. Giustra on his luxuriously appointed MD-87 jet that day was a former president of the United States, Bill Clinton.

Upon landing on the first stop of a three-country philanthropic tour, the two men were whisked off to share a sumptuous midnight banquet with Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose 19-year stranglehold on the country has all but quashed political dissent.

Mr. Nazarbayev walked away from the table with a propaganda coup, after Mr. Clinton expressed enthusiastic support for the Kazakh leader’s bid to head an international organization that monitors elections and supports democracy. Mr. Clinton’s public declaration undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

Within two days, corporate records show that Mr. Giustra also came up a winner when his company signed preliminary agreements giving it the right to buy into three uranium projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium agency, Kazatomprom.

The monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers in a transaction ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra, analysts said.

Just months after the Kazakh pact was finalized, Mr. Clinton’s charitable foundation received its own windfall: a $31.3 million donation from Mr. Giustra that had remained a secret until he acknowledged it last month. The gift, combined with Mr. Giustra’s more recent and public pledge to give the William J. Clinton Foundation an additional $100 million, secured Mr. Giustra a place in Mr. Clinton’s inner circle, an exclusive club of wealthy entrepreneurs in which friendship with the former president has its privileges.

Mr. Giustra was invited to accompany the former president to Almaty just as the financier was trying to seal a deal he had been negotiating for months.

Read the rest of this entry »

Anyone know anything more about this doll?

Gong Show - now that brings back memories!

Ralph Nader Kicks Off Exploratory Presidential Bid

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

WASHINGTON — Ralph Nader is seeking the presidency — again.

The consumer activist and political gadfly kicked off an exploratory presidential campaign Wednesday with the launch of a new Web site that promises he’ll fight “corporate greed, corporate power, corporate control” and asks people to donate $300 each.

Nader sought the White House in each of the last three presidential elections: He ran on the Green Party ticket in 1996 and 2000, and as an independent in 2004.

Gee, the AP sounds pretty snippy about this turn of events, don’t they?

Sadly, Mr. Nader may be our only hope.

Except he would probably draw as many voters from Mr. McCain, if he is the GOP’s nominee.

Source: Sweetness and Light

Nader did say in a interview I saw that HE WOULD run IF he thought Hillary would be the Democrat nominee!