Friday’s Mini-Report

April 11, 2008

Today’s edition of quick hits.

* Hillary tells Bill to please stop talking: “Sen. Hillary Clinton wants her husband to quit talking about her trip to Bosnia in 1996, the former president said Friday. ‘Hillary called me and said, ‘I misstated it, you said I misstated it, but you got to let me handle it because you don’t remember it either’ … I said ‘Yes ma’am,” Bill Clinton said in Terre Haute, Indiana.”

* Discouraging economic news: “Consumer sentiment sunk to its lowest level in 26 years in early April, according to a report on Friday from University of Michigan/Reuters, as worries about the economy, unemployment and inflation deflated hopes for future. U.S. consumer sentiment index fell to 63.2 in early April from 69.5 in March. Sentiment is at its lowest level since March 1982. Economists surveyed by MarketWatch were looking for an April result of 68.8.”

* Remember that Wecht case I mentioned earlier? This is really bizarre: “Two jurors said Thursday they were unnerved by FBI requests for home visits to explain why they deadlocked in the federal public corruption trial of former Allegheny County coroner Cyril H. Wecht. Experts said the practice of using FBI agents to contact and interview jurors in their homes after mistrials was unusual, but the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Pittsburgh characterized it as ‘commonplace.'”

* At least it’s not a Peabody: “Barry Nolan, a local Boston news reporter, is mounting a campaign to protest the fact that Bill O’Reilly will be awarded an Emmy Award by the Boston/New England Chapter next month. Nolan insists that O’Reilly is ‘a mental case’ who shouldn’t be held up as an example of journalistic integrity.”

* If McCain is going to go after Soros-funded outfits, he might want to look a little closer to home, Part I and Part II.

* Wouldn’t this be entertaining: “Earlier this week, House Judiciary Committee Chair John Conyers (D-MI) invited John Yoo to testify before the committee on May 6th about the infamous legal memos on torture that he issued while with the Department of Justice. If Yoo did not want to appear, Conyers wrote, then the panel would subpoena him. Now Conyers, following up on the reports in the last couple of weeks about the role of top administration officials in authorizing the use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques including waterboarding, has invited a slew of current and former officials to testify at the hearing. Among those invited are former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former CIA Director George Tenet, former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, Chief of Staff to the Vice President David Addington, and former Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin, who headed up the Office of Legal Counsel for a brief time.”

* Speaking of Conyers, he’s interested in the Wecht case, too.

* One wonders if Mark Penn had any friends in the Clinton camp at all. Here’s Paul Begala on Penn: “I have nothing but contempt for Mr. Penn. And for those of us who wanted to see him out from the beginning, it became almost a Rumsfeldian thing. And he is not even fired. He has been demoted. How could this be?”

* There is a parallel: “Lawyers for the House Judiciary Committee compared President Bush to the late President Richard Nixon in a legal motion filed today in federal court as part of their civil contempt lawsuit against White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers for failing to comply with panel subpoenas. The subpoenas were issued as part of the committee’s probe into the firing of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006.”

* The “nuclear option” is one of theirs, not one of ours.

* Note to the LA Times: unhinged, right-wing blogs who peddle ridiculous smears shouldn’t be used as sources for news articles.

* Nice metaphor: “But the administration’s critics (and even some sympathizers) see the current policy as the equivalent of constructing an expensive road, under hazardous conditions, without being able to explain where the road will lead. The road becomes an end in itself. The point is to keep building it in the hope that it will eventually arrive at some lovely destination.”

* And finally, you may have heard about the odd image, possibly of a naked woman, in the reflection of Dick Cheney’s sunglasses. The mystery seems to have been resolved: “McClatchy/Tribune Information Services photo editor George Bridges used the latest digital technology to enlarge the picture, took a close look at Cheney’s sunglasses and concluded that Mitchell was telling the truth. The image is of the vice president’s hand on his fly rod. ‘In one lens of his sunglasses you can clearly tell it is a sleeved arm of Cheney or a fishing companion. The other lens has an extreme distortion that, without looking at it closely, could be misconstrued,’ said investigative photo editor Bridges.” Good to know.

Anything to add? Consider this an end-of-the-day open thread.

Is it just me, or is it possible that producerism could be the “real” basis of the Greater Conservative Agenda for Indecision 2008?

  • Hillary tells Bill to please stop talking: “Sen. Hillary Clinton wants her husband to quit talking about her trip to Bosnia in 1996, the former president said Friday. ‘Hillary called me and said, ‘I misstated it, you said I misstated it, but you got to let me handle it because you don’t remember it either’ … I said ‘Yes ma’am,” Bill Clinton said in Terre Haute, Indiana.”

    Good Lord.

    Jesus.

    All Mighty Christ.

    ‘nuf said.

  • On the issue of Bill Clinton cramming four lies into 23 words, I have two theories.

    Theory 1:
    Bill Clinton is getting senile and can no longer tell reality from fantasy.

    Theroy 2:
    Bill Clinton is well aware of the effect his words have and, in fact, is trying to sabotage his wife’s candidacy. Maybe he knows something about her plans that we don’t know and he’s trying to save the world. Or maybe he’s afraid of what Hillary, with the power of the presidency behind her, would do to him.

  • Experts said the practice of using FBI agents to contact and interview jurors in their homes after mistrials was unusual, but the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Pittsburgh characterized it as ‘commonplace.’”

    Commonplace if you’re running a police state in RepublicanWorld and the “citizenry” fails to do their duty. I have been keeping track of Fools and Buffoons, Inc., since 1966, and this is the first time I have ever heard of such outrageous behavior.

    Lawyers for the House Judiciary Committee compared President Bush to the late President Richard Nixon in a legal motion filed today in federal court as part of their civil contempt lawsuit against White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten and former White House Counsel Harriet Miers for failing to comply with panel subpoenas.

    They called him a criminal?

    Conyers, following up on the reports in the last couple of weeks about the role of top administration officials in authorizing the use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques including waterboarding, has invited a slew of current and former officials to testify at the hearing. Among those invited are former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former CIA Director George Tenet, former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, Chief of Staff to the Vice President David Addington, and former Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin,

    “Round up the usual suspects.”

  • Oh Bill, you should have just said “Obama ’08” instead. Would have been much shorter and to the point.

  • What’s with Conyers (and Waxman for that matter)? It’s like they have investigative ADHD. Pick one or two things, run them to ground and hang someone. All these investigations that lead nowhere are just busy work.

    Cheney’s hand on his fly rod is not an image I wanted in my head, but it may explain a lot of things. (So?)

  • It’s hard not to think that Begala’s simply trying to distance himself from Penn now that it’s clear that Penn will forever be blamed for one of the worst presidential campaigns in memory. Begala’s done more than his share of triangulating and Clinton excuse-making and propping up the DLC while wrongly fighting against the 50-state strategy.

    He knows the Clintons are going down and he’s looking to salvage some shreds of his career by pinning this debacle on Penn while pretending that he and the other DLCers are still relevant. They aren’t. They won’t be.

  • Bill should have just said, “She is a liar!”

    I am a retired US Army officer and a combat veteran and I can tell you that I remember each time I was shot at in great detail. I don’t talk about them often, but I don’t believe I’ve ever “mispoke” about them either. Had she only mispoke once, I might have ignored it as a one time incident, but she mispoke on this subject at least three times over several months. Unbelievable!

  • Hillary tells Bill to please stop talking: “Sen. Hillary Clinton wants her husband to quit talking about her trip to Bosnia in 1996, the former president said Friday. ‘Hillary called me and said, ‘I misstated it, you said I misstated it, but you got to let me handle it because you don’t remember it either’ … I said ‘Yes ma’am,” Bill Clinton said in Terre Haute, Indiana.”

    Holy Mother of Mary of God…
    Our Father, which art in Heaven….
    Jesus Died for My Sins..

    ‘nuf said…

  • Regarding President Clinton’s bringing up Bosnia again…perhaps this is a conscious strategy and the Clintons are hoping for more media pile-on so that Senator Clinton can generate sympathy.

    I’m really trying to give the benefit of the doubt. He wasn’t always this inarticulate and foolish.

  • danimal: I’m really trying to give the benefit of the doubt. He [Clinton] wasn’t always this inarticulate and foolish.

    Yeppers. Once upon a time Bill wielded a mighty cigar.
    Alack. How far the chosen have fallen….

  • …to explain why they deadlocked…

    Since when are jurors expected to justify their decision to the prosecution? It’s a simple process—you vote innocent or you vote guilty. If the jury “hangs,” then it hangs, and the prosecution reserves the right to re-try. Some of these jurors need to stand up and tell MuKasey’s Kops to f*

  • “latest digital technology”?
    Give me a break. I downloaded it, opened in windows picture viewer, rolled the mouse wheel and figured it out in 15 seconds.

  • Obama stuck his foot in his mouth trying to explain how those damn Pennsylvanians got bitter and cling to their guns and religion.

    “You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.

    And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” – Barack Obama

  • Hey, give ol’ Bill a break. He’s 61 and he’s tired.

    I bet that remark went over big at the Clinton house. Like the last time he told her that pantsuit made her ass look big…

  • From a post written by Andrew Gumbel: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/

    “For me, the most telling falsehood was one of the more seemingly innocent: placing the incident in 1995 instead of 1996. That may seem like a little thing, but in 1995 the Bosnian war was still raging, while in 1996 the country has changed from a civil war theater to an international peace-keeping theater. I was in Bosnia in 1996 and it was perfectly safe for foreign visitors, dignitaries or not…

  • “Consumer sentiment”? Is that the current parlance for consumer confidence? It would be perfectly in keeping with the modern trend for trying to minimize the impact of bad news and inflate the significance of the mediocre. I guess the former “consumer confidence” might start a panic if it were implied that it’s in the cellar. Far better if it just looks like consumers are negatively sentimental about the economy.

  • Actually, Susan @16… If it were just the matter of a date — 1995 vs 1996 — I’d have given her a pass. I’m still a few months short of 59 and I have a *terrible* time with numbers, including dates. If she had been paying a bit less attention to the whole Bosnia story *then*, than she’d have us believe *now*, getting the date off by a year would have been perfectly understandable.

    But. Even at 60, and even if the event happened (or not) 12yrs ago, you don’t forget being (or not being) shot at. You don’t forget *any* especially stressful situations you had been involved in… 43yrs down the road I still remember every detail of the car accident I was the victim of, even though the damage was minor. So, you’re not likely to “mis-remember” – 3 times, yet! — running and weaving through the tarmac, while avoiding shots aimed at you (as opposed to what had really happened).

    And that’s before the *real* question kicks in: for someone who’s so devoted to child welfare that she didn’t divorce Willie Wanker because a child needs two parents… WTF was she doing taking her teenage daughter with her into that “too dangerous for the President” scene? I wish the journos would stop asking Chelsea about Lewinski and asked her about all that duckin’ and weavin’ at the Tuzla airport… Even if her Mom has forgotten the details, I’m sure being shot at would have made an impression on her.

  • The best strategy for lying is to first lie to yourself, and convince yourself that it isn’t a lie. If you can do that, then lying to others is easy.

    Bill and Hill have been lying to themselves for so long that the process of convincing themselves that their lies are truth is completely internalized.

    Greg, what Obama said is true. It ain’t pretty or heartening, but it’s true. The MidWest is a basket case. In the old days, a second rate HS education was more than enough to get a good job on an assembly line. That doesn’t cut it anymore. And people with a second rate HS education are going to have a hard time understanding the complicated mechanisms that took their way of life.

    I don’t care who does it, but this country needs some honesty from its politicians. While too many in the MidWest may be undereducated, they aren’t stupid. They have the capability to understand the situation if someone is willing to explain it. But the explanation isn’t going to come from rag, small-town newspapers. It isn’t going to come from the major dailies (which most of those people don’t read and which tend to cheerlead the very policies that have gutted the MidWest). It isn’t going to come from the TV news. And apparently, it isn’t going to come from the esteemed, junior Senator from NY.

  • If you haven’t watched the Obama response to the “bitter” brouhaha, check it out:

    http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/188566.php

    Wow. Every time they come after him, he flips it around and uses it to his benefit.

    What was the Alec Guinness line from Star Wars? “If you strike me down I will become even more powerful than before.”

    Obama-Wan Kenobi for President.

  • Let the man speak! Take the muzzle off! Everytime he opens his mouth it’s another nail in Hillary’s coffin. Obama ’08

  • libra: WTF was she doing taking her teenage daughter with her into that “too dangerous for the President” scene?

    That was exactly the point of the three mothers I mentioned in a separate thread–women who had been Clinton supporters but were thoroughly disgusted and walked away after this. Their comments summarized: She blithely lies about taking her child into gunfire or literally can’t remember if she took her child into gunfire and doesn’t see why that’s something a parent should, you know, clearly recall.

    I wish the journos would stop asking Chelsea about Lewinski and asked her about all that duckin’ and weavin’ at the Tuzla airport

    I saw a clip of one journo doing exactly that. Chelsea’s face just closed down and she coughed out, “I agree with her [Hillary],” and wouldn’t say any more. She was so obviously embarrassed and ashamed that I felt sorry for her.

  • I personally take offense to Mrs Clinton’s remarks about Bosnia. I was in Bosnia on a mission that went bad. I had a bullets passing my head a mere 12 to 18 inches. They finally forcibly had taken my government issued handgun from me and stuck it to the back of my head. Then was knocked unconsious and when I came through I did not even know who I was, where I was, what I was doing or how I got on the ground. Anyway, how can we support voting for Mrs Clinton when she fabricates stories such as hers on Bosnia? It’s pathetic and it’s wrong. “We the People” cannot trust her.

  • Well it seems Hillary is trying to change the subject by using what Obama said in her stump speech’s.
    Ok…I don’t know what the offense is…….I’m from PA and I am sick of the the state of affairs as they are now..
    With the rising cost of gas,and food ect. The loss of jobs and homes,why wouldn’t a sane person be bitter????

  • stop about and start talking:
    Hillary being fired when she was 27 for being a liar & cheater?
    Her NAFTA lies?
    Peter PAul
    Vince Foster
    Her tax’s returns
    None of this has been answered

    It is time it will be answered, the press is not getting in to this yet they wait till after she loses PA. BO will walk over MCWAR so the only thing left for the press is Clinton bashing…..

  • Everyone is filled with righteous indignation at Sen. Clinton’s description of her landing in Tusla, Bosnia. But no one blinked an eye when Obama wove the tale about how his parents fell in love at the civil rights march in Selma, Alabama, and conceived him (even though at the time of the march, he was FOUR years old and his father had already split), a lie that he told several times, including in his book.
    How is Clinton’s Tusla story any worse than Obama’s Selma story? Both candidates were trying to create a fable about their past to enhance his/her mystique.
    In fact, Clinton’s story has more bearing on the truth, since the Bosnian president (at the time) and 2 White House staffers who were with her on that flight have come forward to say that their descent was very dangerous, they had been told to take last minute precautions, and there were snipers in the surrounding hills. Whereas Obama’s story may be best compared with the fake Holocaust memoir by the Belgian author Misha Defonseca, who said at times “it was difficult for me to tell the difference between what was reality and what was my interior universe.”
    N.B. the fighting and rapes in Bosnia didn’t stop on the day the Dayton Accords were signed. It was a war zone for many years after.

  • I’ll tell you how bad it is. Mrs Clinton undermined every Soldier, Airman, Navy, Marine, Coast Guardsman and Civilian that lost their life in supporting and defending the Constitution of the United States of America. Not just in today’s war against Terrorism but to those that lost lives in previous wars such as WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, Just Cause, Desert Storm, Enduring Freedon and Iraqi Freedom. The fabrication of her story is useless and serves no purpose to the public or the Uniformed Services. She lied, was an imposter by saying those things and “We the People” cannot trust her. Oh by the way, I helped carry out the Dayton Peace Accords in Bosnia. We caught a few criminals and brought them to justice. And, by the way, Mrs Clinton was not there just in case she said she was. God Bless America!

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