Hillary Clinton has not yet declared that she is running for president in 2016, but already the Republican jokers have began their attacks.
This attack though, takes the cake. Somehow, Republican presidential wannabe candidate Senator Rand Paul is suggesting that the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal should give Americans pause when it comes to evaluating the Clinton legacy — and, by extension, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s potential presidential campaign.
Paul’s wife, Kelley, made similar remarks in a Vogue profile last year, and her husband agreed with her Sunday in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” Rand Paul said the scandal is about more than just infidelity and lying to the American people, but also as “predatory behavior” from the former president.
“One of the workplace laws and rules that I think are good is that bosses shouldn’t prey on young interns in their office,” Paul said. “And I think really the media seems to have given President Clinton a pass on this. He took advantage of a girl that was 20 years old and an intern in his office. There is no excuse for that, and it is predatory behavior.”
Paul said the episode undercuts Democrats’ allegations of a GOP “war on women” and should color people’s perceptions of the Clintons. He added that “sometimes it’s hard to separate” Bill and Hillary Clinton.
“And then they have the gall to stand up and say Republicans are having a war on women?” Paul said rhetorically. “So yes, I think it’s a factor. It’s not Hillary’s fault, but it is a factor in judging Bill Clinton and history.”
US President Barack Obama and his wife Michelle will travel to South Africa next week to pay their respects to the late Nelson Mandela together with former first couple George W. and Laura Bush.
Ex-president Bill Clinton, who was in office when Mandela took power to become South Africa’s first black president, also said that he would be making the trip with his family.
White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said the Obamas would “participate in memorial events” for the iconic leader who died Thursday at age 95.
Carney declined to provide more details on the trip, saying more information would be provided once it becomes available.
President Obama has paid tribute to President Kennedy at the Medal of Freedom ceremony today as he presented awards to former President Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, country singer Loretta Lynn and newspaper editor Ben Bradlee.
In his opening remarks, Obama highlighted the slain President’s sister-in-law Ethel Kennedy, calling her ‘one of my favorite people’ in a room full of dignitaries. He went on to also give President Kennedy’s grandson Jack a shout out by praising his basketball skills.
Aside from the fact that the 50th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination comes this Friday, the Democrat was mentioned because he was the one to establish the Medal of Freedom initiative which is the highest civilian honor in the country.
His death on November 22, 1963 came two weeks before the first group of winners were due to receive their medals.
President Bill Clinton is far from the first former Commander in Chief to receive the award- in fact all but four Republicans: Presidents Nixon, Ford and both Bushes- have been granted the award by their predecessors.
So the Republicans are jumping in unison on Bill Clinton’s statement that Obama should “fix” Obamacare to allow people to keep the garbage insurance plans if they want to. To these people with such short attention span, Bill Clinton is the only person of importance in the Democratic party to make such a request.
But if they were listening to the President last week in an interview with Chuck Todd of MSNBC, these same dim-wits would have heard the President himself say that he and his team are working on ways to fix this problem in the healthcare law. White House spokesman Jay Carney was asked about this in a recent press conference, and had to remind everyone that what Clinton said is actually a moot point, because it is already being looked into.
JULIE PACE, ASSOCIATED PRESS: I wanted to get your reaction to a comment that President Clinton made in an interview that was posted today. He was talking about health care, he said, President Obama should honor his commitment to people who have lost their health care or losing their health care under the president’s law, even if it means changing that law. Does the president agree with the comment?
JAY CARNEY: I think as you saw the president say in an interview with NBC last week, the answer’s yes. The president has asked his team with looking at a range of options — as he said — to make sure that nobody is put in a position where their plans have been canceled and they can’t afford a better plan even though they’d like to have a better plan.
You heard the president address this very issue in his interview last week. And I think it’s important to note that President Clinton, in that interview, also said, and I quote, ‘the big lesson is that we are better off with this law than without it.’ And he said, quote, ‘the enrollment period did not come off well because the national website wasn’t ready. But this happened once before. It happened when President Bush put in the Medicare drug program for seniors, which was not as complicated but had exactly the same problem with the rollout. It was a disaster. There were people that lost their prescriptions for their existing medicine and they fixed it.’
So, the president, as you know, has pledged to ask his team, tasked his team to look at potential actions that could be taken to address this problem, because his focus is on making sure that people get quality and affordable health insurance.
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But it’s a waste of time. These Republicans would only hear what they want to hear, and Clinton’s statement plays right into their gameplan – creating enough noise about Obamacare, in hopes that Americans would not buy into the law, thus making it a failure.
And no, I’m not talking about Dick Cheney. The revelation came courtesy a new book calked Double Down, with exerts published by Politico.
The book details behind the scenes comments and statements made by those closest to the president’s re election campaign 2012. For example, unnamed sources in the book claim that President Obama, when asked about a Golf outing with former President Bill Clinton, replied “I like him… in doses.”
Clinton, on the other hand, thought Obama was one of the luckiest people in the world, and expressed this as only Bill Clinton can.
Romney’s ineptness staggered Clinton. After the release of the 47 percent video, he remarked to a friend that, while Mitt was a decent man, he was in the wrong line of work. (‘He really shouldn’t be speaking to people in public.’) As for Obama, Clinton trotted out for his pals the same line again and again: ‘He’s luckier than a dog with two dicks.’”
“He’s luckier than a dog with two dicks.”
If that doesn’t become a t-shirt slogan by tomorrow, I will be very disappointed in the internet.
(CNN) — Former President Bill Clinton weighed in Monday on the legislative impasse at the heart of the government shutdown, admonishing the “constant conflict” that has come to define American politics.
Speaking at a convention of the National Community Pharmacists Association in Orlando, Clinton said he liked the crowd because of the practicality of their profession.
“I worry that our politics has gotten impractical. That’s about the nicest word I can think of,” Clinton said.
Convictions are a good thing, Clinton said, as are political beliefs and support of one policy over the other.
The comments are some of the first Clinton has made on the spat over government funding, debt and Obamacare since before the partial shutdown took effect October 1.
In an interview with ABC at the end of September, Clinton took a hardline approach to the looming shutdown, calling on President Barack Obama to call a congressional Republican “bluff” on defunding the Affordable Care Act.
Obama could have stopped the shutdown, Clinton said at the time.
“But the price of – the current price of stopping it is higher than the price of letting the Republicans do it and taking their medicine,” he said.
Clinton on Monday was far less confrontational and far more the elder statesmen who has seen and done it before, having been President during the last federal government shut downs in 1995 and 1996.
Instead of conflict, Clinton urged cooperation.
“Nobody’s right all the time. And the more complex problems are the more you need people to work together,” he said.
But politics is often a zero-sum game where there are winners and losers and especially in Washington, working together is often far less attractive than some notion of winning.
Six degrees of separation: What does a convicted con, an Orthodox Jewish couple and their unborn child,a murdered stick-up kid from the 80’s, a rap artist and the borough of Brooklyn have in common? Ex con, Julio Acevedo, charged with criminally negligent homicide and leaving the scene of an accident, plowed his car, into a livery cab carrying newly married Orthodox Jewish couple Nachman and Raizel Glauber and their unborn baby, killing all three. Acevedo has a rap sheet that includes being charged with the shooting death of his best friend, street thug Kelvin Martin, nicknamed 50 Cent, back in the 80’s, a name which Platinum-selling rapper Curtis Jacksonaka50 Cent, uses as his stage moniker. All this, occurring in the great borough of Brooklyn, New York…just sayin’. ♦
And speaking of Fiddy… Rapper 50 Cent talks about the influence that secret societies have over the music industry and how certain artists are not allowed to make their own kind of music if it goes against the industry giants wishes, a subject I’ve written about in a past blog on Ezkool. ♦
Old Bill’s got more sides than a polygon. Did you know pilgrims, that our former president Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 barring federal recognition of same-sex marriages? Yep! Clinton said that at the time he was under a lot of pressure from Republicans who he believed were trying to block his re-election as POTUS for a second term by posturing him outside the mainstream attitude surrounding gay marriage at the time. Hmmm…I think having the Monica Lewinsky sucked outta you in the Oval Office after winning the electionmight have been a bit detrimental to keeping your post, maybe? But that’s neither here nor there, because Mr.Clinton is now urging the Supreme Court to overturn the bill, because he believes that it was and is, in fact unconstitutional. He says this about that, “As the president who signed the act into law, I have come to believe that DOMA is contrary to those principles and, in fact, incompatible with our Constitution. Although that was only 17 years ago, it was a very different time. In no state in the union was same-sex marriage recognized, much less available as a legal right, but some were moving in that direction. Washington, as a result, was swirling with all manner of possible responses, some quite draconian.” A mouthful (no pun intended). To be fair Clinton has done more than any previous president to court the gay community and promote gay rights and for the last intervening years has tried to distance himself from the law, culminating in his lending his support to a measure legalizing same-sex marriage in New York in 2011 alongside President Barack Obama. Not only is Bill Clinton a polygon but he’s a polygon, shaped like a cat who always seems to land on his feet. ♦
The film, ‘Fear Of A Black Republican’ is based on the simple premise of whether or not the Republican Party really wants to include more African-Americans in its coffles. ‘Fear’ is the brainchild of indie filmmaker Kevin J. Williams, and in it he takes a non-partisan journey over four years and two presidential elections in an attempt to answer the question of why there are so few Black Republicans and what, if anything, is the GOP doing to court and keep them. Looks like lots of interesting vignettes and quotables! “Before I started shooting, I was just a voter wondering why things weren’t getting better after each election. Picking up my camera changed everything for me. My intention with this film is to find out if our political system supports the decaying of Urban America, what that means and what if anything can be done about it. Journeying across the country and spending time with an important, but misunderstood segment of our society – Black Republicans, revealed a reality and an experience few will ever see. As race, politics, human nature and history all clash in this film, I know that as the Director, I am only opening the book on this subject matter and its implications for America.” – Kevin J. Williams, Director Btw, Kevin– he’s a white dude. Yes…real interesting indeed! ♦
On his registration form for one of the new teaching positions in India, the candidate who called himself Osama Bin Laden said his father’s name was Bill Clinton.
He was one of hundreds of bizarre false names given by chancers apparently hoping to secure jobs in schools in Uttar Pradesh, in northern India.
Perhaps the so-called ‘Abcdefgh’ thought he would stand a better chance of teaching children English when he told India’s Ministry of Education that his father’s name was Xyz. Or maybe bow-wielding Hindu deity Jai Sri Ram thought he needed a break from heavenly duties to help boost the state’s religious education results.
There was even one aspirant who gave his name as Farji, which translates as ‘fake’. His father’s name was given as Farji Singh. And unsurprisingly, all these applicants had spotless academic records to boot, with 100 per cent marks in all exams.
When dead terrorist ‘Osama bin Laden’ applied for a teaching post at an Indian primary school last year, citing Bill Clinton as his father, it did not take long for teachers to unravel his masquerade.
But rather than dismiss the applications out of hand, the state’s basic education department allotted them all registration numbers and and even issued letters for counselling on their ‘fake’ addresses.
Such aspirants, shortlisted in the first list of candidates for the primary teachers’ job, have made the state’s basic education department’s recruitment drive a laughing stock.
BILL CLINTON: “The stuff some folks are saying about President Obama sound kind of familiar. The same people said my ideas destroyed jobs—they called me every name in the book. Well we created 22 million new jobs and turned deficits into surpluses. President Obama’s got it right. We should invest in the middle class, education and innovation. And pay down our debt with spending restraint and asking the wealthy to pay a little more. Sound familiar?”
Clinton pointed out that under Democratic presidents since 1961, the economy has added 42 million private-sector jobs, while under Republicans it has added just 24 million. He used the same concept to argue that President Obama has outscored both congressional Republicans and his GOP presidential opponent, Mitt Romney, in terms of creating jobs.
Clinton has some intriguing facts on his side. Aside from a rounding error, his historical numbers are accurate (figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the tally under Democrats since 1961 rounds to 41 million, not 42 million). I crunched the numbers a few different ways to see if Clinton was cherry-picking the best numbers. His figures measure job gains from the month a president took office until the month he left. Since it takes a year or so for any president’s policies to go into effect, I also measured job gains from one year after each president took office till one year after he left. Here’s the score by that measure: Democrats: 38 million new jobs, Republicans, 27 million.
Clinton only mentioned private-sector jobs, so I pulled the data for all jobs, including government. Again, the Dems have a big edge, accounting for 48 million new jobs, compared with 31 million for Republicans. If you push the boundaries out one year for each president, the gap narrows to 44 million new jobs under Democrats, and 34 million under Republicans.
Former President Bill Clintonspoke at a recent fundraiser earlier this week and warned of the dangers this country faced if the Supreme Court rules against President Obama’s Health Care Law. Given his special abilities to explain complex matters to a two-year old, Mr. Clinton broke it down like this”
If the Supreme Court decides to invalidate the individual mandate in the Affordable Care Act, there will be consequences, Clinton said, which he claims aren’t being reported, and which he spelled out:
• Changing the health-care delivery system has already produced two years in a row of 4 percent inflation in health-care costs. This is the first time in 50 years that health-care costs have gone up so little. Killing the Affordable Care Act would let inflation loose again.
• Some 2.6 million people ages 21 to 26, who now have insurance coverage for the first time because they can be carried under their parents’ policy, would lose it.
• $1.3 billion dollars in insurance refunds have already been paid to businesses and individuals because now the law says 85 percent of your premium has to go to health care and not to profits and promotion. (California hasn’t reported yet, but will likely increase that figure to more than $1.5 billion.) Refunds would shrink.
• If Republicans succeed in persuading the Supreme Court to repeal the individual mandate, somewhere between 12 million and 16 million Americans will be unable to get health insurance because of preexisting conditions.
The Daily Beast also reports that “Clinton predicted that if the law is declared unconstitutional, Republicans will suffer a backlash when millions of Americans calculate what they have lost. Before the Affordable Care Act passed, two thirds of all the applications for bankruptcy were because of health-care emergencies, a consequence likely to return if health care inflation again rises precipitously.”
“Before Mitt Romney as governor signed the individual mandate, Massachusetts had the highest health-care costs in America. Today, that state is seventh, because inflation in health-care costs in that state have been much lower than in the country as a whole. Why? The mandate prevents insurance companies from shifting their promotional costs to consumers, Clinton said.”
The Supreme Court will issue its decision on Health Care on Thursday.
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