bill clinton bak

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NO MERRI

some new here, starting re-assessment eg triangulation

see hillary, whitewater, bimbogate ark pjt, fdn for newer

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THEHILL 12 25

“We are the free world now.” Those words from Raphael Glucksmann, a French socialist member of the European Parliament, captured the pearl-clutching outrage of Europeans after the Trump administration did what no prior administration has ever done — stand up to Europe to defend the freedom of speech.

This week, Secretary of State Marco Rubiobarred five figures closely associated with European censorship efforts from traveling to the U.S. This includes Thierry Breton, the former European Union commissioner responsible for digital policy.

In a post on X, Rubio declared that the U.S. “will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship” and will target “leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States.”

Breton achieved infamy as one of the architects of the massive EU censorship system, which is now being globalized. Armed with the notorious Digital Service Act, Breton and others threatened American companies and officials that they would have to yield to European standards of free speech. After Breton learned that Musk was planning to interview Trump before the last presidential election, he even warned the X owner that he would be “monitored” and potentially subject to EU fines.

Socialist Glucksmann is now irate at “this scandalous sanction against Thierry Breton.”

“We are Europeans,” he declared. “We must defend our laws, our principles, our interests.” In other words, this is a war over whether Europe or the U.S. Constitution will dictate the scope of free speech for American companies and citizens.

Breton and his colleagues are finally being treated as what they are: a clear and present danger to the “indispensable right” that defines all Americans.

The EU has been enlisted by anti-free speech figures in the U.S. to force companies like X and Facebook to restore censorship of Americans. After Musk bought Twitter with a pledge to restore free-speech protections, Hillary Clintoncalled upon European officials to force him to censor under Europe’s Digital Services Act.

Nina Jankowicz, the former head of Biden’sinfamous Disinformation Governance Board, appeared before the European Parliament. She called upon the 27 EU countries to fight against the U.S., which she described as a global threat.

The E.U. enthusiastically took up the challenge. This year, I spoke in Berlin at the World Forum, which boosted the slogan, “A New World Order with European Values.” Bill and Hillary Clinton and other Americans cheered on the European efforts.

The Digital Services Act bars speech that is viewed as “disinformation” or “incitement.” When it was passed over the condemnations of many of us in the free speech community, European Commission Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestagercelebrated by declaring that it is “not a slogan anymore — that what is illegal offline should also be seen and dealt with as illegal online. Now it is a real thing. Democracy’s back.”

It is indeed a “real thing.” In my forthcoming book, Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution, I discuss the challenges facing our republic in the 21st century, including the EU and its transnational governance model. Many on the left are supporting the erosion of national laws and values in favor of standards set by global experts and elites.

This cadre of American enablers has been increasingly vocal in Europe. Notably, late-night ABC host Jimmy Kimmeldelivered a Christmas Eve address in Great Britain denouncing the U.S. as a global threat. He declared that “from a fascism perspective, this has been a really great year. Tyranny is booming over here.”

It was crushingly ironic. Many of us have been writing for years about how free speech has been eviscerated in the United Kingdom, where people are being prosecuted for “toxic ideologies” and an ever-lengthening list of unacceptable political viewpoints.

Justice Amy Coney Barrettissued a warning this week about the collapse of free speech in the United Kingdom. Yet that is where a comedian, who is paid millions and attacks Trump nightly, went to complain about the threat to free speech in the U.S.

Both Vice President JD Vance and Secretary Rubio have delivered major speeches warning the EU about its effort to export censorship systems, particularly targeting American citizens and companies. After years of encouragement and enabling from the Obamaand Bidenadministrations, the U.S. government is finally in this fight.

That is why Europe is up in arms, denouncing the move to bar these officials as an attack on its own sovereignty. In other words, an effort to defend our own free speech values is a threat to the proclaimed “New World Order with European Values.”

In reality, I do not like travel bans. I prefer that these figures come to this country and face free-speech advocates. Yet despite our calls for Congress to get into this fight, it has done nothing due to opposition from Democratic members. We cannot wait as the EU weaponizes and globalizes censorship.

Glucksmann is right about one thing. This is a fight over who today can be rightfully called the “free world.” In the U.S., we continue to cling to the quaint notion that the free world should be based on … well, freedom.

*Jonathan Turleyis the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of the forthcoming “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution” on the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution.

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AN 12 25

New York Times writer Alan Feuer says pro-Trump influencers have “always had a lot to say about the Jeffrey Epstein files.”

Several called for the files release before President Donald Trump was re-elected, certain they would “expose a cabal of Democrats who had palled around” with Epstein after he’d been exposed as a convicted sex offender, said Feuer. Several more criticized Trump this year as he sought to block the files’ release, calling them a “Democratic hoax.”

“But many of them were conspicuously quiet on Tuesday, when the Justice Department released a batch of materials that contained hundreds of mentions of Mr. Trump," Feuer said. “Their silence contrasted with the uproar made over the weekend when the department’s first release focused on former President Bill Clinton, including an image, stripped of context, showing him reclining in a hot tub. MAGA influencer Laura Loomer – also known as Trump's unofficial "loyalty enforcer" — mocked Clinton on social media after the photos emerged.

“On Tuesday, however, Ms. Loomer said nothing about the newly released materials, which showed, among other things, that federal prosecutors had determined that Mr. Trump had flown on Mr. Epstein’s private plane more times than they originally knew,” Feuer noted. “Instead, Ms. Loomer seemed to post about everything except the Epstein files: immigrant work visas; ‘anti-white racism’; next year’s midterm elections; and Zohran Mamdani, the mayor-elect of New York.”

Feuer identified similar silence with conservative influencer Rogan O’Handley, who posts on X under the handle DC Draino. On Friday, O’Handley was also berating Clinton, writing how the Epstein files had depicted him “shirtless in a hot tub with a female that is not his wife.”

“But on Tuesday, Mr. O’Handley had nothing at all to say about the files,” said Feuer.

The same went for pro-Trump podcaster and “The Benny Show,” host Benny Johnson, who Feuer said much preferred posting about fired transgender instructors rather than Epstein.

“One Trump-friendly account did, however, post about the newly released files: the one run by the Justice Department,” said Feuer, adding that the department quickly jumped to defend the president as if they were his personal troupe of lawyers.

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https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB861917340688900500

Ginni clinton jihad: proto-Benghazi

no lnx

By Edward Felsenthal and David Rogers Staff Reporters of The Wall Street Journal

April 25, 1997

WASHINGTON -- Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, had to force herself to be pleasant when she met Hillary Clinton for the first time four years ago.

Mrs. Clinton had been an outspoken supporter of Anita Hill, the woman who had famously accused Mr. Thomas of sexual harassment during his 1991 confirmation hearings. Ms. Thomas couldn't get the association out of her mind.

"For me, it was, 'Wow, now I have to, in my role, be respectful and cordial and courteous,' " Ms. Thomas recalls thinking as she moved through a receiving line toward the new first lady. Although the brief encounter was awkward for her, Ms. Thomas says she was proud of how she handled it. She gave Mrs. Clinton some verses from the Bible, along with a warning about how tough this city can be.

Today Ms. Thomas feels a kinship with Mrs. Clinton. Like the first lady, she is best known as the spouse of a prominent man. But also like Mrs. Clinton, she has become a controversial political player and has been the subject of vigorous public criticism for her partisan activities.

Although she takes pains to carve out her own identity, Ms. Thomas, 40 years old, is inevitably linked with her husband in much of what she does. "A lot of people treat her a certain way ... because of who she is married to," says radio-host Armstrong Williams, a former close aide and a friend to Justice Thomas.

Awkward Predicament

Ms. Thomas says there are challenges that come with "being a Supreme Court spouse, as opposed to just a lawyer working in Washington." Her dual role highlights an increasingly common political phenomenon: Now that many political partners are professionals themselves, they face an awkward predicament. Many find they have to struggle to avoid being used as political tools or being perceived as benefiting from their spouse's position.

Barbara Olson,an aide to the Senate leadership who has worked in congressional investigations of the Clinton administration, has been a target of Democratic sniping that she is a proxy for her husband, Theodore Olson, a prominent lawyer who has represented one of the president's accusers in the Whitewater affair. Republicans in the last Congress delighted in cutting money for a small anticrime program that paid consulting fees to Sylvia Panetta, wife of then-White House Chief-of-Staff Leon Panetta. That put Mr. Panetta in the uncomfortable position of having to fight to get the money back.

Ms. Thomas had already made a name for herself as an activist in conservative circles before Republicans took over Congress in 1994. But her influence grew after that election when her boss, Rep. Dick Armey of Texas, became House majority leader.

Ms. Thomas operates much as an eager young administrative officer back at the base camp for the Republican infantry. She works behind the scenes, serving as part strategist and part cheerleader for the leadership's effort tobeef-up the GOP's ability to investigate and oversee the White House and executive agencies.[benghazi much later?]

Partisan Battles

It is a role that takes her from dry, detailed General Accounting Office reports to the higher-profile and more partisan-edged investigations of administration scandals. She has assisted with the investigations of White House ethics, Whitewater, the firing of the White House travel staff, and the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown's financial dealings. When Republicans approved an expanded budget for House committee investigations last month, the move partly reflected Ms. Thomas's influence.

She has figured in several high-profile fights involving the House Appropriations Committee. Over the objections of some Republicans on the committee, she pressed hard for deep cuts in funding to Legal Services Corp., a provider of legal aid to the poor that she viewed as using federal money to advance liberal causes.

And in a stormy panel meeting in1995, she stood watch on behalf of Mr. Armey as Republicans reluctantly lined up behind a leadership attempt to bar funding for nonprofit organizations that engage in advocacy, in many cases for poor constituencies. The measure ultimately failed because of opposition in the Senate.

During this Congress, Ms. Thomas has stepped back, as the leadership has relaxed its efforts to control committee chairmen. But she is still a force behind continuing investigations, and before last year's election she helped gather information on White House scandals for Republicans to use on the campaign trail. (That project was abandoned after word of its existence leaked, prompting concern that it would make Republicans look like scandalmongers.)

A memo this past January titled "Foreign Money Contributions Scandal" illustrates Ms. Thomas's style. Throwing as wide a net as possible, she addressed it to Republican staff on 19 committees, including the sensitive Intelligence panel. In it, she cited statutes or regulations that might have been violated by overseas contributions to Democrats. She urged staff directors to be "watchful" for administration efforts to dismiss problems as just "campaign finance." Ms. Thomas wrote, "what we don't know is how much was for sale in the Clinton presidency."

Though Ms. Thomas is good-humored and engaging, her writing sometimes gets her into trouble.Much of her job is simply informational: She helps produce a biweekly "Oversight Bulletin" publicizing current investigations. But when she pens strategy, she betrays a partisan edge that makes experienced staff directors blanch.

A case in point is an April 1996 memo she wrote for Republican congressmen Bob Walker and Jim Nussleand sent to House committees, asking for "examples of dishonesty or ethical lapses in the Clinton administration" and "anecdotes that amplify these areas." The memo requested that all such materials be sent to her as quickly as possible and reminded committee chairs that "you are a tremendous resource for this project."

Democratic Backlash

Democrats quickly turned Ms. Thomas's memo on the Republicans, claiming it proved that the investigations were partisan. During one hearing, Democrats blew up the memo and posted it on an easel to suggest that the proceeding was part of a GOP plot to denigrate the administration.

Even some Republican staff members complained that it went too far. "It didn't dawn on her that in Congress, things aren't supposed to appear politically driven,"even if they are, says a senior GOP aide who has worked with her.

In May, two weeks after the memo was distributed, Democratic Rep. Jim Moran of Virginia spotted Ms. Thomas in the audience at a hearing on the White House travel-office firings. In a rare public attack on a congressional staffer, he demanded to know why "Mrs. Clarence Thomas in that bright blue dress" was present. "I really smell a political witch hunt," he said.

Ms. Thomas didn't endure the attack silently. Later that day, she confronted Mr. Moran on a House elevator and showed him a copy of a book, "Everything Men Know About Women," in which all the pages are blank. "This book is about you," she said.Justice Thomas later left his wife a voice-mail message in which he teasingly sang verses of the song, "Devil With a Blue Dress On."

Spousal Conflict?

Democratic Rep. Paul Kanjorski of Pennsylvania, who also questioned Ms. Thomas's role at the travel-office hearing, believes it is a conflict of interest for her to be involved in disputes between Congress and the White House that the Supreme Court might be called on to settle. "We may have a problem here where the marital relationship confuses the constitutional intent" of the separation of powers, Mr. Kanjorski says. Ms. Thomas laughs when told of Mr. Kanjorski's statement, but declines to comment....[much more]

===

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_policy_of_the_Bill_Clinton_administration

The economic policies of Bill Clinton, referred to by some as Clintonomics (a portmanteau of "Clinton" and "economics"), encapsulates the economic policies of United States President Bill Clinton that were implemented during his presidency, which lasted from January 1993 to January 2001.

President Clinton oversaw a very robust economy during his tenure. The U.S. had strong economic growth (around 4% annually) and record job creation (22.7 million). He raised taxes on higher income taxpayers early in his first term and cut defense spending and welfare, which contributed to a rise in revenue and decline in spending relative to the size of the economy.

These factors helped bring the United States federal budget into surplus from the fiscal year 1998 to 2001, the only surplus years after 1969. Debt held by the public, a primary measure of the national debt, fell relative to GDP throughout his two terms, from 47.8% in 1993 to 31.4% in 2001.^[1]

Clinton signed North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) into law, along with many other free trade agreements. He also enacted significant welfare reform. His deregulation of finance (both tacit and overt through the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act) has been criticized as a contributing factor to the Great Recession.^[2]

Overview

Four charts showing real GDP growth, unemployment rate, non-farm jobs added, inflation rate, and interest rates in the Clinton era.

Fiscal policy

The Ominibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 increased the average federal tax rates for the top 1%, while lowering average tax rates for the middle class.

[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Job_Growth_by_U.S._President_-_v1.png)

Job Growth by U.S. President, measured as cumulative percentage change from month after inauguration to end of term. More jobs were created under the Clinton administration than any other President.

Tax reform

===

ref dems wary

nyt

China: Communism at 50

U.S.-China Relations, special report from the Asia Society

WASHINGTON, April 17 -- In a setback for the Clinton administration, the House Democratic leader, Richard A. Gephardt, intends to oppose granting China permanent normal trading privileges, several people familiar with his decision said today.

For months, Mr. Gephardt refused to say how he would vote, hesitating to worsen divisions among Democrats on the issue and jeopardize his greater goal of reclaiming the House this fall and becoming speaker.

He is expected to announce on Wednesday in St. Louis, his hometown, that alternatives to Congress's annual review of China's trading status fall short of giving lawmakers enough leverage over **Beijing's behavior on human rights, religious tolerance and the environment.**

The timing of the expected announcement is important, since the House began a two-week recess today, and during their time at home, undecided lawmakers will be the target of intense lobbying and advertising campaigns from both sides.

The Democratic leader is also expected to tell his rank-and-file to vote their consciences and the best interests of their districts. That would free some of them to vote for the pact, strengthening them in campaigns against pro-trade Republicans this fall.

Both sides say the House vote, scheduled for the week of May 22, is too close to call. The Senate is considered certain to back the change.

The vote on China's trade status will determine to what degree America benefits from China's expected entry into the World Trade Organization.

**Mr. Gephardt's decision is a victory for the coalition of labor, environmental and human rights groups, and their allies on Capitol Hill, who oppose the measure as an undeserved reward to a repressive regime.**

"I never had any doubt that Dick would come down on the right side of the issue, where his heart is," said Representative Peter A. DeFazio, an Oregon Democrat who opposes permanent normal trade status for China.

**It also complicates President Clinton's efforts to rally dozens of uncommitted Democrats to support one of his most important remaining foreign policy goals.**Given Mr. Gephardt's stature, his position could give wavering Democrats political cover to vote no on the agreement, which is an important step in China's entry into the World Trade Organization.

"Obviously, we're disappointed and wished he were able to be for this," Commerce Secretary William Daley, Mr. Clinton's point man on the vote, said in a telephone interview. "But we'll continue to make the case with Democrats and Republicans that this is good for national security and our overall world leadership position."

On Friday, Mr. Daley suffered an embarrassment when he was forced to cancel a trip with both Democratic and Republican lawmakers to China when most of the dozen invited legislators opted for various reasons to pull out.

Mr. Gephardt's decision is not surprising.

**On virtually every nettlesome trade issue of the Clinton administration, Mr. Gephardt has joined the opposing charge, calling for tougher labor, environmental and human rights standards.** He opposed the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement, which Mr. Clinton won, and the bill to give the President special authority to negotiate trade accords, which Mr. Clinton lost.

Over the years, Mr. Gephardt has voted against granting China normal trading status in the annual review. He is a staunch ally of organized labor, which is aggressively fighting the measure to give China the same permanent lower tariffs the United States gives most every other country.

Republicans never took Mr. Gephardt's silence seriously. The No. 2 House Democrat, David E. Bonior of Michigan, is leading the attack against the measure, but top House Republicans, especially Dick Armey of Texas, the majority leader, have always lumped Mr. Gephardt in with its foes.

Trade policy has long played in important role in defining Mr. Gephardt's political agenda.

The centerpiece of his failed 1988 presidential campaign was a measure that would have forced retaliation against nations that gained large trade surpluses with the United States through unfair means.

**Mr. Gephardt has recently intensified his courtship of corporate America, especially high-tech companies, to dispel his label as a traditional, old-style Democrat**. But many trade advocates said it would have been unfathomable for Mr. Gephardt to switch his trade stripes so quickly.

"We anticipated this, and the fact Dick is not making this a litmus test is very important to all of us," said Representative Robert T. Matsui of California, the top Democratic vote-counter in favor of the measure.

**Clearly, the significance of the China vote has weighed on Mr. Gephardt. Last month, he said he was trying to broker a compromise with the administration, labor unions, business groups and House Democrats.**

Such an alternative, he said, would include "a methodical way" to ensure that China abides by its treaties, a mechanism to evaluate its human rights record and a code of conduct for American companies doing business in China.

It would also permit the United States to impose sanctions against China if it violated the agreement, as long as the penalties were consistent with the World Trade Organization rules.

But some critics questioned Mr. Gephardt's commitment to finding a third way. He has been dismissive of a popular effort along those lines by Representative Sander M. Levin of Michigan, one of the uncommitted Democrats.

===

coc wanted

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2000-05-28/china-trade-will-clinton-pull-it-off

May 2, Representative Ken Bentsen, a second-term Democrat from Houston, found himself sitting in the living room of the White House family residence getting the Full Clinton Treatment. As Bentsen and two dozen other members of Congress munched peanuts and washed them down with Cokes, Martin Lee, chairman of the Hong Kong Democratic Party and a strong critic of China's repressive human-rights record, made an impassioned plea. "I have never been to China, and I probably never will in my lifetime," lamented Lee. Nevertheless, he said, it was critically important for the U.S. Congress to grant China permanent normal trade relations (PNTR). Then, with considerable emotion, President Clinton pressed the case for dismantling the barriers to trade with China."How can we address your concerns?" Clinton beseeched the group.

Bentsen, a 41-year-old former investment banker and nephew of ex-Treasury Secretary Lloyd M. Bentsen, was already under strong pressure to vote yes. Compaq Computer, Enron, and Coastal--all located in his district--operate subsidiaries in China. The Port of Houston handles many of China's exports to the U.S. And Texas farmers and the oil-services industry have been clamoring for access to the Chinese market. But like other Democrats, Bentsen had also been pressed by theAFL-CIO to vote against normalizing relations with China in order to preserve U.S. jobs.

...

https://carnegieendowment.org/2000/03/20/why-rush-to-favor-china-pub-236

robert kagan wkly std

Clinton was right when he said last Wednesday that the decision to grant China permanent most-favored-nation trading status will have a historic significance equal to Richard Nixon's opening to China and Jimmy Carter's normalization of relations. But if that's true, why is the president rushing Congress to make a hasty decision, with almost no time to consider the merits and consequences of this momentous step?

There are a whole host of good reasons to slow things down. Many members don't even know what's in the trade deal the United States struck with China last November. Meanwhile, the Europeans are negotiating their own agreement with China and probably won't complete negotiations for several months. The administration argues that there's no reason to wait and see if the Europeans get a better deal than our own negotiators, since American businesses will benefit anyway. What the administration doesn't point out is that rapid passage of permanent trade status by Congress will strengthen the Chinese hand and weaken the European negotiating position. It would be better for Congress to to wait and give the Europeans maximum leverage to extract concessions from Beijing.

Then there is the problem of implementation. In any trade deal, the devil is in the details. This is especially true in China's case, because Beijing has a miserable record of implementing the deals it strikes. (The United States is still trying to get China to abide by the agreement it signed on intellectual property rights almost a decade ago.) We won't know the terms of implementation until China reaches an agreement with the WTO much later this year.

By far the most important reason to delay any vote, however, concerns China's recent threats to attack Taiwan if that government does not move more rapidly toward reunification. President Clinton seems to believe that America's very first official response to a Chinese threat of war should be to give Beijing the largest economic gift we have to offer: permanent, low-tariff access to our markets. What kind of signal could that possibly send to Jiang Zemin and his military chiefs? Threaten war against an American ally and a democracy, and the first thing Washington does is lavish gifts upon you. Extreme belligerence, they would have to conclude, is good for business. (Incidentally, guess what two words never appear in last Friday's Wall Street Journal editorial supporting President Clinton's rush to favor China: Taiwan and democracy.)

Some responsible Democrats see what a disaster it would be to approve China's trade status so soon after Chinese threats against Taiwan. Congressman Jack Murtha, an influential centrist Democrat, has informed his colleagues that, in light of Beijing's recent behavior, he will not support permanent MFN for China this year, even though he consistently supported annual renewal of MFN in the past. "It is not in our national security interest," Murtha declared, "to condone and reward grossly irresponsible conduct." Meanwhile, some Republican senators are considering linking any vote on permanent MFN to passage of the Taiwan Security Enhancement Act. The House approved the Taiwan measure overwhelmingly. At the very least, the Senate should pass the Taiwan legislation before it even considers voting on permanent MFN for China. If we want to avoid tempting Beijing into future aggressive actions against Taiwan, the United States must convince the Beijing government now that belligerence carries a real price.

And what are the good reasons to rush through a vote? There aren't any. The president's demand for a hasty decision is purely about politics. Clinton held off making his pitch for permanent MFN until Al Gore had sewn up the Democratic party's nomination, thereby minimizing the pressure that could be brought to bear on the vice president by his big labor allies. With the primaries out of the way, Clinton now wants Congress to rush approval through before the general election campaign goes into full swing, calculating that election-year politics will dim chances of passage.

To put it another way, the White House and the Republican leadership in both houses want to get this thing done before the American electorate gets a chance to look at it. The big corporations want to use their big money to frighten members of Congress into supporting permanent MFN before those members have a chance to hear from their constituents. Polls show that a large majority of Americans oppose China's entry into the World Trade Organization and oppose granting China permanent trade relations. In fact, they don't much like China, period. The White House wants to make sure that this overwhelming public opinion does not influence congressional deliberations. That's one reason the administration has kept secret the terms of the WTO deal it reached with China last November. Keeping the public in the dark was also the hallmark of Henry Kissinger's and Jimmy Carter's China diplomacy in the 1970s.

Of course, there's another reason to rush through a vote in Congress: Bill Clinton's "legacy". The truth is, Congress can just as easily vote on China's permanent trade status next year. After all, China can't even become a WTO member until it cuts its deals with the Europeans and completes negotiations with the WTO authorities on the terms of implementation. In short, it is almost inconceivable that China could join the WTO much before the end of the year. American business will not lose out if the vote is delayed. Therefore, it makes no practical difference whether Congress votes this year or next. Except to Bill Clinton, who wants to leave a trade deal with China as one of his presidential legacies. We can understand why some Democratic leaders in Congress would find this a compelling reason to vote quickly. Why do Republicans?

aha, why so many fewer dems than gop? thotony coelho got dems in game:

grimm bk

we have ppl --> AOC

conversation with political analyst Ryan Grim on how big money took over the Democratic party and the struggle against it. The last thirty years has seen the building of a movement, which first exploded into public view with the largely forgotten presidential run of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a campaign that came dangerously close to winning. This movement is th e one that propelled Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into office.

Guest: Ryan Grim is The Intercept’s D.C. Bureau Chief. He is a contributor to the Young Turks Network and author of the book This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America.His latest book is We’ve Got People: From Jesse Jackson to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the End of Big Money and the Rise of a Movement.

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-june-17-2019/

1976 carter kinda central, fix rep by post-prez

1978 newt g shellacking, longtime senators, lions like frank church, birch bayh

roger stone et al tactics, 1976 scotus camp fin reform [buckely valeo?], political consultant, pol ops, oppo, 30 sec ads TV, corp $ (TV and corp money // rose as factors together: we have opposite now, TV decline coupled with online small $ raising?))

dccc a backwater, tony c goes to corps and sez we have house 40 yrs(still have dixiecrats) so you need to fund us; win big in 1982? said to be b/c of Reagan recession, but grimm sez dem $ ctr; then dems pick Mondale, defiicit hawk, but was painted as liberal, landslide loss; dens say oh liberal is loser, so leads to clinton triangulation?

pelosi endorsed by widow, beat DSA britt pro gay cand (so when she says i understand the SF left, she means i have beaten them); she thinks usa basically conservative in RR era, so she still fears backlash cf clinton impeachment.

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-december-26-2019/

https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/how-america-broke-up-with-the-democratic-party/

no lnx

How America broke up with the Democratic Party

Written by Thom Hartmann / Independent Media Institute December 17, 2019

Many grassroots Democrats separated from their party in the 1990s, and the 2020 election may be the last chance to save the marriage.

While the GOP has been trying to establish a semi-permanent ruling majority through bigotry, gerrymandering and voter suppression, Democrats had long-term majority control of American politics pretty much continuously for more than a half-century.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected four times to the presidency and brought with him a Democratic Party sweep so complete that, with the exception of two brief two-year periods, Democrats controlled the House of Representatives from 1931 to 1995. FDR built the modern-day Democratic Party and launched it toward the 21st century.

Working-class Americans had fallen in love with Roosevelt and Democratic Party policies in the 1930s, and that love affair persisted across the better part of three generations. In the past few decades, though, they “fell out of love” with the Democratic Party and began regularly putting Republicans in charge of the country.

What happened?

Back in the 1980s, sociologist Diane Vaughan did some remarkable research about how people fall in and out of love that she compiled in her book Uncoupling. Her surprising but commonsense findings, now used by psychotherapists and marriage counselors around the world, apply to politics as much as they do to intimate relationships.

At some point during most relationships, one partner will become dissatisfied with the behavior of the other. When this dissatisfaction is so fundamental that the unhappy partner might consider dissolving the relationship if it’s not changed, they will almost always say something or otherwise signal their dissatisfaction.

This signal of dissatisfaction is referred to by therapists as “the cry,” as in “the announcement” (think town crier, not sobbing). If the “offending” partner ignores or doesn’t understand the gravity of this “cry out” about how the relationship is going, it’s referred to as “the cry unheard.” The most common occurrence is that the partner “hears” the cry, but doesn’t think it’s a big deal and so ignores it; in other cases, it’s missed altogether.

When the “cry” isn’t heard or is misunderstood as a routine small disagreement, the dissatisfied partner will begin noticing other things that are offending, and, over time, compile a list of reasons to leave the relationship that outnumbers the reasons to stay.

Meanwhile, the offending partner—not having heard, or having misunderstood the “cry”—is oblivious and thinks everything is just fine.

The first turning point in the relationship comes when the dissatisfied partner, having put out the cry unheard and not seeing changes in behavior, starts to share the grievance with others, complaining (often subtly) about their partner.

After a (typically relatively short) time, having gotten feedback from others that, “Yes, that behavior would bother me, too,” the dissatisfied partner, concluding the relationship can’t be salvaged, begins an emotional separation process, moving past bargaining and anger into grieving the loss, accepting that the relationship is not salvageable, and then, finally, announcing that they are pulling the plug on the relationship.

Hearing for the first time this announcement that the relationship is dead, the clueless partner who didn’t hear the cry is blindsided, shocked, and devastated. While their partner has already gone through all the stages of unhappiness, deciding to leave, grieving the failure of the relationship, and accepting it as over, the clueless partner is forced to begin the process (similar to Kubler-Ross’ stages of dying) for themselves from a cold start.

Applying this model to the Democratic Party, the first really loud “cry unheard” from the Democratic electorate came in 1992.

Prior to 1992, the Democratic Party had been FDR’s and LBJ’s party of big government, big projects (from legalizing unions to creating Social Security and Medicare to putting a man on the moon), and the great defender of working people.

For example, many Democrats and their union allies strongly opposed Nixon’s 1974 Trade Act (ultimately signed by Gerald Ford) that gave fast-track authority to the president to encourage offshoring American jobs (we’ve lost more than 80,000 factories just since then) by cutting protective tariffs on imports.

I was living in Michigan running an advertising agency and reporting news part-time in the mid-1970s, and I remember well how dangerous it was to drive one of the cheap imported (mostly Japanese) cars that began flooding the country that decade as a result of the Nixon/Ford trade policies.

Working people were furious with the job losses, and when Jimmy Carter didn’t reverse Nixon’s trade policies, they turned to Reagan, who had promised, in the election of 1980, that he would protect workers’ jobs, even securing the endorsement of PATCO, the air controllers union he would famously betray in his first year in office. While union leaders were wary and opposed Reagan, many rank-and-file members believed the charismatic actor.

But instead of standing up for working people, in 1981 Reagan declared war on the unions (then the largest funders of the Democratic Party nationwide),and began negotiations with Mexico and Canada to speed up the rate at which American companies were moving factories and, thus, union jobs out of the U.S.

This picked up steam with the NAFTA agreement itself, which was finalized by the George H.W. Bush administration in 1992, although it was yet to be ratified by Congress.

In 1971, when Walmart was a regional retailer operating in only five states, its stores often had banners proclaiming what became the title of Sam Walton’s autobiography: “Made in America.” By the election year of 1992, four years after Sam had stepped down as CEO, it was getting hard to find anything in a Walmart that was still made in the USA.

And it wasn’t just Walmart—the 1970s trickle of foreign cars had become a flood by the end of the Reagan and Bush years in 1992, and union jobs all across America were vanishing, along with the factories that provided for them.

Thus, the “cry unheard” of America’s working people—most of them Democrats back then (even if they’d had an “affair” with Reagan)—was, “Please stop these insane ‘free trade’ deals that Nixon started and Reagan/Bush put on steroids!”

But by this time the leadership of the Democratic Party wasn’t listening, or dismissed union concerns as something that would pass. As Reagan planned, union jobs evaporated throughout the 1980s and with them went the ability of big unions to support Democratic politicians with either cash or boots-on-the-ground.

With the unions dying under Reagan’s assault, Bill Clinton, planning to run for president in the election of 1992, knew he had to find other sources of financial support (the Supreme Court had opened the floodgates to corporate money in 1976 and 1978, exploding the cost of a presidential campaign). This was before anybody knew how to raise individual contributions on the internet, so Clinton had to figure out how to finance his campaign without relying on the unions.

As Al From lays out in his book The New Democrats and the Return to Power, he and Bill Clinton worked “to rescue the party from the political wilderness, redefine its message, and, most importantly, win presidential elections.” And that would take a lot of cash.

Bank robber Willie Sutton famously said that banks were “where the money is,” and the money available for politics in 1992 had moved from the pockets of working people (wages had been flat for more than a decade) and their unions (unionization was in freefall) into the pockets of banks, insurance companies, drug companies, defense contractors, and other big corporations. And the Supreme Court had legalized taking their money in exchange for favors just before Reagan’s election in 1976 and 1978 (and tripled down on it in 2016).

“In April 1989,” From’s book notes, he “traveled to Little Rock, Arkansas, to recruit the state’s young governor, Bill Clinton, to be chairman of the DLC.” The result of their partnership was the creation of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) and a new mantra for the Democratic Party: “[E]conomic centrism, national security, and entitlement reform…” that brought with it a flood of corporate and billionaire money.

The party of big government solutions had become the party of big corporate money.

As a result, that first Clinton election year, 1992, was also the year when the “cry unheard” of American working people became a primal scream.

Nearly one in five voters that year cast a ballot for an eccentric billionaire from Texas, Ross Perot, whose mantra was that the NAFTA free trade agreement negotiated by Reagan/Bush but also supported by the newly baptized DLC chair Clinton would lead to “a giant sucking sound from the South” as factories and jobs moved to Mexico.

Clinton suggested that blue-collar jobs weren’t the future of America, and his running mate, Al Gore, said that moving automotive and other factories to Mexico would actually be good for America because Mexican workers would no longer have an incentive to cross our southern border and “we [could] cut down on illegal immigration.”

The Democratic Party now led by Clinton thus embraced a behavior that most working Americans knew would be a disaster for them, and that they had cried out loudly against with their Perot vote in 1992.

Over the next eight years, as Clinton ignored them, many began considering having another affair with the GOP. After all, if Clinton was going to embrace Reagan/Bush trade policies, why not just go right to the source—the GOP itself—for policy prescriptions.

According to Bob Woodward, during a meeting in the Oval Office, Clinton said sarcastically, “Where are all the Democrats? I hope you’re all aware we’re all Eisenhower Republicans.”

He added, “We’re Eisenhower Republicans here. Here we are, and we’re standing for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isn’t that great?”

Further turning his back on the FDR/LBJ Democratic Party principles, Clinton went on to heartily embrace Republican policies of cutting the social safety net. “The era of big government is over,” he proclaimed.

Putting the knife hilt-deep into the spine of LBJ’s Great Society, Clinton said, “Today we are ending welfare as we know it” as he signed into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. That law undid much of LBJ’s Great Society legislation, which had succeeded in cutting poverty rates in America from 22.2 percent in 1963 down to 12.6 percent in 1970.

For the first time since LBJ’s Great Society in the 1960s, families in poverty were not guaranteed a lifeline. They had to prove they were working in order to qualify for assistance, which sounded like a good idea in theory, especially during boom times like the ’90s, when there were lots of jobs available. But during recessions, when three or four people are looking for every one available job, a work requirement for welfare does a lot of harm to already struggling families.

The stats have borne this out. In the years after welfare reform, as a series of presidents and governors have followed in Clinton’s footsteps, ever more people have been kicked off benefits, while poverty has increased. Before Clinton’s “welfare reform,” roughly 70 percent of impoverished families had access to a lifeline. But after reform, by 2016, only 23 percent did, and in some states that number was below 10 percent.

Meanwhile, the Reagan Revolution’s trade policy was wiping out the industrial base of America, while its tax policies were simultaneously moving trillions of dollars in wealth from middle-class families into the pockets of the top 1 percent.

The year Reagan was sworn in, we were the richest nation in the world, and other than a few wobbles during the Civil War and two World Wars, our national debt had been relatively steady in inflation-adjusted dollars since the administration of George Washington. We were the world’s largest creditor—more countries owed us money than any other nation on earth.

Today, after nearly 40 years of neoliberal Reaganomics, we are the world’s largest debtor nation, and our national debt nearly outweighs our annual GDP.

The year Reagan was sworn into office, the United States was the largest importer of raw materials in the world, and the world’s largest exporter of finished, manufactured goods. We brought in ores for manufacturing, and shipped out everything from TVs and computers to cars and clothing.

Today, things are totally reversed: We are now the world’s mining pit, the largest exporter of raw materials, and the world’s largest importer of finished, manufactured goods. We’ve gone from trade surpluses to trade deficits, a reflection of the fact that our factory floors had moved to Asia and Mexico.

In 1960, about one in four Americans worked in manufacturing, producing things of lasting wealth for our nation. Today, after jumping headfirst into one free-trade agreement after another, fewer than one in ten Americans work in manufacturing.

Between 2000 and 2017, 5.5 million manufacturing jobs have been lost. They didn’t disappear; they just moved to low-wage factories in foreign nations.

Ironically, Republican President Eisenhower (1952-1960) knew that Americans loved FDR’s New Deal, and continued FDR’s trade policies. He had, after all, grown up with them (he was born in 1890), and fought World War II as the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe under FDR and led the invasion at Normandy.

He told his brother Edgar in a 1954 letter, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.”

Eisenhower added, “There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are… Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

But Clinton and the “moderate” DLC Democrats embraced becoming Eisenhower Republicans, even as Eisenhower would have repudiated their policies.

“CLINTON SWIPES THE GOP’S LYRICS” read the headline of a 1996 Washington Post column by E.J. Dionne, which opened with this prescient paragraph:

“‘The good news is that we may elect a Republican president this year,’ said Republican consultant Alex Castellanos. ‘The bad news is that it may be Bill Clinton.’”

The result was the beginning of the Great Uncoupling the Democratic Party experienced in the 1990s, with formerly Democratic-voting working-class and poor people going over to the GOP, a trend we saw continued with Trump’s election.

As Harry Truman once said, “The people don’t want a phony Democrat. If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time; that is, they will take a Republican before they will a phony Democrat…”

As jobs and economic issues became the exclusive provenance of what the media calls “far-left” politicians like Sherrod Brown and Bernie Sanders, and the leadership of the Democratic Party stayed with Reaganomics, working people generally failed to show up in large enough numbers to keep George W. Bush out of the White House.

But George W. Bush didn’t repudiate Reaganomics, so the working class continued to stagnate economically. Frustrated Americans decided to take another try with the Democrats.

This set up Senator Barack Obama, who promised “hope and change,” to beat John McCain’s “steady as she goes” approach to the presidency.

But, vague rhetoric aside, Obama’s “change” was largely a continuation of Clinton’s Eisenhower-like corporate- and billionaire-friendly DLC policies.He restored dignity and sanity to the presidency, but also pushed hard to expand NAFTA-like outsourcing policies by throwing several years of political capital into the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which was ultimately as unpopular among a majority of Americans as was NAFTA in 1992. And his support of organized labor was weak, at best.

Since 1981, not one American president has seriously challenged the neoliberal basis of Reaganomics. Billionaires and corporations now largely run our politics, to the point that average working people’s desires are about as likely to be made into law as random chance.

As a result, Pew found that only about half of Americans qualified as “middle class” by the beginning of the Obama presidency. “From 1971 to 2011, the share of adults in the middle class fell by 10 percentage points,” they noted.

With fewer than half of Americans qualifying as middle class by 2015, Pew concluded their study: “The hollowing of the middle has proceeded steadily for the past four decades.” Four decades earlier, of course, the Democratic Party began a course that culminated in Bill Clinton leading the party to turn its back on FDR and LBJ, and embrace Republican-lite economic and trade policies.

Like a partner whose cry was still unheard, America’s still-wounded working-class and newly poor voters decided to take another chance with a new Republican partner, this time a mobbed-up New York City real estate hustler and reality TV star who promised to reverse so-called “free trade” and “bring those jobs home.”

Donald Trump had reached back into the old Democratic playbook, picking up where LBJ (who maintained protective tariffs and brought us Medicare and Medicaid without a single Republican vote) had left off, promising to reinstate protectionist trade policies to bring factories back to America. He also promised to reinstate LBJ’s emphasis on the quality of life for working-class and poor people through a national health insurance plan that would be “better” than Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which was floundering after being gutted by the Supreme Court.

“We’re going to have insurance for everybody,” Trump told the Washington Post. “There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us.” Then-Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price added, on “Meet the Press,” that “nobody will be worse off financially” with the new Trumpcare plan. Trump tweeted that there would be “no cuts… to Medicaid” and said that “no one will lose coverage.”

And while Trump’s trade efforts have been ham-handed, his trade war with China is—outside of farming communities—still popular in the industrial heartland, particularly among current and former union workers.

His health care plan was a scam, making available on Obamacare exchanges formerly 90-day (now three-year) emergency “bridge plans” that could still cancel insurance for preexisting conditions. But with the media focused on Trump, horserace and scandal, virtually no Americans realize that the plans Trump pitched as new and cheaper are so dangerous.

Thus, working-class whites in the American Midwest and South, even those not in thrall to Trump’s pitch to white supremacists, are largely staying with him. Hope springs eternal, after all, and dies last. The Democratic Party is still locked out of the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the White House, even after two of the past four presidents who served for eight years each were Democrats.

Which brings us to how relationships heal and couples reunite, and how this could be applied to save the soul and electoral outcomes of the Democratic Party.

When the partner who had ignored the “cry” now hears it, there’s a very real chance that the relationship can be saved. Doing so requires two steps, both done with a lot of commitment and hard work.

First, change the offensive behavior.

Second, remember why you “fell in love” in the first place, and revisit those reasons, experiences, feelings, and activities that first brought you together.

Democrats know how to do both of these things, party leadership notwithstanding.

The Democratic Party had built a three-generation governing majority once in the past. All they need do today is reimplement Democratic policies from 1933 to 1979, updated for modern times.

Raise taxes on the rich, bring our factories home, expand the safety net, support GI Bill-style free education, and restore union rights. The party should know its history, after all, and should remember how well it was received by the American people.

Like a partner who wants to repair a wounded relationship, the Democrats must return to core principles and stay faithful to them. And we still have the template.

Today, the Democratic Party has two presidential nominees who carry the values and economic policies of FDR and LBJ, while embracing modern-day values of diversity and inclusion in ways neither party dared before this century. The Congressional Progressive Caucus is the second-largest Democratic caucus and the third largest in all of Congress.

If the Democratic Party follows its base and promotes progressive candidates and policies, it has a good chance of pulling America back from the brink of authoritarianism and oligarchy, and to restore our moral authority in the world. A return to big thinking and big goals like those of FDR and LBJ will put Democrats on a track to a second multigenerational governing majority.

If the party uses its convention and superdelegates (on a second vote) to choose another candidate committed to DLC (now Third Way) policies, get ready for either another four years of Donald Trump or a “moderate” one-term pause in the continuing deterioration of the middle-class American Dream.

Thom Hartmann is a former psychotherapist, SiriusXM talk-show host and the New York Times bestselling author of The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America and more than 25 other books in print. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

aha: ok maybe not tip pt but certainly inflection points:

see doom tip pt, along with 2010 TP wave, ripple cascade effects bad.

dereg presumably started with RR mandate of L, hit list. Bush 41n not dereg wacko (tho John Graham OIRA DQA?)

Newt 1994 wave forced triangulation?

Koch TP libtards favors dereg

https://www.alternet.org/2019/08/how-deregulation-led-to-the-opioid-epidemic

no lnx

The opioid abuse epidemic is one of the worst public-health crises in American history. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), between 1999 and 2017, almost 400,000 people died in the U.S. from an overdose of either prescription or illicit opioids. In 2017 alone, opioids, more than one-third involving prescriptions, killed more than 47,000 individuals. And today, on average 130 people die each day from opioid overdoses.

This article originally appeared on The American Prospect.

The root cause of most cases of opioid addiction, particularly prescription-initiated addiction, is pain, a devastating but sometimes overlooked symptom. As a recent American Industrial Hygiene Association paper argues, “the opioid crisis should be seen primarily as a pain crisis, much of which is related to work.” Addressing that crisis precipitated another: treatment regimes that relied heavily on opioids. Today there’s little awareness that almosttwo decades ago, conservative members of Congress, in a burst of anti-regulatory zeal, championed the fight to eliminate the very ergonomics standard that was designed to reduce the high incidence of a number of common workplace injuries.

The tale of that misguided effort begins with the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which was signed into law by President Richard Nixon in 1970, following decades of unregulated, preventable workplace deaths, injuries, and illnesses. Its goal was to “assure safe and healthful working conditions for working men and women” and included “authorizing enforcement of the standards developed under the Act.”

The act incorporated existing industry safety standards and adopted new ones to cover an array of workplace hazards, such as work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMSDs). These disorders included a wide range of conditions like carpal tunnel syndrome, back pain, and tendonitis that are related to repetitive stress, or sustained or sudden exertions resulting from lifting, pushing, and pulling; carrying many or irregularly shaped objects; maintaining awkward or unnatural positions; or handling vibrating machinery and tools.

By the 1980s, labor health and safety activists recognized that alarming rates of disabling WMSDs were occurring in a wide variety of workplaces, including auto manufacturers, garment factories, office environments, and meatpacking and poultry plants. New modes of assembly line production exacerbated these long-standing problems. The need to implement an ergonomics standard, one that would require employers to systematically address the hazards that give rise to musculoskeletal injuries suffered by their workers, became even more urgent.

There were several false starts for the controversial provisions, but OSHA began working in earnest on the standard in 1993. However, the resulting proposals soon ran into trouble on Capitol Hill. The Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994, and Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” heralded the new Republican majority’s deregulatory push. Bemoaning the costs that an ergonomics standard would entail for the private sector, industry lobbyists derided OSHA’s ergonomic proposal as the poster child for government overregulation. The agency estimated that the new rule would require $4.5 billion in annual compliance costs, but would generate $9.1 billion in benefits every year in the first ten years, and prevent hundreds of thousands of musculoskeletal disorders each year.

Gingrich’s acolytes fought the development of the standard tooth and nail, despite a 1997 General Accounting Office report that found that “billions of dollars are spent by private sector employers on workers’ compensation claims associated with WMSDs,” and that “employers can reduce these costs and injuries and thereby improve employee health and morale, as well as productivity and product quality” by implementing effective ergonomics programs in their workplaces.

After a decade of research and heated political debate,OSHA finally prevailed. On November 14, 2000, during the final weeks of the Clinton administration, the agency issued its ergonomics regulation. It applied to more than six million worksites covering 102 million workers and required all general-industry employers (excluding the agriculture, maritime, and construction sectors) to establish an ergonomics program if triggered by reports of a worker’s WMSD or persistent evidence of WMSDs in the workplace.

The standard went into effect days before George W. Bush was inaugurated. But a few months later, Congress used the Congressional Review Act of 1996 to obliterate the regulation, the first and only time the act had been used to rescind an agency regulation (until President Trump began to make frequent use of it). Usually, if a new administration dislikes a regulation and wants it revised or revoked, it needs to engage in rulemaking all over again and must justify the desired changes. The ergonomics standard escaped this process. In his first legislative act as president, Bush signed the rescission resolution on March 20, 2001, taking the standard off the books and prohibiting OSHA from ever issuing a substantially similar one. A regulation designed to protect workers from debilitating workplace injuries—that frequently required painkilling treatment regimes—had been completely destroyed.

The Bush administration paid lip service to the value of ergonomics programs. Administration officials noted that employers who ignored obvious problems with WMSDs might be cited under OSHA’s “general duty” to provide a workplace reasonably free from recognized hazards. But, as a June 2004 memo to OSHA’s regional administrators made clear, any new guidelines for the prevention of WMSDs “are not new standards or regulations and do not create any new OSHA duties for employers” (emphasis in original). Today, no federal ergonomics regulation exists. (Some states run their own OSHA programs, with federal financial and technical assistance and oversight. They are required to provide worker protections at least as vigorous as federal OSHA regulations require. Of these states, only California has specific ergonomics regulations currently on the books.)

But the hazardous workplace conditions that give rise to musculoskeletal injuries, and the chronic pain that so often accompanies those injuries, haven’t gone away. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, musculoskeletal injuries are the most prevalent occupational injury in the United States today, totaling, in 2017, 32 percent of serious nonfatal occupational injuries and illnesses. The CDC, meanwhile, continues to claim that “together, employers, workers, and other parties with an understanding of ergonomics can design effective programs to prevent and minimize WMSDs.”

In 2017, there were344,970 cases of workplace musculoskeletal injuries involving days away from work.How many of those cases represent workers who are being treated or are self-medicating with opioids today? How many are addicted? And how many of their injuries could have been prevented with an effectively enforced standard designed to reduce the hazards that cause WMSDs, like the short-lived 2001 rule?

Today, the CDC points out that the best ways to prevent opioid overdose deaths include improving prescribing through revamped clinical-practice guidelines and treatment and preventing opioid use disorder. But there’s little discussion even now about preventing the workplace injuries that cause the pain that contribute to opioid use and abuse. Federally enforceable worker-informed ergonomics programs continue to be urgently needed in every workplace where these hazards exist. If only Congress and President Bush had understood that 18 years ago.

NEW

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Clinton

William Jefferson Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe III; August 19, 1946) is anAmerican politician who served as the 42nd president of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Prior to the presidency, he was the governor of Arkansas from 1979 to 1981, and again from 1983 to 1992, and the attorney general of Arkansas from 1977 to 1979. A member of the Democratic Party, Clinton was ideologically a New Democrat, and many of his policies reflected a centrist "Third Way" political philosophy.

Clinton was born and raised in Arkansas and attended Georgetown University,^[1] University College, Oxford, and Yale Law School. He met Hillary Rodham at Yale and married her in 1975. After graduating, Clinton returned to Arkansas and won election as the Attorney General of Arkansas, serving from 1977 to 1979. As Governor of Arkansas, he overhauled the state's education system and served as chairman of the National Governors Association. Clinton was elected president in 1992, defeating incumbent Republican opponent George H. W. Bush. At age 46, he became the third-youngest president and the first from the Baby Boomer generation.

Clinton presided over the longest period of peacetime economic expansion in American history.He signed into law theNorth American Free Trade Agreement but failed to pass his plan for national health care reform. In the 1994 elections, the Republican Party won unified control of the Congress for the first time in 40 years. In 1996, Clinton became the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to be elected to a second full term.

He passed welfare reform and the State Children's Health Insurance Program, as well asfinancial deregulation measures, including the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act and the**Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 200**0.

In 1998, Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives for perjury and obstruction of justice following allegations that he committed perjury and obstructed justice to conceal an affair that he had with Monica Lewinsky, a 22-year old White House Intern. Clinton was acquitted by the Senate in 1999 and completed his term in office. He is only the second U.S. president—following Andrew Johnson 131 years earlier—to ever be impeached. During the last three years of Clinton's presidency, the Congressional Budget Office reported a budget surplus, the first such surplus since 1969. In foreign policy, Clinton ordered U.S. military intervention in the Bosnian and Kosovo wars, signed the Iraq Liberation Act in opposition to Saddam Hussein, participated in the 2000 Camp David Summit to advance the Israeli–Palestinian peace process, and assisted the Northern Ireland peace process.

Clinton left office with the highest end-of-office approval rating of any U.S. president since World War II, and has continually scored high in the historical rankings of U.S. presidents, consistently placing in the top third. Since leaving office, he has been involved in public speaking and humanitarian work. He created the William J. Clinton Foundation to address international causes such as theprevention of AIDS and**global warming**. He has remained active in politics by campaigning for Democratic candidates, including the presidential campaigns of his wife and Barack Obama. In 2004, Clinton published his autobiography, My Life. In 2009, he was named the United Nations Special Envoy to Haiti and after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, he teamed with George W. Bush to form the Clinton Bush Haiti Fund. In addition, he secured the release of two American journalists imprisoned by North Korea, visiting the capital Pyongyang and negotiating their release with Kim Jong-il.

Early life and career

Further information: Early life and career of Bill Clinton

Clinton's birthplace in Hope, Arkansas

Clinton was born William Jefferson Blythe III on August 19, 1946, at Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, Arkansas.^[2][3] He is the son of William Jefferson Blythe Jr., a traveling salesman who had died in an automobile accident three months before his birth, and Virginia Dell Cassidy (later Virginia Kelley).^[4] His parents had married on September 4, 1943, but this union later proved to be bigamous, as Blythe was still married to his third wife.^[5] Virginia traveled to New Orleans to study nursing soon after Bill was born, leaving him in Hope with her parents Eldridge and Edith Cassidy, who owned and ran a small grocery store.^[3] At a time when the southern United States was racially segregated, Clinton's grandparents sold goods on credit to people of all races.^[3] In 1950, Bill's mother returned from nursing school and married Roger Clinton Sr., who co-owned an automobile dealership in Hot Springs, Arkansas, with his brother and Earl T. Ricks.^[3] The family moved to Hot Springs in 1950.^[6] Although he immediately assumed use of his stepfather's surname, it was not until Clinton turned 15^[7] that he formally adopted the surname Clinton as a gesture toward his stepfather.^[3] Clinton said that he remembered his stepfather as a gambler and an alcoholic who regularly abused his mother and half-brother, Roger Clinton Jr., to the point where he intervened multiple times with the threat of violence to protect them.^[3][8]

In Hot Springs, Clinton attended St. John's Catholic Elementary School, Ramble Elementary School, and Hot Springs High School, where he was an active student leader, avid reader, and musician.^[3] Clinton was in the chorus and played the tenor saxophone, winning first chair in the state band's saxophone section. He briefly considered dedicating his life to music, but as he noted in his autobiography My Life:

Sometime in my sixteenth year, I decided I wanted to be in public life as an elected official. I loved music and thought I could be very good, but I knew I would never be John Coltrane or Stan Getz. I was interested in medicine and thought I could be a fine doctor, but I knew I would never be Michael DeBakey. But I knew I could be great in public service.^[3]

Clinton began an interest in law at Hot Springs High, when he took up the challenge to argue the defense of the ancient Roman Senator Catiline in a mock trial in his Latin class.^[9] After a vigorous defense that made use of his "budding rhetorical and political skills", he told the Latin teacher Elizabeth Buck that it "made him realize that someday he would study law".^[10]

Clinton has identified two influential moments in his life, both occurring in 1963, that contributed to his decision to become a public figure. One was his visit as a Boys Nationsenator to the White House to meet President John F. Kennedy.^[3][8] The other was watching Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech on TV, which impressed him enough that he later memorized it.^[11]

College and law school years

Georgetown University

Clinton ran for president of the Student Council while attending the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

With the aid of scholarships, Clinton attended the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., receiving a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service degree in 1968.

In 1964 and 1965, Clinton won elections for class president.^[12] From 1964 to 1967, he was an intern and then a clerk in the office of Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright.^[3]While in college, he became a brother of co-ed service fraternity Alpha Phi Omega^[13] and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Clinton was also a member of the Order of DeMolay,^[14] a youth group affiliated with Freemasonry, but he never became a Freemason. He is a member of Kappa Kappa Psi honorary band fraternity.^[15]

Oxford

Upon graduating from Georgetown in 1968, Clinton won a Rhodes Scholarship to University College, Oxford, where he initially read for a B.Phil. in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics but transferred to a B.Litt. in politics and, ultimately, a B.Phil. in politics.^[16] Clinton did not expect to return for the second year because of the draft and he switched programs; this type of activity was common among other Rhodes Scholars from his cohort. He had received an offer to study at Yale Law School, Yale University, but he left early to return to the United States and did not receive a degree from Oxford.^[8][17][18]

During his time at Oxford, Clinton befriended fellow American Rhodes Scholar Frank Aller. In 1969, Aller received a draft letter that mandated deployment to the Vietnam War. Aller's 1971 suicide had an influential impact on Clinton.^[16][19] British writer and feminist Sara Maitland said of Clinton, "I remember Bill and Frank Aller taking me to a pub in Walton Street in the summer term of 1969 and talking to me about the Vietnam War. I knew nothing about it, and when Frank began to describe the napalming of civilians I began to cry. Bill said that feeling bad wasn't good enough. That was the first time I encountered the idea that liberal sensitivities weren't enough and you had to do something about such things".^[16] He also developed an interest in rugby union, which he played at Oxford.^[20]

While Clinton was president in 1994, he received an honorary degree and a fellowship from the University of Oxford, specifically for being "a doughty and tireless champion of the cause of world peace", having "a powerful collaborator in his wife," and for winning "general applause for his achievement of resolving the gridlock that prevented an agreed budget".^[17][21]

Vietnam War opposition and draft controversy

During the Vietnam War, Clinton received educational draft deferments while he was in England in 1968 and 1969.^[22] While at Oxford, he participated in Vietnam War protests and organized a Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam event in October 1969.^[3] He was planning to attend law school in the U.S. and was aware that he might lose his draft deferment. Clinton tried unsuccessfully to obtain positions in the National Guard or Air Force, and he then made arrangements to join the Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) program at the University of Arkansas.^[23]

He subsequently decided not to join the ROTC, saying in a letter to the officer in charge of the program that he opposed the war, but did not think it was honorable to use ROTC, National Guard, or Reserve service to avoid serving in Vietnam. He further stated that because he opposed the war, he would not volunteer to serve in uniform, but would subject himself to the draft, and would serve if selected only as a way "to maintain my political viability within the system".^[24] Clinton registered for the draft and received a high number (311), meaning that those whose birthdays had been drawn as numbers 1 to 310 would have to be drafted before him, making it unlikely that he would be drafted. (In fact, the highest number drafted was 195.)^[25]

Colonel Eugene Holmes, the Army officer who had been involved with Clinton's ROTC application, suspected that Clinton attempted to manipulate the situation to avoid the draft and avoid serving in uniform. He issued a notarized statement during the 1992 presidential campaign:

I was informed by the draft board that it was of interest to Senator Fulbright's office that Bill Clinton, a Rhodes Scholar, should be admitted to the ROTC program ... I believe that he purposely deceived me, using the possibility of joining the ROTC as a ploy to work with the draft board to delay his induction and get a new draft classification.^[26]

During the 1992 campaign, it was revealed that Clinton's uncle had attempted to secure him a position in the Navy Reserve, which would have prevented him from being deployed to Vietnam. This effort was unsuccessful and Clinton said in 1992 that he had been unaware of it until then.^[27] Although legal, Clinton's actions with respect to the draft and deciding whether to serve in the military were criticized during his first presidential campaign by conservatives and some Vietnam veterans, some of whom charged that he had used Fulbright's influence to avoid military service.^[28][29] Clinton's 1992 campaign manager, James Carville, successfully argued that Clinton's letter in which he declined to join the ROTC should be made public, insisting that voters, many of whom had also opposed the Vietnam War, would understand and appreciate his position.^[30]

Law school

After Oxford, Clinton attended Yale Law School and earned a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree in 1973.^[3][8] In 1971, he met fellow law student Hillary Rodham in the Yale Law Library; she was a class year ahead of him.^[3][31] They began dating and were soon inseparable. After only about a month, Clinton postponed his summer plans to be a coordinator for the George McGovern campaign for the 1972 United States presidential election in order to move in with her in California.^[32] The couple continued living together in New Haven when they returned to law school.^[33]

Clinton eventually moved to Texas with Rodham in 1972 to take a job leading McGovern's effort there. He spent considerable time in Dallas, at the campaign's local headquarters on Lemmon Avenue, where he had an office. Clinton worked with future two-term mayor of Dallas Ron Kirk,^[34] future governor of Texas Ann Richards,^[35] and then unknown television director (and future filmmaker) Steven Spielberg.^[36]

Bill married Hillary on October 11, 1975, and their only child, Chelsea, was born on February 27, 1980.^[31]

Early political career

Further information: Electoral history of Bill Clinton

Governor of Arkansas (1979–1981, 1983–1992)

Further information: 1978 Arkansas gubernatorial election, 1980 Arkansas gubernatorial election, 1982 Arkansas gubernatorial election, 1986 Arkansas gubernatorial election, and 1990 Arkansas gubernatorial election

After graduating from Yale Law School, Clinton returned to Arkansas and became a law professor at the University of Arkansas. In 1974, he ran for the House of Representatives. Running in a conservative district against incumbent Republican John Paul Hammerschmidt, Clinton's campaign was bolstered by the anti-Republican and anti-incumbent mood resulting from the Watergate scandal. Hammerschmidt, who had received 77 percent of the vote in 1972, defeated Clinton by only a 52 percent to 48 percent margin. In 1976, Clinton ran for Arkansas Attorney General. With only minor opposition in the primary and no opposition at all in the general election,^[37] Clinton was elected.^[8]

Newly elected Governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton meets with President Jimmy Carter in 1978, fifteen years before assuming the nation's highest office.

[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Arkansas_Governor_Election_Results_by_County,_1978.svg)

Results of the 1978 gubernatorial election in Arkansas

In 1978, Clinton entered the Arkansas gubernatorial primary. At just 31 years old, he was one of the youngest gubernatorial candidates in the state's history. Clinton was elected Governor of Arkansas in 1978, having defeated the Republican candidate Lynn Lowe, a farmer from Texarkana. Clinton was only 32 years old when he took office, the youngest governor in the country at the time and the second youngest governor in the history of Arkansas.^[38] Due to his youthful appearance, Clinton was often called the "Boy Governor".^[39][40][41] He worked on educational reform and directed the maintenance of Arkansas's roads, with wife Hillary leading a successful committee on urban health care reform. However, his term included an unpopular motor vehicle tax and citizens' anger over the escape of Cuban refugees (from the Mariel boatlift) detained in Fort Chaffee in 1980. Monroe Schwarzlose, of Kingsland in Cleveland County, polled 31 percent of the vote against Clinton in the Democratic gubernatorial primary of 1980. Some suggested Schwarzlose's unexpected voter turnout foreshadowed Clinton's defeat by Republican challenger Frank D. White in the general election that year. As Clinton once joked, he was the youngest ex-governor in the nation's history.^[8]

Clinton joined friend Bruce Lindsey's Little Rock law firm of Wright, Lindsey and Jennings.^[42] In 1982, he was elected governor a second time and kept the office for ten years. Effective with the 1986 election, Arkansas had changed its gubernatorial term of office from two to four years. During his term, he helped transform Arkansas's economy and improved the state's educational system.^[43] For senior citizens, he removed the sales tax from medications and increased the home property-tax exemption.^[44] He became a leading figure among the New Democrats, a group of Democrats who advocated welfare reform, smaller government, and other policies not supported by liberals. Formally organized as the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the New Democrats argued that in light of President Ronald Reagan's landslide victory in 1984, the Democratic Party needed to adopt a more centrist political stance in order to succeed at the national level.^[44][45] Clinton delivered the Democratic response to Reagan's 1985 State of the Union Address and served as chair of the National Governors Associationfrom 1986 to 1987, bringing him to an audience beyond Arkansas.^[8]

Governor and Mrs. Clinton attend the Dinner Honoring the Nation's Governors in the White House with President Ronald Reagan and first lady Nancy Reagan, 1987.

In the early 1980s, Clinton made reform of the Arkansas education system a top priority of his gubernatorial administration. The Arkansas Education Standards Committee was chaired by Clinton's wife Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was also an attorney as well as the chair of the Legal Services Corporation. The committee transformed Arkansas's education system. Proposed reforms included more spending for schools (supported by a sales-tax increase), better opportunities for gifted children, vocational education, higher teachers' salaries, more course variety, and compulsory teacher competency exams. The reforms passed in September 1983 after Clinton called a special legislative session—the longest in Arkansas history.^[43] Many have considered this the greatest achievement of the Clinton governorship.^[8][44] He defeated four Republican candidates for governor: Lowe (1978), White (1982 and 1986), Jonesboro businessmen Woody Freeman (1984), and Sheffield Nelson of Little Rock (1990).^[37]

Also in the 1980s, The Clintons' personal and business affairs included transactions that became the basis of the Whitewater controversy investigation, which later dogged his presidential administration.^[46] After extensive investigation over several years, no indictments were made against the Clintons related to the years in Arkansas.^[8][47]

According to some sources, Clinton was a death penalty opponent in his early years, but he eventually switched positions.^[48][49] During Clinton's term, Arkansas performed its first executions since 1964 (the death penalty had been reinstated in 1976).^[50] As Governor, he oversaw four executions: one by electric chair and three by lethal injection. Later, Clinton was the first president to pardon a death-row inmate since the federal death penalty was reinstated in 1988.^[51]

1988 Democratic presidential primaries

In 1987, the media speculated that Clinton would enter the Presidential race after incumbent New York Governor Mario Cuomo declined to run and Democratic front-runner Gary Hart withdrew owing to revelations of multiple marital infidelities.^[52] Clinton decided to remain as Arkansas governor (following consideration for the potential candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton for governor, initially favored—but ultimately vetoed—by the First Lady).^[53] For the nomination, Clinton endorsed Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. He gave the nationally televised opening night address at the 1988 Democratic National Convention, but his speech, which was 33 minutes long and twice the length it was expected to be, was criticized for being too long^[54] and poorly delivered.^[55] Clinton presented himself as both a moderate and a member of the New Democrat wing of the Democratic Party, and he headed the moderate Democratic Leadership Council in 1990 and 1991.^[44][56]

Presidency (1993–2001)

Main article: Presidency of Bill Clinton

Countries visited by President Bill Clinton during his terms in office

During his presidency, Clinton advocated for a wide variety of legislation and programs, most of which were enacted into law or implemented by the executive branch. His policies, particularly the North American Free Trade Agreement and welfare reform, have been attributed to a centrist Third Way philosophy of governance.^[57][58] His policy of fiscal conservatism helped to reduce deficits on budgetary matters.^[59][60] Clinton presided over the longest period of peacetime economic expansion in American history.^[61][62][63] The Congressional Budget Office reported budget surpluses of $69 billion in 1998, $126 billion in 1999, and $236 billion in 2000,^[64] during the last three years of Clinton's presidency.^[65] Over the years of the recorded surplus, the gross national debt rose each year. At the end of the fiscal year (September 30) for each of the years a surplus was recorded, The U.S. treasury reported a gross debt of $5.413 trillion in 1997, $5.526 trillion in 1998, $5.656 trillion in 1999, and $5.674 trillion in 2000.^[66][67] Over the same period, the Office of Management and Budget reported an end of year (December 31) gross debt of $5.369 trillion in 1997, $5.478 trillion in 1998, $5.606 in 1999, and $5.629 trillion in 2000.^[68] At the end of his presidency, the Clintons moved to Chappaqua, New York, in order to satisfy a residency requirement for his wife to win election as a U.S. Senator from New York.

1992 presidential campaign

Further information: 1992 Democratic Party presidential primaries, 1992 United States presidential election, and Bill Clinton 1992 presidential campaign

In the first primary contest, the Iowa Caucus, Clinton finished a distant third to Iowa Senator Tom Harkin. During the campaign for the New Hampshire primary, reports surfaced that Clinton had engaged in an extramarital affair with Gennifer Flowers. Clinton fell far behind former Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas in the New Hampshire polls.^[8] Following Super Bowl XXVI, Clinton and his wife Hillary went on 60 Minutes to rebuff the charges. Their television appearance was a calculated risk, but Clinton regained several delegates. He finished second to Tsongas in the New Hampshire primary, but after trailing badly in the polls and coming within single digits of winning, the media viewed it as a victory. News outlets labeled him "The Comeback Kid" for earning a firm second-place finish.^[69]

Winning the big prizes of Florida and Texas and many of the Southern primaries on Super Tuesday gave Clinton a sizable delegate lead. However, former California Governor Jerry Brown was scoring victories and Clinton had yet to win a significant contest outside his native South.^[8][56] With no major Southern state remaining, Clinton targeted New York, which had many delegates. He scored a resounding victory in New York City, shedding his image as a regional candidate.^[56] Having been transformed into the consensus candidate, he secured the Democratic Party nomination, finishing with a victory in Jerry Brown's home state of California.^[8]

The Clintons in a White House Christmas portrait, 1993

During the campaign, questions of conflict of interest regarding state business and the politically powerful Rose Law Firm, at which Hillary Rodham Clinton was a partner, arose. Clinton argued the questions were moot because all transactions with the state had been deducted before determining Hillary's firm pay.^[3][70] Further concern arose when Bill Clinton announced that, with Hillary, voters would be getting two presidents "for the price of one".^[71]

Clinton was still the Governor of Arkansas while campaigning for U.S. president, and he returned to his home state to see that Ricky Ray Rector would be executed. After killing a police officer and a civilian, Rector shot himself in the head, leading to what his lawyers said was a state where he could still talk but did not understand the idea of death. According to both Arkansas state law and Federal law, a seriously mentally impaired inmate cannot be executed. The courts disagreed with the allegation of grave mental impairment and allowed the execution. Clinton's return to Arkansas for the execution was framed in an article for The New York Times as a possible political move to counter "soft on crime" accusations.^[48][72]

Bush's approval ratings were around 80 percent during the Gulf War, and he was described as unbeatable. When Bush compromised with Democrats to try to lower Federal deficits, he reneged on his promise not to raise taxes, which hurt his approval rating. Clinton repeatedly condemned Bush for making a promise he failed to keep.^[56] By election time, the economy was souring and Bush saw his approval rating plummet to just slightly over 40 percent.^[56][73] Finally, conservatives were previously united by anti-communism, but with the end of the Cold War, the party lacked a uniting issue. When Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson addressed Christian themes at the Republican National Convention—with Bush criticizing Democrats for omitting God from their platform—many moderates were alienated.^[74] Clinton then pointed to his moderate, "New Democrat" record as governor of Arkansas, though some on the more liberal side of the party remained suspicious.^[75] Many Democrats who had supported Ronald Reagan and Bush in previous elections switched their support to Clinton.^[76] Clinton and his running mate, Al Gore, toured the country during the final weeks of the campaign, shoring up support and pledging a "new beginning".^[76]

1992 electoral vote results

Clinton won the 1992 presidential election (370 electoral votes) against Republican incumbent George H. W. Bush (168 electoral votes) and billionaire populist Ross Perot (0 electoral votes), who ran as an independent on a platform that focused on domestic issues. Bush's steep decline in public approval was a significant part of Clinton's success.^[76] Clinton's victory in the election ended twelve years of Republican rule of the White House and twenty of the previous twenty-four years. The election gave Democrats full control of the United States Congress,^[4] the first time one party controlled both the executive and legislative branches since Democrats held the 96th United States Congress during the presidency of Jimmy Carter.^[77][78]

First term (1993–1997)

"Our democracy must be not only the envy of the world but the engine of our own renewal. There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America."

Inaugural address, January 20, 1993.^[79]

Clinton was inaugurated as the 42nd President of the United States on January 20, 1993. Less than a month after taking office, he signed the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which required large employers to allow employees to take unpaid leave for pregnancy or a serious medical condition. This action had bipartisan support,^[80] and was popular with the public.^[81]

Two days after taking office, on January 22, 1993—the 20th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade—Clinton reversed restrictions on domestic and international family planning programs that had been imposed by Reagan and Bush.^[82] Clinton said that abortion should be kept "safe, legal, and rare"—a slogan that had been suggested by University of California, San Diego political scientist Samuel L. Popkin and first used by Clinton in December 1991, while campaigning.^[83] During the eight years of the Clinton administration, the U.S. abortion rate declined by about 18.4 percent.^[84]

On February 15, 1993, Clinton made his first address to the nation, announcing his plan to raise taxes to close a budget deficit.^[85] Two days later, in a nationally televised address to a joint session of Congress, Clinton unveiled his economic plan. The plan focused on reducing the deficit rather than on cutting taxes for the middle class, which had been high on his campaign agenda.^[86] Clinton's advisers pressured him to raise taxes, based on the theory that a smaller federal budget deficit would reduce bond interest rates.^[87]

On May 19, 1993, Clinton fired seven employees of the White House Travel Office. This caused the White House travel office controversy even though the travel office staff served at the pleasure of the president and could be dismissed without cause. The White House responded to the controversy by claiming that the firings were done in response to financial improprieties that had been revealed by a brief FBI investigation.^[88] Critics contended that the firings had been done to allow friends of the Clintons to take over the travel business and the involvement of the FBI was unwarranted.^[89]

In August, Clinton signed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, which passed Congress without a Republican vote. It cut taxes for 15 million low-income families, made tax cuts available to 90 percent of small businesses,^[90] and raised taxes on the wealthiest 1.2 percent of taxpayers. Additionally, it mandated that the budget be balanced over a number of years through the implementation of spending restraints.^[91]

Clinton and Vice President Al Goreon the South Lawn, August 10, 1993

On September 22, 1993, Clinton made a major speech to Congress regarding a health care reform plan; the program aimed at achieving universal coverage through a national health care plan. This was one of the most prominent items on Clinton's legislative agenda and resulted from a task force headed by Hillary Clinton. The plan was well received in political circles, but it was eventually doomed by well-organized lobby opposition from conservatives, the American Medical Association, and the health insurance industry. However, Clinton biographer John F. Harris stated that the program failed because of a lack of coordination within the White House.^[47] Despite the Democratic majority in Congress, the effort to create a national health care system ultimately died when compromise legislation by**George J. Mitchell**failed to gain a majority of support in August 1994. The failure of the bill was the first major legislative defeat of the Clinton administration.^[44][47]

In November 1993, David Hale—the source of criminal allegations against Bill Clinton in the **Whitewater controversy**—alleged that while he was governor of Arkansas, Clinton pressured him to provide an illegal $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal, the Clintons' partner in the Whitewater land deal.^[92] A U.S. Securities and Exchange Commissioninvestigation resulted in convictions against the McDougals for their role in the Whitewater project, but the Clintons themselves were never charged, and Clinton maintains his and his wife's innocence in the affair.

On November 30, 1993, Clinton signed into law the Brady Bill, which mandated federal background checks on people who purchase firearms in the United States. The law also imposed a five-day waiting period on purchases, until the NICS system was implemented in 1998. He also expanded the**Earned Income Tax Credit**, a subsidy for low-income workers.^[47]

In December of the same year, allegations by Arkansas state troopers Larry Patterson and Roger Perry were first reported by David Brock in The American Spectator. In the affair later known as "Troopergate", the officers alleged that they arranged sexual liaisons for Clinton back when he was governor of Arkansas. The story mentioned a woman named Paula, a reference to Paula Jones. Brock later apologized to Clinton,saying the article was politically motivated "bad journalism", and that "the troopers were greedy and had slimy motives".^[93]

Yitzhak Rabin, Clinton and Yasser Arafat during the Oslo Accords on September 13, 1993

That month, Clinton implemented a Department of Defense directive known as "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", which allowed gay men and women to serve in the armed services provided they kept their sexual preferences a secret. The Act forbade the military from inquiring about an individual's sexual orientation.^[94] The policy was developed as a compromise after Clinton's proposal to allow gays to serve openly in the military met staunch opposition from prominent Congressional Republicans and Democrats, including Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Sam Nunn (D-GA). According to David Mixner, Clinton's support for the compromise led to a heated dispute with Vice President Al Gore, who felt that "the President should lift the ban ... even though [his executive order] was sure to be overridden by the Congress".^[95] Some gay-rights advocates criticized Clinton for not going far enough and accused him of making his campaign promise to get votes and contributions.^[96] Their position was that Clinton should have integrated the military by executive order, noting that President Harry S. Truman used executive order to racially desegregate the armed forces. Clinton's defenders argued that an executive order might have prompted the Senate to write the exclusion of gays into law, potentially making it harder to integrate the military in the future.^[44] Later in his presidency, in 1999, Clinton criticized the way the policy was implemented, saying he did not think any serious person could say it was not "out of whack".^[97] The policy remained controversial, and was finally repealed in 2011, removing open sexual orientation as a reason for dismissal from the armed forces.^[98]

NB before shellacking

On January 1, 1994, Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement into law.^[99] Throughout his first year in office, Clinton consistently supported ratification of the treaty by the U.S. Senate. Clinton and most of his allies in the Democratic Leadership Committee strongly supported free trade measures; there remained, however, strong disagreement within the party. Opposition came chiefly from anti-trade Republicans, protectionist Democrats and supporters of Ross Perot. The bill passed the house with 234 votes against 200 opposed (132 Republicans and 102 Democrats voting in favor; 156 Democrats, 43 Republicans, and 1 independent against). The treaty was then ratified by the Senate and signed into law by the president.^[99]

The Omnibus Crime Bill, which Clinton signed into law in September 1994,^[100] made many changes to U.S. crime and law enforcement legislation including the expansion of the death penalty to include crimes not resulting in death, such as running a large-scale drug enterprise. During Clinton's re-election campaign he said, "My 1994 crime bill expanded the death penalty for drug kingpins, murderers of federal law enforcement officers, and nearly 60 additional categories of violent felons."^[101] It also included a subsection of assault weapons ban for a ten-year period.

On October 21, 1994, the Clinton administration launched thefirst official White House website,whitehouse.gov.^[102][103] The site was followed with three more versions, resulting in the final edition launched in 2000.^[104][105] The White House website was part of a wider movement of the Clinton administration toward web-based communication. According to Robert Longley, "Clinton and Gore were responsible for pressing almost all federal agencies, the U.S. court system and the U.S. military onto the Internet, thus opening up America's government to more of America's citizens than ever before. On July 17, 1996, Clinton issued Executive Order 13011 – Federal Information Technology, ordering the heads of all federal agencies to utilize information technology fully to make the information of the agency easily accessible to the public."^[106]

After two years of Democratic Party control, the Democrats lost control of Congress to the Republicans in the mid-term elections in 1994, for the first time in forty years.^[107]

Clinton's coat of arms, granted by the Chief Herald of Ireland in 1995

The White House FBI files controversy of June 1996 arose concerning improper access by the White House to FBI security-clearance documents. Craig Livingstone, head of the White House Office of Personnel Security, improperly requested, and received from the FBI, background report files without asking permission of the subject individuals; many of these were employees of former Republican administrations.^[108] In March 2000, Independent Counsel Robert Ray determined that there was no credible evidence of any crime. Ray's report further stated, "there was no substantial and credible evidence that any senior White House official was involved" in seeking the files.^[109]

On September 21, 1996, Clinton signed into law the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defined marriage for federal purposes as the legal union of one man and one woman; the legislation allowed individual states to refuse to recognize gay marriages that were performed in other states.^[110] Paul Yandura, speaking for the White House gay and lesbian liaison office, said that Clinton's signing of DOMA "was a political decision that they made at the time of a re-election". In defense of his actions, Clinton has said that DOMA was intended to "head off an attempt to send a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage to the states", a possibility he described as highly likely in the context of a "very reactionary Congress".^[111] Administration spokesman Richard Socarides said, "the alternatives we knew were going to be far worse, and it was time to move on and get the president re-elected."^[112] Clinton himself stated that DOMA was something "which the Republicans put on the ballot to try to get the base vote for Bush up, I think it's obvious that something had to be done to try to keep the Republican Congress from presenting that".^[113] Others were more critical. The veteran gay rights and gay marriage activist Evan Wolfson has called these claims "historic revisionism".^[112] In a July 2, 2011, editorial The New York Times opined, "The Defense of Marriage Act was enacted in 1996 as an election-year wedge issue, signed by President Bill Clinton in one of his worst policy moments."^[114] Ultimately, in United States v. Windsor, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down DOMA in June 2013.^[115]

Despite DOMA, Clinton was the first president to select openly gay persons for administrative positions,^[116] and he is generally credited as being the first president to publicly champion gay rights.^[117] During his presidency, Clinton issued two substantially controversial executive orders on behalf of gay rights, the first lifting the ban on security clearances for LGBT federal employees^[118] and the second outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation in the federal civilian workforce.^[119] Under Clinton's leadership, federal funding for HIV/AIDS research, prevention and treatment more than doubled.^[120] Clinton also pushed for passing hate crimes laws for gays and for the private sector Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which, buoyed by his lobbying, failed to pass the Senate by a single vote in 1996.^[121] Advocacy for these issues, paired with the politically unpopular nature of the gay rights movement at the time, led to enthusiastic support for Clinton's election and reelection by the Human Rights Campaign.^[117] Clinton came out for gay marriage in July 2009^[122]and urged the Supreme Court to overturn DOMA in 2013.^[123] He was later honored by GLAAD for his prior pro-gay stances and his reversal on DOMA.^[124]

"When I took office, only high energy physicists had ever heard of what is called the Worldwide Web ... Now even my cat has its own page."

Bill Clinton's announcement of Next Generation Internet initiative, October 1996.^[125]

The 1996 United States campaign finance controversy was an alleged effort by the People's Republic of China (PRC) to influence the domestic policies of the United States, before and during the Clinton administration, and involved the fundraising practices of the administration itself.^[126][127] Despite the evidence,^[126][128] the Chinese government denied all accusations.^[129]

As part of a 1996 initiative to curb illegal immigration, Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) on September 30, 1996. Appointed by Clinton,^[130] the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform recommended reducing legal immigration from about 800,000 people a year to about 550,000.^[131][132]

Ken Gormley, author of The Death of American Virtue: Clinton vs. Starr, reveals in his book that Clinton narrowly escaped possible assassination in the Philippines in November 1996. During his visit to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Manila, while he was on his way to meet with a senior member of the Philippine government, Clinton was saved from danger minutes before his motorcade was scheduled to drive over a bridge charged with a timed improvised explosive device (IED).^[133] According to officials, the IED was large enough to "blow up the entire presidential motorcade".^[134] Details of the plot were revealed to Gormley by Lewis C. Merletti, former member of the presidential protection detail and Director of the Secret Service. Intelligence officers intercepted a radio transmission indicating that there was a wedding cake under a bridge.^[133] This alerted Merletti and others as Clinton's motorcade was scheduled to drive over a major bridge in downtown Manila.^[134] Once more, the word "wedding" was the code name used by a terrorist group for a past assassination attempt.^[134] Merletti wanted to reroute the motorcade, but the alternate route would add forty-five minutes to the drive time. Clinton was very angry, as he was already late for the meeting, but following the advice of the secret service possibly saved his life. Two other bombs had been discovered in Manila earlier in the week so the threat level that day was high.^[135] Security personnel at the Manila International Airport uncovered several grenades and a timing device in a travel bag.^[136] Officials also discovered a bomb near a major U.S. naval base.^[136] The president was scheduled to visit both of these locations later in the week. An intense investigation took place into the events in Manila and it was discovered that the group behind the bridge bomb was a Saudi terrorist group in Afghanistan known as al-Qaeda and the plot was masterminded by Osama bin Laden.^[134] Until recently, this thwarted assassination attempt was never made public and remained top secret. Only top members of the U.S. intelligence community were aware of these events.^[134]

1996 presidential election

Second term (1997–2001)

In the January 1997, State of the Union address, Clinton proposed a new initiative to provide health coverage to up to five million children. Senators Ted Kennedy—a Democrat—and Orrin Hatch—a Republican—teamed up with Hillary Rodham Clinton and her staff in 1997, and succeeded in passing legislation forming the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), the largest (successful) health care reform in the years of the Clinton Presidency. That year, Hillary Clinton shepherded through Congress the Adoption and Safe Families Act and two years later she succeeded in helping pass the Foster Care Independence Act. Bill Clinton negotiated the passage of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 by the Republican Congress. In October 1997, he announced he was getting hearing aids, due to hearing loss attributed to his age, and his time spent as a musician in his youth.^[138] In 1999 he signed into law the Financial Services Modernization Act also known as theGramm–Leach–Bliley Act, which repealed the part of the Glass–Steagall Act that had prohibited a bank from offering a full range of investment, commercial banking, and insurance services since its enactment in 1933.^[139]

Impeachment and acquittal

Main article: Impeachment of Bill Clinton

Clinton's impeachment trial in 1999

After the 1998 elections, the House impeached Clinton, alleging perjury and obstruction of justice related to the Lewinsky scandal.^[47] Clinton was only the second U.S. president to be impeached, after Andrew Johnson. Impeachment proceedings were based on allegations that Clinton had illegally lied about and covered up his relationship with 22-year-old White House (and later Department of Defense) employee Monica Lewinsky.^[140] After the Starr Report was submitted to the House providing what it termed "substantial and credible information that President Clinton Committed Acts that May Constitute Grounds for an Impeachment",^[141] the House began impeachment hearings against Clinton before the mid-term elections. To hold impeachment proceedings, the Republican leadership called a lame-duck session in December 1998.

Future president Donald Trump and Clinton shaking hands at Trump Tower, June 2000

While the House Judiciary Committee hearings ended in a straight party-line vote, there was lively debate on the House floor. The two charges passed in the House (largely with Republican support, but with a handful of Democratic votes as well) were for perjury and obstruction of justice. The perjury charge arose from Clinton's testimony before a grand jury that had been convened to investigate perjury he may have committed in his sworn deposition during Jones v. Clinton, Paula Jones's sexual harassment lawsuit.^[142] The obstruction charge was based on his actions to conceal his relationship with Lewinsky before and after that deposition.

The Senate later acquitted Clinton on both charges.^[143] The Senate refused to meet to hold an impeachment trial before the end of the old term, so the trial was held over until the next Congress. Clinton was represented by Washington law firm Williams & Connolly.^[144] The Senate finished a twenty-one-day trial on February 12, 1999, with the vote of 55 Not Guilty/45 Guilty on the perjury charge^[143] and 50 Not Guilty/50 Guilty on the obstruction of justice charge.^[145] Both votes fell short of the Constitutional two-thirds majority requirement to convict and remove an officeholder. The final vote was generally along party lines, with no Democrats voting guilty, and only a handful of Republicans voting not guilty.^[143]

On January 19, 2001, Clinton's law license was suspended for five years after he acknowledged to an Arkansas circuit court that he had engaged in conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice in the Jones case.^[146][147]

Pardons and commutations

Clinton controversially issued 141 pardons and 36 commutations on his last day in office on January 20, 2001.^[47][148] Most of the controversy surrounded Marc Rich and allegations that Hillary Clinton's brother, Hugh Rodham, accepted payments in return for influencing the president's decision-making regarding the pardons.^[149] Federal prosecutor Mary Jo White was appointed to investigate the pardon of Rich. She was later replaced by then-Republican James Comey, who found no wrongdoing on Clinton's part. Some of Clinton's pardons remain a point of controversy.^[150]

Military and foreign events

Further information: Foreign policy of the Bill Clinton administration

https://thinkprogress.org/what-we-now-know-about-the-men-who-led-the-impeachment-of-clinton-8b5557723bc9/

What We Now Know About The Men Who Led The Impeachment Of Clinton

JUDD LEGUM

MAY 30, 2015, 5:43 PM

On December 19, 1998, the House of Representatives impeached Bill Clinton on two charges related to his extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky. (The charges were for perjury and obstruction of justice.) The historic vote, and subsequent trial in the Senate, involved the work of three men who were elected Speaker of the House Of Representatives by the Republican majority, Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston and Dennis Hastert.

Almost 17 years later, with the federal indictment of Hastert for illegally concealing up to $3.5 million in hush-money, we finally have a more complete understanding of the men who led this effort.

Newt Gingrich

Speaker Newt Gingrich(R-GA) led the push for Bill Clinton’s impeachment. Following a disappointing election in November 1998, he announced he was stepping down as Speaker and resigning from Congress.

Gingrich later admitted that, while he was pushing for Clinton’s impeachment, he was engaged in an affair with a Congressional aide. “There were times when I was praying and when I felt I was doing things that were wrong. But I was still doing them,” Gingrich said in 2007. He later said the situation was “complex and, obviously, I wasn’t doing things to be proud of.”

Bob Livingston

After Gingrich announced his resignation, Republicans unanimously selected Rep. Bob Livingston (R-LA) to succeed him. Livingston represented the party as Speaker-elect in the led up to the impeachment vote.

On the day of the impeachment vote, Livingston announced he was resigning following revelations that he had engaged in an extramarital affair.According to Hustler Magazine Publisher Larry Flint, who offered a reward for information about the sex lives of members of Congress, he “found four women who said they had been involved with Mr. Livingston over the last 10 years.”

Dennis Hastert

Following Livingston’s resignation, which occurred on the same day the House voted on impeachment, Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) quickly gained support of the Republican leadership to succeed him as Speaker-designate. He began formally serving as speaker in January 1999, and held that role while the Senate conducted their trial on the articles of impeachment.

On Thursday, Hastert was indicted on charges that he illegally structured $1.7 million in payments to an individual in an attempt to cover up prior misconduct. According to reports, the payments were allegedly intended to “conceal sexual abuse against a former male student he knew during his days as a teacher in Yorkville, Ill.” The LA Times also reported that “investigators also spoke with a second man who raised similar allegations that corroborated what the former student said.”

Update:

On April 27, Hastert was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison for improperly structuring payments to cover up the abuse. In open court, a federal judge repeatedly called him a “serial child molester.”

triangulation: term was first used by U.S. President Bill Clinton's former chief political advisor Dick Morris as a way to describe his strategy for getting Clinton reelected in the 1996 presidential election. In Dick Morris' words, triangulation meant "the president needed to take a position that not only blended the best of each party's views but also transcended them to constitute a third force in the debate."^[1] In news articles and books, it is sometimes referred to as "Clintonian triangulation".^[2][3][4] Morris advocated a set of policies that were different from the traditional policies of the Democratic Party. These policies included deregulation and balanced budgets. One of the most widely cited capstones of Clinton's triangulation strategy was when, in his 1996 State of the Union Address, Clinton declared that the "era of big government is over."^[5]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1996

The United States presidential election of 1996 was the 53rd quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 5, 1996.^[2] Incumbent Democratic President Bill Clinton defeated Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, the Republican nominee.

Clinton and Vice President Al Gore were re-nominated without incident by the Democratic Party. Numerous candidates entered the 1996 Republican primaries, with Dole considered the early front-runner. Dole clinched the nomination after defeating challenges by publisher Steve Forbes and paleoconservative leader Pat Buchanan. Dole's running mate was Jack Kemp, a former Congressman and football player who had served as the Housing Secretary under President George H. W. Bush. Ross Perot, who had won 18.9% of the popular vote as an independent candidate in the 1992 election, ran as the candidate of the Reform Party. Perot received less media attention in 1996 and was excluded from the presidential debates.

Clinton's chances of winning were initially considered slim in the middle of his term as his party had lost both the House of Representativesand the Senate in 1994 for the first time in decades. He was able to regain ground as the economy began to recover from the early 1990s recession with a relatively stable world stage. Clinton tied Dole to Newt Gingrich, the unpopular Republican Speaker of the House. Dole promised an across-the-board 15% reduction in federal income taxes and attacked Clinton as a member of the "spoiled" Baby Boomergeneration. Dole's age was a persistent issue in the election, and gaffes by Dole exacerbated the issue for his campaign.

Clinton maintained a consistent polling age over Dole, and he won re-election with a substantial margin in the popular vote and the Electoral College. Clinton became the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win two straight presidential elections. Dole won 40.7% of the popular vote and 159 electoral votes, while Perot won 8.4% of the popular vote. Despite Dole's defeat, the Republican Party was able to maintain a majority in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Turnout was registered at 49.0%, the lowest for a presidential election since 1924.

[hide]

Background

In 1995, the Republican Party was riding high on the significant gains made in the 1994 mid-term elections. In those races, the Republicans, led by whip Newt Gingrich, captured the majority of seats in the House for the first time in forty years and the majority of seats in the Senate for the first time in eight years. Gingrich became Speaker of the House, while Bob Dole elevated to Senate Majority leader.

The Republicans of the 104th Congress pursued an ambitious agenda, highlighted by their Contract with America, but were often forced to compromise with President Clinton, who wielded veto power. A budget impasse between Congress and the Clinton Administration eventually resulted in a government shutdown. Clinton, meanwhile, was praised for signing the GOP's welfare reform and other notable bills, but was forced to abandon his own health care plan.

...

The term was first used by U.S. President Bill Clinton's former chief political advisor Dick Morris as a way to describe his strategy for getting Clinton reelected in the 1996 presidential election. In Dick Morris' words, triangulationmeant "the president needed to take a position that not only blended the best of each party's views but also transcended them to constitute a third force in the debate."^[1] In news articles and books, it is sometimes referred to as "Clintonian triangulation".^[2][3][4] Morris advocated a set of policies that were different from the traditional policies of the Democratic Party. These policies included deregulation and balanced budgets. One of the most widely cited capstones of Clinton's triangulation strategy was when, in his 1996 State of the Union Address, Clinton declared that the "era of big government is over."^[5]

---

3rd way

In the United States, "Third Way" adherents embrace fiscal conservatism to a greater extent than traditional economic liberals, advocate some replacement of welfare with workfare and sometimes have a stronger preference for market solutions to traditional problems (as in pollution markets) while rejecting pure laissez-faire economics and other libertarian positions. The Third Way style of governing was firmly adopted and partly redefined during the administration of President Bill Clinton.^[41] The term "Third Way" was introduced by political scientist Stephen Skowronek.^[42][43][44] "Third Way" presidents "undermine the opposition by borrowing policies from it in an effort to seize the middle and with it to achieve political dominance". Examples of this are Nixon’s economic policies, which were a continuation of Johnson's "Great Society", as well as Clinton’s welfare reform later.^[45]

Clinton, Blair, Prodi, Gerhard Schröder and other leading Third Way adherents organized conferences to promote the Third Way philosophy in 1997 at Chequers in England.^[46][47]The Third Way think tank and the Democratic Leadership Council are adherents of Third Way politics.^[48]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_campaign_finance_controversy

china

===

Clinton Foundation Receiving Millions of Dollars from Corporations That Want to Build Keystone XL

According to a voluntary disclosure from the Foundation, in 2014 the not-for-profit received between $250,000 and $500,000 from Canada’s Foreign Affairs, Trade, and Development department, which has pressed for approval of the Keystone XL pipeline.

The agency’s own website states that one of its priorities is to “Deepen commercial relations with the United States through support for innovation and foreign investment and promote Canada as a stable and secure source of energy and energy technology, such as the Keystone XL initiative.”

This Canadian agency is not the only donor aligned with big oil.

Numerous fossil fuel giants sent direct payments to the foundation in 2014, including Exxon MobilCorp., which donated up to $5 million, Anadarko Petroleum Corp., BP,ConocoPhillips Co., Chesapeake Energy Corp., Citgo Petroleum Corp. and Occidental Petroleum Corp, the Hill reported.

Big Oil has played a key role in lobbying in favor of the Keystone XL pipeline, including in a letter to U.S. President Barack Obama signed by the CEOs of ExxonMobil and Anadarko.

:{linton Founda:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:tion Receiving Millions of Dollars from Corporations That Want to Build Keystone XL

BC got punked on logging salvage rider mark rey, but risked govt shutdown to save ANWR 41 (shutdown led to furlouhs that allow monica to deliver pizza) 41 Dombeck aslo got aggressive/effective on forests roadless 58mil acres; EPA sued power plants (on track to get rid of 1/4 of all indust pollut) 42 BC up effic stds, rule no govt contract for poluters (or other lawbreakers) , lower arsenic and fact farm runoff 45, lower diesel emissions b2 put 371 rules on hold in 1st 90 min 46 b2 3rd wave of attack RR climsy, Newt 94 failed, but rove and luntz learned: look like you're doing no harm 47 strat ignor?

BC got punked on logging salvage rider mark rey, but risked govt shutdown to save ANWR 41 (shutdown led to furloughs that allow monica to deliver pizza) 41 Dombeck aslo got aggressive/effective on forests roadless 58mil acres; EPA sued power plants (on track to get rid of 1/4 of all indust pollut) 42 BC up effic stds, rule no govt contract for polluters (or other lawbreakers) , lower arsenic and fact farm runoff 45, lower diesel emissions b2 put 371 rules on hold in 1st 90 min 46 b2 3rd wave of attack RR climsy, Newt 94 failed, but rove and luntz learned: look like you're doing no harm 47

OIRA JG ~ Joe Lieb; OIRA could ask agency to repeal laws; rejects 58 RR; 16 BC; 316 B2 2001 (CTT and trade gp input) 64 dioxin no safe level, but ok to spread on crops and parks 64 nrdc found 34-56 mill ppl had arnsenic; BC browner went for 10 ppb (CTT said pvt well shd do something if 5 ppb) but ~ 1oppb at epa; Rvoe and Karen Hughes ~ b/c NMex close election, backed by CEI arsenic "an essential ingredient" and good for us 67 CEI angela logomasini NAS backed Browner and B2 caved, also on other BC rules allowed, based by CEI Jon Adler.

Hunting of the Pres

Bradley and Olin funded brock anita hill bk 100

Hale paid 60K$ by feds 161

Gt Unravel 8 yr 75 mil investigation found no wrongdoing by clintons p 270

Elves: George Conway

Ann Coulter

Jerome Marcus (philly) Fed Soc

Susan Carpenter-McMillan (born circa 1949) was a senior adviser to Paula Jones during the Lewinsky scandal and headed the chairperson for the Paula Jones Legal Defense Fund.^{[^^1]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Carpenter-McMillan#cite_note-0) In 1997 Clinton was willing to settle the lawsuit that Jones brought against him for $700,000. Carpenter-McMillan advised Jones to reject Clinton's offer because the offer did not include an apology.^{[^^2]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Carpenter-McMillan#cite_note-1) Jones followed Carpenter-McMillan's advice, which contradicted the advice she received from her lawyers, Gilbert Davis and Joseph Cammarata. Jones eventually settled the case with Clinton for $850,000 and no apology.^{[^^3]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Carpenter-McMillan#cite_note-2)

In 2000 Carpenter-McCmillan unsuccessfully ran for the California State Assembly against Carol Liu.^{[^^4]^}(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Carpenter-McMillan#cite_note-3)

Big Lies

gop claimed BC tax hike biggest in hist, but actually RR 77 (BC's on top 1.2%)

115 mos economic growth (record), 4%/yr, 22m jobs (record) poverty rate down, paid off 360b in debt

gov spending to gnp at 60's levels and taxes comparable; 80, record home and stock ownership

B2? 1st absolute decline in jobs since Hoover 80. war and recession factors, but deficit came from tax cuts 81-2

discret spending up 50% after gingrich revo/earmarks 83

D'amato aide Chertoff clinton -gate 211 hunt

Lawmakers who had been prepared to give Clinton the benefit of the doubt such as Hatch, Gephardt, and Lieberman found themselves bitterly discouraged at his response. In the Capitol office of House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, however, there was never any question of forgiveness. He did not believe for a second that Clinton was genuinely repenting; the president was only confessing because he had been caught. The DNA had forced his hand. For months, DeLay had been denouncing Clinton as a "sexual predator" and accusing him of providing only "the spin, the whole spin, and nothing but the spin." This then, finally, was the moment DeLay had waited for, the moment when Clinton would stand revealed as the liar he always was. He had lied about Gennifer Flowers, about the draft, about smoking marijuana. He had lied to DeLay and other Republicans during the budget battle that led to the shutdown of the federal government in 1995. And now at last was DeLay's chance to make him pay.

It was the waiting that was killing them now. At 5:44 P.M. that Monday, DeLay's policy director, Tony C. Rudy [not chris rudy?], out in California for the congressional recess, sent an E-mail to press secretary Michael P. Scanlon back in Washington to find out what was happening with Clinton at the grand jury.

"still no word?" he wrote in that casual internal E-mail style in which capitalization, precise spelling, and proper grammar were optional.

"Hes going to admit it," Scanlon wrote back. "the big q is on what level — I still say we need to attack!"

Rudy agreed. "we need to force dems to distance themselves from the liar," he replied. "He looked into americas eyes and lied."

"God bless you Tony Rudy — Are we the only ones with political instincts — This whole thing about not kicking someone when they are down is BS — Not only do you kick him — you kick him until he passes out — then beat him over the head with a baseball bat — then roll him up in an old rug — and throw him off a cliff into the pound surf below!!!!!" �

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/baker-breach.html

Clinton, Conspiracism, and the Continuing Culture War

The Role of the Media

http://www.publiceye.org/conspire/clinton/Clintonculwar8-02.html

Clinton Wars Sidney Blumenthal

http://books.google.com/books?id=RlJKrGSaFMkC&dq=Clinton+Wars+Sidney+Blumenthal&source=gbs_navlinks_s

'89, LA saw BC as threat to B1 p34 devised Horton

Larry Nichols, contras p 36 tried to shake down BC 37 (much later waved gun at militia event and threatened BC)

Jan 92 BC frontrunner so tabloid ? paid big $ to Nichols and Flowers (gave $ to gop)

2/18 4 in bed orgy and black love child in Globe

Sidney Blumenthal ( born November 6, 1948) is a former aide to President Bill Clinton and a widely published American journalist, especially on American politics and foreign policy.

Born in Chicago, he earned a BA in sociology from Brandeis University in 1969 and started his career in Boston as a journalist who wrote for The New Republic. Over a career of twenty years, he became editor of several departments and wrote for several publications including The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. During the '00s, he published several essays critical of the administration of then-President George W. Bush.[1][2][3][4]...

Blumenthal v. Drudge

In 1997, Blumenthal instigated a $30 million libel lawsuit against Internet blogger Matt Drudge (as well as AOL, who had hired Mr. Drudge) stemming from a false claim Drudge had made of spousal abuse attributed to "top GOP sources." Drudge retracted the story later, saying he was given bad information. In Blumenthal v. Drudge, 992 F. Supp. 44 (D.D.C. 1998), the court refused to dismiss Blumenthal's case for lack of personal jurisdiction. Drudge later publicly apologized to the Blumenthals. Blumenthal dropped his lawsuit and eventually reached a settlement involving a small payment to Drudge over having missed a deposition. In his book, The Clinton Wars, Blumenthal claimed he was forced to settle because he could no longer financially afford the suit.[5] [6]

Following the end of the Clinton presidency, Blumenthal subsequently wrote a book titled The Clinton Wars published in 2003. The book includes a small biography of Blumenthal, but focuses on his years with the Clintons and in the White House. Other books by Blumenthal include The Permanent Campaign, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, Pledging Allegiance: The Last Campaign of the Cold War, and How Bush Rules: Chronicles of a Radical Regime.

Uncovering Clinton

A Reporter's Story

By MICHAEL ISIKOFF

Crown Publishers

http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/i/isikoff-clinton.html?_r=4&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

What did that mean? Nobody was satisfied, including Reed Irvine, the dyspeptic chief of Accuracy in Media--a conservative watchdog group. Irvine wanted Jones to tell all.

...I had gotten to know CLIFF Jackson in 1992, when I first started chasing down Clinton scandal stories. There was no question he had an agenda and a deep animus toward the president. They had known each other for more than a quarter century and had actually once been friendly at Oxford University, where Jackson was a Fulbright Scholar while Clinton was a Rhodes. Clinton later had sought Jackson's help in contacting the leader of the Arkansas Republican Party to get a crucial draft deferment. But at some point the two went their separate ways. Over the years, a rivalry turned into a near blood feud--at least on Jackson's side. I recalled having dinner with Jackson along with a colleague, David Marannis, in early 1992 and being struck by how personal it all seemed. Jackson was soft-spoken, shy, socially inept--everything the fast-talking and personable Clinton was not. To Jackson, Clinton was a phony, a man who pretended to be your best friend one minute and forgot you the next, a man who would do anything to get ahead. Jackson, it was clear, burned with resentment toward Clinton.

Hunting pres (video)

The Hunting of the President

By Gene Lyons

http://books.google.com/books?id=DPNYQBwQ7uoC&pg=PA59&lpg=PA59&dq=peter+smith+gopac+rnc&source=bl&ots=i3yBkyjd-b&sig=lgZCFcA-cJK2ZSKI10p126S2IU8&hl=en&ei=oqVKStHmH8fPlAeal6wb&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2

cf video notes

book:

dirty camp not new, but media channels are xiii

p3 atwater uses ark primary to preempt BC pres run

bradly olin funded brock anita bk 100

scaife bio 106- backed goldwater then nixon (wrote 354 checks to avoid gift taxes in 71. Nixon staff tried to get him to buy Wa Post!

fronted for CIA 107-8 Forum World Features, gave credentials to agents also spread propaganda (cf sectret govt website

Hale made proffeer to Fiske, said afraid for life 129

book: http://www.benegesserit.com/THOTP/Porter-THOTP.htm

***

SCAIFE

Money from the Pittsburgh billionaire's foundations also supported three conservative organizations prominently associated without he Jones case. Between 1988 and 1996, nearly a million dollars in Scaife funds had been lavished on the Landmark Legal Foundation, an organization based in Kansas City and Washington which litigated on behalf of right-wing causes. Well over half a million dollars had been doled out to the Independent Women's Forum since 1994, when its leaders engaged Starr to write a brief on Jones' behalf.

Another million or so had subsidized the Federalist Society, established as a national legal fraternity during the Reagan era. It acted as a clearinghouse for clerkships with conservative judges, policy forums, and a right-wing political network. Its roster of members and patrons included many of the most prominent Republican judges, attorneys, and legal scholars, including Kenneth Starr and Judge David Sentelle, the presiding judge of the Special Division that had appointed Starr.) Certain of its members, including Starr, had provided a great deal of high-priced legal advice to Jones for free.

Gil Davis and Joe Cammarata weren't the sort of attorneys attracted to the highly ideological Federalist milieu. But Richard Porter and George Conway were among the group's active members, and they had mobilized its resources during the early days of the Jones lawsuit to lend additional repectability to her claims. At the urging of Conway and Marcus, a group of Federalist-affiliated law professors and constitutional lawyers had signed 'friend of the court" briefs in 1994 supporting her right to proceedings against the president while he was still in office.

Now, as the date for argument on that issue in the Supreme Court approached, the young Federalist attorneys in the Jones camp called upon two of the organization's legal eminences to help prepare Davis and Cammarata. During the first week of January, the brought Davis and Cammarata to the Army-Navy Club for a coaching session with Robert Bork, who had addressed the founding conference of the Federalist Society at Yale in 1982, and Ted Olson, the chairman of its powerful Washington chapter. [Olson was also David Hale's attorney.]

pp. 298-300

The worst mistake Davis and Cammarata made was to confide all those sensitive details to their behind-the-scene advisers, a little group of committed conservatives led by Philadelphia lawyer Jerome Marcus. (It was Marcus' name that appeared most often on the time sheets kept by the Jones lawyers, although they frequently spoke and communicated with George Conway in New York, and less often with Richard Porter in Chicago.) Both men valued the assistance donated pro bono by the group, though they had believed from the beginning that Conway, Marcus, and Porter all were motivated more by hatred of Bill Clinton than by any desire to rescue Paula Jones. Yet Davis and Cammarata, although Republicans themselves, wouldn't countenance the misuse of their lawsuit to advance a partisan agenda. They took their duties as officers of the court seriously and consistently placed their client's interest ahead of politics.

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CBUQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slate.com%2Fid%2F1832&ei=d4s4TKHnGISosQOJwoBS&usg=AFQjCNH9DZeqIvTUW8RRn6t4F4o-BQ7MyQ

Susan C McMillan, anti abort who had 2

http://www.slate.com/id/1832

Susan Carpenter-McMillanThe woman who ate Paula Jones.

By David PlotzPosted Sunday, Sept. 21, 1997, at 3:30 AM ET

Geo T Conway III

And Jonathan Broder writing in SALON writes:

"Last week Liesl Noll, a spokeswoman for the New York law firm of Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, confirmed to Salon that a process server had tried to deliver a subpoena to one of its lawyers, George Conway III, but was unsuccessful because Conway was away. Conway's secretary told Salon that he was on vacation and unreachable. Conway did not return several messages left by Salon on his voice mail, and his whereabouts remain a mystery.

Noll confirmed that Conway, a 34-year-old conservative activist, had recently informed the firm's stunned partners that he had worked for free and without their knowledge on the Jones case, writing the crucial Supreme Court brief that successfully argued Jones' suit should proceed despite the fact that Clinton was still in office.

... For example, the White House strongly suspects that Conway delivered portions of Linda Tripp's tapes to Newsweek and put Tripp in touch with her current lawyer, James Moody, another conservative activist."

We also suspect that Starr, and Jones' lawyers - perhaps in concert with Conway - may have schemed together to jump Lewinsky at a suburban shopping mall hotel on the 16th of January in order to scare the bejeezus out of her and admit she did have an affair with the President and that he counseled her to lie under oath.

We wonder if Conway has accepted Bennett's subpoena as yet. At least he was in his office today.

But by far the most damaging story on George Conway was by Joe Conason of the newly chic New York Observer. Conason is a terrific reporter and has a way with words. He reports that Conway is a secret adviser to Paula Jones and evaded the Bennett subpoena by suddenly "disappearing" on the 26th of January.

http://www.americanpolitics.com/021198ConwayIII.html

A Vast Conspiracy

Jeffrey Toobin

http://books.google.com/books?id=EUqdRPykHd0C&pg=PA402&lpg=PA402&dq=Toobin,+Jeffrey+%281999%29,+A+Vast+Conspiracy:+The+Real+Story+of+the+Sex+Scandal+That+Nearly+Brought+Down+a+President,&source=bl&ots=Gp9PmR-x8U&sig=QRxZ-gE9YwKxYmYpa88CPm5XxyE&hl=en&ei=Za04TKHNApDCsAODkOxR&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CCMQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q&f=false

has cast of characters, chrono

Even before the Arkansas Project had gotten underway, Scaife personally hired a former New York Post reporter named Christopher Ruddy to write about Foster's death for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, the daily newspaper Scaife has owned since 1969. Ruddy's stories about Foster's death – most of them challenging the suicide theory, without offering an alternative explanation – began to appear in January 1995.

Scaife has funded other Clinton efforts as well: Two zealous and resourceful (and rival) public interest law firms that have pursued Clinton and his administration relentlessly, the Landmark Legal Foundation and Judicial Watch, have received more than $4 million from Scaife. Judicial Watch, which is aggressively suing several branches of the government and has questioned numerous White House officials under oath, has received $1.35 million from Scaife sources in the last two years, a large fraction of its budget.

The Fund for Living American Government (FLAG), a one-man philanthropy run by William Lehrfeld, a Washington tax lawyer who has represented Scaife in the past, gave $59,000 to Paula Jones's sexual harassment suit against Clinton. FLAG has received at least $160,000 in Scaife donations. And lawyers who belong to the conservative Federalist Society, which has enjoyed Scaife support for 15 years (at least $1.5 million), were members of a secretive group who provided important legal advice to Paula Jones and who may have pulled off the key legal maneuver in the Clinton case by connecting the Jones suit and the Starr investigation.

Officers of the Scaife-supported Independent Women's Forum have appeared on many television programs as Clinton critics. William J. Bennett, author of "Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American Ideals," is on the board of the Sarah Scaife Foundation, and has received Scaife support as a fellow of the Heritage Foundation and other enterprises.

One of the most publicized allegations of a tie between Scaife and Clinton's enemies was the suggestion that Scaife was trying to set up independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr in a posh deanship at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif. Starr briefly toyed with accepting the job early in 1997.

Scaife has been a generous supporter of Pepperdine, donating more than $13 million since 1962 (in personal gifts as well as foundation grants), according to the school. But Scaife and the current president of Pepperdine, David Davenport, both have said that Scaife played no role whatsoever in the offer to Starr. Scaife and Starr have said they don't know each other, and have never met.

By Robert G. Kaiser and Ira Chinoy

Washington Post Staff Writers

Sunday, May 2, 1999; Page A1

hmmn

Larouche:

"Get Clinton!"

As should be clear to the reader by now, Dickie Scaife's current financing and coordination of the news-media attack on President Clinton, is exactly of the same form as what Scaife has been deployed to do since the early 1970s, when he was assigned to take over Forum World Features/Kern House by the Anglophile bankers' intelligence network. Forum World Feature's specific purpose was to finance and circulate selected features and articles for the news media internationally. The ``Public Diplomacy'' operation in the 1980s which Scaife financed did exactly the same thing as FWF, including orchestrating news media attacks on targetted adversaries.

The Columbia Journalism Review put it slightly more politely in a 1981 profile of Scaife: It said that he ``has made the formation of public opinion both his business and his avocation.... Scaife could claim to have done more than any other individual in the past five or six years to influence the way in which Americans think about their country and the world.''

Today, almost on a weekly basis, one can pick up a newspaper and find full-page ads on the Vincent Foster death, reprinting articles written by Christopher Ruddy for Scaife's Greensburg (now ``Pittsburgh'') Tribune-Review. The ads are paid for by Scaife, with funds laundered through the Western Journalism Center (WJC). WJC also occasionally reprints articles by the British Intelligence stringer and London Sunday Telegraph Washington correspondent Ambrose Evans-Pritchard--who also writes directly for the Tribune Review.

Other ads promoting theories about the alleged coverup of the Vincent Foster death can also be found, produced by Accuracy in Media (AIM), another group bankrolled by Scaife since the 1970s, and long known for its defense of the CIA against any attacks, not to mention its protection of George Bush's drug-running Contras in the 1980s. Currently, Scaife's foundations are AIM's largest contributors, having given them $630,000 from 1989-93.

The WJC and AIM also produce features on the Foster case for newspapers and television programs. AIM's Reed Irvine has a weekly broadcast on National Empowerment Television (NET), a cable channel founded by Paul Weyrich's Free Congress Foundation, to which Scaife gives about $1 million a year.

At the end of 1993, the Whitewater scandals against President Clinton, which had been dormant since the 1992 primaries, were revved up again with the publication of the Troopergate'' story in the British-linked American Spectator. Already in the 1970s, Scaife had given over $1 million to the American Spectator's publishers, and this has continued to the present day; between 1989 and 1993, Scaife gave $1.3 million to the American Spectator Educational Fund for research'' and other purposes.

Another top purveyor of Vincent Foster conspiracy theories is Strategic Investment newsletter, run by former Times of London editor Lord William Rees-Mogg, and James Dale Davidson, chairman of the National Taxpayers Union, also Scaife-funded. Davidson has produced a video jointly with the Western Journalism Center called ``Unanswered: The Death of Vincent Foster.''

What does Scaife himself say about all this? Very little publicly, but, in a rare interview he gave to the New York Times in 1995, he proclaimed, ``The death of Vincent Foster: I think it's the Rosetta Stone to the whole Clinton administration,'' adding that Foster's death had the potential to become the political story of the century.

The other major means by which Scaife finances attacks on the President--apart from his funding of House Speaker Newt Gingrich's GOPAC and right-wing think-tanks such as the Heritage Foundation--is through the cluster of right-wing legal foundations and litigation centers. Prominent among these (see Documentation, p.|67 in our previous issue's installment) is the Landmark Legal Foundation, which has offered advice and assistance to Paula Jones in her sexual-harassment claim against Clinton, and which has ensconced itself in other Whitewater-related matters.

Another, similar Scaife-financed organization is the Washington Legal Foundation, previously known as the Capital Legal Foundation. On its Legal Policy Advisory Board are Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr, John Norton Moore of the University of Virginia Law School, and Massachusetts governor and former LaRouche prosecutor William Weld. On its National Board of Advisers are Senators Fred Thompson (Tenn.) and Orrin Hatch (Utah)--both involved in Senate investigations of the Clintons--and Jesse Helms, who played a role in the dumping of the first Whitewater independent counsel and his replacement with Kenneth Starr.

The work of Scaife's network of conservative legal foundations is overseen by the Washington-based National Legal Center for the Public Interest (NLCPI), which he, of course, also funds. One of the directors of NLCPI is David Davenport, president of Pepperdine University; Scaife is on Pepperdine's board of trustees. Davenport and Scaife also sit together on the advisory board of the Hoover Institution for War, Revolution and Peace in Palo Alto, California.

It is David Davenport who has offered Bush-leaguer Kenneth Starr a cushy position at Pepperdine University, financed in large part by Scaife, when Starr wraps up his investigation and legal assault on President Clinton as the Whitewater independent counsel. Starr may be ``independent'' of the administration, but he is certainly not independent of Dickie Scaife.

Hunting Pres JC says help front CIA prop p 108

hated BC

Olson met w/ troopergate guys. indicted? p 109

scaife funded IWF hunt 261

Starr's law firm contacted the Independent Womens Forum to see if they would sign on a proposed legal brief opposing President Clinton's claim of immunity in Paula Jones' sexual harassment lawsuit.145 Those discussions should have been disclosed. The Scaife-funded IWF grew out of the informal "Women for Clarence Thomas" in 1991.146 IWF was founded by by Barabra Olson, wife of Theodore Olson, the former Starr law partner, and a funder of the Federalist Society.

bill clinton bak

Overview

Fiscal policy

Tax reform

Early life and career

College and law school years

Georgetown University

Oxford

Vietnam War opposition and draft controversy

Law school

Early political career

Governor of Arkansas (1979–1981, 1983–1992)

1988 Democratic presidential primaries

Presidency (1993–2001)

1992 presidential campaign

First term (1993–1997)

1996 presidential election

Second term (1997–2001)

Impeachment and acquittal

Pardons and commutations

Military and foreign events

Contents

Background

Clinton, Conspiracism, and the Continuing Culture War