CNN's Ticker

CNN is putting out the idea that Hillary Clinton might put her husband, Bill, on the Supreme Court.

What an interesting news flash to come out on the day of the Iowa Caucuses! Was this something that leaked from the Clinton campaign? Was it something Hillary said? Has Bill dropped some hints to CNN?

Uh, no. It's a "prediction" by conservative law professor Doug Kmiec, who worked for Reagan and Bush 41 in the OLC. You remember Kmiec... He penned a lackluster defense of the Bush administration after James Comey testified about the shenanigans in John Ashcroft's hospital room. During the Clinton years, of course, Kmiec was the champion of the "rule of law" and intense critic of executive abuse of power.

In short, Kmiec has no insight of value on Hillary's intentions. Certainly not enough for CNN to front page his "prediction." Absolutely not enough value to make this a top news item on Caucus Day.

I guess they didn't have enough stupid predictions to fill the airwaves and internets.

UPDATE: This didn't even register in my brain when I read it:

Kmiec worked in the Reagan and Bush 41 White Houses as a top lawyer, but said he has no personal or political "disdain" for Bill Clinton.

Disdain? What a joke. Trash reporting. Maybe they should have indicated in the article somewhere that the dean of Pepperdine Law School -- that is Kmiec's boss -- is Ken Starr. Actually, they shouldn't have printed this crap at all.

Shameful reporting.

UPDATE II: It's 6:50 pm ET and Wolf Blitzer just pushed this story, too -- without even mentioning Kmiec by name.

Gore on the Internet

Last year, DB had the pleasure of going to hear a speech delivered by former president Bill Clinton. While I gave the speech high marks overall, I was very disappointed with one aspect:

He spent most of his time discussing the Internet in terms of its other benefit: the ability to raise money. He mentioned the huge amounts raised on the Net by both Republicans and Democrats in 2004. He talked about the money raised for both the tsunami relief and Katrina.

All true, but Clinton came up terribly short here, and in the same manner as all the D.C. Democrats. Essentially, his only examples of Americans using the Internet to have a positive impact on the world involved a citizen typing in a credit card number or handing over $50.

No mention of the effect of the netroots. No mention of the unique opportunity for the public to use the Net to hold the government accountable. No mention of the Net as an incubator for thoughts and movements.

While I was away this past week, I read Al Gore's Assault on Reason. It is an outstanding book. Anybody who reads blogs regularly will already be aware of much of the book's examples from recent history. But Gore puts our recent decline in collective thought as a nation into a much-needed context.

One of the things that stood out to me was this refreshing conclusion:

In fact, the Internet is perhaps the greatest source of hope for reestablishing an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. The ideas that individuals contribute are dealt with, in the main, according to the rules of a meritocracy of ideas. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge.

An important distinction to make is that the Internet is not just another platform for disseminating the truth. It's a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It's a platform, in other words, for reason.

Al Gore gets it. He always has.

Lying Duck

What a lying little mallard Chris Wallace is. This is how Wallace describes his interview with Bill Clinton:

We started off fine, talking about the initiatives and his efforts and then I said, because I've gotten a lot of emails, "People want to know why didn't you do more to bring bin Laden to justice? Why didn't you, in your eight years in office, go after al-Qaeda?" And I gotta say, Brian... and you figure he would have been prepared to deal with that... he went off. He just... he wanted to go back to Somalia in '93 and the USS Cole.

He just wanted to go back, eh? Let's look at the actual question Wallace asked:

When we announced that you were going to be on FOX News Sunday, I got a lot of email from viewers, and I got to say I was surprised most of them wanted me to ask you this question. Why didn't you do more to put bin Laden and al-Qaeda out of business when you were President. There's a new book out which I suspect you've read called "The Looming Tower." And it talks about how the fact that when you pulled troops out of Somalia in 1993, bin Laden said 'I have seen the frailty and the weakness and the cowardice of US troops.' Then there was the bombing of the embassies in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole.

Wallace asked him specifically about those events and is acting surprised about the fact that Clinton answered him. As if only an unprepared lunatic would discuss the events Wallace asked about. He actually brought the Cole up a second time halfway through the interview. Perhaps it did surprise him to learn that if you actually ask somebody about the Cole, you might get an answer. Or it might surprise him to learn that there are people who aren't paid shills and when you ask them about something, they won't talk about something entirely different. Some people don't need to dissemble, Chris.

Wallace also tries to frame the interview as though Clinton has some sort of paranoia:

He says this is all basically an effort by right-wing critics to diminish his administration and that George W. Bush isn't held to the same account. That he did a heck of a lot better job in the two-to-three months after the Cole than George Bush did in the eight months that he had after the Cole as president before 9/11 happened.

What does Wallace mean by "He says this is all?" What is "this?" It sounds like Clinton is freaking about a conspiracy when he was talking specifically about the "context" of the questions coming out of Wallace's smirky little grill. Here's the first thing out of Clinton's mouth on the subject:

OK, let's talk about it. I will answer all of those things on the merits, but I want to talk about the context of which this... arises. I'm being asked this on the FOX network... ABC just had a right-wing conservative on "The Path to 9/11" falsely claim that it was falsely based on the 9/11 Commission Report with three things asserted against me that are directly contradicted by the 9/11 Commission Report. I think it's very interesting that all the conservative Republicans who now say that I didn't do enough, claimed that I was obsessed with bin Laden.

As if Clinton weren't justified in wondering why out of his entire media tour only FOX was asking him why he failed to capture bin Laden? The same FOX network that falsely reported that the ratings for "The Path to 9/11" were excellent.

Finally, Wallace tosses out this line of crap:

And the interesting thing is that I was mindful of the 15 minutes and the 50-50 rule and I kept on trying to bring him back. He wanted to get into it and we ended up doing 22 minutes.

I guess that's why he said this towards the end of the interview:

I know we're over but can I ask you two political questions. Let's talk some politics.

He certainly was mindful of it all. But he's lying when he says that it was Clinton who was taking the interview off the topic of the Clinton Global Initiative. He's just flat-out lying.

These jokers at FOX News cannot even report the truth about a completely-recorded situation they themselves were in only a day before. It's hard to understand why any Democrat -- except maybe Joe Lieberman -- would ever agree to spend half a second talking to the stooges at FOX.

An evening with Bubba

DB was given a ticket to see Bill Clinton speak in Los Angeles on Thursday, so this blogger made the journey to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. On a side note, an opera will be debuting there next month, "Grendel," based on the 1971 John Gardener novel. Don't know much about the opera, but there's a great chance you'll do worse if you purchase just about any other novel the next time you visit a book store.

Clinton covered a number of topics and delivered an excellent, well-conceived, vintage Clinton speech. He did not use the opportunity to criticize President Bush, although he did articulate some policy differences. On the other hand, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa pulled no punches in his introduction.

Villaraigosa said (paraphrasing here) he could remember a time when we sent our troops to battle for the reasons we gave them. He could remember a time when we had a president who was known far and wide for his intellectual curiousity and belief in science. He could remember a time when we left surplusses for our children and the future was not clouded with fear. He ended his introduction by saying that those times will come again (and maybe Bill Clinton will return to the White House in a more historic role).

Clinton began by remarking how high Villaraigosa's approval ratings are in Los Angeles and delivered his best line of the night.

"Eighty percent? I could've taken a boat to the middle of the Potomac and walked back to shore and my approval ratings wouldn't have been that high. The Republicans would be all over the radio. I can just hear Rush Limbaugh now... 'Bill Clinton can't swim.' "

Then he began to discuss his views on global interdependence and some of the world's big concerns. DB would just like to touch on a couple things the former president said, mostly because this blogger was disappointed with what could have been a home run, but turned out to be a bloop single.

Clinton said that there were two phenomena which have significantly impacted the world today: Non-governmental organizations (NGO's) and the Internet.

In discussing the Internet, Clinton described two ways in which its impact is significant: It can bring people together as a force for good, and it provides a mechanism for raising money from people of all means.

The only example Clinton gave of a non-financial contribution by users of the Internet, was SARS in China. He said that China was in denial over the disease and would have continued along that path had young Internet users there not flooded government websites with demands for action.

No examples of the internet influencing policy or ideas in America. Just China. The country where search results are filtered so nobody stumbles upon the word "democracy." Where the Rolling Stones are preparing to play a concert this week, but aren't allowed to play "Beast of Burden."

He spent most of his time discussing the Internet in terms of its other benefit: the ability to raise money. He mentioned the huge amounts raised on the Net by both Republicans and Democrats in 2004. He talked about the money raised for both the tsunami relief and Katrina.

All true, but Clinton came up terribly short here, and in the same manner as all the D.C. Democrats. Essentially, his only examples of Americans using the Internet to have a positive impact on the world involved a citizen typing in a credit card number or handing over $50.

No mention of the effect of the netroots. No mention of the unique opportunity for the public to use the Net to hold the government accountable. No mention of the Net as an incubator for thoughts and movements.

As DB types this, Fox News is passing off Pat Roberts' comments about Joe Wilson in the SCSI Report as the "findings" of the Senate and claiming that the NIE demonstrates absolute unity in the claims about WMD in Iraq.

But Clinton made no mention of the collective efforts of Net users to counter the dreadful effects of the consolidation of all American media into the hands of a small group of corporations. In fact, he even mentioned how much donations from the Net help candidates offset the high cost of television time. The last thing this blogger wanted to hear from Clinton was that the Internet is a great way to funnel money from hard-working Americans to the pockets of Rupert Murdoch.

The Democratic establishment just does not get it. They apparently have no ability to look to the future and anticipate where politics and technology are heading together. They are barely aware of where that junction exists today. It's not unlike the record industry, which was convinced just a decade ago that the cost of producing and selling CDs would remain so inexpensive compared to electronic delivery that there was no need to create business models for online purchasing. In two or three more election cycles, these politicians will be analogous to the record industry executives who have wasted billions in fruitless attempts to protect their audio data after technology already left them -- and continues to leave them -- in the dust.

Clinton echoed what we've heard from many of the party leaders... The Internet is a giant ATM. Only a new crop of smart candidates will prevent the Democrats from squandering the opportunity the Internet has provided them and it has been a long time since this party had enough political advantages to throw some away from neglect.

There were some great moments in his speech. He talked about global warming and pointed to England as a prime example that reducing emissions has a positive effect on the economy, contrary to what we are told by the Bush administration. He talked about bravery in Colombia. He talked about Darfur and using the U.N. and Nato to stop the violence.

In the end, most in attendance left looking inspired and gratified. But after hearing Clinton say that the Internet was one of the two great "miracles" of the 21st Century before praising it only for its fundraising capacity, DB left thinking mostly about sushi in Little Tokyo.