..
CLINTON RIPS GOP RECORD ON RACE WASHINGTON (Dec. 19) - Former President Clinton says Republicans are hypocritical for berating Senate Republican leader Trent Lott about his insensitive comments on race. ``How can they jump on him when they're out there repressing, trying to run black voters away from the polls and running under the Confederate flag in Georgia and South Carolina?'' Clinton said Wednesday in New York. ``I mean, look at their whole record. He just embarrassed them by saying in Washington what they do on the backroads every day.'' Lott has been trying to atone for publicly wishing that former segregationist Sen. Strom Thurmond had been elected president in 1948. Lott said his home state of Mississippi voted for Thurmond ``and if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years either.'' Lott has apologized, but many conservatives have called for him to give up his leadership post. President Bush's aides have said Lott doesn't have to resign, but the White House is not making the case for keeping him in place either. ``I think that the way the Republicans have treated Senator Lott is pretty hypocritical, since right now their policy is, in my view, inimical to everything this country stands for,'' Clinton said while attending an event for the European Travel Commission. ``They've tried to suppress black voting, they've ran on the Confederate flag in Georgia and South Carolina. And from top to bottom, the Republicans supported it. So I don't see what they're jumping on Trent Lott about.'' Republican National Committee Chairman Marc Racicot called Clinton's comments ``misleading'' and ``divisive rhetoric.'' ``This is another tired example of Bill Clinton misrepresenting the facts and misleading the American people to gain political advantage,'' Racicot said.
12/18/02 20:42 EST
Copyright 2002 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. All active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL. |
|
|
|
Meet the Smart New York Women Who Can't Stand Hillary Clinton, The New York Observer, JANUARY 17, 2000
hillary clinton, someone she regards with utter contempt, reveals the insidious process by which classes of voters become auto-disenfranchised.
|
|
"I did not have any involvement in the pardons that were granted or not granted," insisted Sen. KnowNothing, seeming to forget her presence at the New-Square/Oval-Office schmooze that secured pardons for the four Hasidic felons who set up a phony school in Brooklyn to swindle the government out of millions intended for the poor. |
|
the Gestalt--the synthesis of the evidence -- the absurd reason for the president's Thanksgiving-Day Camp David-DC-Camp David trip; the Ron-Brown-posthumous, Ron-Brown-related, Thanksgiving-Day corpse; the Sonya Stewart deposition informing us that evidence of illegal Commerce activity had "left the building;" and "a huge box" hauled back to Camp David by said corrupt president under subpoena. Mia T, Helen Thomas Syndrome: THE SYMPTOMS
|
"Ron Brown killed by someone in clinton administration, perhaps clinton, himself."
...I'd like to focus the rest of the broadcast on the pioneering work which you have done with respect to Ron Brown, the Commerce Department, and his role in all of these scandals. Let me get right to the heart of the matter. There are many people in America who believe that Ron Brown's death was all too convenient for Bill Clinton, that, had he lived, the testimony he would have been required to give, the focus of investigation on his activities would have brought down Bill Clinton. Many people think that the plane crash in which he perished was not an accident. What do you think? LARRY KLAYMAN: Well, I think it wasn't an accident either, but, what is unfortunate is that you need an investigative agency like the Justice Department and the FBI to really look into it and find out what happened. We knew that Ron Brown was a scandal waiting to happen. That's why, back in 1995 I brought a lawsuit in January on behalf of Judicial Watch because it seemed to me that, if you are going to look at the Clinton administration, the Commerce Department where Brown was Secretary, was the first place to look. You had the all time leading Democrat fund-raiser. You had someone who had been accused of accepting the $600,000 bribe from the government of Vietnam to push trade relations &emdash; and that mysteriously ended just a day before we opened up trade relations (there was this grand jury in Miami). Someone who had represented, in his private practice, Baby Doc Duvalier, one of the worst dictators in American history (America being the whole region), who persecuted Brown's own people in effect &emdash; somebody who was just completely amoral. Brown was the kind of person who got himself involved in business deals profiting off of government service, or public service. So that's why we focused on him. We were making headway, we brought a lawsuit. The judge, in fact, had allowed us to take discovery, we had noticed his deposition, and, ironically, he asked for a postponement because he had to go to Bosnia during that trip, no one was more disappointed (obviously I didn't want to see him die, from a humanitarian standpoint). We wanted to get the information out of him. He had a tremendous knowledge of what went on in that Clinton administration. Now, moving forward, of course, months later, we came upon John Huang and that was the spark that rekindled this whole scandal. But since then, we've met with someone that he was in business with, and this was his latest Independent Counsel grand jury investigation at the time that he died. That person's name: Nolanda Hill. She opened a company called First International. It was alleged that he received $500,000 of defaulted government loan money from that company under the table which he never reported on his disclosure forms when he became Secretary of Commerce, and perhaps not on his income tax returns. Nolanda Hill is in a position to know what happened with Ron Brown, and we were fortunate enough to convince her to meet with us. She told me and she told our investigator, Andy Thibault, that she believes Ron Brown was killed &emdash; which is an incredible statement. HOWARD PHILLIPS: Killed intentionally, not by accident. LARRY KLAYMAN: Killed intentionally, by the Clinton administration. I asked her "how did you come to that conclusion?" She said that two weeks before that plane went down, Ron Brown had gone to the White House and met with the President. Typically, he was walking around in bare feet; he sat down on his couch, put his feet up on the stool, and Brown said to him, that he was going to have to plea to some type of plea bargain to end that Independent Counsel investigation that concerned First International; that it was closing in on him, it was closing in on his son, Michael, who was alleged to have taken a bribe on his behalf from these lums? [hoodlums?] who ultimately have gotten into trouble. And the reaction of Clinton was, with his hands crossed: that's nice, no comment, kind of like an organized Nolan figure, she took it. And when the plane went down two weeks later, she received a call from the Secretary of the Army that said they were looking for the bodies in the water &emdash; and, of course, we know the official alibi is that the plane hit a mountain. And, from that, she kind of comes to the conclusion that there is something obviously very suspicious here. She says that Brown always had a difficult relationship with the White House; it was a marriage of convenience, and she thinks he was killed. And that is, perhaps, her motivation in coming forward and now talking to the authorities (she's talked not just to us, but to the Thompson committee, perhaps to Dan Burton's committee), she's trying to arrange for some type of immunity to testify. We hope and pray for her health, because she is in a position that she could tell the entire story. And, although she admits to wrongdoing, she says she now wants to set the record straight. So here is somebody, the closest person to Ron Brown (perhaps even closer than his wife) who believes that he was killed by someone in the Clinton administration, perhaps the President himself. HOWARD PHILLIPS: And, of course, there were other people traveling with him who went down in the process of Mr. Brown's death in that plane crash. LARRY KLAYMAN: Well, you know, ruthless people will do ruthless things. Some of those people actually had knowledge about Ron Brown's doings. For instance, this person, Chuck Meissner, who we heard about during the Thompson committee hearings, and who we've received a lot testimony about &emdash; Meissner was John Huang's boss. Meissner was the guy who, according to Jeffrey Garten [Undersecretary of Commerce for international trade during Clinton's first term], didn't heed instructions in keeping Huang just in certain areas. This is somebody who, conveniently, also went down in that plane crash, who might have a lot to say today. HOWARD PHILLIPS: So it was like shooting fish in a barrel for those who found Mr. Brown's continued existence un... LARRY KLAYMAN: That's a good way of putting it, Howard. You know, after Ron Brown died there was also someone else who turned up dead at the Commerce Department &emdash; a Miss Wise &emdash; this was somebody who worked in the same division as John Huang who perhaps knew that documents were being destroyed. We had taken the deposition &emdash; that is when we get oral testimony as lawyers &emdash; of John Huang's secretary, and she was forced to admit at our deposition that Huang handed her cables from overseas (who knows where from &emdash; perhaps even Communist China) and told her to shred them on a daily basis.
|
THE CLINTON LEGACY OF LYNCHING BUMP! |
It's not easy to play fair against Mr. and Mrs. Clinton, who, in the words of the authors, "operated like a crime family, expecting friends and aides to protect them even against their own best interests." What's amazing, of course, is that's exactly what Clinton friends and aides have always done, from Susan McDougal to Webster Hubbell to flocks of nameless White House special assistants. Even Jim McDougal died just in time to deprive the independent counsel of a key witness against Mrs. Clinton, thus derailing what the authors report to have been her likely indictment for perjury and obstruction related to the Whitewater investigation.... Reading the tumultuous events of the Lewinsky probe in a comprehensive narrative is unlike attempting to make sense of it in daily doses. Something different comes through the heavy accumulation of detail of, for example, the duplicity of the Justice Department, or the sharklike behavior of the White House. One begins to get a choking sense of the atmosphere of corruption and ruthlessness the Clintons inhabit -- and, worse, have forced the rest of us to inhabit. Taken in one piece, the habitual, even casual abuse of power on display begins to resemble conditions one normally associates with a state of totalitarianism, where such concepts as truth and justice are only paid lip service. In the end, then, it makes you wonder when there will be fresh air again. |
|
|
If you want on (or off) of my black conservative ping list, please let me know via FREEPmail. (And no, you don't have to be black to be on the list!)
Extra warning: this is a high-volume ping list.
The Democrats' Race to the Bottom
The Weekly Standard | 12/30/2002 | Stephen F. Hayes
DEMOCRATS GOT SMART about the Trent Lott controversy too late. A few days before Lott stepped down as majority leader, prominent Democratic politicians and pundits--Rep. John Lewis, Jesse Jackson, James Carville, Lanny Davis--began saying that Lott should remain. They all spoke of forgiveness and redemption and deplored the harsh world of Washington politics.
Even the most casual observer could see that Democrats wanted Lott to keep his official job, as Senate GOP leader, and his unofficial one, as the face of Republican racism. Even as top Democratic partisans were making nice with Lott, former President Bill Clinton was reinforcing the notion that Lott's offensive words were a gaffe that had exposed a Republican agenda "inimical to everything this country stands for."
"How do they think they got a majority in the South anyway?" Clinton asked on CNN. "I think what they are really upset about is that [Lott] made public their strategy." Clinton added: "He just embarrassed them by saying in Washington what they do on the back roads every day."
There you have it--a simple, two-tiered strategy: Keep Trent Lott in power, then portray the Republicans as the party of Trent Lott, neosegregationist. Into the bargain, Democrats would push Lott to abandon the colorblind policies favored by Republicans in Congress, by Republican voters, and by an overwhelming majority of Americans, according to most polls.
Indeed, on that score, Democrats succeeded with respect to Lott himself. Lott told Black Entertainment Television's Ed Gordon that he supports affirmative action "absolutely." What's more, he said, his efforts from now on would be "about actions more than words. As majority leader I can move an agenda that would have things that would be helpful to African Americans and minorities of all kinds and all Americans."
Plainly, Lott, had he retained his leadership job, would have taken his party along on a Repent with Trent tour, trying desperately--a statute here, a preference there--to win the approval of black political leaders. Naturally, any such attempt to fawn his way to favor would have failed. Lott was too valuable to the Democrats. You can hear them now: How can you, Candidate X, oppose affirmative action? Even Trent Lott, who wanted the segregationists to win in 1948, is for affirmative action.
No, the Democrats wanted Lott right where he was--in leadership. They wanted him because they need black voters and high turnouts, or their fragile interest-group coalition falls apart. For them, Republicans reasonable on race and attractive to blacks are a mortal danger.
Think back to the presidential election in 2000. George W. Bush ran as a new, inclusive, "compassionate conservative." He swore he would ban racial profiling. He denounced "the soft bigotry of low expectations." He backed some school choice proposals, strongly favored by most blacks with school-aged children. He was loath to mention racial preferences or affirmative action. His nominating convention was a multicultural wonderland.
Despite all of this, an outsider watching the final days of the Democrats' 2000 campaign could have concluded that George W. Bush was Jefferson Davis and that segregation, lynching, and voting rights were major issues.
At an appearance at a black church in Pittsburgh as part of a last-minute attempt to get black voters to the polls, Al Gore accused Bush of speaking in code on the campaign trail. "When my opponent, Governor Bush, says that he will appoint strict constructionists to the Supreme Court," Gore said, "I often think of the strictly constructionist meaning that was applied when the Constitution was written, how some people were considered three-fifths of a human being."
Later that weekend, Gore joined Louvan Harris, sister of the murdered James Byrd Jr., on stage in Philadelphia. He listened to her describe her brother's horrible killing by Texas racists. "They spray-painted him black, chained him to a truck, dragged him three miles. His head came off, his arms--dismembered his whole body," Harris said. Gore stood by silently as Harris continued, "We have a governor of Texas who doesn't think that's a hate crime. My question to him is, if that isn't hate, what is hate to George Bush? He had an opportunity to do something for our family. He did nothing."
The NAACP memorably turned that repulsive crime into an anti-Bush campaign ad, featuring grainy, black-and-white footage of a pickup truck, chains dragging from the back. Jesse Jackson was asked on CNN, "Is the NAACP going too far in suggesting that Governor Bush is someone who could support the murder of James Byrd?" He gave a direct answer: "No."
Get that? George W. Bush could support the murder of James Byrd.
"The threat is real," Jackson said of Bush that same weekend. "Clarence Thomas, backed by Strom Thurmond, Jesse Helms, Orrin Hatch--they'll take us back to 1896 [when the Supreme Court upheld segregation]. We'll go back on organized labor. We'll go back on affirmative action. We'll go back on self-determination."
It's worth noting here that Jackson's disgusting remarks--Clarence Thomas would like to return to an America where segregation is legal?--elicited none of the media response that greeted Trent Lott's comments. Three reasons: One, Jackson isn't the Senate majority leader. Two, Jackson has a long history of outrageous pronouncements. Three, there is a media double standard on race. In Lott's case, most journalists showed up late to the controversy and then piled on. With Jackson, there was no outrage at all. Reporter Greg Bolt of the Eugene, Oregon, Register-Guard even gave Jackson's comments a sycophantic introduction: "The man known sometimes as the great unifier and the conscience of the nation hammered home the need to vote."
The Clinton administration, never content to leave politics to the political realm, sent Attorney General Janet Reno in front of the cameras to warn against voter intimidation. Five days before the election, Reno warned that federal law contains "special protections for the rights of minority voters and guarantees that they can vote free from acts that intimidate or harass them." She continued: "For example, actions of persons designed to interrupt or intimidate voters at polling places located in minority areas by questioning or challenging them, or by photographing or videotaping them, under the pretext that these are actions to uncover illegal voting may violate federal voting rights law and will not be tolerated."
Reno was essentially updating the words her boss had spoken in 1998, days before a record minority turnout helped Democrats pick up congressional seats against historical precedent. Clinton, speaking specifically to Republicans, had urged them to "stand up and put a stop" to their alleged intimidation of minorities. "For the last several elections there have been examples in various states of Republicans either actually or threatening to try to intimidate or try to invalidate the votes of African Americans in precincts that are overwhelmingly African-American--mostly places where they think it might change the outcome of the election." Despite several attempts by Republicans and at least one reporter to substantiate these charges, the Clinton administration could provide no evidence.
The attacks throughout the 2000 election cycle came despite the virtual absence of race as a policy issue. Shortly before the election, a think tank that focuses on race, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, polled black voters. Only 2percent polled said "race relations/ racism" was the top issue. Even President Clinton, who had spent much of the fall appealing to blacks on behalf of his party, allowed that the election was "not fundamentally about race."
Yet Democrats had a reason for race-baiting: "I think there's no question that the African-American community, no doubt about it, is the base of the Democratic party," Gore campaign chairman Bill Daley said on CNN just before the election. "So we're going to be working very hard to get that base out."
Gore's efforts to get the base excited were tireless. Shortly after Bush selected Dick Cheney as his running mate, a "Democratic strategist" told the New York Times about well-developed plans to go after Cheney for a 1986 vote he cast "against Nelson Mandela." The suggestion was that this was a vote for apartheid. The Democrats' opposition research was effective but dishonest. Cheney had voted against the resolution in question for complicated reasons, most having to do with the Communist leadership of Mandela's African National Congress. Cheney was hardly alone in casting the vote--145 Republicans and 31 Democrats had voted with him. Still, he was forced to explain the vote--one of thousands he'd cast--on numerous occasions during the campaign. Democrats had radio ads in the can. And a media frenzy seemed imminent, especially if Democrats could come up with the right person to make the accusation.
Who better than Bill Clinton? "Now, all the big publicity is about, in the last few days, an amazing vote cast by their vice-presidential nominee when he was in Congress against letting Nelson Mandela out of jail," Clinton said. "That takes your breath away."
But Clinton's effort failed, and the Democratic campaign had to be shelved. This had nothing to do with a sudden emergence of conscience. Rather, it was a product of poor planning. Clinton unveiled his attack on Cheney's vote in speeches at three fundraisers for Democrat Bill Nelson, now the junior senator from Florida. The problem was, Nelson had been in Congress with Cheney, and he had voted the same way. As a spokesman for Nelson explained at the time: "Bottom line is that Nelson strongly supported two components of the measure, and he considers Mandela one of the century's great leaders. He could not support the third, recognizing the ANC, because it was dominated by the Communist party. This vote should be looked at in context."
There were similar efforts to paint Republicans as racists throughout the country. Democrats were behind some of them. Their allies in the NAACP and the civil rights establishment were responsible for others. In a 2000 campaign that even Bill Clinton conceded had little to do with race, race was everywhere.
It would have been again in 2004 had the Democrats had Trent Lott to kick around. They don't, so it won't be as easy for Democrats to play the race card, but Lott's absence won't cause them to stop trying.
|
PRENUP/POST-RAPE SENATE SEAT Hardball's Softball hillary clinton 'Interview' BUSH: "I will not wait on events, while dangers gather."
rodham-clinton reality-check
BUMP! |
In 1989 then-Gov. Bill Clinton was sued as one of three top Arkansas officials responsible for the intimidation of black voters in his state as part of a legal action brought under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, NewsMax.com has learned.
And a year earlier the U.S. Supreme court ruled that Clinton had wrongfully tried to overturn the election of a black state representative in favor of a white Democrat.
In the 1989 case, "the evidence at the trial was indeed overwhelming that the Voting Rights Act had been violated," reported the Arkansas Gazette on Dec. 6, 1989. (The paper later became the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.)
"Plaintiffs offered plenty of proof of monolithic voting along racial lines, intimidation of black voters and candidates, other official acts that made voting harder for blacks," the Gazette said.
A federal three judge federal panel ordered Clinton, then Arkansas Attorney General Steve Clark and then-Secretary of State William J. Mc Cuen to draw new boundaries to give maximum strength to black voters.
"Until last year," the Gazette complained at the time, "in more than a thousand legislative elections, the (Arkansas) delta region sent not one black to the legislature. Last year, the federal district court split a multimember district in Crittenden County that had submerged the large number of black voters in the county."
In a related 1988 case, Clinton had tried to replace duly elected African-American state representative with a white candidate, only to be stopped by the U.S. Supreme Court.
"The court, by an 8-0 vote, ruled against an appeal by Gov. Bill Clinton and other Arkansas officials that had challenged the election of Ben McGee as a state legislator," the Associated Press reported on Dec. 12, 1988. McGee is an African-American.
"The case began when blacks in Crittenden County filed a voting rights lawsuit attacking the county's at-large system for electing two House members. The suit contended that the system deprived black voters of a chance to elect a black to the House.
A special three-judge federal court had agreed earlier in the year that the system violated the federal Voting Rights Act.
The three-judge court threw out the results of a March 8 primary election in which the black candidate McGee, was defeated by James Stockley, the white candidate handpicked by Gov. Clinton for the Democratic nomination.
"That was tantamount to election on Nov. 8, since no Republican ran for the seat," the AP said.
Clinton and the other state officials had argued that the federal court improperly threw out the results of the first primary and ordered a new election.
The Supreme Court ruling came as the then-governor was fighting another court battle to preserve racial profiling in his state, a tool that Clinton later criticized while president as a "morally indefensible, deeply corrosive practice."
But a decade earlier he approved the profiling of Hispanics by Arkansas State Police as part of a drug interdiction program in 1988, the Washington Times revealed in 1999.
"The Arkansas plan gave state troopers the authority to stop and search vehicles based on a drug-courier profile of Hispanics, particularly those driving cars with Texas license plates," the Times said.
"A federal judge later ruled the program unconstitutional, the paper reported. "A lawsuit and a federal consent decree ended the practice - known as the 'criminal apprehension program' the next year."
Then Gov. Clinton, however, not only criticized the profiling ban, "at one point, (he) threatened to reinstate the program despite the court's ruling," the Times said.
"The state's position was to give away a . . . program that we're now trying to get back," Clinton announced at the time, saying the race-based stop and search program was more important than even airport security measures.
Three years later in 1991, Clinton actually did implement a modified version of the profiling program that prohibited the use of ethnic screening but allowed troopers to continue to stop cars on the highway at their discretion.
Hearing Clinton's condemnation of racial profiling in 1999, Roberto Garcia de Posada, executive director of the Hispanic Business Roundtable, complained that the then-president "had been a strong supporter of racial profiling against Hispanics in the past."
"He does not have the moral authority to lead a national campaign on this issue. If President Clinton truly meant what he said . . . he should apologize to all those Hispanics who suffered this 'morally indefensible' practice, which he publicly supported," de Posada said.
On Thursday and Friday both ex-President Clinton and his wife, Democratic Party presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton, criticized Republicans for trying to suppress the black vote in states like Arkansas and Florida. But reporters declined to ask either Clinton about the well documented record of black voter disenfranchisement in Arkansas while they ran the state.
BUMP! |
Gary Lane
|
|