Bill Clinton thinks former Presidents should be allowed to run for President again: Three times could be a charm — but not for him. Former President Bill Clinton said Tuesday that presidents should be able to run for a third term as long as they take off some time after their second term. “I’ve always [...]

Former President Clinton doesn’t necessarily think his fellow Democrats are pursuing the right policy in their response to the Ryan Plan: WASHINGTON (CNNMoney) — Bill Clinton had a word of warning on Wednesday for fellow Democrats: Don’t get too cocky about voters’ rejection of Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan. In a special election for a vacant [...]

Bill Clinton earned the nickname The Comeback Kid during the 1992 Presidential campaign when he came in a strong second place in the New Hampshire primary only weeks after the Gennifer Flowers story became public. He managed to stage comebacks again and again throughout his Presidency as well, bouncing back from the 1994 GOP “revolution” [...]

When you’re a politician like Jerry Brown, who’s been a part of California politics since the 1970s, there’s bound to be plenty of video footage out there that can be used against you, and Meg Whitman’s campaign has resurrected one from 1992′s Democratic Presidential primary campaign for it’s first negative ad: Expect to see more [...]

In his new book, Tony Blair recognizes something that was rather apparent to Americans a long time ago: (CNN) – Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair was hesitant in an interview broadcast on Sunday to explain a passage from his new book that referenced a “potentially sexual element” to former President Bill Clinton’s “curiosity about [...]

If you think Jimmy Carter is the Worst Figure in American History, you really need to read more.

Should anyone care that Chelsea Clinton’s wedding was ridiculously lavish?

So discovers Chicago Sun-Times reporter Bill Zwecker: • Given I was surrounded by five armed Secret Service agents who eyed me suspiciously, I didn’t have the nerve to bring up Al Gore’s name, but another Aspen pal did so. ”Even though it was about a global warming issue and had nothing to do with that masseuse [...]

A survey of historians ranks Obama as the 15th best president ever, ahead of Ronald Reagan and behind Bill Clinton.

A new Rasmussen poll of the public’s attitude toward President Obama’s two most immediate successors shows much more fondness for the Clinton era than the Bush years: Democrats see Bill Clinton as a key factor in embattled Senator Blanche Lincoln’s Arkansas primary win last week and a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that [...]

As with many things involving the 39th 42nd President, this story just writes itself: Former President Clinton has sent out a fundraising letter on behalf of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee under his own name warning that Republicans are trying to “derail’ President Obama’s agenda. Not much unexpected there. But along with the letter, Clinton [...]

The White House released it’s response to the questions that have arisen regarding the allegations of a job offer made to Congressman Joe Sestak during his primary run against Arlen Specter: At the urging of the Obama White House, former President Bill Clinton asked Rep. Joe Sestak whether he would abandon his plans to challenge [...]

The New York Times has just broken a story about the Joe Sestak job controversy that puts the entire story in a new light: President Obama’s chief of staff used former President Bill Clinton as an intermediary to see if Representative Joe Sestak would drop out of a Senate primary if given a prominent, but [...]

Earlier this morning I noted that since 1976 there have been three failed SCOTUS nominees:  Robert Bork, Douglas Ginsburg and Harriet Miers. Commenter Charles Austin asked “They all seem to have only one relevant thing in common besides being nominated for Justice of the Supreme Court. Can you identify it?” And yes, it is true [...]

Saturday night’s annual White House Correspondents’ dinner has provoked the standard commentaries about the insipidness/banality/sinisterness of the event, what with the press sucking up to the president and the highlighting of the thin line between politics and celebrity.   And then there’s the required assessments of the president’s talents as a stand-up comedian. The most common [...]

Posting will be exceedingly light this morning, as I’ll be writing lots at New Atlanticist about the Atlantic Council’s annual Awards Dinner, which was held last evening. It together more than 900 leaders from over 50 countries to honor individuals who have made exceptional and distinctive contributions to the strengthening each of the four pillars [...]

Steve Benen is scratching his head over WaPo’s disparate treatment of two political scandals. According to a Nexis search, the newspaper has run 26 stories that mention Eric Massa since March 1. Some of those articles were Style-section pieces that mentioned Massa in passing, but most are substantive news stories — some on the front [...]

Speculating on Supreme Court appointments is a great parlor game and throwing the “pick a politician” wildcard into the game is especially fun. Ezra Klein jumps in with both feet: I’ve always been partial to the idea of seeing Hillary Clinton appointed to the Supreme Court. She’s got a law degree, of course. She’s practiced [...]

Nike made Tiger Woods a multimillionaire before he took his first swing* as a professional. There’s one of the few major sponsors to stay with him through his recent scandal.  Now, they’ve released a new ad that some are calling “creepy.” The Telegraph‘s Murray Wardrop has the setup: The commercial, in which a silent Woods [...]

Secretary of Defense Bob Gates today issued an order sharply limiting the enforcement of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the Clinton-era regulation governing how the military deals with homosexual troops.  Spencer Ackerman has details. In a major victory for opponents of the military’s ban on open homosexual service, Defense Secretary Robert Gates significantly revised how the [...]

As regular readers are painfully aware, I’ve been opposed to President Obama’s health care reform plan, such as it was, from the beginning.  But, apparently, it’s much worse than I thought.   Economist Thomas Sowell, one of the more thoughtful columnists in the business, sees it as the banana peel on the slippery slope to doomsday. [...]

There has been some interesting analysis of the impacts on our health care system of the bill President Obama signed into law earlier today by libertarian economists Arnold Kling, Bryan Caplan, and Tyler Cowen.   Many of the ideas have been floating around for a while  (the bill’s been in development for more than a year [...]

Professional iconoclast Stanley Fish has been predicting for a while that people would come to miss George W. Bush once the heated controversies of the moment had faded and the big picture emerged. Now, he sees evidence that he was right. A perhaps more substantial sign incorporates a sign famous (or infamous) in the Bush [...]

As the University of Alabama football team prepares to meet President Obama as part of the ritual victory tour that comes with winning a national championship, Randy Ross reflects on the last time the Tide made the trip. Then Alabama’s recruiting coordinator under head coach Gene Stallings, and now the director of football operations at [...]

Mike Huckabee used some harsh words in explaining why he didn’t attend CPAC this year. “CPAC has becoming increasingly more libertarian and less Republican over the last years, one of the reasons I didn’t go this year,” Huckabee said in an interview with Fox News, where he is a paid analyst and has his own [...]

Kenneth Starr, best known as the head of the controversial investigation into Bill Clinton’s various scandals, is expected to be named president of Baylor University. Ken Starr, the constitutional lawyer who conducted the independent counsel investigation that led to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, is expected to be named this week as president of [...]

“Support for Gays in the Military Depends on the Question,” Kevin Hechtkopf informs us in the No Duh Headline of the Week. But the specifics are interesting: It seems people are much more sympathetic to “gays and lesbians” than to “homosexuals.” A new CBS News/ New York Times poll finds that the wording of the [...]

The 65 percentage-point gap between Democrats’ (88%) and Republicans’ (23%) average job approval ratings for Barack Obama is easily the largest for any president in his first year in office, greatly exceeding the prior high of 52 points for Bill Clinton. So begins Jeffrey Jones‘ introduction of a new Gallup poll.  Here’s the graphic illustration: [...]

Barack Obama’s approval ratings are now firmly below 50 percent, with the CBS poll as the latest data point: President Obama’s job approval rating has fallen to 46 percent, according to a new CBS News poll. That rating is Mr. Obama’s lowest yet in CBS News polling, and the poll marks the first time his [...]

A curious piece by Politico’s Ben Smith, “Game over: The Clintons stand alone,” begins: A new book is out with a highly critical but unsourced portrait of Hillary Clinton. This familiar occurrence — it’s happened too many times to count over the years — has usually been greeted with an equally familiar response: A fast [...]

Dana Milbank starts an otherwise thoughtful piece with a rather sophomoric attempt at humor: First, the good news: President Obama will not be wearing a flight suit when he addresses the cadets at West Point on Tuesday night. Nor will he wear a bomber jacket with the presidential seal on the chest, nor even, the [...]

Barack Obama has been president for just under 10 months but he’s added two trillion to the national debt and will double it by the end of the decade.  CBS’ Mark Knoller: This latest milestone in the ever-rising journey of the National Debt comes less than eight months after it hit $11 trillion for the [...]

As widely expected, the Powers That Be have declared the recession  over, while cautioning that the economy still has a long way to go.  And, of course, the Obama administration is crediting its stimulus packages for the good news. It might not feel like it to most voters, but the U.S. economy is growing again [...]

Mark Liebowitz had a piece for NYT over the weekend titled “Man’s World at White House? No Harm, No Foul, Aides Say.” At first blush, it reads like some feminists are genuinely concerned about a male-dominated culture in the West Wing. After awhile, however, one begins to suspect it’s a PR exercise to make President [...]

Paul Krugman continues to demonstrate that brilliance in one field doesn’t necessarily translate into sound insights into others. He’s upset that some Republicans took pleasure in President Obama’s embarrassment in not landing the Olympics for his adopted Chicago and their cynicism in positioning themselves as the defenders of Medicare in order to fight his health [...]

Bill Clinton is joining Gavin Newsom’s campaign for governor of California in what Michael Finnegan argues is payback for Jerry Brown’s snub way back in 1992. Seventeen years after fellow Democrats Bill Clinton and Jerry Brown clashed in the 1992 race for the White House, the former president made clear today that bygones will not [...]

Former Pentagon spokesman Ken Bacon has died.  He was only 64. Kenneth H. Bacon, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who became chief Pentagon spokesman under President Bill Clinton, died Saturday at age 64. Bacon had been battling melanoama, and was on leave was his job as president of Refugees International, a Washington-based group he [...]

Lane Hudson felt justified in interupting former President Bill Clinton’s remarks at Netroots Nation to scream questions about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and Defense of Marriage Act on the grounds that there was no Q&A session scheduled and he was therefore “being held as a captive audience.” Julian Sanchez, also in attendance and quite sympathetic [...]

I’ve refrained from rapid reaction to the controversy over Bill Clinton’s trip to North Korea to secure the release of two American journalists because I’ve been torn between competing maxims.  I agree with the critics who say rewarding despots who have seized American citizens is bad precedent, incentivizing illegal behavior.  Yet, Bob Manning is right, [...]

The next episode of OTB Radio, our BlogTalkRadio program, will record and air live from 5:30-6:30 Eastern. Dave Schuler and I will be talk about the Cash for Clunkers program, the Birthers, Bill Clinton’s North Korea trip, and other topics in the news. We’ll also be taking calls at (646) 716-7030. Owing to a high [...]

“I know folks think I’m a city boy, but I do appreciate listening to country music. It’s about folks telling their life story the best way they know how.” – President Barack Obama Via Norm Geras, I see that the president hosted Alison Krauss, Brad Paisley, and Charley Pride as part of the White House [...]

Julian Sanchez argues that, while Sonia Sotomayor was given special consideration because she’s a Latina at various stages in her life, her case is “pretty close to the ideal of how affirmative action is supposed to work.” From a pool of highly qualified candidates, you let ethnicity act as a tiebreaker. It seems self-evident to [...]

Danny Glover reports on President Obama’s total restructuring of the White House message machine in a piece ominously titled “The Cost of Controlling The Press.” Barack Obama’s White House is spending more than $80,000 a week to staff its old and new media offices. Add the price of speechwriters and the White House communications tab [...]

The protests in Iran have entered a third week and the state media acknowledges that the death toll has reached 19 and that hundreds have been injured. Fareed Zakaria, a man not noted for idle leaps, proclaims, “we are watching the fall of Islamic theocracy.” In an interview with CNN, he explains: No, I don’t [...]

Gays looking to get the Supreme Court’s help in being allowed to openly serve in the military have been rebuffed. The Supreme Court on Monday turned down a challenge to the Pentagon policy forbidding gays and lesbians from serving openly in the military, granting a request by the Obama administration.  The court said it will [...]

It’s been years since I’ve quoted Ted Rall here. He hasn’t appeared in a post title since September 2005′s “Rall: Charities are for Suckers.”  The man’s eminently quotable, if in a train wreck sort of way, but constantly pointing out that some commentators are crazy attention whores really doesn’t advance the debate much. But you’ve [...]

Josh Marshall has noted something peculiar in the recent media tour of former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich: He seems to insist with members of the press that he still be referred to as “Speaker Gingrich.” And actually his website is speakergingrich.com. Not former Speaker Gingrich, Speaker Gingrich. And it goes beyond him. On [...]

UCSB political scientist Aaron Belkins‘ HuffPo piece “Obama To Fire His First Gay Arabic Linguist” has drawn quite a bit of blogospheric attention. Dan Choi, a West Point graduate and officer in the Army National Guard who is fluent in Arabic and who returned recently from Iraq, received notice today that the military is about [...]

Jeremy Lott’s attempted response to my response piece on “Ending the Vice Presidency” was, for some odd reason*, rejected altogether by my commenting system.  Rather than pasting them into the comments of a post buried in the archives, I’ve done it below, with my original in blockquotes, followed by his retort in boldface, followed by [...]

Hillary Clinton still owes a lot of money from her ill-fated run for president.  She owes $2.3 million just to consultant Mark Penn.  So, naturally, Clinton’s pals are holding various fundraisers to pay down said debt. Ezra Klein asks an uncomfortable question: Between 2004 and 2006, tax documents show that Bill Clinton earned $51 million. [...]