Remember Filegate? Where the Clinton's promised everyone that they had only accidentally been looking through FBI files on Republicans?

From William Safire:

Remember ''Filegate''? Three years ago we learned that the White House had been regularly pulling the files from the F.B.I. on hundreds of Republicans -- ostensibly for security clearance, but including hundreds of former Reagan and Bush appointees never being considered for jobs.  

Even Clinton partisans shuddered at shades of an ''enemies list.'' White House spokesmen dismissed it as a ''bureaucratic snafu,'' caused by a Secret Service that couldn't keep its lists straight. 

Suspicion fell on D. Craig Livingstone, a Democratic advance man unqualified for his sensitive security post. Because some Clinton appointees had drug problems in their pasts, White House operatives may have felt that a supply of political mud was needed to drive off potential critics.  

The F.B.I. admitted wrongdoing in being so complaisant, apologized and said it would never again ship files over without proper paperwork. But it was obviously not qualified to investigate White House abuse of its files; Janet Reno asked for independent counsel, and the matter was assigned to Ken Starr, who had an organization up and running. . . .

Now we supposedly have 4 sources of information used by FBI to launch spying on Trump during the election. The Hill newspaper's John Solomon claims: "All 4 Dossiers Used to Launch the FBI Investigation Against Trump Will Trace Back to the Clintons."

All this makes one wonder what the Clintons did with all that earlier information.

Jake Tapper: When Bill Clinton complained about guns in Baltimore, ask him why the law-abiding poor can't carry

Bill Clinton on CNN's State of the Union:

. . . The Baltimore thing came on the heels of what happened in Ferguson, what happened in New York City and all these other places. And their is a big national movement about whether the lives of young African-American men count. 

You can’t have people walking around with guns. I used to tell people when we did Bosnia, Kosovo anything like that, you get enough people with weapons around and there will be unintended consequences. People make mistakes People do wrong. Things happen. To hold a community together you got to have a high level of community trust. . . .

Note that in Baltimore, it costs over $300 to license and register a handgun to own in the home.  It is virtually impossible to get a concealed handgun permit (just 0.3% of adults in Maryland have a permit), and about half of those are retired police officers.  The permits that are issued are definitely not going to people who live in this poor area of Baltimore.  The formal legal costs of getting a permit are not just the license and registration fees to own a handgun, but also the $75 ($70 application and $5 fingerprinting fee) and training costs.  Even then they are just a small part of the cost of getting a concealed handgun permit.  The poor aren't going to hiring lawyers to go through the legal process to get approval to have a permit, and even if they did, it is unlikely that a judge would grant them a permit.

When Bill "Mr. Triangulation" criticizes Obama for relying too much on polls you know Obama is in real trouble.

 From Politico:

At another point during a closed-press event Tuesday, Clinton implied that Obama or any president risks looking like “a total fool” if they listen too closely to opinion polls and act too cautiously. He used his own decisions on Kosovo and Bosnia as a point of reference. 

The former president also said commanders-in-chief should avoid over-interpreting public opinion polls about whether the United States should get involved in crises overseas. . . .

WaPo Fact checking Bill Clinton’s speech

Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post has singled out some of these claims by Bill Clinton.

“He [Obama] has offered a reasonable plan of $4 trillion in debt reduction over a decade. For every $2.5 trillion in spending cuts, he raises a dollar in new revenues, 2.5 to 1. And he has tight controls on future spending. That’s the kind of balanced approach proposed by the Simpson-Bowles commission, a bipartisan commission. … It passes the arithmetic test.”

— Former President Bill Clinton

WaPo - "The repeated claim that Obama’s budget reduces the deficit by $4 trillion is simply not accurate."

“We could have done better, but last year the Republicans blocked the president’s job plan, costing the economy more than a million new jobs. So here’s another job score. President Obama: plus 4.5 million. Congressional Republicans: zero.”

— Clinton

WaPo - "Obama’s jobs plan was more of a rhetorical device, aimed at Republicans, rather than a real plan."

“During this period, more than 500,000 manufacturing jobs have been created under President Obama. That’s the first time manufacturing jobs have increased since the 1990s.”

— Clinton

WaPo - "Clinton is referring to the period since February 2010, the administration’s preferred date for counting employment figures. If you count from the beginning of Obama’s term, Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that manufacturing jobs have declined by more than 500,000. Manufacturing jobs have been on a long steep decline since the middle of Clinton’s term, with some 2 million jobs lost during the recession that started at the end of George W. Bush’s term."

“The administration agreed to give [welfare] waivers to those governors and others only if they had a credible plan to increase employment by 20 percent and they could keep the waivers only if they did increase employment.”

— Clinton

See my previous post available here.

John Edwards doesn't understand why he is being treated differently than JFK and Clinton

Edwards is right that there is something of a double standard. After all, Edwards was the Democrats VP candidate in 2004. Does this mean that Dems would have also turned on Clinton if he had not been president at the time? From the Washington Post:

“He knows he made mistakes,” Bergenfield says on the eve of Edwards’s trial, which is set to begin Thursday with jury selection. “But John thinks that the treatment of him is so unflinchingly horrible and that what he did is not so different from what others did — JFK, Clinton, the whole rogues’ gallery. We’ve had this conversation about his situation, and I remember he did compare it to Clinton. He said, ‘I did a horrendous thing, but I don’t know why I’m getting such an unforgiving treatment when you think of what other people have done.’ ” . . .

Most Democrats think that Obama and Clinton were about the same, not Independents and Republicans

This Gallup Poll is pretty stunning, at least I am sure that Bill Clinton isn't very happy about it.

Clinton says no tax hikes and no new regulations

Former President Bill Clinton has some choice advice for Obama. Primarily, he thinks that Obama would have been better off if he had just stopped talking after his address to Congress:

[Bill Clinton] explains: “In the speech that the president gave to Congress, he didn’t propose any new taxes. The speech was $250 billion in tax cuts, $250 billion in spending over a period of two to three years. It focused mostly on a rather innovative set of payroll tax cuts and incentives to hire people.

“I personally don’t believe we ought to be raising taxes or cutting spending until we get this economy off the ground. If we cut government spending, which I normally would be very inclined to do when the deficit’s this big, with interest rates already near zero you can’t get the benefits out of it.

“So what I’d like to see them do is come up with a bipartisan approach, starting with the payroll tax cuts because they have the biggest return.

“Then what I’d like to see is an effort made at a bipartisan resolution of the banking home mortgage crisis.

“One of the things that President Reagan did with the Democratic Congress in the early 1980s that never gets any discussion is the way they set up this system to purge the debt overhang from the savings and loan collapse. It was unpopular but it had to be done. And as soon as we flushed it out there was a big increase in investment.

“So that’s what we need to do here with this home deal. I don’t think you can tax or cut taxes, I don’t think you can spend or not spend enough to get America back to a full employment economy until we flush that debt.

Read more on Newsmax.com: Ex-President Clinton to Newsmax: Raising Taxes Won't Work
Important: Do You Support Pres. Obama's Re-Election? Vote Here Now! . . ."

“What I find is a lot of business people can be supportive of new regulations and new standards, but particularly in a fragile time they don’t like to have too many things changing at once.

“A business can’t do five things at once and decide whether to get back into the investment business after it’s slow. It may be that there is a way, for example, to stagger out a way things are going to be done under the Dodd-Frank bill.

“The really important thing about Dodd-Frank, that we had to do to establish our financial bone fides again, was to have capital requirements on banks and investment banks so we have leverage limits.” . . .