An Advance Tour of the CLINTON Presidential Library

[UTUSN]

*******QUOTE*******

http://www.nypost.com/gossip/cindy.htm

November 5, 2004 -- THE Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock opens Nov. 18, with a four-day celebration that begins Nov. 14. President Clinton Avenue will be turned into a mall. Bands, singers, stalls, merchants, gifts, arts and crafts, big video screens, bleachers, whatevers enough for 27,000 guests. No room to accommodate the 35,000 requests for invites. The leftover 8,000 will have to watch on TV or read my description today.

Maggie Williams, who was Hillary's White House chief of staff and Bill's post-White House chief of staff, gave me an advance tour.

Breathtakingly beautiful, the library's two structures overlook the Arkansas River, a working water highway of barges and boats. The ultramodern high-tech repository of archives is a "green" building. Energy efficient; partly powered via 306 solar panels; 10 miles of underground radiant heating, "like Hula Hoops laid straight." The floors are made of bamboo, a "renewable and durable floor that takes heavy traffic." If you drive an electric vehicle, you can even recharge the thing in their parking lot. OK?

Some of its features: The Celebration Circle, which means bricks ringing the outside bear donors' names. The Working Wall features the names of 1,500 of those who helped build it. ....

********UNQUOTE*******

[flpoljunkie]

1. I refer you to Quetzal's post regarding what I consider reprehensible.

If this is true, it is completely unaccecptable, and I admire John Kerry even more for refusing Clinton's advice.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x959585

Kerry refused to take Clinton's antigay advice

A new report from inside the John Kerry campaign suggests that in the final weeks of the campagin former president Bill Clinton advised Kerry to come out in favor of ballot measures that wrote antigay marriage discimination into the constitutions of 11 states. According to the latest issue of Newsweek, "Looking for a way to pick up swing voters in the red states, former president Bill Clinton, in a phone call with Kerry, urged the senator to back local bans on gay marriage. Kerry respectfully listened, then told his aides, 'I'm not going to ever do that.'"

The advice is not inconsistent with Clinton's record: He is the chief executive who signed the 1996 federal Defense of Marriage Act, which forbids the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages and leaves gay and lesbian couples legally married in Massachusetts since May 17 in legal limbo. The federal DOMA also prevents those couples from acquiring access to the Social Security and other benefits that other legally married couples have.

Similarly, Kerry's response to Clinton's advice is consistent with his position on same-sex couples. Kerry, who voted against DOMA in 1996, told The Advocate that although he believes marriage should be between a man and a woman, he favors the establishment of civil unions that included all the rights and responsibilities of marriage and opposes the federal constitutional amendment to ban marriage that President Bush supports.

more...

http://www.advocate.com/new_news.asp?ID=14285&sd=11/05/04

[Bucky]

2. Is that the library or the LIE-brary? HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! < / sarcasm >

I will probably go thru the next four years without killing some Republican moron. Probably.

[freetobegay]

3. I hope his library burns to the ground!

[amazona]

4. whoa whoa whoa slow down there

We don't know if Clinton even really said what some advisor says he said. There is a lot of rumor spreading and attempts to divide going on in the media if you ask me.

[Bucky]

5. Like it or not, Clinton was right to dodge the gay marriage issue

Does it involve selling out people who have supported the Democratic agenda? Yes, it does. Would it be a lie to make it look like Democrats were in favor of discriminating against gays? Yes, it would.

The alternative would be to take a principled stand on the matter and lose the election. And because that's what we did, we lost the election. And because we lost the election there will tens of thousands of more Iraqi dead, thousands of Americans maimed and dead, the increased risk of terrorist attacks on the US, the increased leveraging of our children's future, the destruction of the environment, the erosion of our civil liberties, the probable loss of abortion rights for Americans unable to afford a plane ride to the West Indies, at least one new war in the middle east, and the inevitable move toward a violent show down with a nuclear armed Iran.

Should gays have the right to marry? Hell yes. But that's not the question. The question is, is allowing gays to have full legal marriage rights worth the cost of tens of thousands of people dying? Maybe, but that's not the choice. We were going to lose on the gay marriage issue one way or another.

Now we have neither gay marital rights nor a secure future. We have a solid historical rejection of gay rights that will set back the gay rights cause for at least a generation AND we will have people dying all across the Middle East--and probably in the US too--over the next ten years.

But at least Kerry made his principled stand.

[UTUSN]

6. Whups, I Missed the Memo That

decreed we were supposed to be in full lockstep, eating-our-own mode. This ought to give the lurking freeptards even more thrills. I missed it because I've been away from the board, drowning my sorrow for the past two days. I sincerely thought at posting the link that it was something positive in this time of our sorrow.

That said, here's this:

1) The very first thing CLINTON did when he took office was to put forward Don't-ask-don't-tell, putting Gay reform/rights at the top of his agenda. However, making myself even more "wrong" in this thread, at the time I was vastly disappointed that he had picked this as his #1 item, believing (was I wrong?) that it drew a line of division and contention, besides being a wrong priority. I submit that this, indeed, set the bottom line of division and resistence that grew to the proportions we now know.

2) My history vis a vis CLINTON is very mixed. Despite my overall opinion that he wasn't able to accomplish as much as I had hoped (my old mother died hoping for his promised health care), I took solace and gave him support based on his being able to out maneuver the Repukes and to irritate the heck out of them. But when the FAKE impeachment came along, I defended him to the end, despite that I was literally DISGUSTED with his sexual escapades, but MORE THAN ANYTHING mad-as-hell that he AND THAT IDIOT GIRL put their SELFISH personal pleasure ahead of the precious opportunity he had to ENACT our agenda, not to mention giving our enemies all the ammunition.

3) I haven't digested what CLINTON advised JK and what JK did as a result. As for my own political position, I am a Dem of the Old Fart variety: Meaning, FULL separation of church-state, FULL social and civil rights, social service programs, employment enhancements, and so on. That said, regarding Gay rights, I stop this side of anybody walking down Main Street in nothing but a thong, which, I submit, does not make me a political Conservative.

[UTUSN]

7. Kick n/t