Congrats Bill Clinton

thanks for the nice compliment!

Can I ask, DTOM, whether you took your moniker from Lou Dobbs? Hardly ever watched more than a clip on him but I heard some of his radio show recently and I noticed that he ended segments with, in a ponderous voice,

"Don't tread on me!"

or at least I think that's what he used, memory being what it is.

ReportAugust 4th, 2009 1:41 am

Bill Clinton in Pyongyang
UPDATE: “Clinton Delivers” is the headline on the Drudge Report, with breaking news that in response to Bill Clinton’s visit to Pyongyang, North Korea’s Kim Jong Il has pardoned the two jailed American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee. They are expected to be home shortly, and it will be a welcome relief when they are free of North Korea.

But the huge and disturbing question is, what else has Bill Clinton delivered? And to whom? The White House is calling Bill’s trip a “private mission,” but there are reports that Bill was met at the Pyongyang airport by North Korea’s chief nuclear negotiator, Kim Kye Gwan " a curious choice of host if Clinton went only to discuss the two hostage journalists. Likewise, just how private is it when Clinton had a long talk with Kim Jong Il over a dinner hosted by North Korea’s National Defense Commission.

Kim Kye Gwan and Kim Jong Il led the Bush administration on a merry dance via the Six-Party Talks of recent years, in which North Korea raked in concessions and aid from the U.S. " and cheated, with the resulting collapse of the deal late last year. The same regime did the same to Bill Clinton when he was president in the 1990s " talk, sign, collect, and cheat. North Korea’s totalitarian regime is not a system in which morality, decency or human kindness figure as motivating factors. Kim Jong Il got something from the U.S. for those journalists " the question is, did he simply get the already huge concession of a visit from a former U.S. president and husband of Obama’s secretary of state? Or did Bill Clinton deliver a lot more to Kim, which we have yet to hear about?

More on the Pyongyang calculus below, as posted just after Clinton arrived in Pyongyang, but before the report that “Clinton Delivers”:

Snatch two American journalists, get yourself a visit from an American ex-president " with added payolas likely to follow.

http://pajamasmedia.com/claudiarosett/bill-clinton-in-pyongyang/

good thing he doesn't own the trademark. i started using it on another forum called "thenleave.com" around 2002.

i just do what i do. i just think what i think. bla-bla-bla. beyond that, i don't worry about it too much.

it's really simple stuff; be cool to me and i'll be cool to you. it used to work that way pretty good in this country.

Did it have anything to do with the Gadsden Flag?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsden_flag

T
K
O

oh yeah, it would have to, wouldn't it? i used the gasden as my a2k avatar for a long time. it's not the solely owned symbol of the right wing. i see it as more of a personal philosophy than anything else.

so don't hold your breath waiting for me to invite you to a Tea Party, bro... ; )

The right wing might say "don't tread on me" but they also love to say, "**** all over me".

what? like some of them are kinky? like that way?? eeyewwwwww!

HAHAHA. Tea Parties. Those were funny.

You should put that back as you avatar then. It's perfect.

T
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O

the tea parties... i know. still trying to figure out what that's all about other than being pissed about the elections.

doesn't seem to be a unified platform at all.

During the early Clinton years, hard-liners and so-called conservative hawks advocated a pre-emptive strike to halt North Korea's nuclear weapons development before it could field an atomic bomb. Instead of taking the hard line, President Clinton elected to rely on former President Jimmy Carter and decided to appease the Marxist-Stalinist dictatorship.

Carter met with North Korean leader Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang and returned to America waving a piece of paper and declaring peace in our time. Kim, according to Carter, had agreed to stop his nuclear weapons development.

The Clinton appeasement program for North Korea included hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, food, oil and even a nuclear reactor. However, the agreement was flawed and lacked even the most informal means of verification.

In return, Kim elected to starve his people while using the American aid to build uranium bombs. The lowest estimate is that Kim starved to death over 1 million of his own people, even with the U.S. aid program.

http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/1/7/164846.shtml

well, george w. bush had 8 years to do it differently.

so i guess you need to deliver a similarly judgemental missive on his appeasement not only of the NoKos, but also the Saudis who provided 15 of the highjackers on 9/11. or how instead of going after bin laden in afghanistan, his bunch was playing footsies with the murderous Taliban for a big oil pipeline.

or maybe we could all quit waving it around, put it back in our paints and consider if we want to take on the Chi-Coms again. and the Russians.

maybe you haven't noticed, but the u.s. is running out of stuff to throw at the Evil Empire and the Chinese don't really want to loan us money to buy any more...

as worrisome is the recent work that surmises that Japan is about to fall off the cliff. 20 years of economic troubles and a non-op political system has rotted Japan economically from the inside out. They will not be able to buy huge chunks of US debt as they have for decades.

looks like the party's over... might still be able to squeak out a few more marks from the land of my ancestors, but merkel doesn't seem all that interested.

in no small part because the generations have been getting progressively more lazy and unable to focus. Japan followed America into sloth more quickly than might have been imagined.

The Koreans are even worse, the Japanese put together a few good decades but after only a few good YEARS the Koreans are already fat/happy and lazy.

i don't know all that much about the SoKos. they don't seem to get a lot of face time in the news. supposedly they have been doing some leading work on stem cell research though.

If you are looking only at popular American "news" you are missing most of what goes on in the world. You have internet, expand your mind. If you looked regularly at economist.com for instance you would know a good deal about Korea. BBC and CNN international are also not too bad.

i catch bbc when i can, and cnn international... now that i think of it, i haven't seen that on my channel guide for a while. used to watch it frequently. at one time we also got french, british, italian and i think spain.

i'll take a look at economist.com

but i can't say that i put anymore trust in blogs or .coms than i do any other media.

From .coms you can read the mags for free, see what is on CNNI and BBC even if they are not on your TV. TV is getting to be old school anyways, just as many people have dropped land line phone because with cell and voice over internet it serves no purpose, people are now beginning to disconnect from Cable. I have not watched TV in almost two years, it comes onto the house now only because some of the family still watch traditional TV. Me, I use .coms or if I want movies I watch Netflixs instant. I still get Netflix by mail, but Netflix is working to get out of that business. Given that the business model for the US Postal Service is hopelessly broken, none too soon. The Netflix people are again on top of their game.

t.v. is going old school. but i still can't really enjoy a film siting in front of the computer. it must be from working in post for so long.

i have been having fun watching stuff on hulu. haven't tried the netflix instant yet, even though we've had it for quite a while.

the one thing i worry about with the .coms is that unlike trad media, the nature of the blogosphere is one where if you have a computer and a connection.. poof you are a news outlet. unfortunately, they also don't have much in the way of accountability. so they get away with passing out stuff that is as bogus, if not more so than the so called mainstream media.

tech was, it's on course. but, aside from the biggies that you mention and a few others, culturally it's not quite there yet, imho. but i look forward to when it is.