…and apparently the questions, too!

At two campaign events in Iowa this year, aides to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton encouraged audience members to ask her specific questions, a tactic that drew criticism from an opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination and led her yesterday to promise that it would not happen again.

Of course, her highness responded in a fashion quite familiar to a Clinton campaign… plausible deniability.

At a media event in Waterloo, Iowa, Clinton responded to a reporter’s question about two separate incidents, one that occurred this week at a biodiesel plant in Newton, and the other in April on a farm outside Fort Madison, both in Iowa.

“Well it was news to me” Clinton said. “And neither I nor my campaign approve of that. And it will certainly not be tolerated.”

Riiiight. Is there still anyone on this planet that believes this crap?

For what it’s worth, Hillary’s campaign… the one she says “did not approve of that” has now admitted planting the question (and other questions, as well):

Clinton campaign spokesman Mo Elliethee admitted that the campaign had planted the question and said it would not happen again.

And that’s not all… this wasn’t some rogue campaign aide planting questions, it was part of an overall strategy:

According to a report on the Grinnell University Web site, the Clinton campaign arranged for some of the questions for the candidate to be asked by college students:

“On Tuesday Nov. 6, the Clinton campaign stopped at a biodiesel plant in Newton as part of a weeklong series of events to introduce her new energy plan. The event was clearly intended to be as much about the press as the Iowa voters in attendance, as a large press core helped fill the small venue….

“After her speech, Clinton accepted questions. But according to Grinnell College student Muriel Gallo-Chasanoff ’10, some of the questions from the audience were planned in advance. ‘They were canned,’ she said. Before the event began, a Clinton staff member approached Gallo-Chasanoff to ask a specific question after Clinton’s speech. ‘One of the senior staffers told me what [to ask],’ she said.

And it’s obvious Clinton, herself, was in on the gig…

“Clinton called on Gallo-Chasanoff after her speech to ask a question: what Clinton would do to stop the effects of global warming. Clinton began her response by noting that young people often pose this question to her before delving into the benefits of her plan.

Of course they do…

“But the source of the question was no coincidence — at this event ‘they wanted a question from a college student,’ Gallo-Chasanoff said.”

Still buying her line that it’s “news to me”?

What a joke.

To each and every veteran and his or her family who’ve ever served this great nation…

…Thank You.

Reminiscent of John Kerry’s “foreign leaders love me” moment, Bill Clinton is now talking up a poll showing Hillary is favored… in Canada, Britain and Italy.

“In every country, without question, if you take out the undecided, she had the absolute majority,” Clinton said.

Then I say, go for it. Send her to one of those countries and let her highness reign. I will fully support her campaign… in Canada, Britain or Italy.

I’m sure I’d like her more too if she was in another country peddling her socialism.

I can almost imagine him giving her his patented lip-bite and telling her, “Darlin’, I feel your pain.” He’s trying to defend his little woman from vicious attacks of the evil right wing smear machine (even though Democrats levied much criticism as well):

Former President Clinton on Monday compared Republican criticism of his wife’s position on driver’s license for illegal immigrants to the ads that helped sink John Kerry’s White House hopes in 2004.

“I had the feeling that at the end of that last debate we were about to get into cutesy land again,” Clinton told some 3,000 members of the American Postal Worker’s Union at a convention.

At the end of a televised Democratic presidential debate last week, Hillary Rodham Clinton hedged on whether she supported a plan by her home state governor, New York’s Eliot Spitzer, to issue licenses to illegal immigrants.

So what is Bubba calling “cutesy“?

Russert: Senator Clinton, I just want to make sure of what I heard. Do you, the New York senator, Hillary Clinton, support the New York governor’s plan to give illegal immigrants a driver’s license?

You told the New Hampshire paper that it made a lot of sense. Do you support his plan?

A simple yes or no. Do you support it or not? We all know how much Clintons hate being asked to take a definitive position on anything… and how dare anyone try to make them.

So Hillary did what the Clintons do best… Attack the question, then refuse to answer it… oh, and blame Bush for good measure.

Clinton: You know, Tim, this is where everybody plays “gotcha.” It makes a lot of sense. What is the governor supposed to do? He is dealing with a serious problems. We have failed. And George Bush has failed. Do I think this is the best thing for any governor to do? No. But do I understand the sense of real desperation, trying to get a handle on this? Remember, in New York, we want to know who’s in New York. We want people to come out of the shadows.

He’s making an honest effort to do it. We should have passed immigration reform.

For what it’s worth, Bubba, it’s not just the evil vast right wing conspiracy mocking your bride for her triangulation and hedging…

Williams: Senator Obama, why are you nodding your head?

Obama: Well, I was confused on Senator Clinton’s answer. I can’t tell whether she was for it or against it. And I do think that is important. One of the things that we have to do in this country is to be honest about the challenges that we face…

Russert: Are you for it or against it?

Obama: I think that it is the right idea, and I disagree with Chris because there is a public safety concern…

As Bryan says:

Vote for Hillary Clinton and you get all the Clinton corruption and doubletalk without any of the greasy charm that at least made him entertaining. She’s so bad at that part of the job that Bill Clinton keeps having to do it for her.

And the more he has to do it, the worse she appears. Maybe it’s time she worked on a patented lip-bite of her own.

UDPATE:
Republicans Democrats continue to advance the vast right wing conspiracy criticize the Clinton triangulation strategy.

Obama said Hillary Clinton contradicted herself at the end of a Democratic presidential debate last week when asked whether she supported a plan by the New York governor to issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. This week, the Illinois senator and former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina have repeatedly reproached her on that subject.

“How you would then draw an analogy to distorting somebody’s military record is a reach,” Obama said.

Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd, another candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, called the Clintons’ response to the debate “outrageous.”

“To have the former president come out and suggest this is a form of swift boating … is way over the top in my view,” Dodd said in a telephone interview.

It’s sad that Democrats would be asking a question like this:

“What do the Democrats do if–yes: if, if, if–the surge appears to have succeeded?“

That you’d even have to worry about what political position you’d be forced to take should the U.S. succeed is quite telling.

Here’s a hint, though. You could begin by congratulating the brave men and women of our military for their success. But that probably never crossed your mind.

Pandering in Iowa, Hillary Clinton said:

“For this generation, climate change is our space race,” said Clinton, speaking in a cavernous factory with giant wind turbines in the background.

Clinton, who is pursuing the Democratic presidential nomination, is calling for creation of a $50 billion strategic energy fund, coupled with tougher fuel efficiency standards financed in part by $20 billion in “green vehicle bonds.” It’s part of a package she calls the most comprehensive offered to tackle global warming.
[…]
Global warming hits particularly hard at the poor, she said.

“One in four low-income families have already missed a mortgage or rent payment because of rising energy costs,” Clinton said.

And somehow she thinks more regulations on our existing energy infrastructure will make energy costs go down?

Also, maybe she ought to take a long, hard look at the definition of “the poor”. Because according to a scientist who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore for his work on the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):

I’m sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never “proof”) and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time.
[…]
My experience as a missionary teacher in Africa opened my eyes to this simple fact: Without access to energy, life is brutal and short. The uncertain impacts of global warming far in the future must be weighed against disasters at our doorsteps today. Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus 2004, a cost-benefit analysis of health issues by leading economists (including three Nobelists), calculated that spending on health issues such as micronutrients for children, HIV/AIDS and water purification has benefits 50 to 200 times those of attempting to marginally limit “global warming.”

Given the scientific uncertainty and our relative impotence regarding climate change, the moral imperative here seems clear to me.

I guess it’s just a matter of perspective as to who one considers “poor”. Is it someone who’s borrowed beyond their means for a home to live in, or someone who struggles each day to find water clean enough to drink for survival? Perhaps the definition depends on who can put money in your bank account and vote for you.

Hillary did have a moment of lucidity, however, whether she realized it or not, during this speech in Iowa when she said:

“The climate crisis is also one of the greatest economic opportunities in the history of our country,” she said.

Of course it is, just ask Al Gore.

For the third year in a row, TexasRainmaker has been named a finalist in the Weblog Awards.

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From the Project for Excellence in Journalism comes this tidbit about our “unbiased reporters of fact”:

Newspapers—More Enterprise and Emphasis on Governance

On the front pages of newspapers, Democrats tended to get more coverage than in other media, somewhat more positive coverage than elsewhere, and more stories tended to contain information that explained how they would be affected if that candidate were elected than was true in the press coverage overall. In addition, many more of the stories were initiated by journalists than elsewhere in the press, a fact that signals a special role for print as a source of enterprise in news.
[…]
Another distinguishing characteristic of the print stories studied was tone. Democrats got much more positive coverage in the daily papers examined than they did elsewhere. Fully 59% of all stories about Democrats had a clear, positive message vs. 11% that carried a negative tone.
[…]
For the top tier Democrats, the positive tilt was even more the case than for Democrats in general. Obama’s front page coverage in the sample was 70% positive and 9% negative and Clinton’s was similarly 61% positive and 13% negative.

Republican candidates, in contrast, were more likely to receive clearly negative stories in print than elsewhere: 40% negative vs. 26% positive and 34% neutral.

Translation - create the news… then slant it to fit your agenda. Welcome to the unbiased media.

And network television?

CNN:

The CNN programming studied tended to cast a negative light on Republican candidates—by a margin of three-to-one.

FoxNews:

The programming studied on Fox News offered a somewhat more positive picture of Republicans and more negative one of Democrats compared with other media outlets. Fox News stories about a Republican candidate were most likely to be neutral (47%), with the remainder more positive than negative (32% vs. 21% negative).
[…]
When it came to Democratic candidates, the picture was more negative. Again, neutral stories had a slight edge (39%), followed by 37% negative and 24% positive.
[…]
But any sense here that the news channel was uniformly positive about Republicans or negative about Democrats is not manifest in the data.

MSNBC had more positive coverage of both parties, but still covered Republicans negatively over 63% more often.

And then there’s the taxpayer-funded network that doesn’t even bother itself with providing any positive coverage towards Republicans at all.

And in talk radio, which doesn’t try to hide its bias, look what the research reveals:

Conservatives will talk positively and negatively about both sides. But liberals refuse to say anything positive about Republicans and, with the exception of Hillary refuse to say anything negative about Democrats.

And as sure as there’s a liberal bias in the media, liberals will continue to deny it exists. Denial of reality and suppression of facts seems to be their only means of existence.