Clinton says don't fuel the unhinged and draws parallels between 'upheaval' of 1995, today
(CNN) -- Former President Clinton said he sees parallels in the mood of the country now and on April 19, 1995, when the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City killed 168 people while he was in the White House.
"There's the same kind of economic and social upheaval now," he told CNN's Wolf Blitzer in an interview to air Friday on "The Situation Room."
"Then, you had the rise of extremist voices on talk radio. Here, you have a billion Internet sites," Clinton said.
And although the hard-core, anti-government radicals are still a minority, "they can communicate with each other much faster and much better than they did before. The main thing that bothered us since the time of Oklahoma City was that already, there was enough use of the Internet that if you knew how to find a Web site -- and not everybody even had a computer back then, but if you knew how to find it, you could learn, for example, how to make a bomb."
"Now, everybody has got a computer; Web sites are easily accessible. And you can be highly selective and spend all of your time with people that are, you know, kind of out there with you," he continued.
Clinton said the Oklahoma City bombing -- then the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history -- was the "last in a series of very high-profile violent encounters" during the 1990s between anti-government activists and authorities.
He said the country is better protected to prevent such an attack now. But when asked whether the anti-government mood now is more intense than in the 1990s, Clinton said, "Now, there are all of these groups, you know, saying things like the current political debate is just a prelude to civil war, all of that kind of stuff."
In an interview with the New York Times on Friday, Clinton warned of the affect that angry political rhetoric might have on antigovernment radicals like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh; he pointed to Rep. Michele Bachmann calling the Obama administration and the Democratic Congress "the gangster government" at a tax day Tea Party rally on Thursday.
"They are not gangsters," Clinton told the newspaper. "They were elected. They are not doing anything they were not elected to do."
Clinton said that demonizing the government with incendiary language can have effects beyond just rallying a crowd.
"There can be real consequences when what you say animates people who do things you would never do," Clinton told the newspaper, pointing out that McVeigh and his conspirators "were profoundly alienated, disconnected people who bought into this militant antigovernment line."
But Clinton said he didn't want to draw too tight of an analogy between then and now. He added that it's not his intent to stifle criticism of government.
"I'm not interested in gagging anybody. I actually love this political debate," Clinton said.
"Most of the Tea Party people, though, are explicitly political. You've got to give that now," he said. "Forget about whether we disagree with them or not. It's really important to be able to criticize your government and criticize elected officials. That doesn't bother me.
"Most of them have been well within bounds," Clinton said. "And they're harsh but limited criticism; in other words, they're not advocating violence or encouraging other people to do it.
"But I just think that we have to be careful," the former president added. "We've been down this road on more than one occasion before. We don't want to go down it again."
And it's about time Wall Street had its day in jail...
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Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
SEC charges Goldman Sachs with fraud (Fortune Magazine)
The Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday charged Wall Street's most gilded firm, Goldman Sachs, with defrauding investors in a sale of securities tied to subprime mortgages.
The SEC said it charged New York-based Goldman (GS, Fortune 500) and a vice president, Fabrice Tourre, for their failure to disclose conflicts in a 2007 sale of a so-called collateralized debt obligation. Investors in the CDO ultimately lost $1 billion, the SEC said.
The SEC's civil fraud complaint alleges that Goldman allowed hedge fund Paulson & Co. -- run by John Paulson, who made billions of dollars betting on the subprime collapse -- to help select securities in the CDO.
Goldman didn't tell investors that Paulson was shorting the CDO, or betting its value would fall. When the CDO's value plunged within months of its issuance, Paulson walked off with $1 billion, the SEC said.
"The product was new and complex but the deception and conflicts are old and simple," said Robert Khuzami, director of the Division of Enforcement for the SEC...
What the Icelandic volcano scientists thought was a sputterer is turning out to be pesky. It's spewing so much ash that flights all over the world in and out of northern Europe have been cancelled until the thick ash in the air clears. Volcanic ash and jet engines don't get along any better than ash and our lungs do. Interesting details as to the interaction of jet engines and volcanic ash.
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Obama Bench Nominee Draws Heated GOP Resistance (NPR)
A Senate hearing on the federal appeals court nomination of law professor Goodwin Liu took a deeply partisan tone Friday, with Republicans assailing the nominee for his criticisms of conservative justices, lack of judicial experience and liberal writings.
Liu, an associate dean and professor at University of California, Berkeley's law school, has been nominated by the Obama administration to the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. He has endorsed liberal positions on affirmative action and gay marriage, but he has also supported conservative stances on school vouchers and charter schools.
During contentious questioning Friday by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Liu was repeatedly taken to task for his written opposition to the nominations of Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts...
Republicans eagerly contrasted Liu's experience with that of Alito and Roberts, noting that he has no judicial experience, had never argued before the Supreme Court and had only argued one case before a federal appeals court.
But Democrats countered that there have been GOP nominees who were conservative activists and had no judicial experience. Liu assured the committee that his personal beliefs would not impact his decisions on the bench, if he is confirmed. And despite not having a judicial resume, he said his legal career shows he's disciplined and adept at making well-reasoned decisions...
expressed in his writings and speeches. in the end, however, a judge takes an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution, and in the case of a circuit judge, fidelity to the law entails adherence to Supreme Court precedent and (apart from the en banc process) adherence to circuit precedent as well," stated Starr and Yale's professor Akhil Reed Amar in a letter to the committee.
If confirmed, Liu would be the only active Asian-American judge on a federal appeals court. The nomination of another Asian-American, Denny Chin, was unanimously approved by the committee in December, but Republicans have prevented a floor vote on his nomination.
During Friday's proceedings, Liu said his parents were Taiwanese immigrants who valued immigration. He didn't learn English until kindergarten, but he went on to be valedictorian of his public high school class and attended Stanford, Yale and Oxford universities.
"I feel I've lived a very ordinary life, but I've had extraordinary opportunities along the way," Liu told lawmakers.
Here we go again with a new Toyota mess...
Toyota Recalls 600,000 Sienna Minivans (NPR)
Toyota Motor Corp. is recalling 600,000 Sienna minivans sold in the United States to address potential corrosion in the spare tire carrier cable in the latest safety problem to strike the beleaguered automaker.
The recall came as House investigators said they planned to hold another congressional hearing in May to review potential electronic problems in runaway Toyotas. The Japanese automaker has recalled more than 8 million vehicles because of faulty accelerator pedals, humbling a car company long known for its quality and safety.
Company leaders vowed to respond quickly to the safety concerns.
Toyota says the recall affects the 1998-2010 model year Siennas that have been operated in cold-climate areas.
The automaker says rust from road salt could cause the carrier cable to break. The spare tire could become separated from the vehicle and cause a road hazard for other vehicles.
Toyota said it was unaware of any accidents or injuries. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said it had received six complaints of spare tires falling off Siennas.
Toyota says it is working on a fix. In the meantime, customers will get a notice telling them to bring their vehicle to a dealership for an inspection.
The recall involves two-wheel-drive Sienna minivans in the District of Columbia and 20 states: Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, Vermont, Wisconsin and West Virginia...
There is a truth to the saying "Time heals all wounds" and bring about a real change of heart...
50 Years Later, A Civil Rights Tribute ... And Apology
Students who formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, which protested segregated lunch counters, movie theaters and bus stations, returned this week to Raleigh, N.C., to commemorate the group's 50th anniversary.
Hundreds of civil rights veterans -- black and white -- have gathered at Shaw University in Raleigh for an anniversary conference and reunion. They've come to celebrate and, they say, to inspire others.
Among the speakers at the four-day event is Julian Bond, one of the group's founders, who began leading demonstrations in Atlanta in 1960.
"What began 50 years ago is not just history," Bond says. "It was part of a mighty movement that started many, many years before that and continues on to this day -- ordinary women, ordinary men proving they can perform extraordinary tasks in the pursuit of freedom."
Back in April 1960, when the students first came together, the South's public facilities and public transportation were segregated. So-called "freedom riders" went south to confront discrimination.
An Apology
As members of SNCC recall their civil rights campaigns at the event, Elwin Wilson, 73, sits in his living room in neighboring Rock Hill, S.C. He also recalls the protests, but back then, he was on the other side. In 1961, Wilson was angry and waiting when a civil rights activist named John Lewis -- then 21 years old -- got off a bus in this small Southern city.
"The bus pulled in. He got out and started over there to the door," Wilson says. The former Klan member, who is in poor health, says he started beating Lewis as he opened the door to a "whites only" waiting room.
"I remember him laying there, and it was blood on the ground and somebody done called the police," Wilson says.
Years later, Wilson realized the protester he had attacked was John Lewis, who had become a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. Last year, Wilson finally apologized in person. Here's how Lewis, a Georgia Democrat, described the meeting:
"I said to him, 'I forgive you.' I don't have any ill feelings, any bitterness, any malice. He gave me a hug. I hugged him back. He cried a little, and I cried."
The Congressman says it was a powerful meeting that shows racial attitudes can change.
"Well, it was a moment of grace, a moment of forgiveness and a moment of reconciliation, and that's what the movement, that's what the struggle was all about," Lewis says.
Wilson says he found the Lord and realized he was wrong.
"If I can just get one person not to hate, it's worth it," Wilson says...
And here's an interesting opinion piece about the upcoming replacement for the Supreme Court - certainly an offering from the out of the box thinking corner that may not have been considered - though, frankly, I'd prefer to see a female replacement until the Court is half female, reflecting the general American population:
The Nation: Courting For Historic Change by Linda Hirshman (NPR)
Justice John Paul Stevens is stepping down, and President Barack Obama has a second Supreme Court nominee just as his second year in office begins. The conventional wisdom is that Obama should try to select someone his Republican adversaries in the Senate will not dare to filibuster — a moderate, middle-aged white man like Judge Merrick Garland of the DC Circuit, or a thoroughly vetted appeals judge with lots of conservative friends from the University of Chicago like Judge Diane Wood.
That would fit the Jimmy Carter version of Barack Obama, which predominated until his fighting health care reform triumph shifted the comparisons over to the Lyndon Johnson column. President Obama would do well to remember another of Johnson's victories — appointing famed NAACP litigator Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. Johnson himself remembered it as one of his proudest moments — doing something, he said, for the people who had done so much to register and vote and represent themselves. Johnson, it is said, felt guilty, because the executive branch had not done enough to protect African-Americans in their rights, even after passage of the Civil Rights Act.
He did better than he knew. Even after the great triumphs of the civil rights movement were over, Marshall "represented" the human reality of African-Americans in the hallowed chambers of the Supreme Court. And he did it in the most profoundly human way: through stories. Marshall's way, which came to light only after his death, was to call up experiences from his own life to drive home a point during discussions on cases. In her legendary eulogy, Republican appointee Sandra Day O'Connor told her readers of how Marshall's description of life under Jim Crow affected the courts. Marshall's biographer Mark Tushnet even credits the crucial support of Justice Harry Blackmun to salvage some version of affirmative action in the landmark Bakke decision to Marshall's storytelling.
It's not 1967 any more, but there is a movement of people long marginalized and demonized in American society, doing their best to use this great democracy to represent themselves: America's gay and lesbian men and women. Like the racial civil rights movement that inspires them, the gay movement marches for justice, demonstrates for equal rights, seeks to marry and to serve on equal terms in the United States military. Like the African-Americans who so impressed Johnson, gays and lesbians register in huge percentages to vote and raise impressive sums of money to secure their rights in the democratic process. Like the movement Marshall so ably represented, they petition the Supreme Court to extend to them equal justice under the law, recently initiating a case for the right to marry indistinguishable in theory and precedent from the 1967 interracial civil rights case Loving v. Virginia.
Appointing an out gay or lesbian to the Supreme Court would once again open the closeted chambers to the truth of lives the current occupants can not themselves adequately know. There is a reliable story about Justice Lewis Powell, who cast the deciding vote in Bowers v. Hardwick, the case that kept sodomy a crime and which the Court reversed seventeen years later in Lawrence v. Texas. Powell later said he regretted his vote in Bowers; he just never knew any gay people, he said in his defense. Five years before Justice Powell condemned American gays and lesbians to the continued criminalization of their sex lives, his law clerk had been Paul M. Smith, now the openly gay co-chairman of the board of Lambda Legal—the LGBT equivalent of the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund. How differently things might have gone had Justice Powell had a colleague he knew to be gay when the court considered the matter in 1986.
The widely reported case to establish gays' right to marry, Perry v. Schwarzenegger, which recently went to trial in the federal court in California, revealed graphically the power of gay and lesbians telling their stories. When the plaintiffs, one gay and one lesbian couple, finished telling the stories of their efforts to construct respectable, loving lives in a state that forbids them to marry to a courtroom filled with mostly straight media and lawyers, there was not a dry eye in the house.
Legislation comes and goes, but, as they say, the Supreme Court is infallible because it is final. This could be Barack Obama's Lyndon Johnson moment. There's even a nominee who fits perfectly his expressed desire to broaden the Court's demography by adding someone who has engaged in the practice of law, rather than a cloistered academic. Someone of the highest stature in the bar association's Talmudically constructed ranking system, a lion in his prestigious law firm and a man with extensive experience in Supreme Court litigation—Paul M. Smith. Just as Congress would be considering the appointment, Smith is to be the recipient of the ABA Thurgood Marshall Award at the annual ABA meeting this August—a prize held by sitting Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.
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