I don't know about previous years, but for this campaign Obama can't pay off her debts directly.

He will hold joint fund raisers with her amongst the wealthy donors. The arrangement I once heard was that the first $2300 goes to Obama, everything above that goes to Hill's debts. I can't remember where I heard it though.

This will not affect the small or individual doners - Hillary's debts are an insider game. It's really not something to get worked up over.

But DAMN if we COULD just buy her off to kill the VP talk - I'd pony up an extra $100 myself.

The rules haven't changed. It's just that Obama's campaign can't donate more than the legal maximum to Clinton's campaign. That's, what... $2300?

What Obama can do is hold a series of fund raisers on Clinton's behalf. He can, in effect, bundle contributions for her.

So long as Obama paid it off (and I'd have to believe he did; if there were a personal bankruptcy in his past, shouldn't someone have found out), that's sufficient personal responsibility.

If he defaulted, it's another matter.

But the juxtaposition of a $20,000 Obama campaign debt with $20,000,000 or more Clinton debt reminds me of this quip: when you owe the bank $1,000, you have a problem. When you owe the bank 1,000,000, the bank has a problem.

It's not a problem for them. It's a problem for the bullshit artists who keep tossing out this crap for you gullible. However, I don't know what your problem is with people who have money. Al Gore is as rich as the Clintons - are you bitter about him? John Edwards has about half their wealth - bitter about him? Oprah has 10 times their wealth - bitter about her? You know someone can by an elite snob about being poor lazy trash?

The general point of the blog isn't whether Hillary gets her money from Obama.

Here are the facts:

a) Hillary ran up a substantial debt during the campaign. At some point, the usual thing to do is drop out to maintain a cap on the debt. Hillary did not.

b) Hillary has enough money to cover the debt.

c) Hillary's debt is owed (in part) to the working people whom she claims to want to represent. In other words, she is part of their problem.

d) Had Hillary dropped out as a more typical politician would have (bowing to the reality of the financial situation), people could have donated less to Obama for the primary -- and put the money elsewhere. In other words, Hillary's recklessness required us to bleed more.

Romney put up his own fortune to finance his campaign. It wasn't a loan... he really spent the money. Hillary does not. She expects others to clean up a mess of her own making.

Why?

He perjured himself on national TV, wagging his finger and acting outraged over the truth. I don't care what compromise Congress came to in order to put the matter to rest.

President Bill Clinton looked us in the eye and lied when it was clear he would come clean eventually. That's what liars do. They lie when it isn't even needed. They lie because they can't believe the American people are adult enough to deal with an adult truth. It is the same way he conducted his presidency. Telling us one thing while doing another.

Bill was so popular that he could have come on TV and said, "I am not going to discuss personal matters with the nation. This is between me and Hillary."

At least that isn't a lie and all of us could have read the subtext. Monica was an consenting adult, if a naive one. I think Bill used his position to get laid, though that isn't a crime unless there is coercion involved. That has never been the issue.

It is kind of pathetic for a president to pursue an intern, but that is a different conversation.

He was acquitted? How do you suppose that happened? We all heard him lie, and we all heard him admit it. I suppose he had friends among the jurors...

He was disbarred by consent by his home state's bar for a combination of obstruction and perjury. He accepted that action by agreement.

So, sorry, Des, but your fog of ignorance crack rests on bad information. I know it's hard to love Bill and then accept that he did perjure himself, but the universe is big enough for contradictions like that.

My dogma was not directed at you, Articleman. Indeed, your most recent post in my view hits the nail on the head. My quibble is with the rigid and uncompromising attitudes of posters like Clearthinker for whom banishment would not be sufficient punishment for the Clintons and their supporters.

I would disagree, however, that Bill Clinton's consent to disbarment represented an admission of perjury and obstruction on his part. It's like any plea bargain, there are benefits and consequences that need to be weighed. I'm sure the prospect of another proceeding in which the same embarassing and sordid allegations were trotted out was not an appealing process, and the punishment of disbarment when he had no interest in practicing law in Arkansas was a mild one. While Bill certainly played too cute with the truth, I always felt it was far beneath perjury or obstruction. In any event, I could care less about it - and I'd probably think the same if it were a Republican in his shoes. At least I hope so.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that I have reported you and your brother to the appropriate authorities.

I don't think there really is a defense 1, since what was covered under the definition was exactly what was at issue. That is, it's because it couldn't be definitively decided that what went on between Clinton and Lewinsky fell under it that he had defense 2, which is that he hadn't understood their encounters to be covered. As I remember it, the definition was something like "to touch or come into connect with [list of relevant body parts]." That's why I said "almost certainly"; his guilt rests on whether or not you believe that he genuinely thought that his denials were technically correct because he thought receiving oral sex wasn't "sexual relations," while giving it would be. Defense 2 is a good one, and worked for him, because you can't really prove anything about what he genuinely thought at the time. My point was simply that if you believe him, then I'd like to tell you about a great bargain I could get you on a bridge in the New York metro area.

I do think that the other lie, about when the affair began, was the more serious one. Again, it's hard to prove that he didn't genuinely misremember when that was, but given that he was giving testimony in a case about whether he sexually harassed a state employee, and that he "misremembered" his thing with Lewinsky to have begun after she left state employ when in fact she was still in it, there's no doubt in my mind that a) he was lying and b) it's clearly material to the Jones case.

I won't say whether this is a real or hypothetical analogy, but imagine that the chocolate bar I stole has been eaten, the proprietor of the candy store in question is dead, the store closed long ago, the building has been gutted and sold as condos. Beyond my consciousness there's not an iota of proof that my crime ever occurred. You'd have a hard time convicting me of it, but that just means I did a good job covering my tracks.

To be precise (and fair), mans_best_friend, the definition of sexual relations in the Jones case arguably did include oral sex. Clinton's defense was that he believed it did not. I'm not really enjoying this trip down (bad) memory lane, but if you'd like, here's a link to the transcript of the deposition itself.

http://www.australianpolitics.com/usa/clinton/paulajones/deposition.shtml

Just to clarify, I'm not claiming that Clinton's lies on TV constitute perjury; of course they don't. But I think it's pretty clear that his testimony in the Jones case and about that testimony before the Starr grand jury rise to that level.

Clinton was acquitted because what he was accused of--not meaning what he said--is impossible to prove. But the fact that it can't be proven to meet the criminal standard for perjury doesn't mean that it doesn't.

(Of course, it doesn't mean that it does, either...I just think, having followed the case, that that's the only reasonable conclusion you could come to.)