Seven years ago today, Bill Clinton was acquited in his impeachment trial

It was seven years ago today--February 12, 1999--that Bill Clinton's five week impeachment trial came to an end, with the Senate acquitting the President of perjury and obstruction of justice.

President Clinton began an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a 21-year-old intern, in 1995. Over a year and a half, The President and Lewinsky had a dozen furtive encounters in the White House. When she was transferred to the Pentagon in 1996, she confided in Pentagon co-worker Linda Tripp about her trysts with the Commander In Chief.

Tripp began secretly to record conversations with Lewinsky, pumping for the sordid and tawdry details (and there were plenty). Paula Jones, who was suing the president on sexual harassment charges, for another alleged adventure of The President's, subpoenaed Lewinsky. In January 1998, at the urging of The President (allegedly), Monica filed an affidavit denying having had a sexual relationship with him. Later that week, Tripp contacted the office of Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater independent counsel, to rat out Lewinsky and play him the tapes she made of her talks with her "friend."

Tripp was secretly wired by the FBI and met Lewinsky again. Shortly after that, FBI agents and U.S. attorneys questioned Monica and offered her immunity if she cooperated. When the story first broke, President Clinton said "I did not have sexual relations with that woman."

In late July, lawyers for Lewinsky and Starr worked out a full-immunity agreement covering both Lewinsky and her parents. Starr had threatened them all with prosecution.
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Head of the G.O.P. pledges to portray Democrats as pansies and use blogs to slap them around

On Friday, the Republican national chair, Ken Mehlman, outlined a political strategy for the midterm elections to portray Democrats as pansies, liberal apologists, and closet commies. He plans to portray the Dems as too weak to protect the country...and to bypass the liberal media and get the message out via the blog world. [ed. note: We just can't bear to use the words cyberspace or blogosphere].

Dear Ken:

We volunteer to donate all the space you need on the main blog of All This Is That.

A focus of this blog is on presidential and congressional politics. We would gladly furnish space to your worthy cause free of charge. As you may or may not know, The President has expressed his support and written to this blog more than once.

Feelin' the love,

John Newton Brummet III
Editor-in-chief and contributing writer,
All This Is That
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Visiting President Richard Nixon in New York City

By Jack Brummet, Editor-in-Chief
with research by Pablo Fanque, National Affairs Editor

Click collage to enlarge

One of my favorite things when I lived in NYC was to visit President Richard Nixon.

The President had a sweet townhouse at 142 East 65th Street on the Upper East Side. We probably stopped by five times while I lived there. I would drag friends there in a taxi, or car, if someone had one. The President never actually came out to greet us, although I often hoped he'd come out and say hi to the kids, and hang with us like the time he visited the students at the Lincoln Memorial. Maybe we'd have another one of those uncomfortable Nixon moments where he is bound and determined to seem like a regular guy. . .an almost laughable goal.

A few years after he resigned, he returned east from his California exile. This is the President who wanted to send me to Vietnam, so I had mixed feelings, indeed, about this man. He kept the Great Society funded, even as he lied and weaseled his way to disgrace. What could you think of the ex red-baiter who went to China and opened diplomatic relations? He was a two-edged sword, which made him endlessly fascinating. And I went there to pay homage to both Good King Richard and Evil Dick.

These visits often occurred around closing time. I seem to recall often having a bottle or go cup in hand, as we stood outside the townhouse for ten or fifteen minutes and pondered the dark and magnificent phenomenon of President Nixon.

In all of those visits, the Secret Service never came near us. We saw them a few times, but no matter how loud and raucous we got, they never approached. I guess that makes sense. There were 20 million people living within an easy car drive. We were probably not the only knuckleheads in the region to stop by.

Frank Curran, Claudia Curran, Nick Gattuccio, and Jack outside Richard Nixon's House, 1980 - click to enlarge

In the mid-eighties, Richard Nixon and I both moved from Manhattan. He moved to Saddle River, New Jersey and wrote a lot of books, and advised every President in some capacity.  RMN died in 1994, in NYC.

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new index to poems on all this is that

I'm here
Ten ways of looking at lies
The Broken Chord
With our heads in the sand on the transit and eclipse
the sun plays its red song
Litany
Poem: The Developers
A raindrop's life
The mystery of the first amendment to the Ten Commandments
The Bay Of Delusion
Mad Song
Reasons To Keep On
Conspiracy Theory
The Moon Race
Mr. Flue's Grave In Hillcrest Cemetary, Kent, Wash.
The World Seems Especially Calming And Verisimilitudinous Today
Kent, Washington
Rollover
[It's the Lee Harvey Oswald smile]
Zombie Breakdown
Heaven
The Variations
You Rehearse Dying
Sonnet For Hari
Defensive Daydreaming
The Dream
Dogpaddling
The Prostethic Head & The Absence Of Blood
Tetuan - "No Paranoia, My Friend"
The Grey Visitors & Painting: The Grey Ambassador
The Bad Movie
The Bucket
The Man In The Mirror
Liftoff
Optimism
Perspective
A Flight Of Swallows
Audioblog - The Prevaricator
Weather Report
Your Wooden Leg
The Revelations
Sermon At The First Church Of The Mojo Apocalypse
Dosvidaniya, Ivan Ivanovitch
The Late Excavation (Text And Audio)
Jack Kerouac, Meet John Barleycorn
The Gideon Bible In My Nightstand
At The Acropolis
When Aliens Land, Or, The Return Of The King
The sous-chef is a sociopath]
James Wright Falling
[Life Is Not A Hardy Novel]
Seven
Coyote Comes Home Like A Salmon
Shorts For Jerry Melin ca. about 1988
Bird
Monism
The Golden Rule
The Countdown
When Aliens Land, Or, The Return Of The King
AT HILLCREST CEMETARY IN KENT, WASHINGTON, I WALK BY THE GRAVE OF SAM THE GRASSEATER
Notes On Flying Daybreak
Explosions
Not Past Tense Yet
the glass is not half-full
It's Getting Crowded Here
Li Po In Disgrace
The Clock
A Love Song
Bad Timing
The Killer
The Absence of Footprints Growing Up
Gone Fishing
The M.D.s A Poem -
Acrylic
The Marriage
Driving Home To Seattle, We Watch Deer Drinking from the Skookumchuck River

Photograph of urinals in Queenstown, New Zealand

Click photograph to enlarge...

In the lobby men's room, the Sofitel Queenstown hotel has installed life sized images of models behind the urinals to peer down at each customers, uh,

The girls, local Queenstown models, hold cameras, tape measures, and binoculars; some of them are laughing, one is shocked.
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The mule - a parable of management, teaching, and child-rearing

A farmer had a mule for sale. He claimed the mule would obey any command it was given.

One prospective customer was leery of this claim and decided to put the farmer and his mule to the test. So he said to the mule, "Sit down." But the mule just stood there. "Sit!" the customer yelled. Nothing happened. He turned to the farmer and said, "You claim this mule will do anything it is told, but I can't even get him to sit down."

The farmer reached down and picked up a two-by-four, walked over and hit the mule in the head. "Sit," he said. And the mule sat right down. Turning to the shocked customer, he said, "first you have to get his attention."
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Alien Lore No. 63 - President Dwight D. Eisenhower meets up with alien ambassadors in the desert?

On Feb. 20, 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower interrupted his vacation in Palm Springs, California to make a secret trip to nearby Edwards Air Force Base to meet with two extraterrestrial aliens.


Or, maybe, as they explained later that night (and again and again over the intervening years), Ike went to the dentist.

There is an often repeated story that President Eisenhower visited Edwards Air Force Base to either view the wreckage of a flying saucer and the bodies of dead aliens. . .or that he met with live aliens on an urgent diplomatic mission to earth.

There are many version of the story, all roughly telling how Ike mysteriously disappeared from Palm Springs one night, and that he was taken to Edwards A.F.B. He is supposed to have returned around dawn not long after, and ordered absolute blackout about anything having to do with UFOs and the aliens.

Like all the great urban legends and rumors, this story remains in circulation because many of its facts are true. We know the President indeed traveled to Palm Springs between February 17th and 24th, 1954. We also know that on the evening of Saturday, February 20th, he did disappear. Members of the press learned that the President was not where he should be, which triggered speculation that was either gravely ill or had expired.

White House Press Secretary James Haggerty called an urgent late evening press conference to announce "solemnly" that the president had, while eating fried chicken earlier that evening, broken a crown on one of his teeth. He disappeared to a local dentist.

The President arrived as scheduled the next morning for a church service, and the matter was largely forgotten. But the trip does appear to have ended suddenly. Another curious fact was that Ike had returned from a quail shooting vacation in Georgia less than a week before leaving for the Palm Springs "vacation."

Interestingly, the dentist's widow, in a June, 1979 interview, could recall nothing about her husband's treatment of the President (which presumably was a memorable event). And yet, she did remember many of the details the next night, at a steak fry (whatever that is!) where her husband was introduced as "the dentist who had treated the president."

On February 20th, the Associated Press reported that "Pres. Eisenhower died tonight of a heart attack in Palm Springs." Two minutes later, the AP retracted that bulletin and reported that Ike was alive.

Michael Salla, a former American University professor is a main proponent of the Presidential-Grey encounter. "There was telepathic communication," said Salla. The aliens offered to share their superior technology and their spiritual wisdom with Ike if he would agree to eliminate America's nuclear stockpile.

"They were afraid we might blow up some of our nuclear technology," Salla says, "and apparently that does something to time and space and it impacts on extraterrestrial races on other planets."

Ike declined the alien offer, Salla says, because he did not want to give up the arsenal.

Sometime later in 1954, the story goes, Ike reached a deal with another race of extraterrestrials, known as the "Greys" (as opposed to the earlier group of "Nordics") . The president allowed them to capture earthling cattle and humans for medical experiments, provided that they returned the humans safely home. Since then, Salla says, the "Greys" have kidnapped "millions" of humans (you've heard that story, and its variants here numerous times).
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White House announces nation-wide gun buyback and surrender program

Attorney General Gonzales at this evening's press briefing at
the Justice Department

In an unannounced, sparsely attended early evening press conference at the Department of Justice, Attorney Alberto Gonzales announced a stunning new White House initiative in the war on terror.

Beginning on February 21, the Attorney General said the federal government would "commence a firearm buyback program to be administered by the National Guard. For fifteen days, the National Guard, in conjunction with the National Security Agency, will buy back any and all firearms at their fair market value. The program will expire March 6, 2006, and in the second phase, a coalition of the NSA, National Guard, and FBI will begin a compulsory buyback program, utilizing gun registration and sales data collected by the NSA and FBI since 9/11/2001. "

Mr. Gonzales refused questions from the press, reading from a prepared statement later distributed to reporters.

"The Department of Justice and National Security Agency will hold a briefing tomorrow morning, followed by a question and answer session. We intend to outline this national security program in great detail. We believe the buyback program is fully within the scope of recently passed legislation, as well as applicable provisions of H. R. 3162, or, the Patriot Act. "

The Attorney General continued, "This program was formulated by The President, Justice Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. As you all well know, The President is a strong supporter of the 2nd Amendment, and the right of all Americans to own firearms. However, for the time being, we believe it is important for everyone to do their part in the war against terror. Privately held weapons have the potential to fall into the hands of terrorists and be used against our own citizens and government. We fully believe the inconvenience of surrendering firearms until we have won the war on terror is a small price to pay to ensure our continued freedom and liberty. Without this program, there are approximately 200 million guns in circulation that could be used against us to further the terrorist's nefarious goals. We vowed after 9/11 that our airplanes would never be turned against this country again. We have succeeded in that. By taking this counter-terrorist measure now, we ensure the same thing will not happen with our weapons."

Attorney General Gonzales left the briefing room, declining to answer questions about the new counter-terrorism measure. "You'll have a chance to ask all the questions you want in the morning. I'll see you then."
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Couric Olympic ceremony coverage collects ca-ca cascade

It looks like Katie Couric has her hands full!
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Poem: With our heads in the sand during the transit and eclipse

"burning down the house to roast the pig." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti


The first wheel rolled around
The first adze was forged
Every tool and short-cut

Edged us to the brink
In our short dance
With Turtle Island

The machines started turning in 1900
And we started down a path
Toward the dark at the end of the tunnel

No one stands up for earth
But a handful of tree-huggers
Least of all the poets

Poet on poet on poet
Incesting like royals
With their heads in the sand

Becoming funded chinless wonders
For an audience of poets
Clapping for each other

We are in it and watching it
Pretending we're not in it
But carefully observing

For the sake of others
Writing it all down
For a doubtful tomorrow

The machines started groaning
When McKinley laid down his bones
Unloading their by-products

Onto unsuspecting skies
As we demanded encores refills and mas
And cursed the bottle turned up empty

Abboh's boys and girl's have run amok
The wheels and tools have run amok
There's no modulation

We can't slow back down
And run twice as fast
To keep up

The electric plantations hum
With fantastic machinery
Run around the clock

In Bayonne Richmond Kent Tacoma
Manteca South San Francisco The Bronx
Flint Long Beach and Cleveland

We leave vias rues expressways
Strasses avenidas and boulevards
A continent of skull orchard

Caught in flagrante
Pants down
Hands wedged in the cookie jar

No one points the guiltfinger
No one dares to finger or be fingered
And sweet mother earth struggles

To free herself
From the shackles
She turns off the rain

And takes back her Dodos and Whales
Snail Darters and Spotted Owls
Pygmy Hippotami and Flightless Cormorant

Vancouver Island Marmot and Gavial
Great Auk and Wild Ass
Tapir Kagu and Manatee

Carolina Parakeet and Dire Wolf
Coelacanth and Blackfooted Ferret
Snow Leopard and Przewalski's Horse

Glaciers virgin forests and monkey flower
Bigleaf Scurfpea and Spiny Rice
Interrupted Brome and Greensword

The infidels with battle fatigue
Sing the song
We know so well

I don't believe in earth
I just believe
In me.
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Don't muzzle the ox!

Thou shalt not muzzle the ox
when he treadeth out the corn.

- Deuteronomy XXV:iv

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Roseanne Barr: I F***ed George Clooney

http://dailynews.muzi.com/news/ll/english/10002578.shtml

Roseanne Barr recently told Attitude magazine, according to http://dailynews.muzi.com, that she developed a crush on George Clooney when he worked as an actor on her TV show, Roseanne. Roseanne said: "I f****ed him. More than once. I'm trying to be discreet."
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