If this is true, then Bill Parcells is cleaning house big time. The organization needs a shake-up. I would link to the specific place where this is, but they don't have a standard blog system, so I can't.
"SWEEPING CHANGES" COMING IN MIAMI
A source with knowledge of the situation in South Florida tells us that "sweeping changes" are most likely coming for the Dolphins. And soon.
Coach Cam Cameron? Out. General Manager Randy Mueller? Out as soon as Monday, even though he's been doing research all year for free agency and the draft.
We're told that Parcells already has been working directly with the league office to obtain the appropriate permissions to hire Cowboys V.P. of college and pro scouting Jeff Ireland.
As Peter King of SI.com pointed out earlier in the week in his MMQB column, Parcells' contract makes clear that he merely is the overseer of the football operations.
"We set it up so the general manager I hire will have that authority. I want to make it clear: I don't want to be the general manager. I don't want to be the head coach. I told Wayne [Huizenga] that very clearly. I don't think it will be an issue.''
If it is an issue -- if the league concludes that Parcells has final say over personnel -- then the Fins might have trouble finding a G.M. Under league rules, a team is not required to allow a front office employee to leave unless he will have final say in his new job.
So if it's determined that the Tuna has the juice, the only guys he'll be able to hire are guys who are permitted by their teams to leave, or who have contracts that specifically allow a premature departure.
And even if a guy is in the final year of his contract, most front office deals run through the draft.
With all that said, there's a growing sense in some circles that Parcells will get Ireland, and that the pair will work together in reshaping the front office.
Another source tells us that the fates of Mueller and Cameron have been sealed by people telling the Tuna that the current G.M. and coach don't burn the midnight fish oil in South Florida. Parcells, a workaholic, doesn't like the idea of guys not doing all they can to win.
POSTED 9:38 a.m. EST, December 28, 2007
PORTER DONE IN MIAMI?
With new Fins football poobah Bill Parcells declaring that he wants no "thugs and hoodlums" in Miami, the immediate reaction in league circles is that linebacker Joey Porter won't be long for South Florida.
Though Porter is primarily a bag of hot air, he was busted earlier in the year for busting up Bengals left tackle Levi Jones.
And Parcells surely means it. The Cowboys, a team primarily built by Parcells, have had no arrests in 2007. Ditto for the Patriots, who are led by a long-time Parcells' lieutenant, and by Parcells' son-in-law. And the Jets, under the leadership of Parcells' protege G.M. Mike Tannenbaum, have had only one incident this year.
Meanwhile, the Dolphins have amassed the most points in our Turd Watch game (which we need to update). Much of the damage was done by defensive tackle Fred Evans and receiver Kelly Campbell, who already are long gone.
The only caveat as to Porter is that the $20 million in guaranteed money that he reportedly received when he signed would hit the cap. Parcells could designate Porter as a post-June 1 cut, taking the bulk of the hit in 2009.
Friday, December 28, 2007
Oakland Raiders' Warren Sapp Was Fined $75,000
NFL docks Raiders' Sapp $75K for penalties in loss to Jaguars - ESPN and AP
ALAMEDA, Calif. -- Oakland Raiders defensive tackle Warren Sapp was fined $75,000 on Thursday by the NFL for his confrontation with game officials that led to his ejection last week.
The league said Sapp was punished for "physical and verbal actions toward game officials that drew an unprecedented three unsportsmanlike conduct penalties and ejection from last Sunday's game."
Defensive end Derrick Burgess was also fined $25,000 for verbally abusing an official during the same sequence.
The punishments were announced after the Raiders' media availability on Thursday, so neither player nor coach Lane Kiffin was available to comment. Both Sapp and Kiffin said previously they were not worried about a possible suspension.
The altercation came late in the first half of last Sunday's 49-11 loss at Jacksonville, when the Raiders were called for four unsportsmanlike conduct penalties in one sequence. The dispute began when Jaguars right tackle Tony Pashos was flagged for illegal use of his hands to the face.
Officials initially said the Raiders declined the penalty, and the Jaguars lined up for a 43-yard field goal attempt. Officials then said Oakland would accept the penalty, making it third-and-20 from the Raiders 35.
Jacksonville's offense went back on the field, but a few seconds later, the officials called the first unsportsmanlike conduct penalty on Sapp, who said Wednesday he was angry the officials declined the penalty without checking first with the Raiders.
That gave the Jaguars an automatic first down, and Sapp started jawing at officials. Sapp and Burgess were both flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct penalties during the arguments. Sapp kept talking and then drew the third penalty and the ejection. Sapp had to be restrained by teammates and defensive line coach Keith Millard after being kicked out of the game.
Referee Jerome Bogar said after the game that Sapp was ejected for bumping umpire Garth DeFelice. Sapp denied making any contact with an official.
Sapp has had run-ins with officials in the past. Before a game against Washington in 2003, Sapp, then with Tampa Bay, reportedly bumped an official. Four days later he was fined $50,000 for what the league called "repeated violations of abusing officials."
ALAMEDA, Calif. -- Oakland Raiders defensive tackle Warren Sapp was fined $75,000 on Thursday by the NFL for his confrontation with game officials that led to his ejection last week.
The league said Sapp was punished for "physical and verbal actions toward game officials that drew an unprecedented three unsportsmanlike conduct penalties and ejection from last Sunday's game."
Defensive end Derrick Burgess was also fined $25,000 for verbally abusing an official during the same sequence.
The punishments were announced after the Raiders' media availability on Thursday, so neither player nor coach Lane Kiffin was available to comment. Both Sapp and Kiffin said previously they were not worried about a possible suspension.
The altercation came late in the first half of last Sunday's 49-11 loss at Jacksonville, when the Raiders were called for four unsportsmanlike conduct penalties in one sequence. The dispute began when Jaguars right tackle Tony Pashos was flagged for illegal use of his hands to the face.
Officials initially said the Raiders declined the penalty, and the Jaguars lined up for a 43-yard field goal attempt. Officials then said Oakland would accept the penalty, making it third-and-20 from the Raiders 35.
Jacksonville's offense went back on the field, but a few seconds later, the officials called the first unsportsmanlike conduct penalty on Sapp, who said Wednesday he was angry the officials declined the penalty without checking first with the Raiders.
That gave the Jaguars an automatic first down, and Sapp started jawing at officials. Sapp and Burgess were both flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct penalties during the arguments. Sapp kept talking and then drew the third penalty and the ejection. Sapp had to be restrained by teammates and defensive line coach Keith Millard after being kicked out of the game.
Referee Jerome Bogar said after the game that Sapp was ejected for bumping umpire Garth DeFelice. Sapp denied making any contact with an official.
Sapp has had run-ins with officials in the past. Before a game against Washington in 2003, Sapp, then with Tampa Bay, reportedly bumped an official. Four days later he was fined $50,000 for what the league called "repeated violations of abusing officials."
Oakland Raiders' Warren Sapp Was Fined $75,000
NFL docks Raiders' Sapp $75K for penalties in loss to Jaguars - ESPN and AP
ALAMEDA, Calif. -- Oakland Raiders defensive tackle Warren Sapp was fined $75,000 on Thursday by the NFL for his confrontation with game officials that led to his ejection last week.
The league said Sapp was punished for "physical and verbal actions toward game officials that drew an unprecedented three unsportsmanlike conduct penalties and ejection from last Sunday's game."
Defensive end Derrick Burgess was also fined $25,000 for verbally abusing an official during the same sequence.
The punishments were announced after the Raiders' media availability on Thursday, so neither player nor coach Lane Kiffin was available to comment. Both Sapp and Kiffin said previously they were not worried about a possible suspension.
The altercation came late in the first half of last Sunday's 49-11 loss at Jacksonville, when the Raiders were called for four unsportsmanlike conduct penalties in one sequence. The dispute began when Jaguars right tackle Tony Pashos was flagged for illegal use of his hands to the face.
Officials initially said the Raiders declined the penalty, and the Jaguars lined up for a 43-yard field goal attempt. Officials then said Oakland would accept the penalty, making it third-and-20 from the Raiders 35.
Jacksonville's offense went back on the field, but a few seconds later, the officials called the first unsportsmanlike conduct penalty on Sapp, who said Wednesday he was angry the officials declined the penalty without checking first with the Raiders.
That gave the Jaguars an automatic first down, and Sapp started jawing at officials. Sapp and Burgess were both flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct penalties during the arguments. Sapp kept talking and then drew the third penalty and the ejection. Sapp had to be restrained by teammates and defensive line coach Keith Millard after being kicked out of the game.
Referee Jerome Bogar said after the game that Sapp was ejected for bumping umpire Garth DeFelice. Sapp denied making any contact with an official.
Sapp has had run-ins with officials in the past. Before a game against Washington in 2003, Sapp, then with Tampa Bay, reportedly bumped an official. Four days later he was fined $50,000 for what the league called "repeated violations of abusing officials."
ALAMEDA, Calif. -- Oakland Raiders defensive tackle Warren Sapp was fined $75,000 on Thursday by the NFL for his confrontation with game officials that led to his ejection last week.
The league said Sapp was punished for "physical and verbal actions toward game officials that drew an unprecedented three unsportsmanlike conduct penalties and ejection from last Sunday's game."
Defensive end Derrick Burgess was also fined $25,000 for verbally abusing an official during the same sequence.
The punishments were announced after the Raiders' media availability on Thursday, so neither player nor coach Lane Kiffin was available to comment. Both Sapp and Kiffin said previously they were not worried about a possible suspension.
The altercation came late in the first half of last Sunday's 49-11 loss at Jacksonville, when the Raiders were called for four unsportsmanlike conduct penalties in one sequence. The dispute began when Jaguars right tackle Tony Pashos was flagged for illegal use of his hands to the face.
Officials initially said the Raiders declined the penalty, and the Jaguars lined up for a 43-yard field goal attempt. Officials then said Oakland would accept the penalty, making it third-and-20 from the Raiders 35.
Jacksonville's offense went back on the field, but a few seconds later, the officials called the first unsportsmanlike conduct penalty on Sapp, who said Wednesday he was angry the officials declined the penalty without checking first with the Raiders.
That gave the Jaguars an automatic first down, and Sapp started jawing at officials. Sapp and Burgess were both flagged for unsportsmanlike conduct penalties during the arguments. Sapp kept talking and then drew the third penalty and the ejection. Sapp had to be restrained by teammates and defensive line coach Keith Millard after being kicked out of the game.
Referee Jerome Bogar said after the game that Sapp was ejected for bumping umpire Garth DeFelice. Sapp denied making any contact with an official.
Sapp has had run-ins with officials in the past. Before a game against Washington in 2003, Sapp, then with Tampa Bay, reportedly bumped an official. Four days later he was fined $50,000 for what the league called "repeated violations of abusing officials."
Oakland Raiders Steve Smith Needs Our Help
Oakland Raiders running back Steve Smith needs the help of every Raider and football fan as he battles ALS or "Lou Gehrig's Disease". This video is about his struggle and what you can do to help. Pass it on.
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Benazir Bhutto is Murdered; Riots In Pakistan | Nuclear Stockpile Safety At Issue
Pakistan Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was shockingly assassinated by a gunman who then blew himself up, bring another 22 people to the end of their lives on earth. According to officials the terrorist organization Al Qaeda's claiming responsibility.
As Pakistan has an active nuclear stockpile, there's fear around the world that Radical Islamic Fundamenalists could gain control of those weapons.
Here's the news from CNN and YouTube videos:
(CNN) -- Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated Thursday in Rawalpindi, was the first female prime minister of Pakistan and of any Islamic nation. She led Pakistan from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996.
Benazir Bhutto died Thursday after a suicide bombing at a political rally in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
Bhutto, 54, spent eight years in self-imposed exile in Great Britain and Dubai after President Farooq Leghari dismissed her second administration amid accusations of corruption, intimidation of the judiciary, a breakdown of law and order, and undermining the justice system.
She was found guilty of corruption and sentenced to five years in prison. The conviction was later overturned but she remained in exile until this year.
She returned to Pakistan in October after President Pervez Musharraf signed an amnesty lifting corruption charges. Watch political history of Bhutto »
In a September 26 interview on CNN's "The Situation Room," Bhutto said she expected threats against her life as she prepared to lead a push for the restoration of democracy in Pakistan.
"After military dictatorship an anarchic situation developed, which the terrorists and Osama (bin Laden) have exploited," she told CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "They don't want democracy, they don't want me back, and they don't believe in women governing nations, so they will try to plot against me.
"But these are risks that must be taken. I'm prepared to take them," she said.
Bhutto narrowly escaped injury on October 18 when a suicide bombing near her convoy in Karachi killed 126 people.
"Soon thereafter, I was asked by authorities not to travel in cars with tinted windows -- which protected me from identification by terrorists -- or travel with privately armed guards," she wrote for CNN.com in November.
"I began to feel the net was being tightened around me when police security outside my home in Karachi was reduced, even as I was told that other assassination plots were in the offing."
"I decided not to be holed up in my home, a virtual prisoner," she wrote. "I went to my ancestral village of Larkana to pray at my father's grave. Everywhere, the people rallied around me in a frenzy of joy. I feel humbled by their love and trust."
Musharraf declared a state of emergency and placed Bhutto under house arrest twice in November as anti-government rallies grew in Rawalpindi. The arrest warrant was lifted November 16.
She filed a nomination paper for a parliamentary seat on November 25 and appeared headed for a power showdown with Musharraf before she was assassinated Thursday. See a timeline of Bhutto's political career »
Bhutto was the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, former president and prime minister of Pakistan, who was hanged in 1979 for the murder of a political opponent two years after he was ousted as prime minister in a military coup. Benazir Bhutto was the de facto leader of her father's Pakistan People's Party.
Her brother, Murtaza, was killed along with six others in a 1996 shootout with police at his home. Another brother, Shahnawaz, died mysteriously in France in 1985.
"I know the past is tragic, but I'm an optimist by nature," Bhutto told Blitzer in September. "I put my faith in the people of Pakistan, I put my faith in God. I feel that what I am doing is for a good cause, for a right cause -- to save Pakistan from extremists and militants and to build regional security.
"I know the danger is out there, but I'm prepared to take those risks."
Benazir Bhutto earned degrees from Radcliffe College and Oxford University and received an honorary degree from Harvard University in 1989.
She leaves her husband of 20 years, Asif Ali Zardari, two daughters and a son.
Videos,
Benazir Bhutto's last moments...
What are the implications for the US? We'll have more focusing on that question in what is a big, big mess.
As Pakistan has an active nuclear stockpile, there's fear around the world that Radical Islamic Fundamenalists could gain control of those weapons.
Here's the news from CNN and YouTube videos:
(CNN) -- Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated Thursday in Rawalpindi, was the first female prime minister of Pakistan and of any Islamic nation. She led Pakistan from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996.
Benazir Bhutto died Thursday after a suicide bombing at a political rally in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
Bhutto, 54, spent eight years in self-imposed exile in Great Britain and Dubai after President Farooq Leghari dismissed her second administration amid accusations of corruption, intimidation of the judiciary, a breakdown of law and order, and undermining the justice system.
She was found guilty of corruption and sentenced to five years in prison. The conviction was later overturned but she remained in exile until this year.
She returned to Pakistan in October after President Pervez Musharraf signed an amnesty lifting corruption charges. Watch political history of Bhutto »
In a September 26 interview on CNN's "The Situation Room," Bhutto said she expected threats against her life as she prepared to lead a push for the restoration of democracy in Pakistan.
"After military dictatorship an anarchic situation developed, which the terrorists and Osama (bin Laden) have exploited," she told CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "They don't want democracy, they don't want me back, and they don't believe in women governing nations, so they will try to plot against me.
"But these are risks that must be taken. I'm prepared to take them," she said.
Bhutto narrowly escaped injury on October 18 when a suicide bombing near her convoy in Karachi killed 126 people.
"Soon thereafter, I was asked by authorities not to travel in cars with tinted windows -- which protected me from identification by terrorists -- or travel with privately armed guards," she wrote for CNN.com in November.
"I began to feel the net was being tightened around me when police security outside my home in Karachi was reduced, even as I was told that other assassination plots were in the offing."
"I decided not to be holed up in my home, a virtual prisoner," she wrote. "I went to my ancestral village of Larkana to pray at my father's grave. Everywhere, the people rallied around me in a frenzy of joy. I feel humbled by their love and trust."
Musharraf declared a state of emergency and placed Bhutto under house arrest twice in November as anti-government rallies grew in Rawalpindi. The arrest warrant was lifted November 16.
She filed a nomination paper for a parliamentary seat on November 25 and appeared headed for a power showdown with Musharraf before she was assassinated Thursday. See a timeline of Bhutto's political career »
Bhutto was the daughter of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, former president and prime minister of Pakistan, who was hanged in 1979 for the murder of a political opponent two years after he was ousted as prime minister in a military coup. Benazir Bhutto was the de facto leader of her father's Pakistan People's Party.
Her brother, Murtaza, was killed along with six others in a 1996 shootout with police at his home. Another brother, Shahnawaz, died mysteriously in France in 1985.
"I know the past is tragic, but I'm an optimist by nature," Bhutto told Blitzer in September. "I put my faith in the people of Pakistan, I put my faith in God. I feel that what I am doing is for a good cause, for a right cause -- to save Pakistan from extremists and militants and to build regional security.
"I know the danger is out there, but I'm prepared to take those risks."
Benazir Bhutto earned degrees from Radcliffe College and Oxford University and received an honorary degree from Harvard University in 1989.
She leaves her husband of 20 years, Asif Ali Zardari, two daughters and a son.
Videos,
Benazir Bhutto's last moments...
What are the implications for the US? We'll have more focusing on that question in what is a big, big mess.
Barack Obama "Our Moment Is Now" Speech In Des Moines Iowa
Today, in Des Moines, Iowa, U.S. Senator Barack Obama gave what many have said -- including Time Magazine -- is the best speech of the presidential campaign. I also remind all that it was Senator Obama who stated months ago that our focus should be not in Iraq, but in Pakistan, where Prime Minister Butto was assassinated today.
Iowa Obama Supporter Victim Of Hate Crime But Police Say It's Not A Hate Crime? WTF?
You've got to read this; it will make your blood boil! How in heck can this not be a hate crime?
Local Obama supporter victim of vandalism, theft
By KEN BLACK, TIMES-REPUBLICAN
POSTED: December 27, 2007
Save | Print | Email | Read comments | Post a comment
For most, the backlash for supporting one presidential candidate over another is usually nothing more than a random, unappreciative comment — if that.
But one Marshalltown family woke up on Christmas Eve having to deal with much more than baking pies and wrapping a few additional presents.
Supporters of Barack Obama living on 25th Street reported a number of racial slurs and derogatory comments had been spray painted on their property. Further, the family’s Christmas presents were all stolen from a vehicle and a garage.
Chief Lon Walker confirms the police received the report Monday morning.
“We found vandalism to the house. When we got there, we found some racial things regarding presidential candidate Barack Obama,” he said.
Marie Ortiz has been working as a volunteer for the Obama campaign locally. She has volunteered her time in the office, going door to door, and has signs supporting Obama in her yard.
She has two children, ages 11 and 2.
But Christmas was not completely ruined for the youngsters. Campaign workers at the local Obama office came by on Christmas Eve with presents.
A neighbor also gave the family some money to replace some of the things that were lost.
“They were really a godsend,” Ortiz said.
Walker reported he considers the case somewhat unusual because there has been no other reports of such severe backlash for those outwardly supporting presidential candidates. Even among Obama backers, no other crime of this degree has been reported.
“We are treating it right now as if the derogatory racial comments were aimed toward Obama,” the chief said. “We’re not treating it as a hate crime because it does not appear as if the victims were the intended recipient of the racial slurs.”
The couple living at the home comes from a minority heritage.
However, Ortiz has a different opinion on the matter.
“A hate crime is a hate crime. I think it was probably racially motivated,” she said.
At this point, the police have little to go on. Some footprints were found in the snow and photographed, but a canvas of the neighborhood turned up no significant information.
“If anyone saw anything or knows of anything, we’d sure love to hear from them,” Walker said.
The Marshalltown Police Department can be contacted at 641-754-5725.
———
Contact Ken Black at 641-753-6611 or kblack@timesrepublican.com
Local Obama supporter victim of vandalism, theft
By KEN BLACK, TIMES-REPUBLICAN
POSTED: December 27, 2007
Save | Print | Email | Read comments | Post a comment
For most, the backlash for supporting one presidential candidate over another is usually nothing more than a random, unappreciative comment — if that.
But one Marshalltown family woke up on Christmas Eve having to deal with much more than baking pies and wrapping a few additional presents.
Supporters of Barack Obama living on 25th Street reported a number of racial slurs and derogatory comments had been spray painted on their property. Further, the family’s Christmas presents were all stolen from a vehicle and a garage.
Chief Lon Walker confirms the police received the report Monday morning.
“We found vandalism to the house. When we got there, we found some racial things regarding presidential candidate Barack Obama,” he said.
Marie Ortiz has been working as a volunteer for the Obama campaign locally. She has volunteered her time in the office, going door to door, and has signs supporting Obama in her yard.
She has two children, ages 11 and 2.
But Christmas was not completely ruined for the youngsters. Campaign workers at the local Obama office came by on Christmas Eve with presents.
A neighbor also gave the family some money to replace some of the things that were lost.
“They were really a godsend,” Ortiz said.
Walker reported he considers the case somewhat unusual because there has been no other reports of such severe backlash for those outwardly supporting presidential candidates. Even among Obama backers, no other crime of this degree has been reported.
“We are treating it right now as if the derogatory racial comments were aimed toward Obama,” the chief said. “We’re not treating it as a hate crime because it does not appear as if the victims were the intended recipient of the racial slurs.”
The couple living at the home comes from a minority heritage.
However, Ortiz has a different opinion on the matter.
“A hate crime is a hate crime. I think it was probably racially motivated,” she said.
At this point, the police have little to go on. Some footprints were found in the snow and photographed, but a canvas of the neighborhood turned up no significant information.
“If anyone saw anything or knows of anything, we’d sure love to hear from them,” Walker said.
The Marshalltown Police Department can be contacted at 641-754-5725.
———
Contact Ken Black at 641-753-6611 or kblack@timesrepublican.com
NFL DRAFT BIBLE moves Football Friday Podcast to Blogtalkradio.com
Well we have just outdone it this time. We will begin "live streaming"
our weekly shows in just a little over two weeks!
Our Page is www.blogtalkradio.com/nfldraftbible
our weekly shows in just a little over two weeks!
Our Page is www.blogtalkradio.com/nfldraftbible
The Perfect Bowl - NFL Lets NBC and CBS Show Game For Free - Profootballtalk.com
Leave it to Mike Florio to get the scoop on the deal allowing the Pats / Giants game to be shown on NBC and CBS
NBC, CBS GOT PATS-GIANTS FOR FREE
Well, we've done some sleuthing regarding the NFL's decision to simulcast the Pats-Giants game on Saturday night. And a source with knowledge of the situation tells us that NBC and CBS are paying a whopping . . . nothing . . . for the rights to the game.
Plus, the networks get to sell their own commercials.
Wow.
"NBC is the exclusive carrier of prime time 'over the air' NFL football," the source said, "which means if the game was moving to an 'over the air' station it had to be NBC."
But since NBC already has a game for the week (Tennessee at Indianapolis), the Pats-Giants game was partially owned by CBS as well, since CBS would have aired the game on Sunday afternoon, given that the AFC team in the interconference contest is the visitor.
Said the source: "Both parties had to agree to a simulcast or agree not to do it."
Another source tells us that ESPN, which pays the NFL $1.1 billion per year for the rights to Monday Night Football, wasn't even included in the discussions -- which officially confirms the four-letter network's status as the NFL's biatch.
NBC, CBS GOT PATS-GIANTS FOR FREE
Well, we've done some sleuthing regarding the NFL's decision to simulcast the Pats-Giants game on Saturday night. And a source with knowledge of the situation tells us that NBC and CBS are paying a whopping . . . nothing . . . for the rights to the game.
Plus, the networks get to sell their own commercials.
Wow.
"NBC is the exclusive carrier of prime time 'over the air' NFL football," the source said, "which means if the game was moving to an 'over the air' station it had to be NBC."
But since NBC already has a game for the week (Tennessee at Indianapolis), the Pats-Giants game was partially owned by CBS as well, since CBS would have aired the game on Sunday afternoon, given that the AFC team in the interconference contest is the visitor.
Said the source: "Both parties had to agree to a simulcast or agree not to do it."
Another source tells us that ESPN, which pays the NFL $1.1 billion per year for the rights to Monday Night Football, wasn't even included in the discussions -- which officially confirms the four-letter network's status as the NFL's biatch.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Paris Hilton's Grandfather Barron Gives 97 Percent Of Wealth To Charity
The Internet is buzzing over the news that Barron Hilton's pledging 97 percent of his wealth to charity. But in their silly frenzy to trash Paris over the idea that she's not going to be rich, they forgot one little detail: who's going to manage all that money?
Barron's currently the chairman of the foundation, but he could easily hand that role over to Paris.
Not so fast, folks.
Laure Manaudou Nude Photos Scandal Still Tops Technorati List
CLICK TO SEE VIDEO HERE
After over a week, the Laure Manadou Nude Photos scandal continues to rank as the number one search on Technorati and has captured the conversation of sports journalists around the World.
Meanwhile, The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the swimmer has barely eaten or slept since the posting of the photos. Plus, she now points the finger at Luca Martin, who has denied responsibility for putting them up for view online. But you woud think she'd know who took the photos as the person was aiming the camera while she was posing!
Without the scandal, Manadou is under a level of pressure not known to swimmers in the U.S. It seems as if every part of her life is under a microscope. Take this translated account:
In one season when are frays sporting life and private life for better and for worse, Laure Manaudou decided to keep it… worse. During a maintenance diffused Sunday December 23 on Stage 2, the champion it even qualified her year of catastrophic. For its last competition of the season (Interclubs of Montpellier) it appeared tired carrying out average times. She has also to undergo the pressure of the photographers, obliging it to cover her head with a towel when she had patience at the edge of the basin. ANTOINE BOURIAT/DSS
Stll, it seems that even after over a week, there's still considerable hunger for her image. The reasons for this are worth careful study.
NY Times Slams Hillary Clinton's "Experience" Claims
Well, it's about time. Today's NY Times really took Senator Clinton to the woodshed over her claims of experience, accusing her of speaking in broad generalities and not specifics about her time as First Lady, and in the process damaging the view that she's the most experienced presidential candidate. A must read.
The Long Run
The Résumé Factor: Those 8 Years as First Lady
By PATRICK HEALY
As first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton jaw-boned the authoritarian president of Uzbekistan to leave his car and shake hands with people. She argued with the Czech prime minister about democracy. She cajoled Roman Catholic and Protestant women to talk to one another in Northern Ireland. She traveled to 79 countries in total, little of it leisure; one meeting with mutilated Rwandan refugees so unsettled her that she threw up afterward.
But during those two terms in the White House, Mrs. Clinton did not hold a security clearance. She did not attend National Security Council meetings. She was not given a copy of the president’s daily intelligence briefing. She did not assert herself on the crises in Somalia, Haiti and Rwanda.
And during one of President Bill Clinton’s major tests on terrorism, whether to bomb Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, Mrs. Clinton was barely speaking to her husband, let alone advising him, as the Lewinsky scandal sizzled.
In seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, Mrs. Clinton lays claim to two traits nearly every day: strength and experience. But as the junior senator from New York, she has few significant legislative accomplishments to her name. She has cast herself, instead, as a first lady like no other: a full partner to her husband in his administration, and, she says, all the stronger and more experienced for her “eight years with a front-row seat on history.”
Her rivals scoff at the idea that her background gives her any special qualifications for the presidency. Senator Barack Obama has especially questioned “what experiences she’s claiming” as first lady, noting that the job is not the same as being a cabinet member, much less president.
And late last week, Mr. Obama suggested that more foreign policy experts from the Clinton administration were supporting his candidacy than hers; his campaign released a list naming about 45 of them, and said that others were not ready to go public. Mrs. Clinton quickly put out a list of 80 who were supporting her, and plans to release another 75 names on Wednesday.
Mrs. Clinton’s role in her most high-profile assignment as first lady, the failed health care initiative of the early 1990s, has been well documented. Yet little has been made public about her involvement in foreign policy and national security as first lady. Documents about her work remain classified at the National Archives. Mrs. Clinton has declined to divulge the private advice she gave her husband.
An interview with Mrs. Clinton, conversations with 35 Clinton administration officials and a review of books about her White House years suggest that she was more of a sounding board than a policy maker, who learned through osmosis rather than decision-making, and who grew gradually more comfortable with the use of military power.
Her time in the White House was a period of transition in foreign policy and national security, with the cold war over and the threat of Islamic terrorism still emerging. As a result, while in the White House, she was never fully a part of either the old school that had been focused on the Soviet Union and the possibility of nuclear war or the more recent strain of national security thinking defined by issues like nonstate threats and the proliferation of nuclear technology.
Associates from that time said that she was aware of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and what her husband has in recent years characterized as his intense focus on them, but that she made no aggressive independent effort to shape policy or gather information about the threat of terrorism.
She did not wrestle directly with many of the other challenges the next president will face, including managing a large-scale deployment — or withdrawal — of troops abroad, an overhaul of the intelligence agencies or the effort to halt the spread of nuclear weapons technology. Most of her exposure to the military has come since she left the White House through her seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
When it came to the regional conflicts in the Balkans, she, along with many officials, was cautious at first about supporting American military intervention, though she later backed air strikes against the Serbs and the NATO-led peacekeeping mission in Kosovo.
Her role mostly involved what diplomats call “soft power” — converting cold war foes into friends, supporting nonprofit work and good-will endeavors, and pressing her agenda on women’s rights, human trafficking and the expanded use of microcredits, tiny loans to help individuals in poor countries start small businesses.
Asked to name three major foreign policy decisions where she played a decisive role as first lady, Mrs. Clinton responded in generalities more than specifics, describing her strategic roles on trips to Bosnia, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, India, Africa and Latin America.
Asked to cite a significant foreign policy object lesson from the 1990s, Mrs. Clinton also replied with broad observations. “There are a lot of them,” she said. “The whole unfortunate experience we’ve had with the Bush administration, where they haven’t done what we’ve needed to do to reach out to the rest of the world, reinforces my experience in the 1990s that public diplomacy, showing respect and understanding of people’s different perspectives — it’s more likely to at least create the conditions where we can exercise our values and pursue our interests.”
Crisis at Home and Terror Afar
There were times, though, when Mrs. Clinton did not appear deeply involved in some of Mr. Clinton’s hardest moments on national security. He faced a major one in 1998 — the bombings of the United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and subsequently whether to bomb Afghanistan and Sudan. Just days after he acknowledged to his wife, the public and a grand jury that he had had a relationship with Monica Lewinsky, Mr. Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes on targets suspected to be a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and a chemical weapons factory in Sudan.
“It was the height of Monica, and they were barely talking to each other, if at all,” said one senior national security official who spoke with both Clintons during that time.
Asked if she talked to the president about the military choices or advised him, regardless of their personal problems, Mrs. Clinton was elliptical.
“I was very proud of him, he did what he thought he was supposed to do as president based on the best intelligence he had,” she said. “And he was well aware that there would be those that would certainly criticize him for it.”
Friends of Mrs. Clinton say that she acted as adviser, analyst, devil’s advocate, problem-solver and gut check for her husband, and that she has an intuitive sense of how brutal the job can be. What is clear, she and others say, is that Mr. Clinton often consulted her, and that Mrs. Clinton gained experience that Mr. Obama, John Edwards and every other candidate lack — indeed, that most incoming presidents did not have.
“In the end, she was the last court of appeal for him when he was making a decision,” said Mickey Kantor, a close Clinton friend who served as trade representative and commerce secretary. “I would be surprised if there was any major decision he made that she didn’t weigh in on.” (Mr. Clinton declined an interview request.)
But other administration officials, as well as opponents of Mrs. Clinton, are skeptical that the couple’s conversations and her 79 trips add up to unique experience that voters should reward. She was not independently judging intelligence, for the most part, or mediating the data, egos and agendas of a national security team. And, in the end, she did not feel or process the weight of responsibility.
Susan Rice, a National Security Council senior aide and State Department official under Mr. Clinton who now advises Mr. Obama, said Mrs. Clinton was not involved in “the heavy lifting of foreign policy.” Ms. Rice also took issue with a recent comment by a Clinton campaign official that Mrs. Clinton was “the face of the administration in foreign affairs.”
“Making tough decisions, responding to crises, making the bureaucracy implement decisions that they may not want to implement — that’s the hard part of foreign policy,” Ms. Rice said. “That’s not what Mrs. Clinton was asked or expected to do as first lady.”
Not Overstepping Her Bounds
Mrs. Clinton said in the interview that she was careful not to overstep her bounds on national security, relying instead on informal access. During the preinaugural transition, for instance, she sat in on some meetings about presidential appointments at the invitation of Warren Christopher, who directed the transition and became secretary of state in the first Clinton term. Participants recalled that she would mostly speak when Mr. Christopher called on her, and tended to make points about placing more women, minority members and allies in key jobs.
She said she did not attend National Security Council meetings, nor did she have a security clearance — though she was briefed on classified intelligence before going on some important diplomatic trips.
“I don’t recall attending anything formal like the National Security Council,” she said, “because I had direct access to all of the principals. I spent a lot of time with the national security adviser, the secretary of state, other officials on the security team for the president. I thought that was both more appropriate, but also more efficient.”
Mrs. Clinton declined to say if she ever read the President’s Daily Brief, a rundown of the latest intelligence and threats to national security provided to the president each day. “I would put that in the category of I-never-talk-about-what-I-talk-to-my-husband-about,” she said. But she indicated, and other administration officials confirmed, that Mr. Clinton would sometimes talk to her about contents of the briefing.
“Let me say generally, I’m very aware of and familiar with what the P.D.B.’s actually are, how they work, what they include,” she said. “And it wasn’t always through the Clinton administration — when I went to Bosnia, for example, I had a full briefing from the military commanders there about what the situation was like.”
Mrs. Clinton said she was “only tangentially involved” in Mr. Clinton’s first major overseas test, whether to send American soldiers after the Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid and his forces, a raid that ended in 18 American deaths. Asked if she had pressed for an invasion, she said she had acted “more as a sounding board” for Mr. Clinton.
The same was true during the military confrontation in Haiti in 1994, over restoring the exiled president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, which she favored and drew lessons from about joint command of American armed forces.
Asked about her role in Somalia and Haiti, Mr. Christopher said in an interview, “She wasn’t at any of the meetings in the Oval Office or cabinet room, and didn’t take any formal role that I saw.” Mr. Christopher is supporting Mrs. Clinton for president.
Nor was Mrs. Clinton a memorable player on Rwanda. Former White House officials say that no one — not the national security team, not the president, not the first lady — was seriously pushing for American military intervention to stop or slow the unfolding genocide there; the administration’s focus was on confronting the ethnic bloodshed in the Balkans. Mrs. Clinton declined to comment on Rwanda.
A Stand for Women’s Rights
The foreign policy achievement most often credited to Mrs. Clinton came in 1995, with her speech to the United Nations conference on women in Beijing, where she declared that “human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights.” She also tangled with Chinese officials, she said, and refused to bow to pressure to soften her remarks.
“She had a good balance of being firm on these issues, even if they clearly covered Chinese sins, but also understanding the need for good relations with China,” said Winston Lord, then the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, who briefed and accompanied her on the trip.
In visits to Bosnia and Kosovo after the American-led bombing of Serbia, she entered war zones before officials believed it was safe for her husband to go and acted as a spokeswoman for American interests rather than as a negotiator. Mrs. Clinton had become a champion of the bombing campaign, and many officials — including Madeleine K. Albright and Richard Holbrooke in the administration and Tony Blair, then Britain’s prime minister — turned to her at times to stiffen Mr. Clinton’s resolve to take on Serbia.
“Bill, you’re the president,” was a refrain that several administration officials said she used when Mr. Clinton was torn between his advisers.
Mrs. Clinton has disagreed with Mr. Obama’s support for presidential-level talks with leaders of nations like Iran and North Korea, but she said that the Balkans had taught her another lesson: know your enemy. She praised Gen. Wesley K. Clark, then the NATO commander, and Mr. Holbrooke, the administration’s envoy on the Balkans, for socializing and drinking with Serbia’s leader, Slobodan Milosevic, as a means of gauging his strengths.
“He’s there — you don’t learn something about him by pointing at him across the ocean,” she said. “If you do have to engage in a bombing campaign, you’re going to have a much better idea of how much pressure it’s going to take to finally break him.”
Her personal interests also drew her to Northern Ireland, where she believed she could help foster peace as a female leader bringing together women split by the sectarian divide. She played host to a memorable meeting, one of the first of its kind, of Catholic and Protestant women in Belfast. “It gave everybody a safe place to come together and start talking about what they had in common,” Mrs. Clinton said.
As she prepared to run for the Senate, Mrs. Clinton took increasing interest in Israel and Middle East peace, touchstones for Jewish voters, among others, in New York. She was not at the Camp David talks in the summer of 2000, but she did pepper the Middle East peace envoy, Dennis Ross, with questions, like whether the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat was too much the revolutionary to ever make peace, Mr. Ross recalled.
The Middle East situation led to Mrs. Clinton’s first big foreign policy-related problem as a candidate. In 1999, she sat silently, but with apparent discomfort, through an event on the West Bank as Suha Arafat, the wife of Mr. Arafat, accused Israel of poisoning Palestinian women and children with toxic gases.
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, who at that point seemed likely to be her Republican opponent in the 2000 Senate race, sharply criticized Mrs. Clinton for not confronting Mrs. Arafat over her remarks and for kissing her goodbye afterward; the incident also led some Jewish groups to be critical of the first lady.
Mrs. Clinton has often said that she learned from the experience and would not make the same mistake again.
The Long Run
The Résumé Factor: Those 8 Years as First Lady
By PATRICK HEALY
As first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton jaw-boned the authoritarian president of Uzbekistan to leave his car and shake hands with people. She argued with the Czech prime minister about democracy. She cajoled Roman Catholic and Protestant women to talk to one another in Northern Ireland. She traveled to 79 countries in total, little of it leisure; one meeting with mutilated Rwandan refugees so unsettled her that she threw up afterward.
But during those two terms in the White House, Mrs. Clinton did not hold a security clearance. She did not attend National Security Council meetings. She was not given a copy of the president’s daily intelligence briefing. She did not assert herself on the crises in Somalia, Haiti and Rwanda.
And during one of President Bill Clinton’s major tests on terrorism, whether to bomb Afghanistan and Sudan in 1998, Mrs. Clinton was barely speaking to her husband, let alone advising him, as the Lewinsky scandal sizzled.
In seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, Mrs. Clinton lays claim to two traits nearly every day: strength and experience. But as the junior senator from New York, she has few significant legislative accomplishments to her name. She has cast herself, instead, as a first lady like no other: a full partner to her husband in his administration, and, she says, all the stronger and more experienced for her “eight years with a front-row seat on history.”
Her rivals scoff at the idea that her background gives her any special qualifications for the presidency. Senator Barack Obama has especially questioned “what experiences she’s claiming” as first lady, noting that the job is not the same as being a cabinet member, much less president.
And late last week, Mr. Obama suggested that more foreign policy experts from the Clinton administration were supporting his candidacy than hers; his campaign released a list naming about 45 of them, and said that others were not ready to go public. Mrs. Clinton quickly put out a list of 80 who were supporting her, and plans to release another 75 names on Wednesday.
Mrs. Clinton’s role in her most high-profile assignment as first lady, the failed health care initiative of the early 1990s, has been well documented. Yet little has been made public about her involvement in foreign policy and national security as first lady. Documents about her work remain classified at the National Archives. Mrs. Clinton has declined to divulge the private advice she gave her husband.
An interview with Mrs. Clinton, conversations with 35 Clinton administration officials and a review of books about her White House years suggest that she was more of a sounding board than a policy maker, who learned through osmosis rather than decision-making, and who grew gradually more comfortable with the use of military power.
Her time in the White House was a period of transition in foreign policy and national security, with the cold war over and the threat of Islamic terrorism still emerging. As a result, while in the White House, she was never fully a part of either the old school that had been focused on the Soviet Union and the possibility of nuclear war or the more recent strain of national security thinking defined by issues like nonstate threats and the proliferation of nuclear technology.
Associates from that time said that she was aware of Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and what her husband has in recent years characterized as his intense focus on them, but that she made no aggressive independent effort to shape policy or gather information about the threat of terrorism.
She did not wrestle directly with many of the other challenges the next president will face, including managing a large-scale deployment — or withdrawal — of troops abroad, an overhaul of the intelligence agencies or the effort to halt the spread of nuclear weapons technology. Most of her exposure to the military has come since she left the White House through her seat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
When it came to the regional conflicts in the Balkans, she, along with many officials, was cautious at first about supporting American military intervention, though she later backed air strikes against the Serbs and the NATO-led peacekeeping mission in Kosovo.
Her role mostly involved what diplomats call “soft power” — converting cold war foes into friends, supporting nonprofit work and good-will endeavors, and pressing her agenda on women’s rights, human trafficking and the expanded use of microcredits, tiny loans to help individuals in poor countries start small businesses.
Asked to name three major foreign policy decisions where she played a decisive role as first lady, Mrs. Clinton responded in generalities more than specifics, describing her strategic roles on trips to Bosnia, Kosovo, Northern Ireland, India, Africa and Latin America.
Asked to cite a significant foreign policy object lesson from the 1990s, Mrs. Clinton also replied with broad observations. “There are a lot of them,” she said. “The whole unfortunate experience we’ve had with the Bush administration, where they haven’t done what we’ve needed to do to reach out to the rest of the world, reinforces my experience in the 1990s that public diplomacy, showing respect and understanding of people’s different perspectives — it’s more likely to at least create the conditions where we can exercise our values and pursue our interests.”
Crisis at Home and Terror Afar
There were times, though, when Mrs. Clinton did not appear deeply involved in some of Mr. Clinton’s hardest moments on national security. He faced a major one in 1998 — the bombings of the United States Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and subsequently whether to bomb Afghanistan and Sudan. Just days after he acknowledged to his wife, the public and a grand jury that he had had a relationship with Monica Lewinsky, Mr. Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes on targets suspected to be a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and a chemical weapons factory in Sudan.
“It was the height of Monica, and they were barely talking to each other, if at all,” said one senior national security official who spoke with both Clintons during that time.
Asked if she talked to the president about the military choices or advised him, regardless of their personal problems, Mrs. Clinton was elliptical.
“I was very proud of him, he did what he thought he was supposed to do as president based on the best intelligence he had,” she said. “And he was well aware that there would be those that would certainly criticize him for it.”
Friends of Mrs. Clinton say that she acted as adviser, analyst, devil’s advocate, problem-solver and gut check for her husband, and that she has an intuitive sense of how brutal the job can be. What is clear, she and others say, is that Mr. Clinton often consulted her, and that Mrs. Clinton gained experience that Mr. Obama, John Edwards and every other candidate lack — indeed, that most incoming presidents did not have.
“In the end, she was the last court of appeal for him when he was making a decision,” said Mickey Kantor, a close Clinton friend who served as trade representative and commerce secretary. “I would be surprised if there was any major decision he made that she didn’t weigh in on.” (Mr. Clinton declined an interview request.)
But other administration officials, as well as opponents of Mrs. Clinton, are skeptical that the couple’s conversations and her 79 trips add up to unique experience that voters should reward. She was not independently judging intelligence, for the most part, or mediating the data, egos and agendas of a national security team. And, in the end, she did not feel or process the weight of responsibility.
Susan Rice, a National Security Council senior aide and State Department official under Mr. Clinton who now advises Mr. Obama, said Mrs. Clinton was not involved in “the heavy lifting of foreign policy.” Ms. Rice also took issue with a recent comment by a Clinton campaign official that Mrs. Clinton was “the face of the administration in foreign affairs.”
“Making tough decisions, responding to crises, making the bureaucracy implement decisions that they may not want to implement — that’s the hard part of foreign policy,” Ms. Rice said. “That’s not what Mrs. Clinton was asked or expected to do as first lady.”
Not Overstepping Her Bounds
Mrs. Clinton said in the interview that she was careful not to overstep her bounds on national security, relying instead on informal access. During the preinaugural transition, for instance, she sat in on some meetings about presidential appointments at the invitation of Warren Christopher, who directed the transition and became secretary of state in the first Clinton term. Participants recalled that she would mostly speak when Mr. Christopher called on her, and tended to make points about placing more women, minority members and allies in key jobs.
She said she did not attend National Security Council meetings, nor did she have a security clearance — though she was briefed on classified intelligence before going on some important diplomatic trips.
“I don’t recall attending anything formal like the National Security Council,” she said, “because I had direct access to all of the principals. I spent a lot of time with the national security adviser, the secretary of state, other officials on the security team for the president. I thought that was both more appropriate, but also more efficient.”
Mrs. Clinton declined to say if she ever read the President’s Daily Brief, a rundown of the latest intelligence and threats to national security provided to the president each day. “I would put that in the category of I-never-talk-about-what-I-talk-to-my-husband-about,” she said. But she indicated, and other administration officials confirmed, that Mr. Clinton would sometimes talk to her about contents of the briefing.
“Let me say generally, I’m very aware of and familiar with what the P.D.B.’s actually are, how they work, what they include,” she said. “And it wasn’t always through the Clinton administration — when I went to Bosnia, for example, I had a full briefing from the military commanders there about what the situation was like.”
Mrs. Clinton said she was “only tangentially involved” in Mr. Clinton’s first major overseas test, whether to send American soldiers after the Somali warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid and his forces, a raid that ended in 18 American deaths. Asked if she had pressed for an invasion, she said she had acted “more as a sounding board” for Mr. Clinton.
The same was true during the military confrontation in Haiti in 1994, over restoring the exiled president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, which she favored and drew lessons from about joint command of American armed forces.
Asked about her role in Somalia and Haiti, Mr. Christopher said in an interview, “She wasn’t at any of the meetings in the Oval Office or cabinet room, and didn’t take any formal role that I saw.” Mr. Christopher is supporting Mrs. Clinton for president.
Nor was Mrs. Clinton a memorable player on Rwanda. Former White House officials say that no one — not the national security team, not the president, not the first lady — was seriously pushing for American military intervention to stop or slow the unfolding genocide there; the administration’s focus was on confronting the ethnic bloodshed in the Balkans. Mrs. Clinton declined to comment on Rwanda.
A Stand for Women’s Rights
The foreign policy achievement most often credited to Mrs. Clinton came in 1995, with her speech to the United Nations conference on women in Beijing, where she declared that “human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights.” She also tangled with Chinese officials, she said, and refused to bow to pressure to soften her remarks.
“She had a good balance of being firm on these issues, even if they clearly covered Chinese sins, but also understanding the need for good relations with China,” said Winston Lord, then the assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs, who briefed and accompanied her on the trip.
In visits to Bosnia and Kosovo after the American-led bombing of Serbia, she entered war zones before officials believed it was safe for her husband to go and acted as a spokeswoman for American interests rather than as a negotiator. Mrs. Clinton had become a champion of the bombing campaign, and many officials — including Madeleine K. Albright and Richard Holbrooke in the administration and Tony Blair, then Britain’s prime minister — turned to her at times to stiffen Mr. Clinton’s resolve to take on Serbia.
“Bill, you’re the president,” was a refrain that several administration officials said she used when Mr. Clinton was torn between his advisers.
Mrs. Clinton has disagreed with Mr. Obama’s support for presidential-level talks with leaders of nations like Iran and North Korea, but she said that the Balkans had taught her another lesson: know your enemy. She praised Gen. Wesley K. Clark, then the NATO commander, and Mr. Holbrooke, the administration’s envoy on the Balkans, for socializing and drinking with Serbia’s leader, Slobodan Milosevic, as a means of gauging his strengths.
“He’s there — you don’t learn something about him by pointing at him across the ocean,” she said. “If you do have to engage in a bombing campaign, you’re going to have a much better idea of how much pressure it’s going to take to finally break him.”
Her personal interests also drew her to Northern Ireland, where she believed she could help foster peace as a female leader bringing together women split by the sectarian divide. She played host to a memorable meeting, one of the first of its kind, of Catholic and Protestant women in Belfast. “It gave everybody a safe place to come together and start talking about what they had in common,” Mrs. Clinton said.
As she prepared to run for the Senate, Mrs. Clinton took increasing interest in Israel and Middle East peace, touchstones for Jewish voters, among others, in New York. She was not at the Camp David talks in the summer of 2000, but she did pepper the Middle East peace envoy, Dennis Ross, with questions, like whether the Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat was too much the revolutionary to ever make peace, Mr. Ross recalled.
The Middle East situation led to Mrs. Clinton’s first big foreign policy-related problem as a candidate. In 1999, she sat silently, but with apparent discomfort, through an event on the West Bank as Suha Arafat, the wife of Mr. Arafat, accused Israel of poisoning Palestinian women and children with toxic gases.
Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, who at that point seemed likely to be her Republican opponent in the 2000 Senate race, sharply criticized Mrs. Clinton for not confronting Mrs. Arafat over her remarks and for kissing her goodbye afterward; the incident also led some Jewish groups to be critical of the first lady.
Mrs. Clinton has often said that she learned from the experience and would not make the same mistake again.
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