Bill Clinton

TPM’s Josh Marshall, sparked by a photo of Sen. Al Franken at Obama’s health care speech this week, digs up an anecdote from early in his career when he was covering President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. The year was 1999 and Marshall found himself, somehow, sitting beside Franken in a Senate press room in the [...]

Update: CNN confirms that North Korea has released and pardoned journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling.
As a Fargo artist renders one local symbol of press freedom in stencils — journalist Roxana Saberi, who was accused of spying and jailed in Iran — another pair of American reporters remain imprisoned in North Korea. But there’s a [...]

Barack Obama’s White House would rather not fight or switch when it comes to making nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court. So it wouldn’t be surprising if Sonia Sotomayor’s clean slate on political campaign contributions weighed in her favor, against rivals who regularly cough up cash for candidates. It’s a hazard that Minnesota’s high-court justices [...]

President-elect Barack Obama is making good on his promise to include the opposition in his cabinet: He’ll be nominating Republican Rep. Ray LaHood as the next Secretary of Transportation. While some in the liberal blogosphere are outraged that Obama is naming a moderate Republican to the post, I’m not. I cast the first vote of my life for LaHood, a native of my hometown, Peoria, Illinois. And many others, from Central Illinois Democrats to my conservative mom, a self-described “dittohead,” are calling LaHood a solid, pragmatic choice.

More than 4,000 supporters of Al Franken and Barack Obama gathered at the Minneapolis Convention Center Thursday evening to hear President Bill Clinton stump for the DFL Senate candidate. Clinton spoke for 35 minutes, urging Minnesotans to elect Obama and Franken.

Details and a MnIndy slideshow inside.

Minnesota’s top 100 political donors have pitched in a collective $4.1 million to federal candidates since the start of 2007. That’s around $40,000 per family. In this week’s installment of The Crunch, we look at donors ranked 21st through 30th — a field that includes Vance Opperman, dubbed in 1998 “the most powerful man you’ve never heard of,” who, with his wife, comes in at number 27; gay marriage foe Robert Cummins (#21); and, Minnesota’s 24th most generous giver, Timberwolves owner Glen Taylor and his wife, who’ve contributed nearly $50,000 to state and federal GOP candidates and causes this cycle.

In this edition of the Schultz Report audiocast–and we’ll have another tomorrow, after Barack Obama’s Democratic convention-closing speech in Denver tonight–we examine developments at this week’s DNC. Hamline University political science prof and Minnesota politics analyst David Schultz gives the Democrats mixed grades for their handling of the party’s quadrennial infomercial. “The convention in some [...]

I spent the evening in the scrum of the floor. Strangely it’s not the best vantage point from which to come up with a coherent analysis of the evening. Did Bill Clinton stick a shiv in Barack Obama or anoint him the next black president? Did Joe Biden’s tale of growing up a stuttering outsider in Scranton, Pennsylvania come off as hokum or populist humility? You’re so close to the action that it’s difficult to determine. And the true believers in the Pepsi Center treat every uttered word as if it came directly from God. So I offer up instead a gallery of photos from the evening.

Todd Purdum’s Vanity Fair hit piece on Bill Clinton includes this juicy nugget starring WCCO radio host Eleanor Mondale:
In the run-up to the 1996 re-election campaign, when Clinton took one of his many fund-raising trips to California, I teasingly asked his press secretary, Mike McCurry, whether the president intended to go jogging with Eleanor Mondale, [...]

This 2004 speech by Bill Clinton, unearthed by Josh Marshall, is a readymade campaign ad… for Barack Obama.