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Return of the ugly American
President Clinton's choice of Carol Moseley-Braun as ambassador to New Zealand elevates a hypocrite who put her fiancé's financial gain ahead of concern for human-rights violations.
By Bruce Shapiro
[11/09/99]

Hot temper or just hot air?
Who says John McCain doesn't have the temperament to be president?
By Arianna Huffington
[11/08/99]

"I'm guilty of obeying the laws of the creator"
A white supremacist admits he killed a gay couple, but claims the Bible made him do it.
By Gary Delsohn and Sam Stanton
[11/08/99]

Internet chat with the president
Clinton hosts the first-ever presidential Webcast.
By Anthony York
[11/08/99]

The long shot
Gary Bauer talks about why he's running for president.
By Susan Crabtree
[11/08/99]

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Moderated by Al From, president and founder of the DLC, the town hall meeting also included onetime wunderkind Marc Andreessen, the founder of Netscape; as well as DLCers like San Jose Mayor Ron Gonzales; New Hampshire Gov. Jeanne Shaheen; Bethlehem, Penn., Mayor Donald Cunningham, Jr; Wisconsin Assemblyman Antonio Riley; and a particularly chatty Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.

For all of its novelty, the meeting felt like a political love-in, with everyone agreeing that technology is wonderful and that President Clinton is super-duper and everyone participating in the town hall chat is just awesome.

The whole event seemed scripted from start to finish, save for the computer snafus. ("Mayor Cunningham, can you hear me?" From asked. "We lose him? This is the new technology.") Though the buffering glitches indicated there are still a few kinks to be worked out in the technology, sponsored by Excite, the human filtering system that weeded out all but the lightest-thrown softball questions seemed to be operating at 100 percent.

Clinton started by locking eyes with the teleprompter to give his intro speech, the same one he's been delivering since he was a toddler in Hope, Arkansas "For too long, I felt that both our parties had put ideology above ideas that actually worked," he said. "For too long, government seemed to either try to solve all of our problems or to use the failures of government as an excuse to do nothing at all."

For too long, that is, until the Clinton-Gore team came and fixed it all. And one of the ways in which he did this was through the Net.

"When I became president, in January of 1993, the Internet was the province of scientists funded by government research projects," Clinton said in his prepared remarks. "Back then there were only 130 sites on the Web, only 1.3 million computers connected to the Internet. Today, over 56 million computers are connected to the Internet, and there are 3.6 million Web sites. We're adding new pages at the rate of over 100,000 an hour."

Clinton noted that he and Vice President Al Gore had worked closely to "unleash the power of information technology and to bridge the digital divide," working to connect the nation's classrooms to the Internet, 51 percent which are connected as of last year. He pointed out the successes of E-commerce, noting that 20,000 Americans now made a living by swapping various items on eBay. Many of these swapping entrepreneurs "used to be on welfare," the president claimed.

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