Should the Spring air the Clinton videotape in it's entireity?

Or maybe we should edit it like the play by play of a football game. With commentary and Clinton gaining and losing yardage on each question?

i wanted to do a MST3000 or Beavis and Butthead treatment on the tape, or at least the good parts!

That sounds FABULOUS, Ray! Can you DO that?

from TIME online So you thought the "server not responding" and "site too busy" messages that followed the Starr report's online release last Friday were fun? Just wait till you see what four hours of streaming video of President Clinton's testimony does to the World Wide Web. When millions of curious web surfers come to news sites this time around, they won't be doing anything as simple as calling up a 445-page document, poking around (or printing it out) and logging off. They'll be staying connected for hours, bulging t eir bandwidth with pipe-clogging video data, and giving webmasters everywhere a week's worth of migraines. It's no small mercy, then, that partisan wrangling in Congress is set to delay the video's release until early Saturday -- when most of the office surfers are at home and won't be tempted by their employers' T-1 connections. What's more, cable stations are maneuvering to take most of the strain. CNN, Fox and MSNBC all plan to run the tape live, unedited and unabridged, just as soon as they get the feed. The big three TV networks are still undecided, but it's quite possible that Saturday morning cartoons w ll be ditched in favor of the President trying to duck explicit sex questions. It's also possible that millions of families will suddenly discover that they know how to use the "off" button, after all.

well, that will be me. even though i'm curious, i don't really want to know and i certainly don't want my kids watching any of that.

Kids are gonna find this stuff, it will be all over tv and the net on guess when? Saturday morning most likely. "This cartoon is being pre-empted by the following special broadcast . . . "

now that's really sick. they should do it later in the day.

From AP: WASHINGTON �The House Judiciary Committee voted today to release the videotape of President Clinton's grand jury testimony and an additional 2,800 pages of material from Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's investigation. After long hours of partisan wrangling over two days, Committee Chairman Henry Hyde said the committee agreed to release the material after deleting 120 portions deemed sensitive or offensive. Just when the material would be made public was left unclear but Hyde said a timetable was likely to be announced later today. Officials said it was unlikely anything would be released before Monday. The White House immediately denounced the committee's action. "This appears to be a rush to prejudgment and an effort to get out the most salacious material at the speed of light, not at the proper pace of justice," spokesman James Kennedy said. "But in the end it will have to be the American people who will have to see if this indeed has been a fair process or a partisan effort to embarrass the president." Hyde, R-Ill., said the committee sessions were civil but that bipartisanship "doesn't include surrender to everything the Democrats want." "There was a general view among the Democrats not to reveal anything, and there was a general view among Republicans to reveal as much as possible," Hyde said. He added that Republicans agreed to "responsible redactions to protect people whose names and vital statistics and involvement in this was very peripheral." Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., immediately denounced the committee's action as "an effort to discredit the president." He said virtually every vote was a party-line vote. Hyde said there was disagreement within the committee on about 20 deletions, and those were settled along party lines. Frank said that on those votes, Republicans forced release of more salacious material than Democrats favored. "What we have is a very one-sided, partisan effort to release material before the president gets a chance to review it," he said. Rep. Bill McCollum, R-Fla., said it was necessary to release the material because "the president has put things in dispute." As the committee deliberated, Republican congressional leaders appeared before a meeting of the Christian Coalition and told the conservative group they would press ahead with their investigation of the president. "There is no constitutional crisis, there is only a Clinton crisis," said Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss. "We will do our duty," said House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga. "We in the House won't do an inch more than our duty for partisanship and we don't do an inch less than our duty out of intimidation." Republicans argued the additional material is relevant to indicate whether Clinton committed perjury when he testified about his sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Clinton has argued the sexual acts involved did not meet the legal definition of sexual relations approved in the Paula Jones civil case. White House officials complained today that Republican congressmen, meeting in private Thursday, had overruled their own staff's agreement to limit the release of sexually explicit material. Also today, the Democratic and Republican heads of their respective Senate fund-raising committees pledged not to funnel campaign money to candidates who engage in personal attacks on their opponents. Their House counterparts made the same promise a day earlier. Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said use of revelations about politicians' personal lives could "turn our democracy into a nuclear waste dump of slander, gossip, innuendo and cheap moralizing about other people's problems." "If we do not show some restraint in this cycle, the institutions of democracy will suffer," added Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb. The partisan disputes went beyond arguments over what material to release. �Top House Republicans demanded an FBI inquiry into an alleged "systematic attempt to intimidate" Hyde and other lawmakers, and the agency pledged to take "appropriate steps" in response. Republicans have blamed the White House for an online magazine story exposing a sexual relationship between Hyde and a married woman in the 1960s. Presidential aides denied involvement. �Senior committee Democrat John Conyers wrote Hyde a letter, protesting the chairman's acting without his knowledge to seek a copy of Clinton's videotaped deposition in Mrs. Jones' sexual harassment lawsuit, which the president gave Jan. 17. Hyde sent a letter signed only by himself to U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright in Little Rock, Ark., asking for the tape, and later told reporters he expects it ultimately will be made public. The judge's law clerk said she was making arrangements to comply. �Clinton's attorney, David Kendall, said in a statement that Starr had earlier refused a request to destroy the Aug. 17 videotape after it was viewed by a grand juror who was absent for the president's testimony. The only purpose for preserving it, the lawyer contended, "was to ensure its public release and embarrass the president." Starr, in response, said, "We concluded that we could not comply with this request. Federal law required us to transfer to the House ... the videotape, along with all other substantial and credible information that President Clinton had committed perjury and other felonies. ... We cannot and will not destroy evidence of a crime." Democrats also made proposals to make the information available to Clinton before it is released publicly, and to hold up release until Sept. 28 � the House-set deadline for disclosure � so more committee members could review the material. A number of panel members have not seen the videotape or plowed through thousands of pages of material backing up Starr's report, which said he had found evidence of potentially impeachable offenses in 11 separate instances. Even before the committee met on Thursday, TV outlets were making plans for airing the four-hour grand jury tape of the president.

And Times take, to show how even more the American public is going to be screwed With the minority steamrollered, the release shouldn't take long. It will be followed closely by a video of the President's January 17 testimony in the Paula Jones case, which Hyde went out of his way to acquire from Arkansas judge Susan Webber Wright. After that comes the release of thousands more pages of raw undisclosed material that Rep. Chris Cannon of Utah described as "stuff that makes me blush, makes me sick to my stomach." Is America any keener to see it yet? Not according to a CNN/TIME poll rele sed Friday, in which 67 percent said it was a bad idea to broadcast Clinton's video testimony. Considering the ugly mood on the Hill right now, that's one majority that won't matter.

(*yawn*) I should be outraged or something, but instead I'm just bored by the whole thing.

it's getting like the OJ trial, you know? just be done with it already...

hey, this topic is the most I've read and/or seen about the whole thing, myself...

******************************************************************** EDITORIAL ******************************************************************** Welcome to another weekly edition of Nua Internet Surveys. This newsletter provides information on surveys and reports on the Internet, and is brought to you by Nua - one of Europe's leading Internet consultancies and developers. When the Internet held up to an unprecedented surge in traffic on Friday last, initially I felt proud. Proud that 20 million Americans had used the Internet to gain full access to information which they could not have accessed so readily in any other medium. And proud that the Internet held up to the onslaught in traffic. Like the opening night of the world's biggest play, the Net performed fabulously. The publication of the Starr report and the subsequent visiting of the site by 12 percent of the population seemed to be a testament that the Internet is no longer the domain of weirdos, computer geeks, dodgy entrepreneurs and sex fiends. Rather, it has become the medium chosen by Congress to publish one of the most controversial documents in the history of US politics, all in the name of constitutional rights and the Freedom of Information Act. Then I began to think about the nature of the document and the real reason why those 20 million people (of whom some two thirds were male) scrambled online to access it. While the decision to publish the Starr report online was a huge endorsement of the Internet itself, the report's real attraction for millions of Americans was in its sexual explicitness. Ordinary American people logged on to find out what exactly happened in that dark corridor next to the Oval Office. The report's publishers knew that. If publishing the report is anything other than an attempt to humiliate the leader of the US, and effectively the leader of the Western World, I'll eat my socks. If that document was published purely for the good of the American people, because it was in their interest to know the "full facts" or because it was within their constitutional rights, I'll eat my PC. In my opinion the Net was sullied by the US government's publication of that report. Incidentally, it was a Republican politician, Senator John McCain from Arizona, who advocated the mandatory introduction of filters to all schools and libraries benefiting from State grants. This proposed legislation was in the interests of protecting children from the alleged abundance of "unsuitable" content readily available to children on the Net. There was no warning on the Starr Report even though the bulk of the document comprised lurid sexual details involving the President. It seems that the very same legislators who in the past have become very animated about "immoral" and "indecent" content published on the Net, have been the first to use the Net to expose the private life (read sex life) of one of the world's most powerful men. Perhaps they are still not able to think of the Internet without thinking "sexual perversion". It's a pity that this is the first major government document to go online in such a public and well publicised way. It's pretty obvious that the surge in traffic was fuelled by the report's sexual content. And it's pretty obvious that those who fought to get it published online wanted to ridicule President Clinton and force him to resign. In the end, this week's much publicised use of the Net by US government fficials does little to quench the theory that the Internet is home to sex maniacs, pornographers, weirdos and paedophiles (sic). A final note: I am not American, and I don't have any right, or wish, to access that document. Yet my Internet experience was held to ransom for up to six hours on the day of the report. The Internet exists outside of the US and the use of the medium for what essentially amounts to US domestic problems is, in my opinion, arrogant and irresponsible. Is mise le meas, Sorcha Ni hEilidhe. mailto:surveys@nua.ie

That was a drop in the bucket compared to the load that will hit us in about an hour from now.

I found the tape utterly boring.

A very cautious man doing very lawyerly things. Playing it safe. Calculated and cool for the most party. We didn't bother airing it. It got enough airplay everywhere else.

He was lying through his teeth all the way, knowing the American people will believe him - after all it is the land of make-believe...