NEW YORK (AFP) - Former US president Bill Clinton -- now a globe-trotting activist who seems far from retiring, and never far from the limelight -- turned 60, celebrating with family and friends despite his professed distaste for becoming a sexagenarian.

"President Clinton will be spending his birthday Saturday with good friends, his wife and daughter," spokesman Joe Perry said Friday. Perry did not say whether the celebration would take place at Clinton's home in New York or elsewhere.

But Clinton, something of a symbol of his baby-boomer generation in the United States, has not really warmed to slowing down, or to the upper ranges of age.

"In just a few days, I will be 60 years old. I hate it, but it's true," he told reporters this week on the sidelines of a world
AIDS conference in Toronto.

"For most of my working life, I was the youngest person doing what I was doing. Then one day I woke up and I was the oldest person in every room," said Clinton, who was a youthful 46 when he was first elected president, in 1992.

In honor of Saturday's milestone, the William J. Clinton Foundation website offered visitors a chance to wish the former president a happy birthday and make a donation to his charitable foundation.

"Now that I have more days behind me than ahead of me, I try to wake up with a discipline of gratitude every day," Clinton -- who left office in 2001 and has since undergone heart surgery and devoted himself to his foundation -- said in Toronto.

"Discipline" might not be the word his critics most immediately associate with Clinton, who was famous for his fast-food chomping and impeached for perjury concerning his affair with a White House intern.

But he seems to have followed the productive post-presidency plan developed by Jimmy Carter, a Nobel laureate whose good works for democracy, housing and development have left a lasting legacy at home and abroad.

Clinton, whose wife, Hillary, is a US senator representing New York, started a foundation that keeps him engrossed in tackling the challenges of
HIV/AIDS and global poverty, redeveloping US cities and battling climate change.

A former chubby kid, he has even launched an initiative to encourage better nutrition for US youth.

"The brush with death I had maybe had the biggest impact of all" on his decision to take up the cause of combating childhood obesity, Clinton told CNN television last year, recalling his quadruple heart bypass surgery in September 2004.

"I realized that one more time I've been given another chance, and I wanted to make the most of it."

The charismatic man from Hope, Arkansas has lived his own American dream, having been born into poverty on August 19, 1946 and never knowing his father -- who died before he was born -- only to make a remarkable odyssey to the White House.

While still relatively youthful, Clinton -- a veteran of two tumultuous White House terms -- was not the youngest man to be elected to the White House. That distinction belongs to his hero, John F. Kennedy, who was 43 when he took office. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.

Theodore Roosevelt was even younger than Clinton or Kennedy -- 42 years old -- when he took office in 1901 upon the assassination of William McKinley.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060819...e_060819163318

Have a great birthday Mr. President!!

In spite of your faults you sure were a WAY better president than that moron we have now.

Hail Bill!

You know in the years to come society will glorify him to God status since we have a complete idiot to compare him to now.

Bill: humbly born, brilliant, cosmopolitan, charming
W: born with a silver spoon up his ass, intellect of a toddler, not good with complex thoughts, boorish

If liberals supported their intellectual arrogance with generosity maybe the world would be a more gracious place; so brilliance doesn't appear to return much to those who have so little, by those who do so well. Bill lead a very greedy era where the rich were not inspired to share their winnings with those who they like to speak of as "humbly born". Prove brilliance feeds more people during times of prosperity, whereas, a "humbly born" person who busts their arses like Bill can go farther on a paycheck than a government subsidy. Both Bill and "W" were subsidized. How much brilliance does that show, really?

Where the real brilliance shows up is how they keep your attention on their importance rather than improving your own station in life. When you feel smarter, or more righteous, or gifted with street smarts greater than the President of the United States--by your own criticism--they gotcha! Both parties! And the media giants--who own polititians--because it all sells! And you feel superior? This is what a narcissist loves to be fed: the feeling of superiority. You're brilliant! More so than even the President. Now...who wins?

Unplug the media and have a good life. Leave Bill and Hilary, and George, enough slack and they'll hang us all. They can, because you compare your life to theirs-- as if it was really a comparison. Happiness is relative. They have you believing that their screwed-up lives are worse than yours. In this regard George is brilliant.

He's not so old I don't still want to tongue his ass as he's fucking some hot babe.