As many of you are aware, McCain has a new ad up comparing Barack Obama with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Some say this is Harold Ford 2006 redux, others are just wondering if Karl Rove is fully in control of McCain strategy these days. Here is the ad that McCain has put up. It has aired only a few times on actual ad buys. It's another media ad. The whole point is to get the cable talkers to air it for free.
The politico has a story tonight out that reveals that Ron Fournier, the DC bureau chief of the associated press almost became a communications staffer for John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign.
In October 2006, the McCain team approached Fournier about joining the fledgling operation, according to a source with knowledge of the talks. In the months that followed, said a source, Fournier spoke about the job possibility with members of McCain’s inner circle, including political aides Mark Salter, John Weaver and Rick Davis.
Salter, who remains a top McCain adviser, said in an e-mail to Politico that Fournier was considered for "a senior advisory role" in communications.
April 2, 2008
McCain medical records to be released in May
Posted: 03:00 PM ET
(CNN) — The McCain campaign said Wednesday the Arizona senator's medical records will no longer be released by April 15. They now say the new timetable is "sometime in May."
UPDATE: The McCain campaign tells CNN the reason for the delay is because they want to gather all his doctors for a press conference to answer reporters' questions and May is the soonest that can be done.
The only delay is to get the doctors all together. They work hard. Shit happens.
It turns out that John McCain did meet with both Bud Paxton and Vicki Iseman before writing letters to the FEC on their behalf according to Bud Paxton himself in a Washington Post story tonight.
Paxson said he talked with McCain in his Washington office several weeks before the Arizona Republican wrote the letters to the FCC urging a rapid decision on Paxson's quest to acquire a Pittsburgh television station.
Paxson also recalled that his lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, attended the meeting in McCain's office and that Iseman helped arrange the meeting. "Was Vicki there? Probably," Paxson said in an interview with The Washington Post today. "The woman was a professional. She was good. She could get us meetings."
If you were building a Republican presidential candidate from a kit, imagine what pieces you might use: an athletic build, ramrod posture, Reaganesque hair, a charismatic speaking style and a crisp dark suit. You'd add a beautiful wife and family, a wildly successful business career and just enough executive government experience. You'd pour in some old GOP bromides - spending cuts and lower taxes - plus some new positions for 2008: anti-immigrant rhetoric and a focus on faith.
Add it all up and you get Mitt Romney, a disquieting figure who sure looks like the next president and most surely must be stopped.
If you followed only his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, you might imagine Romney as a pragmatic moderate with liberal positions on numerous social issues and an ability to work well with Democrats. If you followed only his campaign for president, you'd swear he was a red-meat conservative, pandering to the religious right, whatever the cost. Pay attention to both, and you're left to wonder if there's anything at all at his core.
Since the late 1970's when James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries had this idea that fundamentalists should be involved in politics, there has been an alliance between the Club for Growth wing of the GOP and those who believe Jesus rode on dinosaurs.
Fundamentalists gave Republicans their votes to politicians who cut taxes on the rich, outsourced jobs, and acted against their best interests. In exchange, these politicians were supposed to do something about evolution in schools, abortion, and homosexuality.
After the scuffle between Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney in the Youtube debate over undocumented workers being used by Willard "Mitt" Romney, enterprising reporters at the Boston Globe decided to see who was doing his yard work these days. Tagg is too damned lazy to mow apparently.
Standing on stage at a Republican debate on the Gulf Coast of Florida last week, Mitt Romney repeatedly lashed out at rival Rudy Giuliani for providing sanctuary to illegal immigrants in New York City.
Yet, the very next morning, on Thursday, at least two illegal immigrants stepped out of a hulking maroon pickup truck in the driveway of Romney's Belmont house, then proceeded to spend several hours raking leaves, clearing debris from Romney's tennis court, and loading the refuse back on to the truck.
In fact, their work was part of a regular pattern. Despite a Globe story in Dec. 2006 that highlighted Romney's use of illegal immigrants to tend to his lawn, Romney continued to employ the same landscaping company – until today. The landscaping company, in turn, continued to employ illegal immigrants.
I don't believe that Bush and Cheney "lied us into war." If the Democrats who say they did really believe it, though, then they ought to do something about it. Surely taking the country into war on pretenses they knew were false counts as a high crime and misdemeanor.
If they don't believe it, on the other hand, they are spreading some poisonous lies for partisan advantage. Good for Kucinich for having the courage of his sincere, though loopy, convictions.
As you may be aware, the house today overwhelmingly condemned Move-On. Steny Hoyer and Rahm Emmanuel voted with the majority (Pelosi, per custom, didn't vote).
Picture it being the year 1995. Republicans just take over the House, and Rush Limbaugh or somebody at the Heritage foundation say something that offends democrats.
At the age of eighteen, Bobby Jindal converted from Hinduism to conservative Catholicism. It was the move that made his career. Being a dark pigmented conservative in a Louisiana that was turning Republican was like having money in the bank. At the age of twenty-four Jindal was named head of Health and Human Services for the entire state. Three years later, he was named head of the statewide university system. Once again, he is running for Governor, and there is a good shot he will win.
The Daily Kingfish has an in depth article about the latest trials and tribulations of Jindal. When his campaign heard word that the democrats were about to launch a series of attack ads against him, they said that his religious faith and the whole exorcism things was out of bounds. Funnily enough, the democrats weren't attacking his faith but the exorcism thing did intrigue people to look into the matter.
LAST MONTH, Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) announced progress in reducing the state police's DNA testing backlog. Now the Governor's Office of Crime Control and Prevention is looking into a proposal to expand mandatory DNA testing to include not only convicted felons and certain misdemeanants (as under current law) but everyone arrested in Maryland, pre-conviction. The DNA identifiers could then be run against a national database of DNA evidence for potential matches in unsolved crimes.
This is from an editorial in the Washington Post that favors this proposal with some guidelines which are inadequate to the loss of privacy that this program will generate. This new law can be exploited in several easy ways by police officers and district attorneys.
Thankfully, John Bolton is no longer the United States Ambassador to the United Nations. Today he writes an op-edin the Financial Times that has the nuance of a junior high school angst power play but with less charm. He is telling the UK that we won't wear the charm bracelet they gave us if they also make friends with that Europe kid. I am not reducing this to a banal generalization. This is exactly what Bolton is saying.
In fact, whether the "special relationship" grows stronger or weaker lies entirely in British hands. Americans across the political spectrum are content to keep it as it is and has been essentially since the second world war. That does not mean that the two countries always agree, nor has it ever meant that Britain is a poodle following America’s lead, self-flagellating Brits notwithstanding.
"It's a difficult decision to make and one we understand is significant for the people affected, so we're doing everything we can to help them transition beyond Dell," spokesman David Frink told the Roseburg News-Review.
He said the company announced plans in May to reduce employment worldwide by 10 percent. He said the Roseburg location is the only such center in the United States to close.
Frink said the closure has nothing to do with a lawsuit filed by employees of the Roseburg center in February, claiming Dell violated federal and state wage and hour laws.
Gregory Paul, a noted paleontologist, dabbled a bit in religion as well. He posited a theory that the more a nation believes in God, the worse off they were when it came to social ills such as homicide, crime, and high rates of unwanted pregnancies.
There does appear to be a relationship.Paul compared 18 western nations and religiosity did correlate with the quality of life in nations. He notes that the nation in Europe with the highest level of religiosity, Portugal, looks more like the United States when it comes to crime statistics than the rest of Europe.
"Surely they understand it's not going to be well-received," Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott told NBC's "Meet the Press." "I think it will damage (their) credibility. It looks like they are hiding something."
"Use of that is reserved just for national security or clearly national interest issues when there's a conversation between the president and his aides, but in this case, for instance, (White House aide) Sidney Blumenthal is not even an attorney. He can't even say there's an attorney-client relationship," Lott said.
In today's Washington Post, there is a guest columnby Paul Howard stating that 'Sicko' didn't tell the whole truth about our health care system. For example, Derek Fisher of the Utah Jazz, has a daughter with cancer in her eye. She is getting world class treatment for it in the USA, but Michael Moore doesn't want to tell you about good stories like these.
Fisher, who has excellent health care, andmade $5,883,600 in salarylast year should be very happy that there is excellent care for his daughter, and he is able to take the year off as an NBA player to focus on her health. How this story has anything to do with what 'Sicko' brought up is just beyond me though.
It's been a slow week in a hot era. I found myself Thursday watching President Bush's news conference and thinking what it is about him, real or perceived, that makes people who used to smile at the mention of his name now grit their teeth.
He's in a good mood. There was the usual teasing, the partly aggressive, partly joshing humor, the certitude. He doesn't seem to be suffering which is jarring. Presidents in great enterprises that are going badly suffer: Loncoln, LBJ with his head in his hands. Why doesn't Mr. Bush? Every major domestic initiative of his second term has been ill thought through and ended in failure. His Iraq leadership has failed. His standing is lower than any previous president's since polling began.
In today's Washington Post, there is a 
