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| Sources: McCain May Declare VP Pick This Week |
by FOXNews.com Monday, July 21, 2008   July 21: John McCain at the Maine Military Museum in South Portland, Maine. (AP Photo) Very well-placed sources told FOX News late Monday that John McCain’s campaign has had discussions in the recent past about the merits of the expected Republican presidential nominee unveiling his choice of a running mate this week while rival Barack Obama is overseas. One source with direct knowledge of the senator’s thinking and of the campaign’s machinations said no announcement will be made Tuesday morning but another top insider suggested the media not throw cold water on the idea that McCain could announce his vice presidential pick this week. Still a third source said unless McCain wakes up in the next two days with a decision, chances are “remote.” Asked about the odds of announcing a vice presidential pick on Tuesday, McCain brushed off the question during a plane ride with reporters to New Hampshire, only giving a mischievous grin. McCain did tell reporters that he wants to make a choice as early as possible and make sure that the person doesn’t detract from that ticket. He separately noted former rival and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s success in the battleground state of Michigan, in which he beat McCain by 9 points. But traveling Press Secretary Brooke Buchanan said no announcements would be made late Monday. Senior adviser Mark Salter said he had “no comment and he is not authorized to say anything” regarding the number two pick.”... |
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Posted by editor on Tuesday, July 22 @ 00:48:41 PDT (61 reads)
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| Iraq Leader Maliki Supports Obama's Withdrawal Plans |
June 19, 2008
Der Spiegel
'AS SOON AS POSSIBLE'In an interview with SPIEGEL, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said Barack Obama's 16 month timeframe for a withdrawal from Iraq is the right one.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki supports US presidential candidate Barack Obama's plan to withdraw US troops from Iraq within 16 months. When asked in and interview with SPIEGEL when he thinks US troops should leave Iraq, Maliki responded "as soon as possible, as far as we are concerned." He then continued: "US presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes."  REUTERS Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki says he agrees with US presidential candidate Barack Obama's plans for withdrawing US troops from Iraq. Maliki was careful to back away from outright support for Obama. "Of course, this is by no means an election endorsement. Who they choose as their president is the Americans' business," he said. But then, apparently referring to Republican candidate John McCain's more open-ended Iraq policy, Maliki said: "Those who operate on the premise of short time periods in Iraq today are being more realistic. Artificially prolonging the tenure of US troops in Iraq would cause problems." Iraq, Maliki went on to say, "would like to see the establishment of a long-term strategic treaty with the United States, which would govern the basic aspects of our economic and cultural relations." He also emphasized though that the security agreement between the two countries should only "remain in effect in the short term."... |
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Posted by editor on Sunday, July 20 @ 06:22:47 PDT (84 reads)
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| Seven years on, no answer from White House on anthrax attacks |
by Eric Brewer
Published: Wednesday July 16, 2008
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 It's been almost seven years since — in the weeks immediately following 9/11 — anthrax powder sent through the mail killed five people, threatened the lives of two Democratic senators, terrorized the entire nation, and helped prod a panicky Congress into passing the so-called Patriot Act.
In the intervening years, not only has the killer remained free, but missteps in the investigation have had major negative consequences. Just last month, in fact, the Department of Justice agreed to pay $4.6 million to former bioweapons expert Stephen Hatfill to settle a lawsuit Hatfill brought against the Justice Department, the FBI, and former Attorney General John Ashcroft for destroying his reputation and career by publicly implicating him in the case. And Glenn Greenwald has pointed out that in 2001, ABC News was fed false information by several "well-placed sources" (presumably officials in the Bush administration) suggesting an Iraq-anthrax link. That imaginary link was widely cited by pro-war cheerleaders.
At Monday's White House briefing, I asked if President Bush was satisfied with the progress of the investigation into the attacks. Press Secretary Dana Perino told me that she didn't even "know if he has had an update on it."
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Posted by editor on Wednesday, July 16 @ 17:13:17 PDT (133 reads)
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| Conservatives deeply depressed over McCain campaign |
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by Richard Viguerie
July 14, 2008
(Las Vegas, Nevada) Conservatives are so depressed over the state of the McCain campaign--particularly its failure to include and enthuse the Republican base--that they are preparing themselves for a monumental GOP defeat in November, Richard A. Viguerie, Chairman of ConservativeHQ.com, said in a speech to FreedomFest.
“You even have some conservatives who are considering voting for Barack Obama, because they fear McCain as president would destroy what’s left of the Republican brand and would finish off the conservative movement,” said Viguerie. “Their mood is that of the fatally ill patient who says ‘Let’s get this over with’.”
“John McCain has had the Republican nomination sewn up for five months and has done little to convince conservatives they should come off the sidelines and fight for him,” he said.
Viguerie said, “Personnel is policy and if Senator McCain won’t surround himself with conservatives during this campaign, when he desperately needs them, why should we think that he will have conservatives making critical decisions in his administration?”
“Senator McCain has never been a conservative, is not one now, and will not govern as one. From McCain-Feingold to cap-and-trade, he is a supporter of one Big Government scheme after another. History shows that, in the Oval Office, where almost all the political pressure comes from supporters of Big Government, he would only get worse.”
Viguerie has also called for the resignation of the Republican leadership in Congress.
“After this year’s expected blood bath in the November elections, the voters will bring about a massive housecleaning of GOP leaders in favor of principled conservatives,” he said.
Freedom Fest, at which Viguerie spoke, is a gathering of prominent advocates for free markets. Other speakers this year include Steve Forbes, George Gilder, Bob Barr, Dinesh D’Souza, Christopher Hitchens, and Congressman Ron Paul...
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Posted by editor on Wednesday, July 16 @ 11:56:23 PDT (126 reads)
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| McCain Touts Free Trade, Defends Immigration Stance at La Raza |
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by Associated Press
Tuesday, July 15, 2008  SAN DIEGO — Republican presidential candidate John McCain, in one of his strongest endorsements of free trade, called himself “an unapologetic supporter of NAFTA,” an agreement that many Americans feel has cost them jobs.
“I reject the false virtues of economic isolationism,” McCain told the National Council of La Raza, a major Hispanic organization. “Any confident, competent country and its government should embrace competition,” he said. “It makes us stronger.”
The Arizona senator has often defended free trade, but Monday’s speech was among his most detailed and full-throated commentaries.
“Lowering barriers to trade creates more and better jobs, and higher wages,” he said. “It makes goods more affordable for low- and middle-income consumers.”
Citing his recent visit to Colombia and Mexico, McCain said he understands “how vitally important it is to the prosperity and security of our country to strengthen our trade, investment and diplomatic ties to other countries in our hemisphere.” He said he fully supports the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central American Free Trade Agreement and the Colombian Free Trade Agreement.
Congress approved the NAFTA agreement with Mexico and Canada in 1993, and the agreement with six Central American nations in 2005, but has blocked the agreement with Colombia.
“I believe a hemispheric free trade agreement is a worthy and necessary goal whose time has come,” he said of a proposal he unveiled during the campaign.
Acknowledging that some Americans do lose jobs “to foreign competition,” McCain said he has proposed “a comprehensive reform of our unemployment insurance and worker retraining programs.”
“And for workers of a certain age who have lost a job that won’t come back,” he said, “if they move rapidly to a new job we’ll help make up the difference in wages between their old job and the new one.”...
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Posted by editor on Tuesday, July 15 @ 04:35:29 PDT (130 reads)
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| McCain's broken marriage and fractured Reagan friendship |
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The nature and timing of his divorce from Carol Shepp alienated key friends -- and his version doesn't always match that in court documents.
By Richard A. Serrano and Ralph Vartabedian
Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
July 11, 2008
Outside her Bel-Air home, Nancy Reagan stood arm in arm with John McCain and offered a significant -- but less than exuberant -- endorsement. "Ronnie and I always waited until everything was decided, and then we endorsed," the Republican matriarch said in March. "Well, obviously this is the nominee of the party." They were the only words she would speak during the five-minute photo op... Complete article here: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-divorce11-2008jul11,0,5924926,full.story |
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Posted by editor on Friday, July 11 @ 13:00:25 PDT (186 reads)
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| McCain Taps Former Giuliani Staffer as Field Director |
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by FOXNews.com
Thursday, July 10, 2008
John McCain’s campaign has hired a former staffer for Rudy Giuliani to be its national field director, one of two positions created by a key adviser who took over operational control of the campaign last week.
Bill Stepien, who was a regional McCain campaign manager for New York and New Jersey and worked as Giuliani’s national field director before that, will join recently named political director, Mike DuHaime.
DuHaime also worked for Giuliani, as his campaign manager during the GOP primaries.
Adviser Steve Schmidt, who has been given new authority in the McCain campaign, announced last week that he was hiring both a political director and field director to “increase our capacity to reach out to voters, build coalitions, identify supporters and ultimately turn them out to the polls on Nov. 4.”
Stepien also worked as the New Hampshire political director for President Bush’s 2004 campaign.
FOX News’ Mosheh Oinounou contributed to this report...
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Posted by editor on Friday, July 11 @ 05:01:28 PDT (173 reads)
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| McCain tells Hispanic group of his commitment to immigration reform |
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By Michael Cooper
International Herald Tribune
July 8, 2008
WASHINGTON: Senator John McCain told a major Hispanic group here Tuesday that he remained committed to passing the kind of immigration legislation that angered many Republican voters last year, but he underscored that he intended to first secure U.S. borders.
Speaking to the convention of the League of United Latin American Citizens, McCain noted his efforts to pass comprehensive immigration legislation, which was supported by President George W. Bush and such Democrats as Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts but which fell apart last year after an angry grass-roots movement that viewed it as tantamount to amnesty rose up to oppose its passage.
"I and many other colleagues twice attempted to pass comprehensive immigration legislation to fix our broken borders, ensure respect for the laws of this country, recognize the important economic necessity of immigrant laborers, apprehend those who came here illegally to commit crimes and deal practically and humanely with those who came here, as my distant ancestors did, to build a better, safer life for their families," McCain said, "without excusing the fact they came here illegally or granting them privileges before those who have been waiting their turn outside the country."
He added: "Many Americans, with good cause, didn't believe us when we said we would secure our borders, and so we failed in our efforts. We must prove to them that we can and will secure our borders first, while respecting the dignity and rights of citizens and legal residents of the United States of America. But we must not make the mistake of thinking that our responsibility to meet this challenge will end with that accomplishment. We have economic and humanitarian responsibilities as well, and they require no less dedication from us in meeting them."
McCain's support of the failed immigration bill, which many Republican primary voters vigorously opposed, threatened to doom his candidacy last year. He was regularly attacked on the issue by Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and Republican contender, who spoke of it as the McCain-Kennedy bill. Voters opposed to the bill often brought it up to him in town hall-style meetings in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina...
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Posted by editor on Wednesday, July 09 @ 03:52:01 PDT (204 reads)
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| Cindy McCain Scolds Husband for Iran Wisecrack |
Associated Press
July 8, 2008
PITTSBURGH — Cindy McCain’s jab to her husband’s back came a second too late Tuesday to keep him from making a wisecrack about the health impact of Iran’s main import from the United States: cigarettes.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain was asked about an Associated Press report that $158 million in cigarettes have been shipped to Iran during George W. Bush’s presidency despite restrictions on U.S. exports to that country.
“Maybe that’s a way of killing them,” McCain told reporters, smiling as he waited for a cheesesteak sandwich at the Primanti Brothers restaurant. His wife, sitting next to him at the counter, poked his back without looking up.
“I meant that as a joke,” McCain quickly explained. “As a person who hasn’t had a cigarette in 28 years,” he began to say, when his wife corrected him: 29 years.
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Posted by editor on Wednesday, July 09 @ 03:50:35 PDT (177 reads)
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| Zogby: Obama has electoral college majority; Barr has 6% support |
Nick Juliano
 Published: Monday July 7, 2008 A new nationwide poll shows Barack Obama securing a majority of electoral college votes over Republican opponent John McCain in a new state-by-state poll.
The Zogby Interactive online survey also shows Libertarian Candidate Bob Barr shaping up as a substantial factor in this year's election, pulling 6 percent of the vote. (He was substantially outperforming then-Green Party candidate Ralph Nader at a similar point in the 2000 campaign)
The poll was conducted June 11-30 among more than 46,000 likely voters.
If the election were held today, Obama would win 273 electoral votes, enough to hand him the presidency, according to Zogby's tally. McCain would receive 160 electoral votes, leaving 105 up for grabs. Obama is the choice of 44 percent of voters surveyed, compared to 38 percent who prefer McCain. Other projections, like the one being maintained at FiveThirtyEight.com, have Obama winning with as many as 308 electoral votes.
 Pollster John Zogby said Barr "could really hurt McCain's chances," pointing to the former Georgia Republican's 7 percent support among conservative or very conservative voters, 43 percent support from libertarians and 11 percent showing with independents.
Liberal gadfly Nader, now running as an Independent, is polling at less than 2 percent in the latest survey.
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Posted by editor on Wednesday, July 09 @ 03:47:41 PDT (197 reads)
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| McCain plan: Let taxpayers, not employers, subsidize health insurance premiums |
 Associated Press
Published: Sunday July 6, 2008 WASHINGTON -- There's a great unknown about Sen. John McCain's health plan: How many employers would drop insurance coverage for their workers because of his tax policies?
The Republican presidential nominee-in-waiting has proposed that everyone buying health insurance get a refundable tax credit, $2,500 for individuals and $5,000 for families. At the same time, he would treat employer contributions toward health insurance like income, meaning workers would have to pay income, but not payroll, taxes on it.
McCain's Democratic rival, Barack Obama, says the plan would "shred" the employer-based system that provides health insurance to about 158 million workers...
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Posted by editor on Monday, July 07 @ 00:18:53 PDT (215 reads)
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| McCain Hires Former Giuliani Campaign Manager as New Political Director |
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by FOXNews.com
Sunday, July 6, 2008
Former Rudy Giuliani campaign manager Mike Duhaime will be the new political director for John McCain’s campaign, officials announced Sunday. Duhaime is the first hire by Steve Schmidt since he took over operational control of the campaign last week.
Before working on the former New York City mayor’s unsuccessful campaign bid, Duhaime was political director of the Republican National Committee. He also served as a regional political director for the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2004.
Duhaime is a protege of former RNC Chairman Ken Mehlman, who developed an elaborate national get-out-the-vote effort for the Bush campaign in 2004.
FOX News’ Carl Cameron contributed to this report.
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Posted by editor on Sunday, July 06 @ 23:40:06 PDT (190 reads)
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| McCain's Vietnam obsession |
The former POW's Senate career has been marked by his outspoken determination never to repeat Vietnam mistakes. So why does he support the Iraq war?
By Mark Benjamin
Reuters photo Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. April 1, 2008 | WASHINGTON -- In a major national security speech delivered last week, John McCain invoked his experience in Vietnam to explain his support for a significant U.S. troop presence in Iraq for as long as it takes to prevent a wider catastrophe in the region. "I hold my position because I hate war, and I know very well and very personally how grievous its wages are," the former POW said in an address to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council. "But I know, too, that we must pay those wages to avoid paying even higher ones later."
But the truth is that it's always about Vietnam for John McCain. He has invoked avoiding the mistakes of Vietnam with a sort of religious fervor in every important debate about dispatching U.S. troops since he first entered Congress in 1983. As he put it in an Aug. 18, 1999, speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he studies "every prospective conflict for the shadow of Vietnam." In fact, a look at his record shows that he subjects every major foreign-policy decision to a Vietnam-derived test similar to the famed Powell doctrine, a test summed up by the McCain quote, "We're in it, now we must win it."
So entrenched are those lessons that McCain sounds, at times, like he wishes they could be applied retroactively. "We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal," McCain said at a speech on Iraq at the Council on Foreign Relations on Nov. 5, 2003. And for that reason, it might be advisable to take him at his word when he says he'll stay in Iraq for 100 years. Whether Vietnam is the prism through which he judges national security decisions, or the rationale he uses to explain whatever position he decides to take -- and even if the lessons he says he's learned from Vietnam often seem contradictory -- he has applied his Vietnam test to Iraq and come up with the decision to stay...
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Posted by editor on Sunday, July 06 @ 05:42:37 PDT (181 reads)
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| McCain Battles a Nemesis, the Teleprompter |
 Mary Altaffer/Associated Press
Senator John McCain is ill-suited to lecterns, which often dwarf his small stature.
By MARK LEIBOVICH, New York Times
Last update: July 5, 2008 - 6:18 PM
LAS VEGAS - While unveiling his energy plan here recently, Sen. John McCain was performing relatively smoothly.
He managed to limit the mechanical hand chops and weirdly timed smiles that can often punctuate his speeches. He delivered his lines with an ease that suggested a momentary peace with his longtime nemesis, the teleprompter. (He relied on a belt-and-suspenders approach, with text scrolling down screens to his left and right, and on a big TV set in front of him.)
But when McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, came to the intended sound bite of his speech -- the part about reducing America's dependence on foreign oil -- he hit a slick.
"I have set before the American people an energy plan, the Lex-eegton Project," McCain said, drawing a quick breath and correcting himself. "The Lex-ing-ton Proj-ect," he said slowly. "The Lexington Project," he repeated. "Remember that name."
In a town meeting in Cincinnati the next day, McCain would again slip up on the name of the Massachusetts town, where, he noted, "Americans asserted their independence once before." He called it "the Lexiggdon Project," and twice tried to fix his error, before flipping the name ("Project Lexington") in subsequent references...
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Posted by editor on Sunday, July 06 @ 04:14:08 PDT (169 reads)
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| McCain camp puts Rove man in charge |
New chief Steve Schmidt, right, a veteran of the Bush campaign, will focus on honing McCain's message. Republicans have complained the campaign lacked clear themes.
Last update: July 2, 2008 - 10:55 PM
Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign has gone through its second shake-up in a year. Responding to Republican concern that his candidacy was faltering, McCain put a veteran of President Bush's 2004 campaign in charge of day-to-day operations, and stepped away from a plan to have the campaign run by 11 regional managers, McCain's aides said Wednesday.
The elevation of Steve Schmidt -- who worked closely with Karl Rove -- at McCain's headquarters represented a sharp diminishment of the responsibilities of Rick Davis, who has been McCain's campaign manager since the last shake-up nearly a year ago.
The move is the latest sign of increasing influence of veterans of Rove's shop in the McCain operation. Nicolle Wallace, who was communications director for Bush in the 2004 campaign (and in his White House) has joined the campaign as a senior adviser, and will travel with McCain every other week. Greg Jenkins, another veteran of Rove's operation who is a former Fox News producer and director of presidential advance in the Bush White House, was hired by Schmidt last week after a series of what McCain's advisers acknowledged were poorly executed campaign events...
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Posted by editor on Sunday, July 06 @ 04:12:59 PDT (182 reads)
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