Presidential campaigns are hoarding money for a coming advertising blitz — mostly in Iowa and New Hampshire — during the final three months of the year on airwaves already saturated with candidate commercials.
The candidates are in the midst of a last-minute fundraising push, eager to have significant amounts of cash on hand by Sunday, the end of the third quarter and a milestone for measuring financial strength.
Army snipers hunting insurgents in Iraq were under orders to “bait” their targets with suspicious materials, such as detonation cords, and then kill whoever picked up the items, according to the defense attorney for a soldier accused of planting evidence on an Iraqi he killed. Gary Myers, an attorney for Sgt. Evan Vela, said Monday his client had acted “pursuant to orders.”
“We believe that our client has done nothing more than he was instructed to do by superiors,” Myers said in a telephone interview.
The excesses of the CIA-leak investigation made clear the need for a federal shield law to protect reporters and their sources. Indeed, the need for such a law has been clear since 1972, when the Supreme Court upset a long-standing understanding that journalists were more or less immune from government investigations into their reporting.
Since then, federal prosecutors have successfully chipped away at that protection and, by one count, more than 40 reporters have been questioned about their sources and at least two have wound up in jail.
Why can’t we get out of Iraq?
I was considering this question as I drove home a few evenings ago, when I stopped at a light behind a big SUV, an Expedition or a Suburban, with a couple of bumper stickers on the back. One read “Bush/Cheney ’04.”
The other one read: “The next time you feel perfect, try walking on water.”
I don’t remember feeling perfect lately, and hardly anyone I know feels that way on a regular basis. Nevertheless, I cannot walk on water and am, therefore, properly put in my place.
While negative political advertising has been around since the beginning of the republic, MoveOn.org seems to have cut some new ground for meanness and ratcheted up the incivility level more than a notch or two, as if it weren’t high enough already. Probably not since Lyndon Johnson’s vicious attempt to portray Barry Goldwater as a threat to nuclear sanity has there been a more controversial attack on a public official than the one implying Gen. David Petraeus has betrayed the nation.
A report showed up on a password-protected terrorist Web site in the summer of 2006 detailing the supposed susceptibility of the Army’s Stryker vehicles to rocket-propelled grenades.
The terrorists found it on a think tank’s Web site, downloaded it to their own site and urged fellow mujahadeen to study it and use what they learned in attacking the U.S. combat vehicles in Iraq.
Though the report had been discredited, its posting on a jihadist Web site shows how dogged terrorists have become in using the Internet.