The Iowa caucuses are widely being acclaimed as a “stand for change” and hopefully they were. Yet the change represented by the two front running candidates of each party is a small one indeed and nothing even close to what this nation needs. If you take all the messages of all the candidates, including the darlings of the “outsiders” Kucinich and Paul, we still would only barely be scratching the surface of America’s real needs.
Republican Presidential candidate Fred Dalton Thompson, out of cash and lagging in the polls, will stay in the Presidential race through at least the New Hampshire primary even though some campaign aides say he should give up his faltering run for President.
Thompson returned home to McLean Thursday while other Presidential contenders headed direct to New Hampshire from Iowa. Aides say he will work the phone to try and raise much-needed campaign cash and try to also cash in on free media appearances.
The Iowa caucus victories by Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee Thursday night were also stunning defeats for the status quo in American politics. Angry voters sent a strong message that they are mad as hell and they ain’t gonna take it any more.
Democratic caucus attendees told Hillary Rodham Clinton that America doesn’t need four years of her kind of politics. She finished well behind Obama and a close third to John Edwards, a slick trial lawyer with an anti-corporate greed platform.
President George W. Bush Thursday ordered White House lawyers to use claims of executive privilege to prevent senior White House aides from cooperating with the Justice Department’s criminal investigation into destruction of videotapes that showed CIA interrogators torturing terrorism suspects.
White House sources tell Capitol Hill Blue that the claims of executive privilege are just “the first step” in a coordinated campaign to stonewall the investigation and prevent administration aides from giving depositions or submitting to interviews with Justice Department investigators.
J. Cofer Black is GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s chief weapon against Islamo-fascism. The former CIA official chairs Romney’s Counterterrorism Policy Advisory Group. Also, the 9/11 Commission, the Congressional Joint Inquiry on 9/11 and the CIA’s inspector general all condemn him for dropping the ball before Sept. 11, 2001. Black’s spot in Romney’s brain trust raises grave doubts about the former Massachusetts governor’s national-security judgment.
If the Supreme Court is as hermetically sealed from outside influence as many believe, then the recent carnage in Nebraska and Colorado will have no influence on its decision whether the Second Amendment gives individual Americans the right to bear whatever arms they choose or limits it to a collective right controlled by the state for the national defense.
There’s only one solution to the wholly disproportionate emphasis on Iowa: Convince the voters of New Hampshire to punish the winners of those caucuses.
Don’t vote for them, people, or write their names in for one of those oddball elected New England offices like selectman in charge of the town dump.
There have been attempts to spread all the attention Iowa and New Hampshire get to new venues, like, say, the other 48 states, but to no avail.
Wrapped up as we have been in presidential-election hoopla, machinations and drivel, we have to sober up and realize we still have another entire year of the Bush administration to deal with. What should we expect?
Ed Gillespie, senior White House counselor and one of the few experienced work-a-day Republicans who haven’t fled the administration, says President Bush plans to spend this year in a “lot of travel.”
He says the time frame for getting anything through Congress will expire on or about July 4 as senators and representatives race home to campaign for re-election.
The official ineptitude that has dogged our war effort in Iraq has spread to affect the fate of tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees, many in fear for their lives having worked for us, desperate for sanctuary in the United States.
We are obligated to help them. You can argue that the violence is Iraqi-on-Iraqi, but there wouldn’t be internecine violence if we hadn’t arrived and there would be less violence if we had arrived in the numbers our military planners recommended.
Michael Mukasey’s confirmation as U.S. attorney general became mired in his ambiguity over whether harsh interrogation techniques like waterboarding constituted torture. In the end, the former judge was confirmed but by the narrowest margin for his post in over 50 years.
Now, with just over two months on the job, the issue of waterboarding is back on his doorstep. So far, Mukasey is handling it better than he did the Senate.