February 27, 2008
February 26, 2008
Texas Congressional Candidate Hires Billboard Showing 911 Attack on Houston
Alan Bernstein, The Houston Chronicle, February 26, 2008
A hellish fire menaces downtown Houston in congressional candidate Brian Klock’s new campaign billboard. Seen through a gun sight, a container ship and a petrochemical plant sit in the foreground as fat targets for terrorists.
And on Klock’s new Web site, actual news video shows the second hijacked plane slamming into the World Trade Center in New York.
Reaction was as mixed Monday as Klock’s use of fictional and factual death scenes as he brought the politics of 9/11 into the 10-candidate race for the Republican nomination against Democratic U.S. Rep. Nick Lampson.
“I don’t want to scare people,” said Klock, a Navy Reserve intelligence officer. “I want to make them aware and prepared (for terrorist attacks),” he said. “Showing Houston in flames is reminding them there is a threat,” he added. “What we wanted to do is project mayhem.”
Klock emphasized that he has experience reviewing intelligence about would-be terrorists capable of targeting NASA or Houston’s port and petrochemical industry, and that in Congress he would work to get extra protection for the Houston area.
February 25, 2008
GrandPa McCain Admits That His Stand on the Iraq War Will Cost Him the Election
The Associated Press, February 25, 2008
ROCKY RIVER, Ohio (AP) — John McCain said Monday that to win the White House he must convince a war-weary country that U.S. policy in Iraq is succeeding. If he can’t, ”then I lose. I lose,” the Republican said.
He quickly backed off that remark.
”Let me not put it that stark,” the likely GOP nominee told reporters on his campaign bus. ”Let me just put it this way: Americans will judge my candidacy first and foremost on how they believe I can lead the country both from our economy and for national security. Obviously, Iraq will play a role in their judgment of my ability to handle national security.”
”If I may, I’d like to retract ‘I’ll lose.’ But I don’t think there’s any doubt that how they judge Iraq will have a direct relation to their judgment of me, my support of the surge,” McCain added. ”Clearly, I am tied to it to a large degree.”
The five-year-old Iraq conflict already is emerging as a fault line in the general election, with the Arizona senator calling for the U.S. military to continue its mission while his Democratic opponents urge speedy withdrawal.
Comments Off
The Tattlesnake – Hillary and McCain Pushing Rocks Edition
The Big Ace Parses the Dem Debate and McCain’s Dilemma
“The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.”
– Albert Camus“It ain’t the heat, it’s the humility.”
– Yogi Berra
The Big Ace sat hunched over a Scotch on the rocks at the bar; since you can’t smoke in saloons in Chicago anymore, he twiddled his unlit cheroot between thumb and forefinger, with the bartender casting an occasional wary eye to make sure he didn’t try to light it up.
“What have you got for me, Ace?” I said, slumping into the barstool next to him and ordering a beer.
“Hell of a thing, you can’t smoke in a bar in Chicago,” he fretted, staring forlornly at his virgin cigar. “You know, it’s this kind of thing that gives you liberals a bad reputation – this no-smoking-in-bars Nanny State crap. Restaurants, office buildings, oxygen tents I can see – but, bars? It’s crazy.”
I agreed with a nod and, flipping out a pocket notebook, asked him again what he had picked up from his contacts in politics and business. The following is recreated from memory and my sketchy notes.
“Did you see the Democratic debate last Thursday? It wasn’t so much that Hillary had to do so well – face it, she’s not the inspiring speaker Obama is and never will be, and racking up debating points is strictly the kind of BS the pundits care about – nobody ever says ‘oh, for joy, my candidate won on debating points!’ No, the thing she had to do was trip Obama up – make him lose his cool and say something really stupid. She needed a clip that would be played over and over in the two weeks before the Texas and Ohio primaries of an angry Obama trying to carve her up like any regular politician and eating his shoe leather in the process. Like that debate between Carter and Ford in ’76 where Ford said Eastern Europe wasn’t Communist – she needed one of those ‘what the hell?!’ moments, but she didn’t get it; she couldn’t rile him out of his ‘zone.’ Worse, of the two clips the media played post-debate, one was of her getting booed. Disaster. Obama played her like a Zen master, making his points and letting her bury herself in minutiae. In the end, who looked more presidential: The woman trying to press some thin plagiarism charge that nobody much cares about, or the guy who calmly deflected her attacks with dignity and poise?
Robert Parry: Why the War on Obama?
Robert Parry, Consortium News, February 26, 2008
While some cynics still view Barack Obama’s appeal for “change” as empty rhetoric, it’s starting to dawn on Washington insiders that his ability to raise vast sums of money from nearly one million mostly small donors could shake the grip that special-interest money has long held over the U.S. government.
This spreading realization that Obama’s political movement might represent a more revolutionary change than previously understood is sparking a deepening resistance among defenders of the status quo-and prompting harsher attacks on Obama.
Right now, the front line for the Washington Establishment is Hillary Clinton’s struggling presidential campaign, which has been stunned by Obama’s political skills as well as his extraordinary ability to raise money over the Internet. Obama’s grassroots donations have negated Clinton’s prodigious fundraising advantage with big donors.
Powerful lobbies-from AIPAC to representatives of military and other industries-also are recognizing the value of keeping their dominance over campaign cash from getting diluted by Obama’s deep reservoir of small donors. It’s in their direct interest to dent Obama’s momentum and demoralize his rank-and-file supporters as soon as possible.
So, neoconservatives and other ideological movements-heavily dependent on grants from the same special interests-are now joining with the Clinton campaign to tear down Obama by depicting him as unpatriotic, un-vetted, possibly a “closet Muslim.”
Read More Here