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By Steven Hill $11.01
By Charlotte Gordon $18.47
$35
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 vassar.edu
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It’s the end of an era for the friends of General Services Administration chief Lurita Alexis Doan, who resigned from her post Tuesday following years of allegations of corruption and other inappropriate uses of power. Doan’s reign over the government’s chief contracting agency was riddled with contract handouts and examples of using her appointed position for political (read Republican) purposes.
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 AP photo / Mary Altaffer
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By Robert Scheer — Would President John McCain forget who made that 3 a.m. call to the special White House phone? I suspect that his aides would not just let him nod off back to sleep, even if they were intimidated by the prospect of one of his alleged intemperate outbursts, but might our septuagenarian president be less than fully focused?
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 flickr.com
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All right, people, it’s high time someone dealt squarely with this question: Does John McCain have anger-management issues? Monday brought word on this potential problem, the Republican Party’s sword of Damocles, from provocateur Christopher Hitchens, who dares to ask “whether [McCain’s] elevator goes all the way to the top.”
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Hey everyone, John McCain has his own controversial preacher on his team! And look, he’s not wearing a flag pin on his lapel either! These points weren’t driven home by media types like George Stephanopolous, whom Jon Stewart accuses of taking a ride on the “Sweet Talk Express” instead of giving McCain a proper grilling.
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 AP photo / Mary Altaffer
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Sen. John McCain has a tough path and a lot to prove in his presidential campaign: that his age isn’t an issue, that he doesn’t have an anger problem and that he’s like Bush in ways some voters admire but unlike him in other ways. Thursday was a day for McCain to make himself appear very different indeed as he campaigned in New Orleans.
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 johnmurneysblog.blogspot.com
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For presidential candidates, celebrity endorsements can be a mixed bag—especially when the star in question is a polarizing figure, as is the latest famous figure to give the nod to Barack Obama: audacious auteur Michael Moore.
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 AP photo / Ron Edmonds
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By Robert Scheer — Are Americans unusually stupid or is it something our president put in the water? As millions surrender their homes and sacrifice other standards of our nation’s economic stability and reputation to the caprice of the Bush-Cheney imperium, a majority of voters tell pollsters that they might vote for a candidate who promises more of the same.
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By Marie Cocco — The latest plot twists are stunners, even as they unfold against the scandalous backdrop of the Bush administration’s sorry regulatory record.
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 AP photo / Mary Altaffer
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Former rivals John McCain and Mitt Romney looked like fast friends as Romney joined McCain in Utah and Colorado for a little campaigning Thursday. Could this be the beginning of a beautiful ticket?
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Liberals who have sung the praises of John McCain in the past confront a fascinating test of consistency, integrity and political commitment now that McCain is the virtually certain Republican nominee. It could be an amusing moment. I should know, since I’m one of them.
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 BGay.com
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Here’s a quiz: What’s the most potentially harmful phenomenon or issue threatening our nation? Our use of torture on suspected terrorists? Hawks in the White House? If you guessed either of those, according to Oklahoma Rep. Sally Kern, you’re wrong—homosexuality is America’s worst scourge. Guess who won’t be voting for Rep. Kern in her next bid for office?
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Ersatz pundit Stephen Colbert, shedding crocodile tears, bids farewell to the presidential campaign of Republican Mike Huckabee, to whom he had given his faux endorsement.
Posted on Mar 6, 2008
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 blog.reidreport.com
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John McCain has secured the Republican nomination with a projected sweep of the March 4th primaries. He was thought by many political insiders to be too independent to pull it off, but his march to the right appears to have been successful. It is fitting, therefore, that he is expected to visit the White House on Wednesday to further tie himself to George W. Bush.
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As Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama battled it out in several states Tuesday, Republican front-runner John McCain sent out a word of warning about the “dangerous” state of the world in trying to win supporters in San Antonio, Texas.
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 AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Aaron Glantz — More than any other candidate for president, John McCain should know that peace talks can be stronger and smarter than bombs, that withdrawing American soldiers can be the best way to achieve stability, and that the best way to protect American troops is to bring them home from the war zone.
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 AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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By Robert Scheer — As Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain twisted briefly in the wind kicked up by that New York Times story suggesting he had swapped political favors for the personal favors of an attractive lobbyist for the telecommunications industry, I kept waiting for the public policy punch line.
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 newsweek.com
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How quickly the tides turn for would-be presidential nominees. Just a few weeks ago, a former Arkansas governor was grabbing headlines, and it wasn’t Bill Clinton. Now, Mike Huckabee is calling for a debate with GOP front-runner John McCain and almost no one in the media is taking note except the six reporters still assigned to trail him.
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 AP photo / J. Pat Carter
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Sen. John McCain, campaigning in Indianapolis, said Cuba won’t be better off under Fidel Castro’s fraternal successor, Raul Castro, whom he called “worse in many respects than Fidel was,” and the Republican front-runner voiced the hope that Fidel will meet his commie maker, Karl Marx, “very soon.”
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 AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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Did unwanted attention from a New Republic scribe prod The New York Times into printing its long-awaited story about certain alleged snags in Sen. John McCain’s moral fabric? McCain’s camp apparently thinks so, but regardless, the Arizona senator’s team is switching into battle mode to counter the paper’s “smear campaign.”
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Americans of a certain age may take umbrage at David Letterman’s characterizations of 71-year-old presidential candidate John McCain as a “Wal-Mart greeter,” a “mall-walker” and “the guy at the supermarket who is confused by the automatic doors.”
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 AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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John McCain’s recent jockeying to make himself look like a direct heir to Ronald Reagan’s Republican legacy was helped along Monday by George H.W. Bush’s vote of confidence that McCain is indeed the right person to lead the nation as the next president.
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A Republican member of the Maryland Legislature has resigned after authorities raided his home and took several items, including his computer, during a child pornography investigation. According to the Baltimore Examiner, state Delegate Robert McKee had been a sponsor of the Child Protection From Predators Act.
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 AP photo / Lauren Victoria Burke
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Sen. John McCain has established himself as an outspoken critic of torture, which makes his vote Wednesday against the Feinstein Amendment, which would set limits on the types of interrogation techniques used by American intelligence agencies, all the more puzzling—or, in the case of The Atlantic columnist Andrew Sullivan, heartbreaking.
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The inevitable parodies of Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can” video have begun—this one isn’t so much about Obama or Hillary Clinton as it is about Republican front-runner John McCain, whose infamous hundred-year (or more) plan for America’s presence in Iraq is deservedly and humorously lambasted here.
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Jon Stewart bids farewell to Mitt Romney, erstwhile presidential candidate and “man-shaped polymer casing for a spiritual vacuum” (ouch!), and calls into question Romney’s anti-terrorist rationale for bowing out of the ‘08 race.
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 AP photo / Orlin Wagner
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If one thing is clear after last week’s Super Tuesday craziness, it’s that candidates who seemed to score big want to claim victory as a foregone conclusion, while others who didn’t show quite as strongly—like Mike Huckabee, for example—want to challenge the finality of the results.
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 AP photo / Charlie Niebergall
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By Bill Boyarsky — After Super Tuesday, Democrats are worrying that a long Clinton-Obama contest might irreparably damage the party’s prospects in November. But, as longtime political reporter and former Los Angeles Times City Editor Bill Boyarsky points out, the bigger threat is a McCain-Huckabee ticket.
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 AP photo / Matt York
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Rush Limbaugh’s said it, and now Charles Hurt from Rupert Murdoch’s Big Apple tabloid, the New York Post, is joining in the chorus of conservatives who worry that Sen. John McCain would betray the GOP’s core right-wing base if he inches any closer to the White House.
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 AP photo / Charles Dharapak
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The UK’s Times Online certainly chose a very particular frame for its profile of John McCain’s wife, Cindy, as evidenced by the headline: “Flawed Cindy McCain Has a Grudge List.” Further down, Mrs. McCain gets a bit more credit when writer Tony Allen-Mills predicts she’d make a “formidable but flawed first lady.” There appears to be a pattern at work here.
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OK, so clearly Ann Coulter is not above leaning heavily on hyperbole to raise a few eyebrows and sell a few books, but this time she even managed to shock us a little with her announcement on Fox’s “Hannity & Colmes” that she’d go to bat for Hillary Clinton if she’s up against John McCain for the presidency, because, Coulter said, Clinton’s “more conservative” than McCain.
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 proof7.com
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Rudy Giuliani is expected to endorse John McCain at the Reagan library in California on Wednesday. The man who suffered one of the most dramatic campaign implosions in recent memory explained his collapse to supporters this way: “You don’t always win, but you can always try to do it right, and you did.” Although doing it a bit earlier, too, wouldn’t have hurt.
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He’s not exactly clear on this point, but what Sen. John McCain doesn’t achieve through specificity he drives home through sheer repetition: America can expect “other wars” in the future. In this clip he delivers that warning to his “friends” at a campaign stop in Florida.
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What’s to be done about the sagging U.S. economy? What’s with John McCain’s dogged insistence that we’re “succeeding” in Iraq? Thursday night found the handful of Republican candidates still in the ‘08 race for the White House facing off in Florida. Here’s what they had to say.
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 AP photo / Lefteris Pitarakis
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What is it with the, shall we say, seasoned action stars endorsing Republican presidential candidates? First we had Huck ‘n’ Chuck, and now Sylvester Stallone has come out in support of Republican front-runner John McCain.
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 AP photo / Mary Ann Chastain
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By Robert Scheer — Because Dennis Kucinich was barred from the Democrats’ South Carolina debate, there was no one willing to say what Kucinich would have said: Bankers are crooks who will steal from the public unless the government holds them accountable.
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On behalf of his faux-fave candidate, (real) Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee, pseudo-pundit Stephen Colbert performs his own brand of negative campaigning, taking to the phones to quiz voters about how their potential support for Huckabee rival John McCain might change if McCain were to have fathered an “illegitimate pirate baby,” among other alarming scenarios.
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 brokerforyou.com
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What to do about the slumping U.S. economy? President Bush may disagree with congressional Democrats on dozens of issues, but he seems to agree with their call for some kind of temporary stimulus measure to be implemented as soon as possible. Bush’s potential bailout plan will likely focus on income tax rebates to inspire Americans to go out and spend for their country.
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Following presidential candidates from state to state as they shake hands, kiss babies (and backsides, some might say, in the figurative sense) and promise to be the Best Prez Ever! must get tiresome for reporters on the campaign trail. In this clip, it’s hard to say if the grind got to AP scribe Glen Johnson or whether Mitt Romney’s claims about eschewing lobbyists made him snap.
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 AP photo / Alex Brandon
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Here’s further evidence that Mike Huckabee isn’t exactly worried about currying favor with Log Cabin Republicans: In an interview with Beliefnet.com, the conservative presidential candidate made the woefully familiar argument that condoning gay marriage is akin to condoning bestiality.
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 politico.com
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Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney is engaged in a make-or-break contest in Michigan, and his eleventh-hour mailers to supporters are striking an urgent note, as evidenced by this recent swipe at rivals John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee over their stands on immigration.
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CNN’s ubiquitous anchor Wolf Blitzer point-blanked Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney last weekend about what exactly constitutes torture and whether techniques like waterboarding are ever defensible, but Romney deferred to the popular national security rationale, implying that in “ticking time bomb” circumstances, a president may elect to use certain unpopular techniques.
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 AP photo / Alex Brandon
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How to explain the discrepancy—which was, in the case of New Hampshire this week, essentially on the Democratic side of the ballot—between polling numbers and election results? In a column, ABC News’ polling poobah, Gary Langer, makes some suggestions and calls for a “serious, critical look at the final pre-election polls in the Democratic presidential primary in New Hampshire.”
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What was up with Fox News excluding Ron Paul from Sunday’s Republican debate? Jay Leno puzzles over the network’s decision, and Paul posits some answers: He’s a “strict constitutionalist” and anti-Iraq war. Leno points out that Paul’s a “Republican.” But as for Fox News higher-ups, the Texas politician responds, “They’re not.”
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By Bill Boyarsky — Just as the Iowa caucuses were hitting their boiling point, Truthdig’s indefatigable campaign correspondent Bill Boyarsky high-tailed it to New Hampshire to check out the next electoral battleground. Here he takes stock of the frenetic scene he just left and looks to the future of political reporting.
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Um, is it just us, or did Rudy Giuliani’s camp seize upon the strike-induced lull in Hollywood to hire out talent to make what looks and sounds like a Mideast-themed action movie trailer to promote his presidential campaign? “A religion betrayed ... a nuclear power in chaos ... madmen bent on creating it. ... ” Steven Seagal’s people should take notes from this one.
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By Bill Boyarsky — As he addressed a room full of members of the Iowa Christian Alliance in the small city of Cedar Falls, the senator demonstrated how hard it is for him to find his way through the tangled forest of Christian right doctrine.
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As the primaries loom ever closer, presidential candidates are contending not only with each other, firing and deflecting accusations at a furious pace, but with themselves—scrambling to “put into context” (i.e., rationalize) things they have said, or written, as in Huckabee’s case here.
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Nepal’s long-standing monarchy is about to become obsolete, after more than two-thirds of the country’s provisional parliament voted to amend the constitution and give the government the power to abolish the monarchy and establish a “federal democratic republican state” instead.
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 AP photo / M. Spencer Green
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By Bill Boyarsky — Political reporters are not widely embraced, but in Iowa, they are eagerly welcomed when they show up to cover the state’s unique system of selecting presidential nominees. The reason is simple: The media is a co-conspirator in a con, the Iowa caucuses.
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The one and only anti-war Republican presidential candidate didn’t raise his hand when asked who doesn’t believe in evolution, but it turns out he may have wanted to. In this clip, Paul responds to a question about the incident by saying that it was an “inappropriate question,” but that “I think it’s a theory—theory of evolution—and I don’t accept it.”
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