JimEd Speaks Out

Idaho Sen. Larry Craig’s political support eroded by the hour on Wednesday as fellow Republicans in Congress called for him to resign and party leaders pushed him unceremoniously from senior committee posts.

Sens. John McCain of Arizona and Norm Coleman of Minnesota joined Hoekstra in urging Craig to step down, as did Rep. Jeff Miller of Florida.

Obama plans to skip AARP's Sept. 20 forum in Davenport, where New York
Sen. Hillary Clinton, former North Carolina senator John Edwards and New
Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson will address about 2,400 Iowa seniors and a
national public television audience.

The decision to not attend the AARP event, aimed at issues important to people 50 and older, could nag at the Illinois senator, some Democrat activists and political observers said.

[H]is performance as mayor is now being turned against him as two of his opponents have begun challenging him on two of the biggest issues in the Republican primary: gun control and immigration.

So much coverage of the 2008 White House race has focused on the front-runners and superstars -- Hillary Rodham Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, Barack Obama and Fred Thompson -- that it can be hard for the third-place contenders to break from the pack. But while national audiences may be fixated on the big guns, polls have shown voters in early primary states are paying attention to the littl(er) guys, particularly John Edwards on the Democratic side.

What success Mike Huckabee has found as a presidential candidate stems largely from his homespun charm – a folksy populism that gets heads nodding when he muses about the Lava soap his skin had to endure during a childhood filled with more want than wealth.

Without naming names, Huckabee is using his second-place finish at the Iowa GOP’s straw poll Aug. 11 to take aim at Mitt Romney, the winner at Ames.

In media appearances and on the stump, the normally sunny Huckabee is using barbed language to portray Romney as a politically expedient and wealthy spendthrift who can’t relate to the day-to-day problems of average Americans.

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is leaping into the long-running Cuba debate by calling for the United States to ease restrictions for Cuban-Americans who want to visit the island or send money home.

President Bush, at a North American summit on Tuesday, offered U.S. assistance and expressed his concern for the citizens of Mexico and elsewhere whose lives were affected by Hurricane Dean.

Security and trade issues dominated talks among the North American leaders who met at a posh chateau along the Ottawa River. The three leaders began talks Tuesday with a council of corporate executives, who are pushing for broader coordination across North America, from regulatory standards to emergency planning.

Los Angeles prosecutors have dropped charges against a self-described pedophile who was arrested last week at UCLA after he allegedly violated an order that prohibited him from being within 30 feet of children.

Prosecutors opted not to pursue charges against Jack McClellan after they determined the judge who issued the order failed to set a hearing to argue its merits and hadn't given the 45-year-old transient proper notice.

McClellan was released from jail today following a court hearing.

But if he runs, he'll do so as an independent. "It's a possibility, not a probability"

.

Candidates develop foot-in-mouth disease

Just about every Republican and Democrat has flubbed an answer to a question or made a borderline inappropriate comment - some so uncomfortable they make you cringe - only to take back the remarks or seek to clarify them later when under fire.

Among the recent gaffes:

* Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, defended his five sons' decisions not to enlist in the military and said "one of the ways my sons are showing support for our nation is helping me get elected." Later, the Republican said he misspoke, explaining: "I didn't mean in any way to compare service in the country with my boys in any way."
* Giuliani, the New York City mayor during the terrorist attacks, claimed he was at ground zero "as often, if not more, than most of the workers" and was exposed to the same health risks. After drawing the ire of some firefighters, he acknowledged: "I could have said it better" and "What I was saying was: 'I'm there with you.'"
* Richardson, New Mexico's governor, said "It's a choice" and then "you know, I'm not a scientist" when gay-rights activists asked during a forum whether people are born gay or whether they choose homosexuality. He quickly clarified. The Democrat also has said, "I screwed up" when citing conservative Byron White as a model Supreme Court justice.
* John McCain, a Republican senator from Arizona known for his off-the-cuff style, twice has clarified comments. In separate instances, he referred to U.S. lives lost in Iraq as "wasted" and used the term "tar baby," which some people consider a racial epithet. In both cases, he quickly said he regretted his word choice.
* Barack Obama, a Democratic senator from Illinois, also apologized for using the word "wasted" about U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. During a campaign speech in Virginia, he drastically overstated the death toll in the springtime tornado in Kansas, saying, "Ten thousand people died - an entire town destroyed." The actual death toll was 12.

Activist judges, I say, have usurped the legislative power and represent a clear and present danger to the Republic.

Democratic presidential candidates argued Saturday night that organized labor is an essential part of the nation’s economy whose troubles mirror the deterioration of the middle class way of life.

“The only way to reinvigorate the middle class is to reinvigorate the labor movement,” Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware told several hundred union members at a labor forum in eastern Iowa

Former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson sauntered into Iowa Friday, portraying himself as a plainspoken Washington, D.C., outsider while all but declaring his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination.

The tall Southerner and familiar television actor was making his first trip to the state as a White House prospect. He acknowledged that he would be entering a race well underway in Iowa, but said he could catch up.

If conservatives are the ones driven by ideological passions, then why are liberals the ones always falling for laughable hoaxes in support of their anti-war ideological agenda? And if liberal beliefs are true, why do they need all the phony stunts to prove them?

Is the vast right-wing conspiracy trying to help Hillary Rodham Clinton win the Democratic nomination?

she's drawing a bounce from an unlikely source: conservative Republicans, whose fears of a Democratic takeover are forcing them to mount a risky venture.

Divided and discouraged by a GOP field they view as lackluster, they've concluded that the best way to energize party activists, hold the White House and, possibly, return to power on Capitol Hill, is to help Clinton secure the Democratic nod and become her party's most dominant voice.

Democrats seeking the White House have received more than four times as much money from some of the nation's wealthiest enclaves as party contenders did in 2003, an analysis of campaign-finance records shows.

The major Democratic presidential candidates have raised nearly $32 million from the 50 ZIP codes that were the top sources of campaign money in the first six months of the year, the non-profit Center for Responsive Politics found. In contrast, Republicans received $13.8 million.

And they told us it was rich conservatives. Is there anything liberals will not lie about? Please tell me.

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards is moving staff out of Nevada to focus on other early voting states, a reflection of the uncertainty about the prominence of the first Western contest.

Two Edwards campaign officials said Wednesday that the Nevada staffers were being relocated to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. They would not disclose how many staffers were being moved but characterized it as a handful.

Senior congressional aides said yesterday that the White House has proposed limiting the much-anticipated appearance on Capitol Hill next month of Gen. David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker to a private congressional briefing, suggesting instead that the Bush administration's progress report on the Iraq war should be delivered to Congress by the secretaries of state and defense.

The skirmishing is an indication of the rising anxiety on all sides in the remaining few weeks before the presentation of what is widely considered a make-or-break assessment of Bush's war strategy, and one that will come amid rising calls for a drawdown of U.S. forces from Iraq.

But nobody actually hunts animals over the Internet. Although the concept -- first broached publicly by a Texas entrepreneur in 2004 -- is technically feasible, it hasn't caught on. How so many states have nonetheless come to ban the practice is a testament to public alarm over Internet threats and the gilded life of legislation that nobody opposes.

Clinton-Obama tensions spill into the Senate

They work in the same building. They slog through the same rigorous travel schedule. Along the way, they often cross paths several times a day.

But Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama have barely spoken to one another – at least in any meaningful way – for months.

The tension between the two Democratic presidential hopefuls, which spilled over into public view during the past two weeks, has been intensifying since January. It is clear, as the candidates approach a mid-point in their fight for the nomination, that the genteel decorum of the Senate has given way to the go-for-the-jugular instinct of the campaign trail.

Don Imus has reached a settlement with CBS over his multimillion-dollar contract and is negotiating to resume his broadcasting career.

Imus and CBS Radio “have mutually agreed to settle claims that each had against the other regarding the Imus radio program on CBS,” the network and Imus’ attorney Martin Garbus said in a joint statement Tuesday.

“I can’t buy you — I don’t have the money,” Mike Huckabee, the Arkansas Republican seeking the presidency, told Republicans at the Iowa Straw Poll this weekend. He offered a mock frown.

“I can’t even rent you,” he said.

The crowd, which had been rustling, burst into warm laughter at a pointed joke intended to remind them of Mr. Huckabee’s earnest underdog campaign. Five hours later, the voters rewarded him with 2,587 votes and a second-place finish in the poll — surprising, it would seem, even Mr. Huckabee.

Looking past the presidential nomination fight, Democratic leaders quietly fret that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton at the top of their 2008 ticket could hurt candidates at the bottom.

They say the former first lady may be too polarizing for much of the country. She could jeopardize the party's standing with independent voters and give Republicans who otherwise might stay home on Election Day a reason to vote, they worry.

In more than 40 interviews, Democratic candidates, consultants and party chairs from every region pointed to internal polls that give Clinton strikingly high unfavorable ratings in places with key congressional and state races.

“We had people who just came out here on their own. We didn’t bus them in. We didn’t buy all their tickets,” Mr. Huckabee said after the results were announced. “They came because they believed in this message. They wanted us to win.”

When the sun rises here in Iowa, and in the coming days, it remains unclear how large the Republican field will remain. Wearing a wide smile, Mr. Huckabee said he was ready to assume anyone – and everyone’s – support.

“I’d like for all of them to go home and quit and they would just turn it over to me,” he laughed.

Mr. Huckabee, who many Republicans believed lacked the resources to put up a significant fight here, said he thought his showing here tonight would translate into a fund-raising boomlet.

Mitt Romney is undergoing the stiffest test yet of his effort to win over conservatives wary of his ideological credentials.

The backing of gay rights groups could turn swing-state voters against a candidate, new polls show. Politico reports that Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania voters, by a large margin, consider the support of such groups reason to vote against rather than for a candidate; no one since JFK has been elected president without winning two of those states.

Frequent tours for U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan have stressed the all-volunteer force and made it worth considering a return to a military draft, President Bush's new war adviser said Friday.

President Nixon abolished the draft in 1973. Restoring it, Lute said, would be a "major policy shift" and Bush has made it clear that he doesn't think it's necessary.

Under a new proposal, men and women who enlist could pick from a “buffet” of incentives, including up to $45,000 tax-free that they accrue during their career to help buy a home or build a business. Other options would include money for college and to pay off student loans.

Space shuttle Endeavour roared into orbit Wednesday carrying teacher-astronaut Barbara Morgan, who was finally fulfilling the dream of Christa McAuliffe and the rest of the fallen Challenger crew.

Rush brought you the story of Mia Farrow's Hostages for Peace program. She's offering herself up in a hostage exchange with Darfur. We're hoping that this trend catches on with other Hollywood celebs as shown in this hilarious graphic representing this on the website. In other news from the kook Hollywood left, actress Cate Blanchett has vowed to stop washing her hair to save the planet.

A company in Jacksonville, Fl., has begun selling Michael Vick-shaped chew toys for dogs, a tasty play on the dogfighting scandal that has incurred the fury of American canine lovers and earned Vick felony charges. The site sells the toys for $7.99 and promises a chewing experience satisfactory even to pit bulls.

Democratic presidential candidates tangled Tuesday at an AFL-CIO forum over Iraq, Pakistan and corporate influence while mostly agreeing on issues crucial to their union audience, such as trade deals and increased spending on infrastructure.

Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani said Tuesday that whether he was a practicing Catholic was a personal matter as he declined to answer questions about his religion.

New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has significantly widened her lead over Illinois Sen. Barack Obama in the Democratic presidential contest after a dispute over foreign policy, a new poll showed on Tuesday.