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Saturday, November 17, 2007 CNN's six "undecided voters" were all Democratic operatives    UPDATES BELOW - CNN hits bottom and digs: All six debate questioners appear to be Democratic Party operatives. So much for "ordinary people, undecided voters". To paraphrase Junior Soprano, CNN is so far up the DNC's hind end, Howard Dean can taste hair gel. In a nutshell, CNN's six "undecided voters" were: A Democratic Party bigwigAn antiwar activistA Union officialAn Islamic leaderA Harry Reid stafferA radical Chicano separatist Wow. This looks "rather" like a scandal. Hot Air: ...You’d think the network’s audience might want to know who...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Rudy Giuliani assured a conservative legal group Friday that if elected president he would appoint federal judges who adhere to their principles. He also praised a judge who declared the capital city's gun ban unconstitutional and ridiculed efforts to eliminate the words "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. In a speech marking the 25th anniversary of the Federalist Society, Giuliani spelled out a conservative legal agenda in which he cited Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts as models for the judges he would appoint to the federal...

<p>Nicolas Sarkozy, the aggressively pro-American president of France, has spent two days charming President Bush, but he also has his eye out for the end of the current administration. Between a frenetic round of appearances today in Washington, Sarkozy found 15 minutes to place a call to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), the front-runner for the Democratic nomination.</p>

WASHINGTON -- The final version of the widely celebrated ethics bill, passed by overwhelming margins in both House and Senate a month ago, finally and quietly made its way last week from Capitol Hill to the White House. It surely will soon be signed into law by President Bush. What only a handful of leaders and insiders realize is that this measure, avowedly dedicated to transparency, actually makes it easier for the Senate to pass pet projects without the public -- or many senators -- being aware of it. Until now, one or two senators could block any provision that...

Call me a cynic but I find Al Gore’s emergence as this hundred-millionaire, successful businessman as a bit of a farce. I can understand the Oscar. When considering who gives out those trophies, I believe he would have won the Oscar if his “documentary” were shot by himself on a $300 camcorder. I remember when the 2,000 election was over and officially decided, one of my dear conservative friends (who shall remain nameless) actually said to me that she feels sorry for Al Gore. She felt sorry for him after hearing how after all those years in office, he was...

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. - When John Edwards pursued his crusade against poverty in 2005, he created a nonprofit center that allowed him to maintain a high profile - and avoid the legal scrutiny of presidential candidates. Not that Edwards was running for the White House at that point. Fresh from his loss as Democratic nominee John Kerry's running mate in 2004, he would not declare himself a candidate for president until late in 2006. However, the nonprofit Center for Promise and Opportunity offered distinct advantages to Edwards, its honorary chairman. The center's five officers all had worked for his previous...

John Edwards ended 2004 with a problem: how to keep alive his public profile without the benefit of a presidential campaign that could finance his travels and pay for his political staff. Mr. Edwards, who reported this year that he had assets of nearly $30 million, came up with a novel solution, creating a nonprofit organization with the stated mission of fighting poverty. The organization, the Center for Promise and Opportunity, raised $1.3 million in 2005, and — unlike a sister charity he created to raise scholarship money for poor students — the main beneficiary of the center’s fund-raising was...

AN DIEGO - Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton denounced President Bush on Saturday for his "Mission Accomplished" speech and said his conduct of the Iraq war was "one of the darkest blots on leadership we've ever had." Addressing delegates at the California State Democratic Party convention, Clinton said that if elected president in 2008, she would end the war. The New York senator also promised to "treat all Americans with dignity and equality no matter who you are and who you love." The pledge was clear bow to California's politically active and influential gay community. Taking on Bush's policies, Clinton contended...

In a thought-provoking statistical analysis, Dr. Peter Tsigaris of Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops, BC, Canada, concludes that whether or not climate change can be wholly attributed to human factors, it makes strong economic and environmental sense to treat it as human-caused and take action now. Despite the fact that the hundreds of scientists and reviewers on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced Feb. 2 in Paris that global warming is "very likely" caused by human activity, governments and other policy-makers may still justify inaction because of naysayers like Danish weather scientist Henrik Svensmark, who maintains that global climate...

DAMASCUS, Syria - President Bashar Assad on Thursday inaugurated the first stage of a joint Syrian-Iranian auto factory, test-driving one of the new cars and declaring that the project will boost cooperation between the allies. ADVERTISEMENT With Iranian Vice President Parviz Davoodi on hand for the ceremony at the Syrian-Iranian Company for Manufacturing Cars, Assad called the project a testament of their "historic" cooperation. "Our political relations are rooted, old and excellent," he said. "This project comes in the framework of boosting economic cooperation between the two countries. ... We are proud of this project." Marketing of the car —...

WASHINGTON --Four years to the day after voting to authorize war in Iraq, Senator John F. Kerry today asserted that the vote is his greatest regret of his political career, and said all lawmakers who voted for the war should admit that it was a mistake. "There's nothing -- nothing -- in my life in public service I regret more, nothing even close," Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, wrote in a dispatch on the liberal blog HuffingtonPost.com. "We should all be willing to say: I was wrong, I should not have voted for the Iraq War Resolution." snip...... Throughout his 2004...

July 18, 2006 Professor John Peter Maher of North-East Illinois University was scheduled to testify as a witness at the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. Due to the untimely death of President Milosevic, Professor Maher was robbed of an opportunity to show the world what he witnessed in the Croatian city of Dubrovnik. In March of 1992, three months after the old city of Dubrovnik (a UNESCO heritage site) was allegedly "destroyed" by JNA artillery fire, Professor Maher visited Dubrovnik with a cameraman. He arrived to find that the old city was almost completely untouched. Professor Maher documents what little damage...

Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan began a hunger strike on Tuesday – and Susan Sarandon, Sean Penn and other stars are joining her in her "Troops Home Fast" protest. Sheehan, whose son Casey was killed in Iraq in 2004, had her last meal at 12 a.m. on July 4 in front of the White House and will remain on a diet of water, teas and juices until Sept. 1, International Peace Day. "Everything we do is to get the troops to come home," she told PEOPLE outside the White House on Tuesday. "We want to show the world that there are...

Washington, D.C. (CNSNews.com) - U.S. Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts on Tuesday told an audience at the liberal Take Back America conference that he was sorry for voting to authorize the war in Iraq, calling the entire mission "a mistake." "We were misled, we were given evidence that was not true," Kerry said. "It was wrong, and I was wrong to vote [for it]." Kerry, who led an unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 2004, said it was necessary to admit mistakes because "you cannot change the future if you''re not honest about the past." He criticized supporters of the...

Bill and Hillary Clinton flew to Chicago together last month to deliver speeches a few hours and a few miles apart. And like any couple, they thought about having dinner at day's end. But life is not so simple when you are married to a Clinton. The former president kept a low profile and left early for Washington, in part to avoid distracting the news media from his wife's speech. They decided later that dinner would not work, so Mr. Clinton did what he often does: He rounded up some familiar faces — former aides including Joe Lockhart and Mike...

When the subject of Bill and Hillary Clinton comes up for many prominent Democrats these days, Topic A is their marriage, the NEW YORK TIMES is planning to report on Tuesday Page Ones. "Democrats say it is inevitable that, in a campaign that could return the former president to the White House, some voters would be concerned and even distracted by the Bill Clinton's political role and his potential for the kind of episodes that led the House to vote for his impeachment in 1998." NYT reporter Pat Healy is filing a report this evening, newsroom sources tell the DRUDGE...

As we watch the tragicomedy in the U.S. Senate on immigration reform, it behooves us to hark back to the last time the Senate debated major immigration reform. It was in 1985. Why does it behoove us to learn this history? Because the promises being made today are exactly the same promises made back then. The bill that the Senate produced in 1985, which became law in 1986, was ambitiously titled the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA). It is probably the most fraudulent legislation in American history, for it neither reformed nor controlled immigration. In fact, it actually exacerbated...

May 15, 2006 -- WASHINGTON - In his live, nationally televised address tonight, President Bush will tell Americans that it's impossible to deport the estimated 11 million illegal aliens living here. "We must reject amnesty, but recognize that it is not realistic to round up millions of people and send them home," said White House spokeswoman Maria Tamburri in a preview of Bush's speech. She said Bush plans to spell out his vision for sealing the border, enforcing the law, and "creating a rational system for workers to come into our country and to do jobs Americans won't do." Bush...

WASHINGTON, April 21, 2006 – A case in which several sailors face charges for arranging sham marriages to foreign women to boost their military housing allowances sends an important message to all servicemembers, a Navy lawyer told the Pentagon Channel. "You're putting in a claim for money that you are not entitled to, and that is a crime. And if you commit a crime, you can expect to be held accountable for it," said Capt. Jennifer Herold, the Navy's deputy assistant judge advocate general for criminal law policy. "This is something that each of the services take very seriously." On...