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Maverick. Political switch hitter. Flirted with joining a ticket with John Kerry against a sitting Republican president back in 2004? This is old ground, but it’s worth going over as a reminder of who we’re dealing with in John McCain.

Sen. Arlen Specter, a 26-year Senate Republican, said he will visit Syria despite loud objections by the Bush administration, contending the situation in Iraq is so dire that it is time Congress step up to the plate and see what it can do. Specter, R-Pa., said in an interview late Friday that he is planning a trip to the Middle East that will include Israel and Syria. The senator said he and other Republicans are concerned that the administration's policies in the Middle East are not working and that other GOP members may follow in his footsteps. "I've talked to...

Let's not get lathered up worrying about what Sen. John Kerry meant when he contrasted the value of book learning to the value of getting shot at in a foreign war. Instead let's assess the public reaction and its possible impact on Tuesday's elections. Parsing Kerry's words is a waste of time. Did he mean a lack of education might make one, like George W. Bush, an ignorant warmonger? Or only that hard work and hitting the books will keep one far away from the violent desert sands of volatile Iraq? Most informed speculators have adopted the second interpretation. But...

During last year's presidential campaign, John F. Kerry was the candidate often portrayed as intellectual and complex, while George W. Bush was the populist who mangled his sentences. But newly released records show that Bush and Kerry had a virtually identical grade average at Yale University four decades ago. In 1999, The New Yorker published a transcript indicating that Bush had received a cumulative score of 77 for his first three years at Yale and a roughly similar average under a non-numerical rating system during his senior year. Kerry, who graduated two years before Bush, got a cumulative 76 for...

The investigation into the Haditha incident is not even complete, no one has been charged, and no defense has been given to the charges, but politicians such as Rep. John Murtha and liberals in the news media already want to publicly hang some young Marines ("General to teach rules of war" Nation, Friday). Before you pass judgment on these young men, you must step out of the fantasyland in which most Americans live and understand there is a war in Iraq and, as in any war, nothing is black and white. There is no way to understand the Al Anbar...

Bush Air National Guard Documents Could Be Intentional Hit On Kerry Despite Dan Rather’s insistence on conducting what amounts to his last stand (he’ll be “urged” by CBS to pack it in after yet another scandal), the alleged Air national Guard documents are beginning to look like sucker bait that Rather took hook, line and sinker. And that sucker bait came from the left, it appears. The problem with the documents is that many aspects of the “facts” are too easy to disprove and may have intentionally been planted to implode Kerry’s credibility and campaign. Consider the fact that the...

WHO IS BEN BARNES?A Deep-Pocketed Kerry Partisan Who Can't Keep His Stories Straight______________________________________________Barnes Under OathUnder Oath, Barnes Testified He Had No Contact With Bush Family Concerning National Guard.  "Ben Barnes, then the speaker of the Texas House, said in 1999 that Sidney Adger, a Houston businessman and longtime friend of the Bush family whose son also won a slot in the 147th, had asked him to help get Mr. Bush into the Guard. Mr. Barnes, who acknowledged a role only after he was questioned under oath, also said that he had spoken to the head of the Texas Air National...

I have a modest proposal that we, as conservatives, from here out and henceforth, refer to the person with a 130-day stint in Indochina as one of the following (and ONLY one of the dollowing): 1) Mr. John Heinz (preferred) 2) Mr. F'ing Heinz (pretty good) 3) JF Heinz (OK) 4) J Fing (good for fast posts) I propose we, as a group, do not waste keystrokes nor bandwidth with the birthname (which is of no import to the semi-vet) nor do we suggest that his "importance" is anything less than a result of his ability to somehow seduce older...

Yeah, well if they suck that bad make your own! There once was a man named Kerry Whose voting record was very scary He flips and he flops, while his poll numbers drop and his positions seem contrary There once was a Democrat named John who of waffles he was very fond over and over he served them up while for some odd reason his followers ate them up until they evetually caught on Part 1: The Fairy There once was a fairy named Leon who asked a paticular John what is your wish I'll serve up a dish and...

In April, Zack Exley was named director of Internet organizing for presidential candidate Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, making him the Democrat's point man on the cyber front in the battle for voters. His background: the operator of a satirical website called GWBush.com and the subject of a federal complaint filed by lawyers for George Bush, according to a report in the LA Times. Exley’s GWBush.com site in 1999 featured doctored photos of then-Governor Bush with cocaine residue under his nose. Exley also posted fake campaign statements under such headlines as "George II: Restoring the Throne to its Rightful...

I have made a career of taking bungee jumps in my election calls. Sometimes I haven’t had a helmet and I have gotten a little scratched. But here is my jump for 2004: John Kerry will win the election. Have you recovered from the shock? Is this guy nuts? Kerry’s performance of late has hardly been inspiring and polls show that most Americans have no sense of where he really stands on the key issues that matter most to them. Regardless, I still think that he will win. And if he doesn’t, it will be because he blew it. There...

"DEMOCRATS ROCK! Can you feel it?" hollers Michigan senator Debbie Stabenow. It is sometime after 7:00P.M. on March 25, and Stabenow is onstage at the National Building Museum in downtown Washington, D.C., addressing countless tables of Democratic donors and politicians, who are half-listening to her as they drink wine, sip iced tea, and eat catered barbecue. There are over 1,500 people in all. Stabenow takes a deep breath. "Isn't this just wonderful to see everyone coming together?"Certainly it's impressive. From the print media's perch on the museum's balcony, some 50 feet above and at least 100 feet away from the...

Standing before a capacity crowd Sunday night on the University of Akron campus, presidential hopeful John Kerry held something in his hand that spoke volumes about the importance of winning Ohio. It was a tiny buckeye. ``On the first day when I stepped foot in Ohio right after I came out of Wisconsin, I was handed a buckeye,'' said Kerry, the Massachusetts senator and likely Democratic nominee. ``And I have still got it with me, and I am carrying it right through to the White House.'' Ohio is expected to play a major role in the coming election as a...

You have probably read the Time Magazine article, "The Tenth Brother," by Kerry's hagiographer, Douglas Brinkley: Tuesday, Mar. 09, 2004 The Tenth BrotherDouglas Brinkley, author of Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, interviews Kerry’s tenth warmate and gets a story sharply different from what the other nine crew members have had to saySource At first blush it is a surprising piece. Brinkley managed after a Herculean effort to unearth a former crewmember of Kerry's Swiftboats who doesn't think Kerry walks on water. When writing my book Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War (William Morrow...

9/11 Victims' Kin Angered by Bush Ads 12 minutes ago Add Top Stories - AP to My Yahoo! By LIZ SIDOTI, Associated Press Writer WASHINGTON - Relatives of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and a firefighters union said Thursday they're angry that President Bush (news - web sites)'s new campaign ads include images of the destroyed World Trade Center and firefighters carrying a flag-draped stretcher through the rubble. They say the ads are in poor taste and accuse Bush of exploiting the attacks. Bush's campaign defended the commercials as appropriate for an election about public policy and...

Ladies and gentlemen, it is breaking hard right before our eyes. Sean Hannity is talking now about the phony outrage story regarding the President Bush ads. We are going to find that the RATS contacted family members who are anti-war, anti-Bush and who lost relatives on 9-11. We will find they were given the phone numbers of newsrooms. We will find they were given talking points. Although some who called got out of hand, we got the NY TIMES to take notice of the story. They were deluged with phone calls. I understand Neal Boortz was on the story as...

We Will Beat Bush - Archives The "Mother" of All House Parties The East Bay for Kerry/MoveOn House party on December 7th combined the forces of two grass-roots organizations based in San Francisco East Bay Area. We had 200 guests eating, drinking, and watching the MoveOn Documentary “Uncovered” featuring Joseph Wilson and Rand Beers from the Kerry campaign.When Teresa Heinz-Kerry arrived, she handed me a pin that read in the center: “Asses of Evil” with “Bush”, “Cheney”, “Rumsfeld” and “Ashcroft” surrounding it. She met, greeted and talked to a jam-packed room of Kerry supporters and others who came for...

Democrats are counting on Sen. John Kerry's military credentials to convince voters that he can be trusted with America's national security. But documents that surfaced over the weekend raise serious questions about whether Kerry was duped in the 1990s into helping the Chinese military perfect its ability to strike the U.S. with nuclear weapons. In 1996 Kerry met with Liu Chaoying, the daughter of a powerful Chinese military official who also doubled as vice president of a subsidiary of the state-owned China Aerospace Corp. Before the meeting, held in Kerry's Senate office, Liu's sponsor, Johnny Chung, made clear she was...

Sunday, June 29, 2003 2:45 a.m. EDT Kerry Protested Vietnam With 'Hanoi' Jane and 'Radical' Ramsey On the campaign trail, presidential hopeful Sen. John Kerry regularly boasts about his Vietnam War combat experience, which earned him three purple hearts, plus the silver and bronze stars. But the Massachusetts Democrat doesn't much discuss what he did after returning home, when he became a much-celebrated organizer for one of America's most radical anti-war groups and rubbed shoulders with the likes of 'Hanoi' Jane Fonda and former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark. As a rising star with Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Kerry...