The Daily Flipper
Read what the Republicans Wish You Wouldn't...
As had been predicted by critics, embattled ex-New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik has been forced to pull out of his contract as security advisor to President Bharrat Jagdeo because of the charges he may soon face in the US."[Kerik] said he doesn't want the country to be tainted," Jagdeo revealed yesterday at a news conference, adding that similar reasons were given for his decision to put off his involvement in Trinidad and Tobago.
US federal prosecutors are preparing to charge Kerik with several felonies, including tax evasion and conspiracy to commit wiretapping. As a result, Kerik revealed last week that he would not be returning to Trinidad until the charges against him are dealt with. He also said he did not want his presence to lead to criticisms of the opposition United National Congress, which contracted his services to deal with the country's high crime rate.
Kerik was President George W. Bush's nominee for Secretary of Homeland Security, but he withdrew his name from consideration for failing to pay social security taxes for his nanny. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani had endorsed the nomination but has since admitted that it was a mistake. Giuliani's association with Kerik is being seen as a major blow to his campaign for the Republican Presidential nomination, particularly after reports of impending charges against him.
Former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a Republican who has few fans among conservatives for his support of abortion rights, has taken a fuzzy position.His spokeswoman Maria Comella said Giuliani thinks "we need to take advantage of new technology, while at the same time need to be respectful of human life." She refused to provide details.
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, making a swing through the South on Wednesday, ducked the racially charged issue of whether Georgia should apologize for slavery, saying it was up to individual states."States like Georgia should decide that for themselves," Giuliani said at a stop in Atlanta.
The mayor made a similar response when asked about another hot racial issue - the Confederate flag.
Giuliani has had a rocky relationship in the black community. During his tenure as mayor of New York, police shot and killed unarmed West African immigrant Amadou Diallo and Haitian immigrant Abner Louima was beaten and sodomized with a plunger in a Brooklyn station house. Black leaders lambasted the mayor for refusing to meet with them and for supporting the police.
Anyone hoping to be president of the United States of America owes it to national unity and historical accuracy to go beyond that and note that to many Americans, the flag is a symbol of the evil of slavery and of a secession effort that threatened to destroy the union of our nation. Anything short of that is unseemly pandering to Southern voters. Mr. Giuliani is admired as much as he is because of his reputation as a straight-talking New Yorker. A presidential campaign is no time for Mr. Giuliani or Mr. Romney to start talking like Trent Lott or Howard Dean or Jefferson Davis. The Republican president for them to emulate on this issue, unapologetically, is Lincoln.
He does have one somewhat bitter memory of Long Island: even worse than when the lifelong Yankee fan had to wear a Boston Red Sox uniform in Little League."One year they changed our name ... we were called the Dodgers," the hated Yankee rival that abandoned Brooklyn. "And that was much tougher."
"Those small animals can be ferocious," Romney joked Wednesday. "There were some pretty sad faces around the Romney household on Easter. We had our grandkids there and they were disappointed the Easter bunny didn't come. He heard I was packing heat."
Eight VMI alumni have been killed in Iraq, as well as two others in the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. And the front rows of Jackson Memorial Hall were filled with former cadets who have served stints in Iraq.The cadets offered McCain polite applause but afterward several of them expressed doubts with the way the war was being handled.
"I really don't know where I stand," said Nick Matson, a sophomore from Roseville, Calif. "I just think we need a new leader."
Sen. John McCain, once considered the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, has fallen to third place in a new Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll, and is running behind Fred Thompson, an actor and former senator who has not even entered the race.The Arizona senator's showing in the poll is his lowest in any national survey to date, marking a new benchmark in his flagging fortunes. The surge of interest in Thompson is a sign of conservative dissatisfaction with the established field of candidates and underscores just how unsettled the Republican race remains.
Sen. John McCain's troubled presidential campaign is eliminating some non-senior staff positions and cutting some consultants' contracts.Chris Drummond, a former top aide to South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, told The Associated Press that his consulting contract was among those dropped. Sanford was McCain's 2000 campaign co-chairman with Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
"It kind of came as a surprise," Drummond said.
Arizona Sen. John McCain stood before an auditorium of uniformed cadets at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Va., on Wednesday with a message about the war in Iraq. "There are the first glimmers of progress," McCain said, in what his campaign billed as the first of three major policy speeches that will lead to the official announcement of his presidential campaign later this month.McCain was reading the words off a teleprompter in the back of the room, but it was hard not to notice how closely they matched a statement made just 25 hours earlier by President Bush, who had also come to Virginia to talk to a military audience. "We're beginning to see some progress towards our mission," Bush had declared to American Legion Post 177 in Fairfax.
The echo-chamber effect did not end there. On Tuesday, Bush told his listeners that the Democratic leadership was "irresponsible" for attaching restrictions on funding for the troops, which Bush called a "political statement" that could risk the war effort. On Wednesday, McCain told the VMI cadets that Democrats had chosen a "reckless" road that would "deny our soldiers the means to prevent an American defeat." On Tuesday, Bush praised Iraq's new oil law, warned of a power vacuum that would be caused by a U.S. withdrawal, and spoke of the lessons of Sept. 11. On Wednesday, so did McCain.
Oddly enough, the Arizona senator previously had been known primarily for unfortunate associations. He had briefly been chairman of Phil Gramm's ill-starred presidential campaign. Before that, he had been tarred by Charles Keating, a disgraced financier of the 1980s who spread a lot of money around on Capitol Hill when the savings and loan industry was collapsing.
Even little 8-year-old Susie Flynn can spell “president,” something that the architects of Rep. Duncan Hunter’s (R-Calif.) run for the title of commander in chief apparently can’t manage.In the California Republican’s formal Federal Election Commission filing making his bid official, Hunter misspelled “president,” mangling the name of his committee as “Hunter for Prseident Inc.”
On the bright side, although the field of candidates for the presidency is a bit crowded, Hunter is uncontested to be prseident.
His signature song? “Hail to the Cheif.”
One former close adviser stipulated that he was "not focused on marital infidelity" except as one indication that Gingrich "was not able to put aside his ego out of a sense of higher purpose or principle." He said, "It breaks my heart to say this, because Newt has a view of the world closest to mine, (but) is this the person I want across the table from Putin?"So how can Gingrich make his greatest contribution to the nation? By remaining an intellectual gadfly. President John F. Kennedy once hosted a dinner for Nobel Prize winners and said the evening displayed "probably the greatest concentration of talent and genius (in the White House) except for perhaps those times when Thomas Jefferson ate alone."
Today, publicists could say that the Heritage Foundation generates more ideas per hour than anyone else -- except when Gingrich is giving a speech. I hope he stays an intellectual entrepreneur and gives many more.
Says a Romney campaign email to supporters in touting the former governor's big national security speech last night at A&M:"Sometimes the "Inside the Beltway" focus on the horserace – the polls, the fundraising, and the endorsements – causes one to lose sight of the most important factors in an election: the candidate’s agenda, policy vision, and leadership capacity."
So does this mean Mitt lost sight "of the most important factors" at his Iowa campaign HQ opening last week when he used his speech there to trumpet his poll standing, fundraising and plans to win the Iowa GOP's straw poll?
I guess the last part is at least part of the "candidate's agenda."
