Republican Hereos( oxymoron)

Republican heroes suddenly in short supply.
March 5, 2007

Pretty little angel eyes
Pretty little angel eyes
Pretty little angel, pretty
little angel
Pretty little angel eyes.
ANN COULTER, dressed in black pants, black top and a sleeveless brown leather vest, her reddish blonde hair falling around her shoulders, a large silver cross on a silver chain around her neck, does not have angel eyes.
In fact the best-selling author's eyes are narrow and hawkish. In the vast basement ballroom of a Washington hotel where, for three days, more than 5000 conservative activists have assembled to restore their faith in themselves and connect with the spirit of Ronald Reagan, the incongruity of the song - a 1960s paean to teenage infatuation - was beside the point.
For the 1000 people in the ballroom - and the hundreds who could not get in and had to watch her on television, this moment, as Coulter made her way to the stage, was the highlight of the day.
They had heard Rudolph Giuliani speak and Mitt Romney, two of the three front-runners for the Republican Party presidential nomination, and both had received something approaching enthusiastic applause.
Giuliani had been fairly low key, obviously aware that many of the delegates from all over America at this annual Conservative Political Action Conference were not thrilled that he had a messy personal history, supported gay rights and was pro-choice on abortion.
These are serious people, committed conservatives, and this shindig, as it is affectionately referred to, is the conservative movement's big event of the year, where every star of conservative America at some point will get up on the stage and urge renewed commitment to the cause.
So Giuliani talked about how he destroyed the Mafia in New York when he was mayor, basically through the use of informers and electronic surveillance and even occasionally killing a few of them when they tried to shoot it out with the police.
All those techniques, he said, could be used to fight terrorism - "remain on the offence" as he put it - if he became president. No mention of gay rights or abortion or even gun control, which he favours. Perhaps the fact that members of the National Rifle Association seemed to make up half the audience meant Giuliani had decided talk of gun control here might not be a great idea.
He left the stage to the sound of Frank Sinatra singing New York New York, which seemed appropriate given the late Sinatra's alleged ties to the Mob.

Mitt Romney, on the other hand, talked at length about all sorts of things, but his speech did not do anything for the man dressed as a porpoise at the back of the hall with several non-porpoises - probably humans - all of them holding up signs that said "Mitt Romney is a flip-flopper".
This was a reference to Romney changing his mind about abortion - he now opposes it - and gay rights - he now trenchantly opposes gay marriage - and he now favours a gun in every home, having recently seen the light and joined the National Rifle Association.
But he is very handsome - tall and well built - and he has a striking blonde wife, five sons and three grandchildren. While he is a Mormon, a religious sect that not so long ago tacitly allowed polygamy, Romney, unlike his Republican challengers - John McCain, Giuliani and Newt Gingrich have all had multiple wives even if not all at once - Romney has opted to settle for one wife.
All of this speculation about Giuliani and Romney and just why McCain stayed away from the conference was forgotten as Coulter made her way to the stage. There are no doubts about her conservatism. No one could accuse her of flip-flopping on anything.
At 45 Coulter looks a decade younger, thin and angular and highly strung, charged, an attack dog for conservatism, if that is what you can call Coulter's spiel, which has earned her millions through the sale of books such as Liberal Lies about the American Right and Slander, in which she refers to Katie Couric, the CBS news presenter, as the "affable Eva Braun" of US television.
Her latest book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, has sold 600,000 hardbacks and topped The New York Times best seller list. She is a regular on Fox News and is a favourite of right-wing radio hosts including Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity.
And now here she is, on stage at the biggest conservative show in town. She reels off a series of jokes about everyone from Al Gore to Hillary Clinton. The jokes are funny in an appalling way, and the crowd loves it.
Coulter on Gore: "I hear he has a small carbon footprint. You know what they say about men with a small carbon footprint. Mind you, at 400 pounds he probably can't see any footprint."
On John Edwards: "I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word faggot."

On Barack Obama: "I refer to him as B. Hussein Obama. He's half white and half black, half Christian and half Muslim and half atheist. Something there for every Democrat."
On Bill Clinton: "He was called the first black president. Obama might be half black and half white. Bill was half white and half trash."
On Hillary Clinton: "Hillary has already started to put together her White House team. It has to be diverse. It has to have blacks and whites and men and women. All sorts of women as long as they aren't called Monica."
And on and on - and on and on went the applause. Meanwhile, in the hall where dozens of small stalls were selling books and T-shirts and memberships from everything from the National Rifle Association to a group called Liberal Lies and another raising funds for a Stop Hillary campaign, hundreds of people were lined up for a Coulter book signing event.
They were even more anxious to be on the receiving end of a Coulter smile after they heard that Howard Dean, the Democratic Party boss, had called on the Republican presidential candidates to denounce Coulter for her "faggot" joke.
"Republicans should denounce her hateful remarks," he said, a statement that would no doubt result in a few thousand extra sales of Coulter's book. Mission accomplished.
The briskest trade in the stall hall seemed to be at the "Stop Hillary" stall, where for $US5 ($6.40) you could buy a pack of cards, each with a picture of an evil liberal on it, ranging from Hillary, who of course was the queen of spades, to the feminist Gloria Steinem. Obama was the jack of spades to Hillary's queen - no one can match Hillary in the hate stakes at the conference.
There was a lot of fervour and a lot of talk of recapturing the spirit of Ronald Reagan, by consensus the greatest of US presidents. Young men and women who would have been babies during the Reagan presidency talked in small groups about America becoming great again if only conservatives would go back to basics, back to Reagan's emphasis on American strength and American greatness.
But what was most striking about this conservative jamboree was that President George Bush was hardly mentioned. The Vice-President, Dick Cheney, gave the speech at the official dinner on Friday night and, at the conference at least, Cheney remains a hero.
Not so, it seems, the President. Not only was there hardly any mention of his name, but there were no photographs of Bush on display - and everyone from Cheney to the disgraced former House majority leader Tom Delay received their photographic due.
As for the Iraq war, it was virtually ignored. Giuliani and Romney both half-heartedly said they supported the Bush troop increase and then they both quickly went on to say mistakes had been made in Iraq. That was more or less it.
Conservatives know who the villains are - Clinton and Obama and Gore and the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi - but who their heroes are is far from clear. Except that George Bush is no longer one of them.
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Checkout Agents MI5 trains supermarket checkout staff
Workers told how to detect potential terrorists as shops are warned of bomb risk in underground car parks
By Sophie Goodchild and Paul Lashmar
Published: 04 March 2007
Supermarket checkout staff are being trained by the security services in how to detect potential terrorists. MI5 has been secretly advising food retailers, including Asda and Tesco, on how to identify extremist shoppers.
Measures include increasing CCTV in underground carparks to prevent bomb attacks and being alert to mass purchases of mobile phones, which can be used as bomb detonators. The awareness training for staff also covers bulk sales of toiletries which could be used as the basic ingredient in explosives.
The security services and ministers are worried supermarkets are an attractive target for terrorists because of the potential for mass casualties.
One terrorism expert said: "Terrorists know if they frighten people from everyday activities they are 'winning the war'. What better than a busy supermarket which is hard to defend and with lots of cars in a car park?"
A Tesco spokesman said: "We have strict procedures and contingency plans in place and we remain in close contact with the security services at all levels." Asda also confirmed it had "contingency plans" to cover a "number of potential crises".
The Asda chain is owned by the US retail giant Wal-Mart. Last year, three Palestinian-Americans from Texas were arrested in a Wal-Mart outlet in Michigan after staff spotted them bulk-buying mobile phones.
The suspects claimed to be buying the 80 handsets to resell them for a profit, but police held them on suspicion they were planning to use the phones as detonators. Their van contained 1,000 phones and pictures of a bridge, police said. The men are awaiting trial.
The FBI has already thwarted a terrorist plot in the US which was aimed at hospitals and supermarkets. Last April, a 23-year-old man was convicted of supporting terror after plotting a jihad against supermarkets and hospitals in the US.
Hamid Hayat, who faces a possible sentence of 38 years, admitted he had attended a terror training camp in the Balakot area of Pakistan. His plea for a new trial was rejected last month.
The FBI and the US Department of Homeland Security sent out joint bulletins in February and March to police departments nationwide warning about the bulk purchase of phones for personal profit or financing terrorism.
Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, warned in the wake of the bombing of the Twin Towers that supermarkets were an attractive target for al-Qa'ida, which could use them to cause mass casualties through bombings or poison plots.
MPs also warned in a report in 2003 that more needed to be done to protect the food industry after Tesco revealed there was a "real and current threat" of terrorists contaminating food supplies.
Special Branch officers were used during the IRA bombing campaigns on the British mainland to give advice to companies, including the food industry, on the threat they faced.
But security sources said that the problem is now much more serious, because modern extremists are more random in their approach, unlike the IRA which focused on very specific targets.
Whitehall sources confirmed that many businesses including "those in the food industry" have been given training and advice, although they refused to give specific details
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Sick of the 2008 presidential race already? You've got reason:
In one measure of news interest, campaign stories have consumed 95 minutes of attention this year through Feb. 27 on the ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts. That's more time than in the comparable periods for the previous four presidential election cycles combined, according to the Tyndall Report.
Presidential politics was so far off the radar in January and February 1991 that the three newscasts together spent less than a minute on the upcoming campaign.
(And no, acknowledging that one might get sick of it doesn't mean we're going to stop covering it around here.)
Guess the MSM is trying to take the heat off the WAR
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Quote Of The Day

“It’s still George Bush’s war. But we run the risk of gaining some ownership of it if we don’t make it absolutely clear that we are the party that wants to get out of there.”
-- Senator Russ Feingold, quoted by The New York Times explaining why Congressional Dems shouldn't consider measures that would give Bush any leeway to continue the war
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