Low Blows and other stories

Edwards Takes Back Lead in IowaA new InsiderAdvantage poll in Iowa shows John Edwards leading among likely caucus-goers with 30% support, followed by Sen. Hillary Clinton at 26% and Sen. Barack Obama at 24%.This is the first poll to show Edwards ahead of his rivals since summer. Key finding: Edwards holds a significant advantage "among a group who could be key to the first contest of the presidential year: those who say their first choice is someone other than the top three. Under Iowa Democratic Party rules, candidates who poll less than 15 percent in the first vote at each caucus around the state are eliminated, and their supporters get a second chance to vote for another candidate."In the Republican race, Mike Huckabee leads with 28%, followed by Mitt Romney at 25%, Fred Thompson at 10%, Sen. John McCain at 9%, Rep. Ron Paul at 6%, and Rudy Giuliani also at 6%. ______________________________________
These trigger happy guys make about $150,000 a year, doing a job that should be done by the MPs or Marines. Bush's idea of all needs met by private Corporations!
This dog was just protecting it's territory and one of the guards was trying to manhandle it a was bitten ( he says) bastards. Of course Bush is the biggest bastard!

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The U.S. embassy in Iraq is investigating another deadly shooting incident involving its Blackwater bodyguards -- this time of the New York Times's dog.
Staff at the newspaper's Baghdad bureau said Blackwater bodyguards shot Hentish dead last week before a visit by a U.S. diplomat to the Times compound.
Blackwater spokeswoman Anne Tyrrell said the dog had attacked one of Blackwater's bomb-sniffer dogs while a security team was sweeping the compound for explosives.
"The K-9 handler made several unsuccessful attempts to get the dog to retreat, including placing himself between the dogs. When those efforts failed, the K-9 handler unfortunately was forced to use a pistol to protect the company's K-9 and himself," she said in an e-mail to Reuters.
The U.S. embassy employs about 1,000 armed Blackwater staff to protect American diplomats in Baghdad.
The firm's role became a serious issue in Iraq and remains so. With charges of fraud and just plain theft!
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LOW BLOW
Posted December 19th, 2007 at 10:07 am

It’s hard to believe that a National Enquirer story about John Edwards’ “love child” is the lead political item on Memeorandum right now, but we’ve apparently reached a point in the campaign at which baseless nonsense deserves to be treated as a big deal.
Mickey Kaus, the in-house blogger for the Washington Post-owned Slate, began pushing this garbage in October, based, of course, on a report in a supermarket tabloid. You know the story was cheap when Mickey proclaimed, “This isn’t the first time kausfiles hasn’t met Drudge’s journalistic standards!”
Edwards denied the rumor, saying, “The story is false.” Kaus said this denial was far too vague. Edwards later added that the rumors are “completely untrue” and “ridiculous,” before concluding the story was “made up.” Kaus was troubled by this, too, arguing the denial was too strong.
Today, Kaus is at it again. (emphasis in the original throughout)
Drudge teases the National Enquirer … Update: The Enquirer posts the gist….. One initial point: There’s no reason to conclude this story was planted by one campaign or another. I’m familiar with how the initial Rielle Hunter/Edwards rumors, true or not, got to at least one news outlet–and no campaigns, Dem or GOP, were involved. It was a story going around–I’d been hearing it for months. Not all rumors are plants. And some are true. Even in the Enquirer.
As it turns out, the Enquirer seems to have pulled the story — clicking on the link leads to a page with no article — but that hasn’t stopped the desperate “debate” from unfolding anyway.
It’s been a frustrating campaign season, in which nonsense has gotten far too much play, but this may very well be a new low. A “love child” story from the National Enquirer is driving the political discussion.
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The Fight for Second ChoiceThe Chicago Tribune has a very good piece on the dynamics of the Iowa caucus that makes a Democratic voter's second choice important."On caucus night, in each of the state's 1,781 precincts, a presidential candidate must have the support of at least 15 percent of the people attending that caucus, and sometimes an even greater percentage in the smallest precincts. If they don't reach that threshold, the candidate is ruled non-viable and those supporters are free to back other contenders, try to encourage others to help make their candidate viable, or go with no one at all.""In early polling in Iowa, Edwards scored well as a second-choice candidate, but more recent private polling suggests Obama has cut into that edge."
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December 18, 2007
Story of the Day: NY Times Buries Dodd's Filibuster Threat Victory
It's nothing new for our country's Paper of Record to stick a crucial story in its back pages (often while providing front-page real estate to a particularly banal article).
But one of the most egregious examples of such editorial decisions is today's move by The New York Times to bury news of presidential candidate Senator Christopher Dodd's victorious filibuster threat against the proposed telecom immunity bill.
So what page did The Times slip in this account of Dodd's courageous and historic stand? What page did it cover this patriotic push-back to a bill that, if passed, would effectively reward telecom companies for complicity in the Bush administration's illegal wiretapping of millions of innocent American citizens and set a frightening precedent of similar retroactive immunity in such cases where various parties (CIA, Blackwater mercenaries, etc.) took part in torture, extraordinary renditions or other criminal activities in George Bush's "war on terror"? What page did the paper that sat on the illegal wiretapping story for a year - before "scooping" it - deem this fit to print?
A29. Yes, A29.
(The online version has no page numbers, but this news is buried there as well; no mention of it even makes the home page - where over 90 stories currently reside.)
Now ask yourself how? Who at The Times authorized this inane editorial decision? And what excuse can possibly explain it away?
Senator Dodd's threat to filibuster yesterday and his triumph in having the patently unconstitutional bill withdrawn from a vote last night is precisely the kind of story that should be big news in a democracy, especially one such as ours, which has been gasping under the boot of an overtly criminal White House for seven long years.
What's the sound of one U.S. senator taking a successful stand against a rogue White House administration and its spineless collaborators in Congress?
If you're The Times, it's something akin to a whisper.