John McCain yesterday said he would not rule out picking a pro-choice running mate, a move seen as a boost for former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, who joined the presumptive GOP nominee for two days of campaign events in his home state. However, McCain may simply have been throwing a bone to Ridge after seeming to indicate the former Homeland Security secretary would not be tapped in remarks to reporters in Erie.
The Washington Times reports McCain said Wednesday "that he would not rule out naming a pro-choice vice-presidential nominee, saying the abortion issue amounts to 'a disagreement' and that he thinks conservatives would accept former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge, who is pro-choice, as a potential running mate." McCain told the Weekly Standard in an interview published on the magazine's Web site Wednesday afternoon, "Tom Ridge is one of the great leaders and he happens to be pro-choice. And I don't think that that would necessarily rule Tom Ridge out."
McCain To Unveil Tech Agenda The technologically-challenged McCain today will unveil a market-oriented plan for the tech sector. The Wall Street Journal reports, "Under fire for being a technophobe," McCain "will unveil a technology agenda that bundles previously announced pro-business proposals with continued support for a hands-off approach to regulation." The plan will "call for a 10% tax credit on wages paid to all research-and-development employees. At the same time, it will reiterate Sen. McCain's opposition to Internet taxes and new laws guaranteeing net neutrality, the idea that Internet providers must treat all legal Internet traffic equally."
The AP reports Barack Obama "chose Mark Warner, Virginia's Senate candidate and former governor, to deliver the keynote address at the Democratic convention, underscoring Democrats' all-out effort to win the Southern state for the first time since 1964." The move "raises questions about the prospects of Obama choosing Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine as his running mate." The Politico says Warner's pick reflects "new Democratic optimism about the South."
On its front page, the Washington Post also reports Warner's selection "appeared to dim chances that the state's current governor...would be selected as the Democrats' vice presidential nominee." Reporting on Warner's selection, the Washington Times also says "it would buck conventional wisdom for the campaign to put two Virginians in the prime-time limelight."
Kaine Said To Replicate Obama's Strengths The New York Times reports the Obama campaign "is eyeing" Kaine "as a potential running mate, seeing in him a like-minded breath of fresh air who has also shown he can win in a red state. But Mr. Kaine's similarities to Senator Barack Obama are also a potential weakness: he has a legislative record that even some supporters say is thin, and virtually no experience in foreign policy or military affairs." While running mates "typically complement the presidential candidate, Mr. Kaine, 50, more replicates Mr. Obama."
Daschle Not Expecting To Be Obama's Veep The Hill reports ex-Sen. Tom Daschle "said Tuesday that he doesn't expect to be asked to be Sen. Barack Obama's (D-Ill.) running mate and has no idea whom Obama will pick." Daschle told The Hill, "I really don't expect to be asked and I haven't weighed in on it."
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The Washington Post, in a front-page story, reviews conservative author Jerome R. Corsi's new book, "The Obama Nation." In the book, Corsi, who inspired the "Swift Boat" campaign against John Kerry in 2004, has "attacked" Obama's "story with a narrative of his own: The son of an 'alcoholic polygamist,' Obama deals with his abandonment issues and 'black rage' by experimenting with drugs and radical thought. He makes a calculated entrance into politics despite having accomplished little and having developed some 'anti-American' sentiments." The Post adds Corsi's book "lacks major revelations and has been dismissed by Obama's campaign as a series of lies from a serial liar." CNN's Situation Room reported the book "alleges Obama is on the extreme left of American politics, and has extensive connections to Islam and with radical racial politics, this despite the fact that, for months, Obama's been explaining he is not Muslim."
The Politico reports Kerry's "former top advisers, who decided to initially pull their punches in 2004, believe this time Democrats must fight back hard -- and fight back now." In a separate story, The Politico reports Corsi "has left a trail of wild theories, vitriol and dogma that have called into question his credibility." Corsi "penned another tome asserting oil is a nearly infinite resource that continues to generate naturally, and posted a series of online comments through 2004, including suggestions that Hillary Rodham Clinton is a lesbian and Muslims worship Satan."
AFP reports former Republican secretary of state Colin Powell "denied Wednesday that he was to appear at the upcoming Democratic convention, in what would have been a coup for White House runner Barack Obama." AFP adds "the idea of Powell, a former chairman of the US military's joint chiefs of staff, crossing party lines in a spectacular endorsement of Obama was raised earlier by conservative journalist William Kristol."
On MSNBC's Hardball, NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell said it was "not true" that Colin Powell would endorse Barack Obama: "He's not going to either convention. And I think perhaps some people inferred from the fact that Colin Powell is not going to the Republican convention that he was going to choose the Democrat, Barack Obama." Powell is "telling friends is that he wants to evaluate both candidates, see whom they choose to be their running mates, and then make a decision, after looking at their positions on policies and their running mates, whether he wants to endorse. So no endorsement of Barack Obama. He's not ruling it out."
Roll Call reports Sen. Joe Lieberman (ID-Conn.) has "resumed his role as an attack dog for" McCain "by accusing" Barack Obama "of putting the needs of other nations ahead of the United States and arguing that he is unfit to lead the nation during wartime." Democrats "privately said Lieberman's comments could cost him in the Senate, where he caucuses with Democrats."
The New York Times reports in a front-page story, "Across the increasingly Democratic Northeast, Republicans are in danger of losing half a dozen or more Congressional seats in November, as even districts once considered safe have become vulnerable to well-financed Democrats, according to political analysts and members of both parties." There are "roughly a dozen competitive Congressional races in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut and New Hampshire, nearly all of them in districts now held by Republicans, according to analysts and strategists in both parties." All "but 2 of the 11 Congressional Democrats who won office in 2006 in the Northeast appear headed into the general election campaign in a strong position, the analysts said."
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The Washington Post reports "scandal-plagued Republican governor" Jim Gibbons "is so politically toxic that few of his party's prominent candidates will be seen with him. The GOP's most powerful state senator survived a tough primary after 36 years of never even facing a credible opponent. And the party may quickly be losing its grip on a state that could be critical to the outcome of the presidential election." In addition, the Republicans "who hold two of the state's three U.S. House seats are in danger of losing them."
The Washington Times reports a "maverick millionaire who took on President Bush in the Dubai Ports fight of 2006 is now aiming for another top Washington politician - Ted Stevens, the senior Republican in the U.S. Senate." Normally, Vic Vickers, "who is challenging Mr. Stevens in the Aug. 26 Republican primary, would be a footnote and the 40-year incumbent would be assured of his eighth consecutive victory." But Stevens "has become a symbol of pork-barrel spending and was indicted last month on federal charges of not reporting hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts." If Stevens "survives the primary, he likely will face Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich, a Democrat. An Ivan Moore poll taken after the indictment gave Mr. Begich a 21-percentage-point lead, up from nine points two weeks earlier."
The Los Angeles Times reports "a gunman shot and killed the chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party at its Little Rock headquarters today. The man authorities said was the gunman later died after being shot by sheriff's deputies after a 30-minute car chase. The motive for the shooting remained unclear." Democratic Party Chairman Bill Gwatney is "a well-known former state legislator and a superdelegate in the upcoming Democratic National Convention in Denver."
The Washington Post /AP reports, "Sen. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, issued a statement calling Mr. Gwatney," a Clinton super-delegate, "not only a strong chairman of Arkansas's Democratic Party, but...also a cherished friend and confidante."
The story was briefly covered by each of the networks, the New York Times, and the Washington Times.
The AP reports that according to the latest Pew Research Center poll, Barack Obama leads John McCain 46%-43%. Obama "led McCain...by 8 percentage points" in Pew's June survey, "though by July his lead was 5 points, about the same as now."
43% Not Fully Committed To Either Candidate The AP reports for "all the passion this year's presidential campaign has stirred, more than four in 10 voters are still up for grabs. ... Forty-three percent of registered voters have not made final decisions on whom to support, according to a recent Associated Press-Ipsos poll."
Obama Landslide Seen As Unlikely The Politico reports, "From the fever swamps of the blogosphere to the halls of academia, there is a chorus of voices who have come to the same conclusion about the presidential election: Barack Obama is going to win in November, by something resembling a landslide." But "for all the breathless analysis and number-crunching that has convinced observers Obama is en route to an epic victory, there is one key historic fact that is often overlooked -- most popular vote landslides were clearly visible by the end of summer. And by that indicator, 2008 doesn't measure up."
Rove: Four Swing States Key In the Wall Street Journal, Karl Rove says the presidential race could "come down to a few battleground states." Barack Obama "will focus on Colorado and Virginia," and "of the two," he "is best positioned to pick up Colorado's nine electoral votes." If John McCain "lost Colorado and Virginia, he would likely have 264 electoral votes (assuming he carried the other states President Bush won in 2004). To win, he would have to pick up a state Democrats are counting on winning, such as Michigan." Obama "needs to pick up 18 electoral votes more than John Kerry received, meaning Mr. Obama must carry Colorado or Virginia and add another small state to his column. If Mr. McCain carries Michigan as well as Ohio, it would make Mr. Obama's Electoral College math very difficult."
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Only a day after it agreed to a ceasefire, Russia appeared Wednesday to be continuing its military operations in Georgia, prompting what media reports are casting as a strong rebuke from President Bush. Speaking from the White House Rose Garden, the President called on Russia to immediately withdraw from Georgia, and ordered US humanitarian relief to be sent to the region. However, says the Wall Street Journal, despite the "dose of Cold War-style brinksmanship" both the US and Russia "appeared to be calibrating their moves carefully to avoid direct hostilities." In addition, the Journal adds, Bush's move to provide humanitarian assistance "may have been geared in part to assuage critics at home and reassure allies abroad."
Nonetheless, media reports last night and this morning described the President as adopting a markedly tougher line against Russia than in previous days. The Los Angeles Times, for example, titles its front-page story "Bush Takes Tougher Stance On Georgian Conflict," and says the President "escalated the American response...to the Russian military action in Georgia." Similarly, referring to Bush's "toughest warning to Russia yet," NBC Nightly News reported the President was "flanked by his Defense Secretary and Secretary of State in the Rose Garden" as he "fired a verbal warning shot at Russia, demanding an end to Russian attacks." And in "a strong signal of US support for Georgia against Russia," the President "is sending" Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice "to France tonight and on to Tbilisi Friday." Bush's "brief but stern remarks," reports the AP, "put the US more firmly than ever on Georgia's side in its conflict with Russia on Wednesday" and revealed his "growing impatience with Moscow's aggression." The US moves, adds the AP, "appeared designed to answer criticism that Bush has not done enough."
The Washington Post reports on what it calls a "sharp rebuke from...Bush" that "drew immediate praise from Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili," and the CBS Evening News said "Bush finally came out forcefully on the escalating conflict, warning Russia it faces international isolation." Said Bush: "To begin to repair the damage to its relations with the United States, Europe, and other nations and to begin restoring its place in the world, Russia must keep its word and act to end this crisis."
USA Today reports "the aid mission" announced by Bush "is small, consisting of cargo flights with modest-size crews who will not leave the airport in Tbilisi, Georgia's capital. Even so, their presence raises the stakes in the conflict by putting US troops in Georgian territory, albeit in a temporary, non-military role." USA Today notes "the move also makes it harder for Russia to isolate its much smaller neighbor." For his part, reports the New York Times, Georgian President Saakashvili "declared the relief operation a 'turning point' in the conflict." The Georgian leader, however, "interpreted the aid operation as a decision to defend Georgia's ports and airports, though Bush administration and Pentagon officials quickly made it clear that would not be the case."
McClatchy reports "the decision to dispatch aid aboard military aircraft potentially put the United States and Russia on a collision course. Pentagon officials said they were taking pains to make sure that the Russians were fully informed of all US actions to avoid misunderstandings." The Financial Times, AFP, Roll Call, Washington Times and The Hill all run additional accounts of Bush's remarks.
Meanwhile, reports last night and this morning suggest the Russian military is gaining ground. NBC Nightly News reported on "Russian tanks rolling defiantly deep inside Georgian territory." It was "day one of the ceasefire and already this looked like a major violation. These tanks were near the strategic town of Gori, miles inside Georgia." The Washington Post also reports that despite the ceasefire, "Russian forces took over the frontline Georgian city of Gori on Wednesday, seized munitions at Georgian military bases and set up positions along the country's main east-west highway." The Wall Street Journal says that when Russian forces entered Gori yesterday they met "no resistance from the demoralized Georgian military" and "were accompanied by hundreds of irregular militias from the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia, witnesses said." The Washington Times, Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, AFP and New York Times also report on the military developments in Russia.
Crisis Wipes "Pretense" That Medvedev In Charge The Washington Post reports, "There was little doubt about who was ruling Russia even before its armed incursion into Georgia this week. But the events of the past five days wiped away any pretense that President Dmitry Medvedev runs the country." The crisis "has demonstrated how much control remains in the hands of his predecessor, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, analysts say." The Post goes on to quote Russian analysts buttressing that point, and adds that "state-controlled television, meanwhile, aired footage that cast Putin as the man in charge."
The Washington Post reports this morning that "Federal investigators probing the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks recovered samples of human hair from a mailbox in Princeton, N.J., but the strands did not match the lead suspect in the case, according to sources briefed on the probe. FBI agents and U.S. Postal Service inspectors analyzed the data in an effort to place...Ivins at the mailbox from which bacteria-laden letters were sent to Senate offices and media organizations, the sources said." Investigators, adds the Post, "have come up dry in their efforts to find direct evidence to place Ivins at the Nassau Street mailbox in September and October 2001."
Meanwhile, the AP reports that DOJ "considers the...attacks solved, but for skeptics and conspiracy theorists, it's far from over." The Post adds that "armchair investigators, bloggers and scientists have pored over hundreds of pages of documents and circulated their own ideas about what happened. 'I think it's going to be one of the great conspiracy theories, like whether we landed on the moon or whether Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone' in assassinating President Kennedy, said Edward Lake, a retired Wisconsin computer specialist whose Web site has for years been one of the most comprehensive repositories for analysis on the anthrax case."
USA Today, however, reports that "former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, whose Senate office received the first anthrax-tainted letter in 2001, says he is satisfied the FBI has found the culprit. Daschle...called the Justice Department's case against Bruce Ivins...'complete and persuasive.' 'I think the evidence is pretty compelling,' he told a group of reporters at USA TODAY's Washington bureau." USA adds, "The most compelling evidence Daschle heard was that the DNA 'fingerprint' of the anthrax could be traced to a flask controlled by Ivins. 'That's as close to a smoking gun as I think you're going to get,' Daschle said."
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ABC News' The Blotter reported last night, "Long before Aafia Siddique was arrested in Afghanistan last month, allegedly in possession of a list of New York targets and chem-bio weapons information, she had allegedly developed a plot, however improbable or amateurish, to kill Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush and to attack the White House. Siddique plotted to use weapons that included biological agents to contaminate former president Carter's water, according to multiple federal sources." ABC added that "the details expanded on by sources spoken to by ABC News, paint Siddique...as a committed Al Qaeda operative, and one whose capture could hold the key to identifying other operatives and supporters both in the US and overseas. But her lawyer, activist attorney Elizabeth Fink, says the entire government case against Siddique is a lie." The AP reports Fink "accused the government on Wednesday of setting up her client by planting evidence on her." Fink "also accused the government of trying to poison the court process by leaking information about her client."
The Los Angeles Times reports this morning that "in what could herald an intensified US campaign against Islamic insurgents in Pakistan's tribal areas, a suspected American missile attack killed at least nine people near the Afghan border, local officials said Wednesday." While "it was not immediately known whether any senior insurgent figures were among the dead...officials in the South Waziristan tribal region said those killed included 'foreigners,' often used to mean Al Qaeda operatives and commanders from outside Pakistan." US "military officials in Afghanistan and the US Embassy in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, disavowed knowledge of the strike, which tribal sources and Pakistani military officials said was carried out late Tuesday." The AP, meanwhile, notes "a spokesman for the US military denied it was behind the four missiles that struck the compound late Tuesday in a remote and mountainous area near Angore Adda in South Waziristan."
Musharraf Hemorrhaging Support The Financial Times reports, "Pakistan's powerful army is distancing itself from Pervez Musharraf, the president, according to high-ranking Pakistani officials and western diplomats, forcing the former military chief to consider resigning rather than face the humiliation of parliamentary impeachment." As the possibility of impeachment increases, "speculation has been rife in the past week that the military is keen to avoid becoming tainted by the possible public humiliation of its former chief of staff. ... 'It's curtains for President Musharraf,' said a government official." And McClatchy says even "Americans and British diplomats are trying to encourage a quick exit from office for...Musharraf, a staunch Western anti-terrorism ally, before he suffers the disgrace of impeachment, Pakistani officials said Wednesday." McClatchy adds "Western diplomats have sought to convince the coalition government that impeachment would further undermine the stability of crisis-racked, nuclear-armed Pakistan and that it should offer Musharraf a 'graceful exit' with immunity from prosecution, Pakistani officials said."
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Craig Ferguson: "The 'Unabomber' Ted Kaczynski wrote a letter from jail saying...he's angry that his cabin is now on display in a museum. Well, they think that's what the letter says. Everyone's a bit afraid to open it."
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