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Marriott Hotels recently announced that it will be phasing out and no longer be offering pay-per-view adult videos in its worldwide hotels. The change will affect nearly 600,000 rooms in the Marriott-brand hotels, which include Fairfield Inn and Suites by Marriott, Renaissance Hotels, Courtyard by Marriott, as well as Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company LLC and others. The company said that the prevalence of phones, iPads and other devices has decreased the use and revenues from hotel-provided entertainment. Yet others have also speculated that pulling the plug on pornography came at the request of potential 2012 presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who until...

The Star-Ledger reports that Chris Christie and some of his top political advisers met with Mitt Romney at the governor's mansion for dinner last night. The sources described the dinner as an informal discussion without any specific talk of endorsements in New Jersey's Republican presidential primary. .... The sources requested anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the meeting. If you remember, Romney endorsed Christie over GOP foe, Steve Lonegan, in the 2009 NJ Republican gubernatorial primary. Considering Christie's meteoric rise in grassroots conservatism, it seems strange to say it, but Lonegan was considered the more conservative of the...

So Mitt Romney - the venture capitalist guru who never sweats - leads all Republicans in a new Zogby poll that has him within striking distance of Obama, 45-43. Can anyone be surprised? The economy’s a mess. We’re basket cases over keeping jobs and homes. Obama’s reduced to courting Whoopi and Barbara Walters today on “The View,” hoping a cozy chat will reassure the wives of independents and/or Tea Party sympathizers who’ve abandoned the president in droves. Close your eyes. Envision, for a second, the best known GOP contenders: Sarah Palin, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul. On the Ward...

SALT LAKE CITY (ABC 4 News) - A new poll shows Republican Mitt Romney leading all current GOP challengers by more than 20 points in New Hampshire. A Public Policy Polling survey released this week shows Romney crushing other GOP contenders among New Hampshire Republican voters with 39 percent of the those polled. Sarah Palin came in a distant second at 13 percent, while Newt Gingrich and Mike Huckabee tied for third with 11 percent. Ron Paul came in fifth. 13 percent were undecided.

WASHINGTON -- Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, one of the most influential Democrats in matters of foreign affairs, said Monday he believes the manpower-intensive war strategy recommended by the U.S. commander in Afghanistan "reaches too far, too fast," and should wait until the Afghan government proves itself a more reliable partner. Speaking days after returning from Kabul, where he brokered a deal with Afghan President Hamid Karzai to hold a runoff election next month, Sen. Kerry said that unless Mr. Karzai's government proves it can sustain gains made by American troops, the U.S. shouldn't commit tens of thousands of additional forces....

Democratic Senator John Kerry said Tuesday he would be "surprised" if US President Barack Obama does not announce his decision on troop levels in Afghanistan before leaving for Asia on November 11. "I'm just speculating, I don't have any inside scoop on this, but I would be surprised if he wants to leave it hanging while he's out of the country for that long a period of time," said Kerry, a close Obama ally. The US president leaves Washington on November 11 and remains in the region for eight days, with stops in Japan, Singapore, China and South Korea. "I...

U.S. Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal's troop request for Afghanistan overreaches and is overly fast, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., said Monday. Kerry said three conditions -- sufficient Afghan troops, reliable local assistance and sufficient development aid -- must be met before additional troops could be deployed to the country, The Hill reported. "I am convinced from my conversations with Gen. Stanley McChrystal that he understands the necessity of conducting a smart counterinsurgency in a limited geographic area," Kerry said in a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. "But I believe his current plan reaches too far, too fast." Kerry, the...

For years, millions of people were enamoured of the anthropomorphic antics of our title character, a bottle-nosed female dolphin named Flipper. Everyone, that is, except the talented though hapless actor who played the father of the boys. He began to phone me, usually after midnight. “Why do they make me out to be a blithering idiot? An incompetent? Why do I always have to be a boob, huh, tell me that?" “I've kept track," he wailed. “We've shot nearly a hundred episodes and in 99 per cent of them I have to ask the bloody dolphin, ‘Where are the boys,...

Dolphins are fantastic sea chefs who have mastered the art of rustling up a soft meal of calamari, say scientists. The intelligent sea mammals have been spotted going through precise and elaborate preparations to rid cuttlefish of ink and bone to produce a soft meal of calamari. Australian researchers observed one wild female Indo-Pacific bottlenose dolphin The research team, writing in the science journal PLoS One, said they repeatedly observed a female dolphin herding cuttlefish out of algal weed and onto a clear, sandy patch of seafloor. The dolphin, identified using circular body scars, then pinned the cuttlefish with its...

The diet of prehistoric Neanderthals living in caves on the Rock of Gibraltar included seals and dolphins, showing once again that the hominids had skills rivaling those modern humans living then, according to a new study. The discovery of seal, dolphin and fish remains in the caves dating from 60,000 to 30,000 years ago provides the first evidence that Neanderthals ate sea mammals as well as land grub.

BLOOMINGTON, Minn. -- Mitt Romney, responding to reporters' questions about sex education policy in the aftermath of the news that Sarah Palin's teenage daughter is pregnant, told reporters he had always thought abstinence should be part of a comprehensive sex education curriculum. "I would not propose that people don't get any sex education but abstinence," he said. But in 2006, as then-Governor Romney prepared to enter the Republican presidential primary, he announced with great fanfare that he would redirect money from a federal abstinence education grant -- money that had the state had been using to promote abstinence within comprehensive...

WASHINGTON — Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's position on space exploration continued to evolve Sunday as the Illinois Democrat endorsed a congressional plan to add $2 billion to NASA's budget and agreed to back at least one more space shuttle mission.

ARLINGTON, Va., Aug. 2 /Standard Newswire/ -- Today, in Florida, Barack Obama once again demonstrated that his words really don't matter. When discussing NASA programs, Barack Obama said that "it's still being reported" that he would delay the NASA Constellation Program to pay for his early education program. Unfortunately for Barack Obama, that is what he proposed and has been saying for months: BARACK OBAMA: "It's Still Being Reported"...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said in an interview published on Saturday the size of a residual U.S. force left in Iraq after the withdrawal of combat troops would be "entirely conditions-based."

Barack Obama's policy switches are giving the Left whiplash The Democratic nominee's policy pivots are causing anguish among liberals. He is no fool Gerard Baker Change, it turns out, wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. Having campaigned for the past year as the agent of transformation, the man who would lead an historic shift in America's political direction, Barack Obama is discovering that there is quite a lot he likes about the way things are. Since securing the Democratic nomination a few weeks ago, the only change coming from the Illinois senator has been in what he...

US election: Barack Obama wobbles on withdrawing Iraq troops By Tim Shipman in Washington Last Updated: 12:20AM BST 04/07/2008 Senator Barack Obama has rushed to clarify his position on the Iraq War after he appeared to wobble on a commitment to withdraw US ground troops within 16 months, a central plank of his candidacy. Barack Obama speaks on his Iraq policy during a news conference in Fargo, North Dakota The Democratic presidential nominee used a press conference to say that the timetable was not set in stone and that he would adjust his plans based on conditions on the ground...

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., faces enormous pressure from social conservatives to ignore his repeated commitment to change the GOP's platform on abortion. "If he were to change the party platform," to account for exceptions such as rape, incest or risk to the mother's life, "I think that would be political suicide," said Tony Perkins, the president of the conservative Family Research Council, to ABC News. "I think he would be aborting his own campaign because that is such a critical issue to so many Republican voters and the Republican brand is already in trouble." A senior Republican close to McCain...

WASHINGTON (AP) — The United States was for slavery “before we were against it.” That history lesson was brought to you by Sen. John Kerry, who argues that if an entire nation can be indecisive about human bondage, voters surely should forgive a political leader who changes his or her mind. “Decisiveness wrongly applied can create a lot of pain for the nation and big, big historic mistakes,” says the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee labeled a “flip-flopper” by President Bush. Four years after his unsuccessful run, Kerry sat down with Associated Press reporters for more than 30 minutes to discuss...

It stings the Obama campaign more, and rightly so. Obama has made his new, non-pandering politics the central selling point for his election. This shows that Obama has no problem with adjusting his message when needed. The specifics of the changes are less interesting than the changes themselves. It also calls into question for what Obama really stands, other than platitudes about "hope" and "change". Mitt Romney got bounced from the campaign for changing his mind on fewer policy issues over a much longer period of time. If people thought Romney had authenticity issues, what will they make from these...

Former Gov. William F. Weld says fellow Republican Mitt Romney can withstand a hometown snub by Bay State voters in presidential balloting next week by simply dismissing the diss as little more than moonbat mania. “I think people understand when you’re a red governor in a blue state that you have to work with the Democrats, which I think is a good thing,” said Weld, who was governor from 1991 to 1997. Asked whether his State House successor has to win Massachusetts in his bid for the presidency, Weld, a Romney backer, said, “Not in my view.” In fact, the...