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McCain: Palin more qualified than Obama By MIKE ALLEN | 9/3/08 7:21 AM EST Text Size: Mounting a ferocious defense of his embattled running mate, John McCain said he is buying a TV ad arguing that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has more experience than the Democratic presidential nominee, Barack Obama. In an effort to rev up conservatives, a campaign statement issued a list of critical media mentions that it called “smears” of Palin, who speaks in primetime at the convention on Wednesday night. The campaign announced: “The McCain campaign will launch a television ad directly comparing Gov. Palin’s executive experience...

<p>Former Senator Fred Thompson delivered these remarks Tuesday night at Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minn.</p> <p>Sound like anybody else we know?</p> <p>THOMPSON: She has run a municipality and she has run a state. And I think I can say without fear of contradiction she is the only nominee in the history of either party who knows how to properly field-dress a moose. (Cheers, applause, laughs.) With the possible exception of Teddy Roosevelt. (Laughter, applause.) Okay.</p>

ST. PAUL, Minn. — When Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin accepts the Republican Party's vice presidential nomination in a much-anticipated convention speech today, the 345-member California delegation will stand in an awkward place. (snip) Voters care about high gas prices, the shaky economy and national security far more than they do divisive social issues, said delegate Sean Walsh of Oakland, a former top staff member for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. "Governor Palin is a woman and in a progressive state like California, that helps, period," Walsh said. "The economy, energy and economic uncertainty are foremost on voters' minds, not social issues." The...

The US military was accused today of having sent a force of commandos across the border from Afghanistan into Pakistan on a raid in which 20 people were reportedly killed, including women and children. Both Nato and the separate US-led coalition in Afghanistan denied any knowledge of the pre-dawn attack, which local residents said involved both American and Afghan troops backed by helicopter gunships. But it was immediately seen as both undermining sovereignty and presenting a challenge to the coalition govermnet led by Yousuf Raza Gillani, the object of an unsuccessful assassination in Rawalpindi this morning. "It is outrageous," Owais...

Russian officials have warned the United States to choose “a real partnership” with Moscow over an “illusory” relationship with countries within Russia’s sphere of influence such as Georgia. However, Russia is offering an illusory choice of its own which we must forcefully reject. We must stand instead with duly elected democratic governments over Russia’s territorial ambitions. Russia evidenced its real intentions by officially recognizing the independence of the secessionist South Osssetia and Abkhazia Georgian provinces in defiance of past unanimous UN Security Council resolutions and then announcing that South Ossetia has agreed to ultimately join “one united Russian state.”

For the first time in Russia's history, over 100 youngsters stand to inherit more than $1 billion from the country's burgeoning ranks of oligarchs. An annual league table produced by the weekly business magazine Finans shows that the number of heirs with a claim to billion-dollar fortunes has risen from 70 to 112 in the past year. The list is topped by five-year-old Marina Deripaska and her seven-year-old brother Pyotr, who have a theoretical value of $20 billion each. They are the children of Oleg Deripaska, an aluminium magnate who leapfrogged Roman Abramovich, the proprietor of Chelsea Football Club, to...

Time's Mark Halperin has posted an advance copy of the cover of US Weekly magazine, the tabloid published by Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner. That cover shows a smiling Sarah Palin, holding her youngest son Trig. The screaming headline: "Babies, Lies and Scandal: John McCain's Vice President." Wenner has contributed $5300 to Obama's campaign since 2007. The cover was sent to select news organizations by Mark Neschis, the head of corporate communications for Wenner Media and former director of television in the Clinton White House. An email from Neschis that accompanied the cover read: "Thought I would send over our Us...

A victory was won this week in Jerusalem for people who think the Fatah stream of Palestinian nationalism should not get away with murder and should be held accountable for its actions like other mortals on the planet. Such “people” sometimes need to be ordinary civilians since the Israeli and U.S. governments can by no means be relied on to apply normal moral and legal standards to the Fatah stream as now embodied in the Palestinian Authority. Back on June 9, 1996, two years after the PA was established, a couple named Yaron and Efrat Ungar were driving near Jerusalem...

WASHINGTON - Rep. Barney Frank is among the first Democrats to publicly say Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s family background, including the pregnancy of her unwed teenage daughter, should be fair game for campaign discussion. "They’re the ones that made an issue of her family," Frank, D-Mass., said Tuesday in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

Even as the Obama camp ponders how best to handle John McCain's veep pick of Sarah Plain, the high priests and priestesses of the media have marked her as an apostate. The Beltway class is in full-throated rebellion against a nondomesticated conservative who might pose a threat to their coronation of Barack Obama and the return of Camelot-on-the-Potomac. Here is a sampler of media comment on Governor Palin this week: - Eleanor Clift, the McLaughlin Group: "If the media reaction is anything, it's been literally laughter in many places across newsrooms." Sally Quinn, Newsweek: "It's a political gimmick..." Maureen Dowd,...

We're finally here with the August totals!  w00t!  Thanks for your patience - one computer crash can sure drive ya nuts huh?  YouTube has still been reticent to enforce their policiesbut we have not let it deter us from our mission.  In August, we began going after "gnats" on the weekend - those pesky little hirabists who only have a few videos on their channels, and we were VERY successful with them -- out of 117 we went after, we got 88 down!  That's 75%!!   A couple other statistics of interest... jSDotd knocked down 29 videos in August.  Has reached...

The Democratic Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press on Aug. 24, 2008. She intentionally used her office and this very public opportunity to add to the efforts of some dissenting Catholics in both major US Political parties to confuse fellow Catholics, other Christians and other people of faith and good will concerning the Catholic teaching on the intrinsic evil of every procured abortion as the intentional and immoral taking of innocent human life. Speaker Pelosi compounded her error by telling the interviewer that the Catholic Church had taught different things at...

Didn't see this posted. He made an informative speech .....

No one begrudges Rep. Charles Rangel a lucrative beachfront villa in the Dominican Republic - as long as he's upfront about it.....what the law requires. But fresh from the disclosure that he was enjoying four rent-stabilized apartments in a Harlem luxury building - one unit was his campaign office - it now appears that Rangel has been less than forthcoming about his vacation hideaway.......financial-disclosure forms over the past 20 years tell a confusing tale about the three-bedroom villa......inconsistencies about what he owns and what it's worth......the most glaring inconsistency concerns income Rangel gets from the property, which is rented when...

Here is video in four parts of a Press Conference held yesterday in Minneapolis by "Citizens for McCain," a grassroots group that is made up of Democrats and Independents who are supporting John McCain for President. The Press Conference was led by Carley Fiorina, and includes John Coale - a major supporter of Hillary Clinton who is now supporting McCain . . . (videos at link)

Almost a year to the day before the Republican National Convention began, members of a self-described anarchist group gathered to talk about ways to disrupt it, including kidnapping delegates, sabotaging air vents at the Xcel Energy Center, blocking bridges and "capturing federal buildings" in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Unbeknown to the RNC Welcoming Committee, two police informants and an undercover investigator had infiltrated their ranks, according to an affidavit and search warrant application filed Tuesday.

Former Republican presidential candidate Fred Thompson defended John McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, as a victim of left-wing media attacks who fear what she represents. The crowd went wild. “What a breath of fresh air Gov. Sarah Palin is,” Thompson told the cheering delegates tonight. “She’s from a small town with small town values. Well, apparently that’s not good enough for folks that are out there attacking her and her family.” Palin disclosed Monday that her unmarried 17-year-old daughter is pregnant and will marry the father. She’s been under intense media scrutiny in recent days for a variety...

McCain's choice for vice president already seems fraught with problems Wednesday, September 03, 2008 The Oregonian I n her first appearance with Republican nominee-to-be John McCain on Friday, Sarah Palin was a fresh and appealing figure. In the three days since, the doubts about her qualifications have grown. Not, it must be stressed, because of her daughter's out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Her children's lives and choices ought to be left out of the political debate. Barack Obama was exactly right when he insisted Monday that her daughter's situation "has no relevance to Gov. Palin's performance as governor or her potential performance as...

ST. PAUL, Minnesota (CNN) -- The main speakers at the Republican National Convention took time out from the program of lauding John McCain's service Tuesday night to come to the defense of his pick for running mate, Sarah Palin. Fred Thompson led the charge, berating "Washington pundits and media big shots" who have questioned her experience as a first-term governor of Alaska. "She is from a small town, with small-town values, but that's not good enough for those folks who are attacking her and her family," he said to cheers. "Let's be clear ... the selection of Gov. Palin has...

The media fawns over Joe Biden's foreign policy experience, but have they bothered to look beyond the "experience" to see if the positions he held withstood the test of time? An early bellwether of Biden's propensity to take the wrong side on almost any issue was his early opposition to the Alaska pipeline, during his first term in office. As Alaska governor Sarah Palin so accurately describes, failing to secure our own resources could put us in a "world of hurt". Imagine where we would be today without fuels flowing from Alaska? Perhaps the most illuminating example of Biden's flat...