Free Republic

<p>Just announced by Jennifer Griffith in a live interview, WH has asked Pentagon for a formal assessment of a withdrawal from Afghanistan, that the Afghan Wart is no longer in our nations interest, blamed the Afghan elections.</p>

"Obama was working with Arab intermediaries to establish an unofficial dialogue with Al Qaida long before his election as the 44th U.S. president, according to a report in the upcoming weekly edition of Geostrategy-Direct.com. ShareThis Al Qaida has offered what has been described as a truce in exchange for a U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan, according to the report." (snip) "The president has been aided by several Persian Gulf Arab Muslims with ties to Al Qaida's leadership in Pakistan, they said."

Russians this morning reacted enthusiastically to Obama's victory - with many voicing the hope that he will improve US-Russian relations, which have severely strained during the Bush years. There was also relief that John McCain - seen in Moscow as the more aggressively anti-Russian of the two presidential candidates - failed to win. McCain had infuriated the Kremlin by calling for Russia's expulsion from the G8 club of industrialised countries following August's war in Georgia. On this occasion the US electorate had got it right, several said. "I always assumed that Americans were rational and that they would pick Obama,"...

While Hillary Clinton has not found a way to break the consecutive primaries losing streak against Barack Obama, now at 10 or 11 depending on whether one counts the expatriate poll, she has managed to force Obama to talk a little more specifically about policy. That apparently has cost Obama some ground, according to Rasmussen, although not so much against Hillary. His negatives have risen seven points in the last month, and now are ten points higher than those of John McCain: Thirty-four percent (34%) of all voters say they will definitely vote for John McCain if he is on...

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama told New Hampshire voters Friday that President George W. Bush grossly misunderstands his role as commander in chief. "When President Bush says, 'I just want to give the commanders what they want, listen to the generals,' he doesn't understand how we work here in America. Civilians control the military and we are supposed to set the mission for the generals and then the generals should carry out the mission," Obama said at an outdoor town hall meeting. "The military has done all we asked. We just asked the wrong things of them....