Guiliani And GOP Insult Community Organizers and Populists

I'm watching former Mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani talk on and on ..and on, but what is so galling is that he can't "do" a good speech. Geez, he's droning on and on and on. The speech is too long.

Ok, back to business. It was a politically stupid speech, because Rudy just insulted and alienated every community organizer and populist and quite possibility kissed that vote good by.

Community organizers bring people together for a common goal, be it getting elected officials to act on a problem or making sure than a neighborhood gets the services they need. Community organizers can work for non-profits or for organizations like the police department in your city.

What a dumb speech. I'm sorry, it just was. Rudy should be ashamed of himself.

Will Mike Huckabee and Senator Jon McCain Gang Up On Romney?

On Fox News Sunday, there's an expressed rumor -- which both candidates deny -- that Mike Huckabee and John McCain will form a temporary alliance against Gov Mitt Romney.

But one look at the exchange from the debate would seem to at least confirm the possibility.

Mike Huckabee Wins Iowa For Republicans; Ron Paul Gets 10 Percent - Huff Post

Not to be forgotten in the Obama victory is that Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee won Iowa as well. He beat Mitt Romney by almost 10 points.

Ron Paul got a good 10 percent of the Iowa vote and beat Rudy Giuliani.

Barack Obama and Ron Paul Win National Presidential Caucus

I just saw this on my Facebook profile news update, and clicked on the headlines, reveling this press release below. Let's see how CNN and Fox and the other main stream news outlets handle this news. It flies in the face of their polls and adds ammo to the idea that some news people there are trying to steer the election toward Hillary Clinton.

For example, in New Jersey, the finish was Obama, Edwards, and Kucnich -- yep. See it here:

Stay tuned.

Video on The National Presidential Caucus:

National Presidential Caucus Announces Results From First-Ever National Caucus

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

National Presidential Caucus Announces Results From First-Ever National Caucus

--

Barack Obama Wins Democrat Caucuses; Ron Paul Dominates Both GOP And "Open" Caucuses

--

Washington, DC (December 12, 2007) -- On December 7, 2007 in cities and small towns across the country, Democrat, Republican and "Open" Caucus groups formed independently online and Caucused face-to-face on National Caucus Day. The first-ever National Presidential Caucus is now history and the results are in.

Barack Obama wins over Democrat voters generating 40% of Democrat Caucus voter preferences. Obama was followed by a three-way tie for second, with John Edwards, Bill Richardson and "Undecided" each generating 20% of Democratic Caucus preferences.

On the Republican side, Ron Paul obliterated the field for the GOP generating the preference of 50% of GOP Caucuses. Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson follow, generating 33.3% and 16.6% of Republican Caucus preferences, respectively.

Among votes in Open Caucuses, Ron Paul wins with 62.5% of Open Caucus votes, followed by Barack Obama (18.75%), Fred Thompson (12.5%), and Hilary Clinton (6.25%).

Results were tallied from 19 independently formed Caucus groups (Republican, Democrat, and Open) that met on Friday, December 7th, 2007 in Dallas, TX (2D); Sarcoxie, MO (O); Boise, ID (R); Needham, MA (D); Carthage, MO (O); Manhattan, KS (D & R); Pineville, MO (O); Richmond, MO (O); Costa Mesa, CA (O); Springfield MO (R); Winston-Salem, NC (O); Overland Park, KS (R); New York City, NY (O); and Joplin, MO (R), Warrensburg, MO (R), Roselle Park, NK (D), and Philadelphia, PA (O).

Some caucuses used multiple voting rounds with minimum vote thresholds to give citizens a chance to change their minds and switch candidate preferences, but all meetings were built on a first round of issue discussion and deliberation. Multiple rounds of voting were not prohibited and each group was encouraged to create the most engaging caucus format possible. However, threshold voting eliminates all but the top vote-getters. While that may have been the intention for some groups, the NPC feels obligated to recognize the efforts and opinions of all caucus goers.

Issue results reflected opposition to Iraq involvement, foreign intervention in general, and health care, immigration and erosion of civil liberties rounding out the top concerns of all caucusers.

Self-organized and independent, most gatherings were small, informal discussion sessions, while others attracted hundreds of participants including party officials and campaign operatives in a raucous bid for supporters. The NPC feels that the results at each caucus is of greatest importance and relevance to those in that caucus room and to that local community where those ideas were exchanged, relationships were created, passions were shared. We believe this is social capital formation at its finest.

The NPC was previewed by major media from CBS News, The Washington Post and The New York Times, among others. The actual Caucuses are receiving a fair amount of local attention from the mainstream media, including front page newspaper coverage in Greensboro, NC and TV coverage by WNBC news in NYC, the largest NBC affiliate in the nation.

But even better, people reported on their own caucus events. Using numerical reports, commentary, pictures & video, and through a growing number of blogs, each caucus tells its own story. Some reports from those who participated, include Kansas City: "Wow, what a great evening it was in Kansas City!"; New Jersey: "It was a fun night with close to 200 people participating in this exercise."; Chicago: "It was a very informative experience."; Boise, Idaho: "It was an extremely fun event..." Video footage is being compiled on the official National Presidential Caucus channel on YouTube. Visit http://www.youtube.com/NationalCaucus to view.

"The NPC wants to applaud everyone who took the time and made an effort to engage their neighbors in this evening of passionate civic discourse, said Don Means, NPC's primary organizer. "You have just ushered in a new era of participatory democracy in America. Your country should be proud of you!"

National Presidential Caucus is the product of a consortium of partisan, bi-partisan and non-partisan interests who seek to demonstrate how local, self-organized, web-enabled face-to-face gatherings is the new basis for participatory democracy. To view National Caucus endorsers visit: http://www.nationalcaucus.com/endorsements . For more information about the National Presidential Caucus vision visit: http://www.nationalcaucus.com/about

CONTACT:

Myles Weissleder
National Presidential Caucus
myles@nationalcaucus.com
Office: 415-332-3205
Mobile: 415-990-0970

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Frank Rich - Keith Olbermann - Bernie Kerik's Affair With Judith Regan | Could Wreck Rudy Giuliani's Presidential Campaign

This is shaping up to be a hot story. Frank Rich of the New York Times has a great discussion of the details-to-date below, and MSNBC's Keith Olbermann has an equally informative video segment -- that too is here.

November 18, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
What 'That Regan Woman' Knows
By FRANK RICH



NEW Yorkers who remember Rudy Giuliani as the bullying New York mayor, not as the terminally cheerful "America's Mayor" cooing to babies in New Hampshire, have always banked on one certainty: his presidential candidacy was so preposterous it would implode before he got anywhere near the White House.

Surely, we reassured ourselves, the all-powerful Republican values enforcers were so highly principled that they would excommunicate him because of his liberal social views, three wives and estranged children. Or a firewall would be erected by the firefighters who are enraged by his self-aggrandizing rewrite of 9/11 history. Or Judith Giuliani, with her long-hidden first marriage and Louis Vuitton 'tude, would send red-state voters screaming into the night.

Wrong, wrong and wrong. But how quickly and stupidly we forgot about the other Judith in the Rudy orbit. That would be Judith Regan, who disappeared last December after she was unceremoniously fired from Rupert Murdoch's publishing house, HarperCollins. Last week Ms. Regan came roaring back into the fray , a silver bullet aimed squarely at the heart of the Giuliani campaign.



Ms. Regan filed a $100 million lawsuit against her former employer, claiming she was unjustly made a scapegoat for the O. J. Simpson "If I Did It" fiasco that (briefly) embarrassed Mr. Murdoch and his News Corporation. But for those of us not caught up in the Simpson circus, what's most riveting about the suit are two at best tangential sentences in its 70 pages: "In fact, a senior executive in the News Corporation organization told Regan that he believed she had information about Kerik that, if disclosed, would harm Giuliani's presidential campaign. This executive advised Regan to lie to, and to withhold information from, investigators concerning Kerik."



Kerik, of course, is Bernard Kerik, the former Giuliani chauffeur and police commissioner, as well as the candidate he pushed to be President Bush's short-lived nominee to run the Department of Homeland Security. Having pleaded guilty to two misdemeanors last year, Mr. Kerik was indicted on 16 other counts by a federal grand jury 10 days ago, just before Ms. Regan let loose with her lawsuit. Whether Ms. Regan's charge about that unnamed Murdoch "senior executive" is true
or not — her lawyers have yet to reveal the evidence — her overall message is plain. She knows a lot about Mr. Kerik, Mr. Giuliani and the Murdoch empire. And she could talk.

Boy, could she! As New Yorkers who have crossed her path or followed her in the tabloids know, Ms. Regan has an epic temper. My first encounter with her came more than a decade ago when she left me a record-breaking (in vitriol and decibel level) voice mail message about a column I'd written on one of her authors. It was a relief to encounter a more mellow Regan at a Midtown restaurant some years later. She cordially introduced me to her dinner companion, Mr. Kerik, whose post-9/11 autobiography, "The Lost Son: A Life in Pursuit of Justice," was under contract at her HarperCollins imprint, ReganBooks.

What I didn't know then was that this married author and single editor were in pursuit of not just justice, but sex, too. Their love nest, we'd later learn, was an apartment adjacent to ground zero that had been initially set aside for rescue workers. Mr. Kerik believed his lover had every moral right to be there. As he tenderly explained in his acknowledgments in "The Lost Son" — published before the revelation of their relationship — there was "one hero who is missing" from his book's tribute to "courage and honor" and "her name is Judith Regan."

Few know more about Rudy than his perennial boon companion, Mr. Kerik. Perhaps during his romance with Ms. Regan he talked only of the finer points of memoir writing or about his theories of crime prevention or about his ideas for training the police in the Muslim world (an assignment he later received in Iraq and botched). But it is also plausible that this couple discussed everything Mr. Kerik witnessed at Mr. Giuliani's side before, during and after 9/11. Perhaps he even explained to her why the mayor insisted, disastrously, that his city's $61 million emergency command center be located in the World Trade Center despite the terrorist attack on the towers in 1993.

Perhaps, too, they talked about the business ventures the mayor established after leaving office. Mr. Kerik worked at Giuliani
Partners and used its address as a mail drop for some $75,000 that turns up in the tax-fraud charges in his federal indictment. That money was Mr. Kerik's pay for an 11-sentence introduction to another Regan-published book about 9/11, "In the Line of Duty." Though that project's profits were otherwise donated to the families of dead rescue workers, Mr. Kerik's royalties were mailed to Giuliani Partners in the name of a corporate entity Mr. Kerik set up in Delaware. He would later claim that he made comparable donations to charity, but the federal indictment charges that $80,000 he took in charitable
deductions were bogus.

Amazingly, given that he seeks the highest office in the land, Mr. Giuliani will not reveal the clients of Giuliani Partners. Perhaps he has trouble remembering them all. He testified in court last year that he has no memory of a mayoral briefing in which he was told of Mr. Kerik's association with a company suspected of ties to organized crime.

Ms. Regan's knowledge of Mr. Giuliani isn't limited to whatever she learned from Mr. Kerik. She used to work for another longtime Giuliani pal, Roger Ailes, the media consultant for the first Giuliani campaign in 1989 and the impresario who created Fox News for Mr. Murdoch in 1996. A full-service mayor to his cronies, Mr. Giuliani lobbied hard to get the Fox News Channel on the city's cable boxes and presided over Mr. Ailes's wedding. Enter Ms. Regan, who was given her own program on Fox's early lineup. Mr. Ailes came up with its rather inspired first title, "That Regan Woman."

Who at the News Corporation supposedly asked Ms. Regan to lie to protect Rudy's secrets? Her complaint does not say. But thanks to the political journal The Hotline, we do know that as of the summer Mr. Giuliani had received more air time from Fox News than any other G.O.P. candidate, much of it on the high-rated "Hannity & Colmes." That show's co-host, Sean Hannity, appeared at a Giuliani campaign fund-raiser this year.

Fox News coverage of Ms. Regan's lawsuit last week was minimal. After all, Mr. Giuliani dismissed the whole episode as "a gossip column story," and we know Fox would never stoop so low as to trade in gossip. The coverage was scarcely more intense at The Wall Street Journal, whose print edition included no mention of the suit's reference to that "senior executive" at the News Corporation. (After bloggers noticed, the article was amended online.) The Journal is not quite yet a Murdoch property, but its editorial board has had its own show on Fox News since 2006.

During the 1990s, the Journal editorial board published so much dirt about the Clintons that it put the paper's brand on an encyclopedic six-volume anthology titled "A Journal Briefing — Whitewater." You'd think the controversies surrounding "America's Mayor" are at least as sexy as the carnal scandals and alleged drug deals The Journal investigated back then. This month a Journal reporter not on its editorial board added the government of Qatar to the small list of known Giuliani Partners clients, among them the manufacturer of OxyContin. We'll see if such journalism flourishes in the paper's Murdoch era.

But beyond New York's dailies and The Village Voice, the national news media, conspicuously the big three television networks, have rarely covered Mr. Giuliani much more aggressively than Mr. Murdoch's Fox News has. They are more likely to focus on Mr. Giuliani's checkered family history than the questions raised by his record in government and business. It's astounding how many are willing to look the other way while recycling those old 9/11 videos.

One exception is The Chicago Tribune, which last month on its front page revisited the story of how, after Mr. Giuliani left office, his mayoral papers were temporarily transferred to a private, tax-exempt foundation run by his supporters and financed with $1.5 million from mostly undisclosed donors. The foundation, which shares the same address as Giuliani Partners, copied and archived the records before sending them back to New York's municipal archives. Historians told
The Tribune there's no way to verify that the papers were returned to government custody intact. Mayor Bloomberg has since signed a law that will prevent this unprecedented deal from being repeated.

Journalists, like generals, love to refight the last war, so the unavailability of millions of Hillary Clinton's papers has received
all the coverage the Giuliani campaign has been spared. But while the release of those first lady records should indeed be accelerated, it's hard to imagine many more scandals will turn up after six volumes of "Whitewater," an impeachment trial and the avalanche of other investigative reportage on the Clintons then and now.

The Giuliani story, by contrast, is relatively virgin territory. And with the filing of a lawsuit by a vengeful eyewitness who was fired from her job, it may just have gained its own reincarnation of Linda Tripp.

CNN / YouTube Debate - Nursing Homes & Private Equity Firms

There's a disturbing trend in the nursing home industry today, and forms the basis for my CNN / YouTube debate question submitted at 10:45 PM PST, 11-25-07, just under the deadline!

The question is are you as a presidential candidate concerned that private equity firms are buying nursing homes, laying off staff, and pocketing the difference, resulting in poor service? If you are concerned, what will you do about it?

J.C. Watts, Mitt Romney, Diversity - CNN / YouTube Question

This is my latest CNN / YouTube Republican Debate Question. and it was inspired by today's "The Situation Room":

Hi I'm Zennie Abraham in Oakland, CA.

On November 21st, Former Oklahoma Congressman and CNN "The Situation Room" Contributor J.C. Watts asserted and complained that your campaign Governor Romney didn't have a single African American staffer.

This question is for all of the candidates: do you have more than one African American employee on your campaign, and if you're going to ask for votes of African Americans, can you realistically do so without having someone who works for you who looks like they do?

In WSJ Peggy Noonan Calls Hillary Clinton A Jerk For Playing Gender Card

Never one to mince words, Peggy Noonan, the former speechwriter for Ronald Regan and a contributing columnist at The Wall Street Journal, wrote this classic column comparing Senator Clinton and former Prime Minister Margret Thacther. In it she wrote..

"It's all kind of wonderful, isn't it? Someone indulged in special pleading and America didn't buy it. It's as if the country this week made it official: We now formally declare that the woman who uses the fact of her sex to manipulate circumstances is a jerk."

Noonan also is a fan of Barack Obama.

PEGGY NOONAN - WALL STREET JOURNAL

Things Are Tough All Over
But Mrs. Clinton is no Iron Lady.

Friday, November 9, 2007 12:01 a.m. EST

The story as I was told it is that in the early years of her prime ministership, Margaret Thatcher held a meeting with her aides and staff, all of whom were dominated by her, even awed. When it was over she invited her cabinet chiefs to join her at dinner in a nearby restaurant. They went, arrayed themselves around the table, jockeyed for her attention. A young waiter came and asked if they'd like to hear the specials. Mrs. Thatcher said, "I will have beef."

Yes, said the waiter. "And the vegetables?"

"They will have beef too."

Too good to check, as they say. It is certainly apocryphal, but I don't want it to be. It captured her singular leadership style, which might be characterized as "unafraid."

She was a leader.

Margaret Thatcher would no more have identified herself as a woman, or claimed special pleading that she was a mere frail girl, or asked you to sympathize with her because of her sex, than she would have called up the Kremlin and asked how quickly she could surrender.

She represented a movement. She was its head. She was great figure, a person in history, and she was a woman. She was in it for serious reasons, not to advance the claims of a gender but to reclaim for England its economic freedom, and return its political culture to common sense. Her rise wasn't symbolic but actual.

In fact, she wasn't so much a woman as a lady. I remember a gentleman who worked with her speaking of her allure, how she'd relax after a late-night meeting and you'd walk by and catch just the faintest whiff of perfume, smoke and scotch. She worked hard and was tough. One always imagined her lightly smacking some incompetent on the head with her purse, for she carried a purse, as a lady would. She is still tough. A Reagan aide told me that after she was incapacitated by a stroke she flew to Reagan's funeral in Washington, went through the ceremony, flew with Mrs. Reagan to California for the burial, and never once on the plane removed her heels. That is tough.

The point is the big ones, the real ones, the Thatchers and Indira Gandhis and Golda Meirs and Angela Merkels, never play the boo-hoo game. They are what they are, but they don't use what they are. They don't hold up their sex as a feint: Why, he's not criticizing me, he's criticizing all women! Let us rise and fight the sexist cur.

When Hillary Clinton suggested that debate criticism of her came under the heading of men bullying a defenseless lass, an interesting thing happened. First Kate Michelman, the former head of NARAL and an Edwards supporter, hit her hard. "When unchallenged, in a comfortable, controlled situation, Sen. Clinton embraces her elevation into the 'boys club.' " But when "legitimate questions" are asked, "she is quick to raise the white flag and look for a change in the rules."

Then Mrs. Clinton changed tack a little and told a group of women in West Burlington, Iowa, that they were going to clean up Washington together: "Bring your vacuum cleaners, bring your brushes, bring your brooms, bring your mops." It was all so incongruous--can anyone imagine the 20th century New Class professional Hillary Clinton picking up a vacuum cleaner? Isn't that what downtrodden pink collar workers abused by the patriarchy are for?

But even better, and more startling, people began to giggle. At Mrs. Clinton, a woman who has never inspired much mirth. Suddenly they were remembering the different accents she has spoken with when in different parts of the country, and the weird laugh she has used on talk shows. A few days ago new poll numbers came out--neck and neck with Barack Obama in Iowa, her lead slipping in New Hampshire. There is a sense that Sen. Obama is rising, a sense for the first time in this election cycle that Mrs. Clinton just may be in a fight, a real one, one she could actually lose.

It's all kind of wonderful, isn't it? Someone indulged in special pleading and America didn't buy it. It's as if the country this week made it official: We now formally declare that the woman who uses the fact of her sex to manipulate circumstances is a jerk.

This is a victory for true feminism, in its old-fashioned sense of a simple assertion of the equality of men and women. We might not have so resoundingly reached this moment without Mrs. Clinton's actions and statements. Thank you, Mrs. Clinton.

A word on toughness. Mrs. Clinton is certainly tough, to the point of hard. But toughness should have a purpose. In Mrs. Thatcher's case, its purpose was to push through a program she thought would make life better in her country. Mrs. Clinton's toughness seems to have no purpose beyond the personal accrual of power. What will she do with the power? Still unclear. It happens to be unclear in the case of several candidates, but with Mrs. Clinton there is a unique chasm between the ferocity and the purpose of the ferocity. There is something deeply unattractive in this, and it would be equally so if she were a man.





I wonder if Sen. Obama, as he makes his climb, understands the kind of quiet cheering he is beginning to garner from some Republicans, and from those not affiliated with either party. They see him as a Democrat who could cure the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton sickness.
I call it that because it seems to me now less like a dynastic tug of war than a symptom of deterioration, a lazy, unserious and faintly corrupt turn to be taken by the oldest and greatest democracy in the history of man. And I say sickness because on some level I think it is driven by a delusion: "We will be safe with these ruling families, whom we know so well." But we won't. They have no special magic. Dynasticism brings with it a sense of deterioration. It is dispiriting.

I am not sure of the salience of Mr. Obama's new-generational approach. Mrs. Clinton's generation, he suggests, is caught in the 1960s, fighting old battles, clinging to old divisions, frozen in time, and the way to get past it is to get past her. Maybe this will resonate. But I don't think Mrs. Clinton is the exemplar of a generation, she is the exemplar of a quadrant within a generation, and it is the quadrant the rest of us of that generation do not like. They came from comfort and stability, visited poverty as part of a college program, fashionably disliked their country, and cultivated a bitterness that was wholly unearned. They went on to become investment bankers and politicians and enjoy wealth, power or both.

Mr. Obama should go after them, not a generation but a type, the smug and entitled. No one really likes them. They showed it this week.

Ms. Noonan is a contributing editor of The Wall Street Journal and author of "John Paul the Great: Remembering a Spiritual Father" (Penguin, 2005), which you can order from the OpinionJournal bookstore. Her column appears Fridays on OpinionJournal.com.

"Meet The Press'" Tim Russert Misquotes Senator Barack Obama

Recently, NBC and MSNBC have been agressively working to change the terms of debate in the 2008 Presidential Race. This video's a great example. According to MediaMatters..

-- During his November 11 Meet the Press interview with Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama (IL) on NBC's Meet the Press, host Tim Russert asserted that "critics will say you've not been a leader against the war," and then read a quote he attributed to Obama: "In July of 2004, Barack Obama: 'I'm not privy to Senate intelligence reports. ... What would I have done? I don't know,' in terms of how you would have voted on the war." After quoting two other Obama statements on the war, Russert concluded: "It doesn't seem that you were firmly wedded against the war and that you left some wiggle room that, if you were in the Senate, you may have voted for it." However, in citing Obama's comment "What would I have done? I don't know," Russert did not quote the very next sentence of Obama's statement, which was, "What I know is that from my vantage point the case [for authorizing the war] was not made." --

In other words, Tim Russert Misquoted Barack Obama, and perhaps deliberately. I think NBC's new approach is based on the idea that all politicians tell "less" than the truth about their beliefs. But it's easier to approach a line of questioning following that idea with Senator Clinton than it is with Senator Obama, who's quite authentic in his views -- that is, he's not always changing his stance, if he ever has, or has had to. This consistency of message damages NBC's approach, and results in this situation where Russert should appologize to Senator Obama.

Mancow Mueller, Clinton / Peter Paul Story Death Threat - Recorded Discussion - EJFA.Org

This is an update of our earlier story on the death threat Radio Talk Show Host Mancow Mueller says he received after he had former Hollywood business man Peter Paul on his show Friday.

I've just received from a source a copy of the radio show audio file where Mancow discusses the death threat he received with James Nesfield of the Equal Justice Foundation (ejfa.org) on Mancow's radio show, Monday, October 29th.

Here's what was said in text form:



Mancow: Listen, I had a guy on named Peter Paul on Friday.
James Nesfield: Yes. I know.
Mancow: Last week. And want to tell you, I had, a, uh, a very high level call over the weekend, and it was very frightening to me.
And..
James Nesfield: It should be.
Mancow: And I'm being sincere.
James Nesfield: No. I believe it. I...Listen. We were at our ISP, where we host the site. We had a attack from Russian and Chinese hackers.
Mancow: My. Uh. My family was threatened. And it was uh. I know the source, and it's a very dangerous source, and I'm really, uh, nervous about talking about your video, cause I think some very powerful people are going to be very upset about me talking to ya.
James Nesfield: You're right. I've been threatened too.

The "movie" they're talking about is called "Hillary Uncensored" and it's a detailed and hard-hitting documentary that has been playing to audiences at colleges around the country. It's drawn a large web-based following , and is continuing to be offered for view by any group that will ask.

What is the movie about? Well, I like WorldNetDaily's description:

"Hollywood filmmakers normally inclined to support candidates such as Sen. Hillary Clinton are working quietly behind the scenes to put the finishing touches on a documentary alleging the New York Democrat committed felonies to get elected and assisted her husband in defrauding a major donor."

The "major donor" is Peter Paul, and you can learn more about the story here.

The rest of the conversation is in the audio file below.

The audio file is here:

Mancow On Death Threat

Please listen to it. But you may be asking what the "so what" is here? Well, some have claimed that the Clintons have a way of associating themselves with people who in some way eliminate those who can block their path to power. Or as one blogger put it, "This is what happens when you have dirt on the Clintons."

The point is, if this can even be connected to the Clinton's it spells m-a-j-o-r t-r-o-u-b-l-e if the news is spread to a wide audience. It speaks to a lust for power that may even be greater than Hillary Clinton's desire to serve the American People.

Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani Spend Donor Money On Five-Star Hotels - Yahoo!

Senator Clinton and Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani should be very careful how they spend their money. Take a look at this Yahoo! report.

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Doughnut eateries, stationery chains and purveyors of private jets are cashing in as White House campaigns open their warchests leading into the make-or-break weeks of primary voting.

ADVERTISEMENT

Financial data released by the candidates shows they have raised collectively a staggering 420 million dollars this year, led by Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton, who has taken in just under 91 million.

Voluminous reports filed with the Federal Election Commission for the third quarter of 2007 also provide a snapshot of how, for the poorer second tier of candidates, it is a tale of two campaigns.

Clinton and her chief Republican rival Rudolph Guiliani spent a fortune on five-star hotels, spa retreats and chartered jets as they pursued their presidential quests in style.

But Texas Representative Ron Paul from the libertarian wing of the Republican Party (campaign issues: scrap income tax, the Federal Reserve and gun control) saves his pennies at motel chains.

"You know, we don't travel around with a retinue of media in a private jet," said Mike Gravel, a rank outsider for the Democratic nomination who has raised just 239,000 dollars overall.

"And, of course, I pay a price for that, because they don't cover me on a continuous basis like they do the other candidates, but that's the nature of the beast," the former Alaska senator told PBS television.

Through the services of a company called Flight Options, Republican John McCain had planned to head to electioneering stops by private jet.

But as he burned through cash, the Arizona senator took more commercial flights and recouped more than 420,000 dollars from canceling charters with Flight Options.

Humble aides for all the candidates were to be found in the cheap eats that dot the United States, such as the IHOP pancake chain, McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts.

Nothing was too small to be itemized: someone in Team Clinton spent 24.07 dollars at a Krispy Kreme branch in South Carolina on September 29. Paul listed all his gasoline receipts from refueling stops on lonely highways.

Fedex did a roaring trade from printing and delivering campaign materials, Staples was the favored supplier of the stationery, and American Express was raking it in from charges on the candidates' hefty credit card bills.

With this campaign on course to top the billion dollar mark by the time the next president is elected next November, some of the contenders are spending freely to raise their exposure before the first primaries.

Among the Republicans, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney spent over 21 million dollars from July to September -- over double the amount he raised. But then Romney is a multi-millionaire who can afford to dip into the red.

Much of the cash from the man bidding to be America's first Mormon president went on a television advertising blitz in New Hampshire and Iowa, which will hold their first nominating contests in less than three months.

"Because the calendar is not yet fixed the strategies are in constant flux," said Costas Panagopoulos, a politics professor at Fordham University who specializes in elections research.

"At the end of the day all candidates will spend heavily on TV but other media are on their plates as well," he said, noting that radio and the Internet are playing a bigger role than ever in grassroots campaigning.

Clinton's main Democratic rivals, Barack Obama and John Edwards, are banking on early advances in this packed election cycle as a springboard to the party's nomination.

Both contenders have lavished millions on building up campaign operations across the flatlands of Iowa, and are more active on the airwaves than the former First Lady, who does not lack for name recognition.

Obama is not too far behind Clinton in the cash stakes, and the Democrats' fundraising take as a whole has dwarfed the Republican effort.

But Giuliani -- who spent about 13 million dollars in the third quarter -- is campaigning harder in more populous states such as Florida, New Jersey and Illinois that will vote later.

For some Giuliani backers, the style in which the former New York mayor travels is no problem.

"I don't give a damn whether he's staying at Motel 6 or Ritz Carlton," one unidentified donor to Giuliani told the Washington Post. "What I care about is where he is in the polls."

Rudy Giuliani - Giuliani To Protect Us From Aliens

According to this article, Republican Presidential Candidate Rudy Giuliani will make sure we're prepared to defend ourselves from an attack by alien beings.

Ok.

I guess that means we have a laser defense system.

The pure idea of this is interesting because 1) we have no freaking idea how we'll be attacked, and 2) it proves how we think -- some of us -- that because something's different, it's bad.

Geez.

Robert Duvall To Host $2,300-Per-Person Event For Rudy Giuliani

From one Godfather to another - Robert Duvall is set to host a $2,300 event for Ex-New York Mayor and Republican Presidential Candidate Rudy Giuliani. According to the Washington Times...

We opened yesterday's mail to see that Academy Award-winning actor and director Robert Duvall and his fourth wife, Luciana, will host a high-end cocktail party at their country home in The Plains, Va., later this month to benefit Republican presidential candidate Rudolph W. Giuliani.

The invitation to the Sept. 20 gala requests a campaign contribution of $2,300 per guest, which gets you a photo with the candidate (and maybe even the celebrated actor). Others can fork over $1,000 ($500 if you're younger than 35) to mingle about the Middleburg-area estate and listen to Mr. Giuliani's remarks.

Mr. Duvall, who is a descendant of both Robert E. Lee and George Washington, announced his support for Mr. Giuliani earlier this week.

Rudy Giuliani Supports Don Imus - GOP Presidential Candidates Would Appear On Don Imus' Show - Wash Post

Just a few days after the major on-air racial slur uttered by Don Imus , GOP Presidential Candidates stated that they would -- I repeat -- would -- appear on The Don Imus Show, according to the Washington Post . This is right after Staples, Proctor & Gamble, and Bigelow Teas pulled their ads from the shock-jock's show. Rudy Giuliani, the current GOP front runner, has openly said he would appear on Don Imus' show again.

I guess through reasoning we can assume that Rudy Giuliani will not get donations from representatives of Staples, Proctor & Gamble, and Bigelow Teas.

Here's what was reported:

* Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.): "The comments of Don Imus were divisive, hurtful and offensive to Americans of all backgrounds. With a public platform, comes a trust. As far as I'm concerned, he violated that trust."

* Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.): "I certainly understand the outrage over his remarks. ... Those women did not deserve those hateful and hurtful comments."

* Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.): "He has apologized ... He said that he is deeply sorry. I'm a great believer in redemption. Whether he needs to do more in order to satisfy the concerns of people like the members of that team, that's something that's between him and them. But I have made many mistakes in my life ... and I have apologized, and most people have accepted that apology."

* Former Gov. Mike Huckabee(R-Ark.) spokeswoman Kirstin Fedewa: "The Governor said yesterday that what Imus said was both insensitive and wrong -- and that he certainly should apologize for his remarks. On top of everything else, what made this so inappropriate was that it was directed at young college women who are amateur athletes and not public figures."

"The Governor considers Imus a friend -- even though he doesn't agree with him on this. Imus did apologize, and he should -- and he's taking repeated steps to show genuine contrition, including offering to meet with the girls, to apologize in person."

* Former Gov. Mitt Romney (R-Mass.) spokesman Kevin Madden: "Governor Romney hasn't been invited to appear on the show again, but if he did go back on the show he would be sure to tell Mr. Imus how awful those remarks were. Governor Romney believes that those remarks were hurtful and obviously never should have even been uttered."

* Gov. Bill Richardson (D-N.M.): Spokesman Pahl Shipley said that Richardson has been in North Korea on a diplomatic mission and was not even sure whether the governor was aware of the controversy.

* Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.): "As the father of two young girls, I can imagine how hurtful these comments were to these young women and their parents. The comments were wrong and unacceptable. We know what the charges are, and we should see what actions he takes in the coming days. I'm glad that he has apologized, and I take him to be sincere in his apology. But his actions in the future will be the test of that sincerity and I'll let that guide my decision."

* Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani spokeswoman Maria Comella: "Mayor Giuliani spoke with Don Imus earlier today and it was clear that Mr. Imus recognizes he made a very big mistake. The Mayor believes Don Imus understands the damage he has done and he did the right thing by apologizing. Mayor Giuliani would appear on Don Imus' program again."

Chris Rock On Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton - Video

This is the funniest Chris Rock performance I've ever seen. The video speaks for itself. Chris Rock says that Barack Obama will be the next President of The United States.