The first vote is still more than a year away, but the campaign to replace President George W Bush in the White House is already throwing up surprises.

Unfortunately for Senator Hillary Clinton, long the front-runner in the Democratic drive to retake the presidency, most of them are coming at her expense.

A brace of Christmas opinion polls has left Clinton with a political hangover after a year that had appeared to cement her status as the Democrats’ best-organised, best-financed and best-connected contender for her party’s presidential nomination.

Despite winning re-election to the US Senate by a handsome margin in mid-term voting last month, Clinton has had little to celebrate as polls from the presidential primary battlegrounds signalled early trouble for her historic bid to become America’s first woman president.

In Iowa, the Midwestern state that will once again open the primary season with its caucus votes on January 14, 2008, Clinton slumped to fourth place with only 10% of the vote in a survey of 600 likely Democratic voters. (more…)

Earlier today, during an interview on CNN, the Republican chairman of the Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee — which just released a report rebuking the FBI on its investigation of the 1999 Oklahoma City bombing — was asked if he was helping to “fuel conspiracy theories.”

American Morning’s Miles O’Brien told outgoing Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, (R-CA) that he had “raised a lot of questions that are just kind of ‘out there’ in the conspiracy theorist world.” O’Brien mentioned different theories relating to Middle East terrorists, Iraqi officials, neo-Nazi bankrobbers, and the alleged John Doe #2. (more…)

• Flashback: U.S. Sen. John Edwards at Bilderberg

John Edwards, the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2004, has announced he will again run for the White House.

Mr Edwards has taken the risky decision of launching his second presidential run in the normally slow news week between Christmas and New Year. Although they have yet to declare their candidacy, Senators Hillary clinton and Barack Obama are widely expected to throw their hats into the ring.

Mr Edwards launched his campaign last night in a poor New Orleans neighbourhood, where thousands of people are still living in poverty following Hurricane Katrina.

The former North Carolina senator reiterated to his supporters that there are “two Americas” - one for the comfortable and another for the struggling. He has proposed a series of work, housing and school measures aimed at lifting millions of Americans out of poverty in the next 10 years, and called for a goal of ending poverty within 30 years. (more…)

Meacher set to announce he’s running in Labour leadership race; could anti-war rebel really stand a chance?

Michael Meacher MP, former environment minister and 9/11 truther who attracted press attention for publicly questioning the official story behind the terrorist attack in a September 2003 article, could be in contention for the Labour Party leadership race and thus replace Tony Blair as the next British Prime Minister.

“Michael Meacher is “well on the way” to announcing his decision to stand in the forthcoming Labour leadership race, according to one of his key supporters,” reports the London Guardian.

With Tony Blair set to stand down before September 2007, the party leader will be the de facto Prime Minister, at least until the next general election in 2009, where many expect David Cameron, a favorite of the Globalists, to reclaim 10 Downing Street for the Tories.

Meacher is set to rally the anti-war left sentiment of the Labour Party in an attempt to defeat current Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, who up until now has been widely tipped as a shoe in for Prime Minister. (more…)

The shadow of President Bush seemed to loom large over his younger brother on Wednesday, as the outgoing Florida governor ruled out any plans to return to elected office.

“No tengo futuro (I have no future),” Jeb Bush told Spanish-language reporters in Miami, when asked about any possible political ambitions after he steps down next month.

The popular, two-term governor has often been touted as a savvy politician with a good chance of following both his brother and father, George H.W. Bush, into the White House.

But the unpopularity and dismal job-approval ratings of his brother may have scuttled any plans Jeb Bush may have had for a future in politics after running one of America’s most crucial swing states for the past eight years. (more…)

Congress preserves and improves internment camps and neocon critics call for them to be used to contain “traitors”

In a discussion concerning Joy Behar comparing Donald Rumsfeld to Hitler, a Fox News guest yesterday asserted that people like her should be rounded up and put in detention camps because they are traitors.

As reported by Fox watchdog newshounds, The program was Fox On Line with Bill Hemmer, his guest was right wing radio host, Mike Gallagher. As Gallagher moved into a tirade against free speech, left wing radio host, Rob Thompson, who was the “fair and balanced” element of the piece, reminded Gallagher what America is and what having free speech means: (more…)

Foreign Office has asked ministers to ditch the phrase invented by Bush to avoid stirring up tensions within the Islamic world

Cabinet ministers have been told by the Foreign Office to drop the phrase ‘war on terror’ and other terms seen as liable to anger British Muslims and increase tensions more broadly in the Islamic world.
The shift marks a turning point in British political thinking about the strategy against extremism and underlines the growing gulf between the British and American approaches to the continuing problem of radical Islamic militancy. It comes amid increasingly evident disagreements between President George Bush and Tony Blair over policy in the Middle East.

Experts have welcomed the move away from one of the phrases that has most defined the debate on Islamic extremism, but called it ‘belated’. (more…)

In a surprise twist in the debate over Iraq, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, the soon-to-be chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said he wants to see an increase of 20,000 to 30,000 U.S. troops as part of a stepped up effort to “dismantle the militias.”

The soft-spoken Texas Democrat was an early opponent of the Iraq war and voted against the October 2002 resolution authorizing President Bush to invade that country. That dovish record got prominently cited last week when Speaker designate Nancy Pelosi chose Reyes as the new head of the intelligence panel.

But in an interview with NEWSWEEK on Tuesday, Reyes pointedly distanced himself from many of his Democratic colleagues who have called for fixed timetables for the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Coming on the eve of tomorrow’s recommendations from the bipartisan Baker-Hamilton commission, Reyes’s comments were immediately cited by some Iraq war analysts as fresh evidence that the intense debate over U.S. policy may be more fluid than many have expected.

Warmonger in sheep’s clothing…it’s time to wake up, Democrats. (more…)

Hannity & Colmes did some PR last night (12/4/06) for a new FOX News “pundit,” Greg Gutfeld, host of a “web show” on FOXNews.com. Gutfeld was obviously trying to make a good impression by showing off just how snide and mean-spirited he could be, sort of an Ann Coulter wannabe without the glassy eyes – at least as far as I could tell. Like Coulter, he seemed to be his own biggest fan, and delighted in his own malice, even when it made no sense.

The excuse for rolling out Gutfeld on prime time was an attack on actress Gwyneth Paltrow for making what Sean Hannity called “anti-American” remarks, as quoted by the European press. The TV screen showed those remarks: “The British are much more intelligent and civilized than the Americans. I love the English lifestyle… I’m not as capitalistic as America. People talk about interesting things at dinner – not about work and money.”

Hannity acknowledged that Paltrow told People that she had been misquoted and claimed to have never said anything against the US. “I felt so upset to be completely misconstrued and I never, ever would have said that,” Paltrow reportedly said.

“I suspect that she said it,” Hannity said, as though it made a difference. (more…)

The right-wing news site WorldNetDaily is reporting a claim by conservative British tabloid The Sunday Express that Scotland Yard is checking into the possibility that dead Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, a KGB defector, may have been attempting to smuggle highly radioactive polonium to terror groups.

Mentioning reports that Litvinenko converted to Islam shortly before his death, the site repeats the paper’s claim that “[Scotland Yard’s] biggest fear … is that Litvinenko, who died of polonium-210 poisoning in a London hospital, may have been helping al-Qaida or other extremist groups get hold of radioactive material to be used in a devastating ‘dirty’ atom bomb.”

Not everyone supports the Express’s assertion, or, by extension, believes in Scotland Yard’s purported concern. (more…)

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has begun a calculated series of meetings with top New York Democratic officials to signal that she is likely to run for the presidency in 2008 and to ask for their support if she does, according to one state Democratic official who spoke with her and two others who have been briefed on her plans.

Senator Clinton met last week with Charles B. Rangel, the dean of the New York Congressional delegation, in what her advisers said was an effort to meet with most New York Congressional Democrats by the end of this month to discuss her plans.

On Friday, she also spoke with Herman D. Farrell Jr., the chairman of the State Democratic Party, Mr. Farrell said, and she plans to meet with Governor-elect Eliot Spitzer as early as today. Mr. Farrell confirmed that Senator Clinton briefed him on her 2008 intentions; Mr. Rangel declined to describe their conversation. (more…)

“Although the Democrats are very uncomfortable with the way the Iraq policy is being executed, they are at pains not to appear that they are shortchanging troops in the field,” Loren Thompson, CEO of the Lexington Institute, yet another “think tank,” this one connected at the hip to the neocon infested Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the Associated Press. “This is their opportunity to show that they, too, are pro-defense,” that is to say pro-killing Iraqis in prodigious numbers with an inventory of truly heinous weapons.

In order to test the loyalty to the neocon ethic of ever ballooning “defense” (i.e., invade small countries) appropriations, the “Bush administration is hammering out its largest-ever appeal for more Iraq war funds—a record $100 billion, at least, and that figure reflects cuts from wish lists originally circulating around the Pentagon,” a “wish list” no different than one submitted by a heroin addict, forever increasing his dosage and thus requiring more and more money, to the ultimate ruination of family and friends. (more…)

Labour will make itself unelectable by resorting to “the politics of fear”, according to Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman Nick Clegg.

Speaking at the Sovereign Debate in London on Wednesday, Clegg said the threat of terrorism had allowed the government to “rediscover legitimacy by corralling the electorate towards the strong, protective arms of the state”.

But he said that relying on the politics of fear could be “an error as fatal as the wrong turn taken by Labour in the 1980s, or the Conservatives in the late 1990s”.

He argued that while voters would rally for a time to those parties which “beat the drum of fear most loudly”, they will come to resent those which do so for political reasons and which fail to match the unrealistic expectations they have set. (more…)

It is said Karl Rove once told Michael Ledeen to fax his “ideas” to him and these so-called ideas often became “official policy or rhetoric,” according to the Washington Post.

Back in June, 2003, a few months into the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Jim Lobe, writing for the Inter Press Service, said Rove regularly consulted with Ledeen, to the horror of foreign policy veterans. In fact, Ledeen, according to Lobe’s sources, was the “only full-time international affairs analyst” consulting with Rove, who had Bush’s ear.

As the Baker Boys attempt to reign in the neocons, or so we are told, and the American people have turned against the Iraqi occupation, Michael Ledeen is as determined as ever to subvert the republic—or the few shreds that remain of the republic—and use it as Israel’s truncheon against Arab and Muslim enemies. (more…)

The latest Evans-Novak Political Report suggests the way President Bush fired Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld caused considerable friction in the White House. “Even Vice President Dick Cheney is said to be profoundly disturbed by Rumsfeld’s treatment.”

Key points:

“On the day after the election, Rumsfeld had seemed devastated — the familiar confident grin gone and his voice breaking. According to Bush Administration officials, only three or four people knew he would be fired — and Rumsfeld was not one of them.” (more…)