Senator John McCain sought to distance himself from President Bush on Monday as he called for a mandatory limit on greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.
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Mr. McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, also pledged to work with the European Union to diplomatically engage China and India, two of the world's biggest polluters, if those nations refused to participate in an international agreement to slow global warming.
A review of military legal proceedings obtained by Salon shows that in the months prior to an unarmed Iraqi farmer's death, the three Army snipers accused of his killing were pressed to their physical limits and pushed by officers to stretch the bounds of the laws of war in order to increase the enemy body count. The pressure from above for more bodies was also toxic in Iraq, where the isolated, outnumbered and outgunned snipers of the 1st Battalion had to make split-second life-or-death decisions. When those decisions landed them in a military court, it was the lowest-ranking soldiers, not the brass, who paid the price, and a sergeant who said he was pushed into taking a fatal shot who wound up with a long prison sentence. It was battalion commander Lt. Col Robert Balcavage, who pushed for a higher body count, who initiated the prosecution of three of the battalion's snipers. "Yes, the chain of command deserves to burn in hell," one sniper who served with the unit wrote Salon in an e-mail. "But I am not going on record saying that, well, cause I am still in the fucking Army."
read moreThe Clintons have never understood how to exit the stage gracefully.
Their repertoire has always been deficient in grace and class. So there was Hillary Clinton cold-bloodedly asserting to USA Today that she was the candidate favored by "hard-working Americans, white Americans," and that her opponent, Barack Obama, the black candidate, just can't cut it with that crowd.
"There's a pattern emerging here," said Mrs. Clinton.
There is, indeed. There was a name for it when the Republicans were using that kind of lousy rhetoric to good effect: it was called the Southern strategy, although it was hardly limited to the South. Now the Clintons, in their desperation to find some way -- any way -- back to the White House, have leapt aboard that sorry train.
Sen. John McCain championed legislation that will let an Arizona rancher trade remote grassland and ponderosa pine forest here for acres of valuable federally owned property that is ready for development, a land swap that now stands to directly benefit one of his top presidential campaign fundraisers.
read moreJosef Fritzl, the Austrian father who kept his daughter locked in a dungeon for 24 years, has for the first time described in detail what motivated him to commit such horrific crimes and how he managed to keep them secret.
His explanations, which included bizarre claims that Nazis were responsible for fostering his twisted morality, were detailed by his lawyer after Fritzl wrote notes from his prison cell.
The 73-year-old said Hitler's Germany had instilled "control and the respect of authority" in him, pushing him to imprisoning his daughter Elisabeth under his family home in Amstetten, west of Vienna, and fathering her seven children.
Senator John McCain, who seeks endorsements from haters of Roman Catholics, is alleging that Hamas has "endorsed" Barack Obama. He darkly suggests that this means something.
It is a despicable, dirty campaign trick. Who do you think the Ku Klux Klan will be endorsing? And if the Grand Dragons plump for McCain, does that tell us anything about McCain except that he is pasty faced? You can't logically read off anything at all from an unsolicited endorsement.
Actually it occurred to me to ask who is endorsing McCain in the Muslim world.
read moreShellshocked House Republicans got warnings from leaders past and present Tuesday: Your party's message isn't good enough to prevent disaster in November, and neither is the NRCC's money.
The double shot of bad news had one veteran Republican House member worrying aloud that the party's electoral woes -- brought into sharp focus by Woody Jenkins' loss to Don Cazayoux in Louisiana on Saturday -- have the House Republican Conference splitting apart in "everybody for himself" mode.
read moreJohn McCain likes to think of himself as a straight shooter--a man of honor who doesn't duck tough questions. But at least one question does get him bobbing and weaving: why doesn't he renounce the endorsement of Pastor John Hagee, the San Antonio televangelist who has offended Roman Catholics and other groups?
On the trail, McCain tries to stay away from talking about Hagee. In New Orleans last month, he grew irritated when asked about the pastor's views on Hurricane Katrina. "It's nonsense, it's nonsense, it's nonsense," McCain said when a reporter drew attention to Hagee's 2006 statement to National Public Radio that New Orleans had suffered "the judgment of God" because of its "level of sin." McCain refused to disavow Hagee's support.
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Hey lady, it's a vagina, not a clown car.