Hamid passes pipe to Canadian Public Safety Minister.

He takes a big hit and then calls the report of a wave of AQ suicide bombers heading to Canada and the US a "PR move". All in the interest of public safety, I guess. Can't get the sheeple spooked. Day downplays warning 300 suicide bombers to target West, including Canada.

US Homeland Security takes a quick toke and then chimes in with a pr move of their own: Homeland Security Official: No imminent threat - that we know of.

The reporters in the room must have gotten a contact high over at alJazeera magazine. It sounds like they forgot to write the rest of the story in their report. And it's like they had too much fun then crashed and burned in the Western media. They pretty much ignored the whole thing!

Who know's what John Edwards was thinking smoking when he came out with that American "bumper sticker' theory deal about the War on Terror. Good luck with that one, John. I don't think its working out so well for you. Just sayin'. That and consorting with Danny Glover on the campaign trail. The same Danny Glover who is making movies with Hugo Chavez (he got paid $18 mil for the first one) and is on the board of Hugo's tv station. The same station who has hooked up with al Jazeera to beam out anti-democracy messages across Latin America.

Note to John Edwards: Lay down with dogs, get up with fleas...

Edwards charges $55,000 to speak to UC Davis students about poverty

This is like candy to me...
Edwards charges $55,000 to speak to UC Davis students about poverty

Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, who as a Democratic presidential candidate recently proposed an educational policy that urged "every financial barrier" be removed for American kids who want to go to college, has been going to college himself -- as a high paid speaker, his financial records show.

The candidate charged a whopping $55,000 to speak at to a crowd of 1,787 the taxpayer-funded University of California at Davis on Jan. 9, 2006 last year, Joe Martin, the public relations officer for the campus' Mondavi Center confirmed Monday.

That amount -- which comes to about $31 a person in the audience -- included Edwards' travel and airfare, and was the highest speaking fee in the nine appearances he made before colleges and universities last year, according to his financial records.

The earnings -- though made before Edwards was a declared Democratic presidential candidate -- could hand ammunition to his competition for the Democratic presidential nomination. The candidate -- who was then the head of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of North Carolina -- chose to speak on "Poverty, the great moral issue facing America," as his $55,000 topic at UC Davis.

That could cause both parents and students to note some irony here: UC Davis -- like the rest of the public University of California system -- will get hit this year by a 7 percent tuition increase that likely hits many of the kids his speeches are aimed at helping.

We wondered if this is Edwards' going speaking rate, and how come he didn't offer to do it gratis for a college, particularly a public institution.

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Repub Rats getting ready to jump ship in Iraq?

Rats: Politicians with tails?

Looks like September is going to be the next big skirmish in the Troop funding war.

From the Chicago Tribune.

"This is going to be a step-by-step process, continuing to isolate" the president, said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), the House Democratic Caucus chairman. (Speaking of rats and who should appear? Why it's Rahm-bo.) "The key to that is to basically get Republicans who say, 'We're not going to do this anymore.'

"Privately and publicly, some House Republicans and their staff say defections could come as early as September, when Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of American troops in Iraq, returns to brief Congress on the progress of Bush's "troop surge" of nearly 30,000 to quell insurgent fighters.Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) said the briefing will be a different sort of "benchmark" for a Republican caucus that has so far stood nearly united behind the president against troop withdrawals.

"That [unity] will change very abruptly and very quickly in September if the report is not good," he said. "People are going to be looking at their next election. Their next election will be right around the corner, and the war will be the big issue."

And if the RNC does not whack the pee-pee of every Republican representative that threatens to jump ship...I am really going to be steamed.

Polls, politics and the war.

Okay, I know I vowed not to get involved in the election magilla until the scrum cleared a bit. And I know the old saying "figures never lie, liars figure is especially true when it comes to the art of election polling but I took a gander at this over at RealClearPolitics and was transfixed. Read on, pilgrim.

If a strong majority of Americans are opposed to the Iraq war, which no one disputes, then why are the voters evenly divided between the Republican and Democratic presidential front-runners?

One would think that mounting opposition to the war and President Bush's handling of it would be driving the presidential polls, and that all of the top Republican contenders -- who fiercely back the war -- would be struggling to overcome lopsided Democratic support.

But that's not the case at all. Not only do polling numbers show the GOP's candidates are quite competitive against the Democrats, they are leading them in some surveys.
This is the inherent political contradiction that appears to be shaping up nearly 18 months before the 2008 presidential election takes place. Bush's approval polls are in the 30s, owing largely to the war, and voters rate the Democratic Party much more favorably than the Republicans (52 percent to 40 percent in the Gallup Poll).
But neither party appears to have an advantage in the race for the White House.

This is a troubling early-warning sign for the Democrats and for the candidates who have risen to the top of their list of prospective nominees...

An interesting analysis worth exploring and it's all here.