Legion of Angels News Archive

WASHINGTON (CNN) – A new national poll suggests that only a quarter of Americans think things are going well in the country today, while the rest of those questioned are angry, scared and stressed out.

Seventy-five percent of those surveyed in a CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll released Tuesday said things are going badly in the United States.

An equal portion of those polled said they are angry about the way things are going. Two-thirds of those questioned said they’re scared about the way things are going and three in four said the current conditions in the country are stressing them out.

“It’s scary how many Americans admit they are scared,” said Keating Holland, CNN’s polling director. “Americans tend to downplay the amount of fear they have when facing tough times. The fact that more than six in 10 say that they are scared shows how bad things are getting.”

The 25 percent who said things are going well in the country is another indicator of the negative mood among Americans.

“Prior to 2008, we have seen that level of dissatisfaction only three times in the past four decades — during Watergate, the Iranian hostage crisis and the recession of 1992,” Holland added.

The survey also suggests that most Americans are not happy with President Bush. Seventy-two percent of those questioned disapprove of the president’s handling of his job.

The war in Iraq also continues to be unpopular with Americans, with 32 percent of those questioned favoring the war.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll was conducted Friday through Sunday, with 1,058 adult Americans questioned by telephone. The survey’s sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.

Source — CNN

(CNN) – Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin suggested Tuesday that it would be Sen. Barack Obama’s policies that would spark the international crisis that Sen. Joe Biden has said would be likely within months of Obama taking office.

At a fundraiser Sunday night, Biden, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, said that after taking office, “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. … We’re going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

He added that the Obama administration would need people to stand with it at the time because “it’s not going to be apparent initially … that we’re right.”

“I guess we have to say, “Thanks for the warning, Joe,’ ” Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee, told supporters during a rally in Reno, Nevada.

She speculated that instead of the crisis being generated by another world leader, as Biden suggested, an international crisis could be sparked by Obama’s willingness “to sit down with the world’s worst dictators without preconditions,” to send troops into Pakistan to try to kill Osama bin Laden and other top al Qaeda officials, or to draw down U.S. troops in Iraq.

In response to earlier criticism of the comments from Sen. John McCain, the GOP presidential candidate, Obama-Biden campaign spokesman David Wade issued a statement saying:

“Sen. Biden was making it clear that history has shown presidents face challenges starting on day one, and with our nation fighting two wars and 21st century threats abroad, we know that we need steady leadership in tumultuous times, not the erratic lurching and stubborn ideology of John McCain.”

But Palin zinged her Democratic counterpart, saying, “I guess the looming crisis that worries the Obama campaign right now is Joe Biden’s next speaking engagement.”

Trailing in polls nationally as well as in battleground states, the Republican ticket in recent days has been aggressively jumping on any opening given to it by the Democratic presidential ticket.

To reach voters in critical swing states, Palin and McCain have also increased the number of interviews they have done with local media outlets, in part to blunt the Obama campaign’s huge cash advantage.

On Sunday, the Obama campaign announced it raised a record $150 million in contributions in September.

McCain on Tuesday continued to hammer Obama for the comment the Democrat made to “Joe the plumber” in which — as he defended his decision to raise taxes on couples earning more than $250,000 a year while cutting taxes for people with lower incomes — Obama said that “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

“After months of campaign trail eloquence, we’ve finally learned what Sen. Obama’s economic goal is. … Sen. Obama is more interested in controlling who gets your piece of the pie than he is in growing the pie,” McCain told supporters during a rally in Bensalem, Pennsylvania.

McCain also accused Obama of waffling on which team he was backing in the World Series between the Philadelphia Phillies and the Tampa Bay Rays, which begins Wednesday.

“It’s kind of like the way he campaigns on tax cuts, but then votes for tax increases after he’s elected. Or the way he says he backs the middle class and then goes and attacks Joe the plumber after he’s asked a tough question,” McCain said.

Obama, however, has said he was rooting for the Phillies and has never said he was also rooting for the Rays.

When he was joined by a number of Rays at a rally in Florida on Monday, Obama said, “I am a unity candidate bringing people together, so when you see a [Chicago] White Sox fan showing love to the Rays, and the Rays showing some love back, you know we’re onto something right here.”

On Tuesday, Obama keep his focus on Florida and the economy, the issue that is foremost on voters’ minds. Polls also suggest that voters have more trust in Obama’s handling of the current financial crisis than in McCain’s.

During an economic roundtable discussion in Lake Worth, Florida, Obama called the crisis “the worst since the Great Depression” and blasted the Bush administration for not doing enough to help “Main Street.”

“While President Bush and Sen. McCain were ready to move heaven and earth to address the crisis on Wall Street, President Bush has failed to address the crisis on Main Street — and Sen. McCain has failed to fully acknowledge it,” Obama said. “Instead of commonsense solutions, month after month, they’ve offered little more than willful ignorance, wishful thinking and outdated ideology.”

The nation’s economic woes appear to be affecting the presidential race more than at any previous time this election cycle, according to a poll released Tuesday.

More than three-quarters of voters who responded to a new survey by CNN and the Opinion Research Corp. say the United States is in a recession, and 40 percent say another depression is likely to hit the country within a year.

According to the new poll, 61 percent of registered voters say the economy is extremely important to their vote, a jump of three points since June and more than 10 points higher than the next most important issue on voters’ minds: terrorism.

Source — CNN

WASHINGTON - None of us will ever forget this day.

That’s what President Bush said on the evening of Sept. 11, 2001. The country felt the same way.

But something fundamental has changed since then, and it says as much about Bush’s mindset as any part of his presidency.

He still lives Sept. 11, not as a memory, but in the present tense. It drives his decision-making, his politics, his legacy.

“He wakes up every day thinking about it and goes to bed thinking about it,” Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino said.

But the country is an entirely different place.

The fears and feelings of that day aren’t fresh. They’re fading. A raft of new polling shows that most people do not worry that terrorists will strike again soon. Most Americans don’t fear that they or their family will be a victim of an attack.

Terrorism is still a concern, but as few as 1 percent of people polled chose it as the biggest problem facing the country today. That’s a pittance compared to economic fears.

Of course the memory still burns for those who lost family and friends on Sept. 11, and for those who fled the falling buildings.

Yet for most everyone else, it comes up like a sharp pain this time of year, then goes away about as fleetingly.

And that has created a striking contrast between the president and the people.

Bush was once the one who successfully encouraged people to move on from Sept. 11. Now he tries to keep them from forgetting it.

“No matter how calm it may seem here in America, an enemy lurks,” the president said this spring. He was speaking in defense of warrantless wiretapping on terror suspects, but has used similar refrains in backing interrogation techniques, the war in Iraq, and the whole way he goes about his job.

That lesson of Sept. 11 imbues so many of his speeches that, at this point in his presidency, the warning almost gets taken for granted.

People have moved on.

Since the attacks, the country has seen the onset of two wars, Hurricane Katrina, the collapse of the housing market. The nation is eager for the election between Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama. Human nature has long kicked in.

After all, as Bush reminded the nation in great detail on Thursday, there has been no attack on U.S. soil in 2,557 days.

That’s a success story for the country and for Bush’s administration. It’s also the reason why terrorism is no longer paramount in people’s minds.

The president predicted this day would come.

“I knew that right after the attacks, the American psyche being what it is, people would tend to forget the grave threat posed by these people. I knew that,” Bush told an audience of troops in early 2007. “As a matter of fact, I was hoping that would happen so that life would go on.”

Yet these days, Bush sees danger in those fading memories — less support and less vigilance in a war against plotting killers.

“The temptation is to kind of say, well, maybe this isn’t really a war. Maybe this is just a bunch of disgruntled folks that occasionally come and hurt us,” he said in the Rose Garden this summer. “You know, that’s not the way I feel about it.”

When Bush scoffs at those who might minimize terrorism as a law enforcement matter, he’s targeting Democratic opponents. Politics are part of this, too. He made national security the centerpiece of his re-election campaign.

Polls show Americans favor McCain over Obama in confronting terrorism, mirroring a traditional election trend. If people are thinking about national security when they go to the polls, Republicans are most likely to gain.

Bush made the point this way in his speech to the Republican National Convention: “We need a president who understands the lessons of September the 11th, 2001: that to protect America, we must stay on the offense, stop attacks before they happen, and not wait to be hit again.”

The implication was that Obama would do the opposite.

The presidential reminders of Sept. 11 come up in many ways.

“Remember, when I mention al-Qaida, they’re the ones who attacked the United States of America and killed nearly 3,000 people on September the 11th, 2001,” Bush said last year.

When the war in Iraq reached its own grim anniversary this year — five years and counting — Bush raised Sept. 11 again.

The independent Sept. 11 commission found no collaborative linkage between the two, but to Bush, a broader struggle unites them. Failing in Iraq, he said, would be “to ignore the lessons of September the 11th and make it more likely that America would suffer another attack.”

At times, Bush seems almost to lament how little Sept. 11 is on the public’s mind.

He is still responsible for stopping another attack. And his reminders are, in fact, daily.

Bush begins his workday listening to intelligence experts describe fresh threats to the country. The public, of course, never hears or sees those confidential briefings. But the leaders of the intelligence community have been blunt in public that the terror threat remains real.

Their message to Congress and the country: Don’t forget Sept. 11.

Bush hasn’t.

“Even when he’s not president anymore,” Perino said, “I am sure that he will think about it every day.”

Source — Yahoo!

WASHINGTON - Senior officials in the Nixon administration discussed a desire to stop the newly elected government of leftist Chilean President Salvador Allende from taking power in 1970, according to recently declassified transcripts of those conversations made public Wednesday.

In one exchange, President Nixon’s former secretary of state, William Rogers, cautioned about secret U.S. efforts to prevent Allende from taking power after the administration had stressed the importance of democratic elections. The CIA ended up supporting the kidnapping of Chile’s top general in an effort to block Allende’s ascendance to the presidency.

“After all we’ve said about elections, if the first time a communist wins, the U.S. tries to prevent the constitutional process from coming into play we will look very bad,” said Rogers, who died in January 2001.

A private nonprofit group, the National Security Archive, published the transcripts on the eve of the 35th anniversary of a coup that resulted in Allende’s death.

Transcripts were made possible because Henry Kissinger taped all his phone calls when he became national security adviser in 1969. His secretaries transcribed the calls from tapes that later were destroyed. The Nixon presidential library declassified the newly released transcripts.

Some of the conversations occurred in 1970 in the run-up to Allende’s inauguration as a democratically elected socialist leader.

In one conversation, Kissinger informed President Nixon that the State Department had recommended an approach to “see what we can work out” with Allende.

“Don’t let them do it,” Nixon replied.

In another conversation, Kissinger told then-CIA director Richard Helms that “we will not let Chile go down the drain.”

“I am with you,” Helms replied.

In a subsequent conversation about Allende, Secretary of State Rogers agreed with Kissinger that “we ought, as you say, to cold-bloodedly decide what to do and then do it.”

Rogers warned that it should be done “discreetly so that it doesn’t backfire.”

“No matter what we do it will probably end up dismal,” said Rogers.

The CIA subsequently acknowledged it supported the 1970 kidnapping of Chile’s top general, Rene Schneider, for refusing to use the Army to prevent the country’s congress from confirming Allende’s election. The kidnapping failed — but Schneider was killed in the attempt — and Allende’s election was confirmed.

Three years later and nine weeks before the coup, Nixon blamed Helms and former U.S. Ambassador Edward Korry for failing to block Allende’s inauguration three years earlier.

“They screwed it up,” the president told Kissinger in another newly released conversation.

In the same call, Nixon told Kissinger, “I think that Chilean guy may have some problems.”

Kissinger responded, “Oh, he has massive problems. He has definitely massive problems.”

The subsequent coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet overthrew the Allende government on Sept. 11, 1973.

At least 3,197 people were killed for political reasons during Pinochet’s 17-year rule and thousands more disappeared, Chile’s government says.

The National Security Archive is a group seeking to open government records to the public.

___

On the Net:

National Security Archive: http://www.gwu.edu/nsarchiv/

CIA files on activity in Chile: https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/chile/index.html

Source — Yahoo!

WASHINGTON - The “Straight Talk Express” has detoured into doublespeak.

Republican presidential nominee John McCain, a self-proclaimed tell-it-like-it-is maverick, keeps saying his running mate, Sarah Palin, killed the federally funded Bridge to Nowhere when, in fact, she pulled her support only after the project became a political embarrassment. He accuses Democrat Barack Obama of calling Palin a pig, which did not happen. He says Obama would raise nearly everyone’s taxes, when independent groups say 80 percent of families would get tax cuts instead.

Even in a political culture accustomed to truth-stretching, McCain’s skirting of facts has stood out this week. It has infuriated and flustered Obama’s campaign, and campaign pros are watching to see how much voters disregard news reports noting factual holes in the claims.

McCain’s persistence in pushing dubious claims is all the more notable because many political insiders consider him one of the greatest living victims of underhanded campaigning. Locked in a tight race with George W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, McCain was rocked in South Carolina by a whisper campaign claiming he had fathered an illegitimate black child and was mentally unstable.

Shaken by the experience, McCain denounced less-than-truthful campaigning. Vowing to live up to his “straight talk” motto, he apologized for his reluctance to criticize the flying of the Confederate flag at South Carolina’s state Capitol in a bid for votes. When the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attacked the military record of Democrat and fellow Navy officer John Kerry in 2004, McCain called the ads “dishonest and dishonorable.”

Now, top aides to McCain include Steve Schmidt, who has close ties to Karl Rove, Bush’s premier political adviser in 2000.

Politicians usually modify or drop claims when a string of newspaper and TV news accounts concludes they are untrue or greatly exaggerated. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, for example, conceded she had not come under sniper fire in Bosnia after a batch of debunking articles subjected her to scorn during her primary contest against Obama.

But McCain and his running mate Palin, the Alaska governor, were defiant this week in the face of similar reports. Day after day she said she had told Congress “no thanks” to the so-called Bridge to Nowhere, a rural Alaska project that was abandoned when critics challenged its costs and usefulness. For nearly a week, major news outlets had documented that Palin supported the bridge when running for governor in 2006, noting that she turned against it only after it became an object of ridicule in Alaska and a symbol of Congress’s out-of-control earmarking.

The McCain-Palin campaign made at least three other aggressive claims this week that omitted key details or made dubious assumptions to criticize Obama. It equated lawmakers’ requests for money for special projects with corruption, even though Palin has sought nearly $200 million in such “earmarks” this year.

It produced an Internet ad implying that Obama had called Palin a pig when he used a familiar phrase, which McCain also has used, about putting “lipstick on a pig” to try to make a bad situation look better. McCain supporters said Obama was slyly alluding to Palin’s description of herself as a pit bull in lipstick, but there was nothing in his remarks to support the claim. Obama accused the GOP campaign of “lies and phony outrage.”

The lipstick wars were fully engaged when the McCain campaign produced another ad saying Obama favored “comprehensive sex education” for kindergartners. The charge triggered the sort of headlines becoming increasingly common in major newspapers and wire services monitoring the factual content of political ads and speeches.

“Ad on Sex Education Distorts Obama Policy,” was the headline on a New York Times article Thursday. “McCain’s ‘Education’ Spot is Dishonest, Deceptive,” The Washington Post’s “Fact Checker” article said.

Major news outlets have written such fact-checking articles for years. “But in the last two election cycles, the very notion that the facts matter seems to be under assault,” said Michael X. Delli Carpini, an authority on political ads at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. “Candidates and their consultants seem to have learned that as long as you don’t back down from your charges or claims, they will stick in the minds of voters regardless of their accuracy or at a minimum, what the truth is will remain murky, a matter of opinion rather than fact.”

With Palin giving McCain’s campaign a boost in the polls, Obama supporters are nervously watching to see what impact the latest claims will have. Surveys already show that most people believe Obama would raise their taxes — a regular McCain claim — even though independent groups such as the Tax Policy Center concluded that four out of five U.S. households would receive tax cuts under his proposals.

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds defended the campaign’s statements. “We include factual backup in every one of our TV spots,” he said Thursday.

Obama, of course, has made exaggerated or questionable assertions as well. Earlier this year, for instance, he repeated a claim that more black men are in prison than in college, after news accounts refuted it. He also used a McCain remark about having troops in Iraq for “100 years” to exaggerate McCain’s proposals for being fully engaged militarily in that country.

In general, however, Obama has been quicker to react to news accounts challenging his accuracy. Faced with skeptical reports this year, for instance, he stopped saying he “worked his way” through college, and instead credited hard work and scholarships.

Dan Schnur, a former McCain aide who now teaches politics at the University of Southern California, said McCain and Obama learned they must stretch the truth “when staying on the high road didn’t work out to their benefit.”

McCain, he said, “tried it his way. He had a poverty tour and nobody covered it. He had a national service tour, and everybody made fun of it. He proposed these joint town halls” with Obama, “and nothing come of it. Through the spring and early summer, that approach didn’t work. You can’t blame him for taking a step back and reassessing.”

Source — Yahoo!