US News
Gustav puts Republicans on ice, but pregnancy causes stir (Roundup)
By Frank Fuhrig Sep 1, 2008, 20:41 GMT
St Paul, Minnesota - Hurricane Gustav battered New Orleans and the Gulf Coast on Monday, but the storm's reach extended nearly 2,000 kilometres north to St Paul, Minnesota where the Republican Party's presidential convention was sharply curtailed.
US President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, mindful of the perception of federal indifference and incompetence in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, cancelled their planned speeches to the convention, where Senator John McCain will become the party's nominee for the November 4 presidential election.
First Lady Laura Bush and McCain's wife, Cindy, were scheduled to speak later Monday in an appeal to the nation to support relief efforts for people in the hurricane-affected states on the Gulf of Mexico.
The McCain campaign and party officials are labouring to avoid any perception of partisan politics or a Republican celebration at the convention, amid the unfolding natural disaster.
On Monday afternoon, Republican National Committee Chairman Mike Duncan gavelled open the convention, which he said would be run 'according to party rules and appropriate circumstances.'
Duncan led the 2,200 assembled delegates in using their mobile phones to make an instant donation toward relief work by the American Red Cross. 'As we gather in Minnesota, a great storm threatens our country, and when one of us is threatened, all of us are threatened,' he said.
Hurricane Gustav, though, was not the only unplanned event making waves at the convention.
News of the pregnancy of the 17-year-old daughter of Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain's vice presidential choice, leapt into the headlines Monday.
Palin, 44, the little-known governor of Alaska, was announced Friday as McCain's surprise choice for vice president.
On Monday, she and husband Todd issued a statement confirming that their daughter Bristol was five months pregnant.
'Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned,' the couple said.
'We're proud of Bristol's decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents.'
The Palins said that Bristol and 'the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family.'
Palin, a mother of five, brings youth to the ticket of McCain, who is 72. She is an outspoken opponent of abortion, and her choice was seen as a pitch to conservative Republicans uneasy about the nomination of the more centrist McCain.
Palin will be only the second woman nominated to a major party ticket, after Geraldine Ferraro, who was the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 1984.
President Bush spent Monday in Texas, to lead the coordination of the federal storm response - a drastic change from Hurricane Katrina three years ago, when he kept low visibility as the disaster unfolded.
With Bush's approval ratings at historic lows - hovering around 30 per cent - his presence at the convention was considered unavoidable, but awkward, for the McCain campaign. Gustav has provided a convenient way for the party to minimize the role of the unpopular president amid the Iraq War and a sputtering economy.
McCain, an oft-described maverick Republican who has spent much of his 26 years in Congress at odds with his own party, has largely avoided Bush, appearing with him publicly only once since March, when the senator nailed down the nomination in intra-party primary elections.
Convention organizers said they would make decisions day-to-day about the programme on Tuesday and Wednesday, and it was not clear when the official nomination of McCain would take place. His acceptance speech was scheduled for Thursday, which would kick off the final two months of the long-running election campaign.
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Older Talkback
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Did you all see the dems in action outside the RNC? Tru colors show how ignorant, uncivilized, and wareing it on their sleeves.
ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) - Democrat protesters smashed windows, punctured car tires and threw bottles Monday during an anti-war march to the site of the Republican National Convention. Police used pepper spray in confrontations with demonstrators and arrested five.
Instead of the single coherent march that organizers had hoped for, fringe groups of democrats and liberals wrought havoc along the streets between the state Capitol and the Xcel Energy Center where the convention was taking place.
Police estimates of the crowd shifted during the event before settling on 8,000 to 10,000. The crowd was clearly in the thousands, many of them marching peacefully.
The arrests occurred in confrontations several blocks from the convention arena. Five democrates were arrested for lighting a trash bin on fire and pushing it into a police car, St. Paul police spokesman Tom Walsh said.
About 20 liberals who had started the trash bin fire later tried to block the intersection of St. Peter and Exchange streets. Police quickly dispersed the group, then shot two tear gas canisters at the fleeing anarchists.
Pictures taken by Associated Press photographers showed officers using pepper spray on democrat protesters who appeared to be trying to block streets.
'There are people who are committing violations of law and they're being arrested,' Walsh said.
About 200 people from a group called dems for Obamanation noisily staged its own separate march. Wearing black clothes, bandanas and gas masks, some of their members smashed windows of cars and stores. They tipped over newspaper boxes, pulled a big trash bin into the street, bent the rear view mirrors on a bus and flipped heavy stone garbage bins on the sidewalks.
One man who seemed to be the leader of the group carried a yellow flag with the motto 'Don't Tread on Me.' The group chanted: 'Whose streets? Our streets! We Will TAX our streets!'
Meanwhile, a group of about 100 democrats pushed a trash bin filled with trash and threw garbage in the streets and at cars. They also took down orange detour road signs. One of them used a screwdriver to puncture the back tire of a limousine waiting at an intersection and threw a wooden board at the vehicle, denting its side. Another hurled a glass bottle at a charter bus that had stopped at an intersection. The bottle smashed into pieces but didn't appear to damage the bus.
Closely following the democrats were teams of riot officers carrying batons, rifles and guns that could be used to shoot tear gas.
The day's march was organized by a group called the Coalition of Liberals to March on the RNC and Obamanation, whose leaders said they hoped for a hateful, anti family-friendly march. But police were on high alert after months of preparations by a self-described democrat group called the RNC Welcoming Committee, which wasn't among the organizers of the march.
Don't connect these rebels to the Democrat Party. Anyone can protest in the name of anything if they want to, and the biggest share of protesters anywhere are usually misfits who will go along with anything just to cause a commotion.
'Don't connect these rebels to the Democrat Party...
usually misfits who will go along with anything just to cause a commotion.'
LOL, misfits who will go along with anything is pretty much the democratic party.
of small mindedness in calling the ones causing the damage all Democrats.
Doug apparently knows nothing of marches and about some of the riff raff who follow them.
Sounds like the more we hear that most political people in Alaska had no clue about Palin's pick for VP - people who would ordinarily have been contacted for background info. Also sounds like McCain did a pretty rush pick and not who he really wanted, but was pressured for someone who could stir things up and not the ordinary ones everyone knows. Guess that was accomplished.
..only true of having a baby constitutes some kind of scandal. Obama's mother had him when she was 18, only a year older.
Honestly, I watched these former hippies in the 60's nuture every sensation, from drugs to sex and now they prude out on a person having a child, that is related to the VP pick, as if SHE was the one who got knocked up. In fact, if the libnazi drive-by media were not so tittilated by this, it'd be over.
Not everyone is thinking Palin isn't a good candidate because her daughter is pregnant, but rather they are not so sure she had her daughter's best interests in mind when she agreed to the nomination in light of all the intense publicity this girl would have to endure. And, heaven knows, she certainly is. But maybe it is Palin's subtle way of 'punishing' her daughter - who knows. I don't care if all of daughters were pregnant, but it is causing havoc whether we like it or not. I'm sure that McCain wishes he could have been able to pick the VP he really wanted to at this juncture.
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PperfectSep 2nd, 2008 - 01:13:35
Not from the 'family values' party? Larry Craig speaking at the convention?
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