NightBlogger

Patrick Martin
A senior adviser to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, in the course of an interview with Fortune magazine made public Monday, declared that a new terrorist attack like September 11, 2001 would be good for his candidate’s electoral prospects. Such an event “certainly would be a big advantage to him,” declared Charles R. Black Jr., in a comment that even the monthly business magazine felt compelled to describe as “startling.”

Black added that the assassination last December of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, while “unfortunate,” had given McCain a boost in the final days before the New Hampshire primary, by focusing public attention on a major international crisis. “His knowledge and ability to talk about it reemphasized that this is the guy who’s ready to be Commander-in-Chief. And it helped us,” Black said. More

There were no warm-up chants, no triumphalist campaign songs, no celebrity supporters, just five local women awkwardly flapping blue Hillary signs.

Suzanne Goldenberg in South Dakota
The audience at this Indian reservation - about 200 counting 14 students on a class trip from Massachusetts and their teacher, who said they were all Barack Obama supporters - was so small Clinton did not even attempt the politician’s hoax of pointing to faces in fake delight.

This is what it looks like for Clinton at the end, the last gasps of a dying presidential campaign. When she launched her campaign in January last year, she cast herself as the inevitable Democratic nominee. “I’m in it to win it,” she said.

Now Obama looks like the inevitable candidate. Clinton’s chances of a miracle recovery evaporated on Saturday when the Democratic party decided to recognise primaries in Michigan and Florida, but halve their voting power at the party’s nominating convention. More

Photo sfslim
By Alan Elsner
Reuters
Sunday, May 11, 2008; 10:36 AM

Democrat Barack Obama’s campaign chief predicted on Sunday his protracted battle against Hillary Clinton for the party’s presidential nomination would soon be over, saying “we’re coming to the end of the process.”

Interviewed on “Fox New Sunday,” David Axelrod said undecided superdelegates to the party convention who will decide the nomination were opting for Obama, the Illinois senator who would be America’s first black president if elected in November.

“You’re going to see people (superdelegates) making decisions at a rapid pace from this point on,” he said. “We’ve been announcing several each day for the last few days. We’re going to continue to unfurl these endorsements on a regular basis.” Read more

A reporter asks White House spokeswoman Dana Perino about the Pentagon’s propaganda

On April 20, The New York Times published an expose revealing the Pentagon’s secret program using retired military analysts to “generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance.” Since that time, the media have been disappointingly silent on the story and their roles in the Pentagon’s program. Read more

VINCENNES, Ind. (WTHI)
A local campaign office has been vandalized just 24 hours before election day in Indiana. An investigation is underway currently as to who is behind the destruction of Senator Barack Obama’s Vincennes campaign headquarters. The vandalism occured sometime Sunday night. Duane Chattin, President of the Vincennes City Council tells News 10 “our hope now is that the police will catch these criminals and they can be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
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The New York Times has exposed a secret Pentagon campaign to infiltrate the media with pro-war propaganda. The scheme reaches all the way to the Bush White House, where top officials recruited dozens of “military analysts” to spread favorable views of the war via the news. Many of these propaganda pundits didn’t reveal that they were working from Pentagon scripts or lobbying for companies seeking to cash in on major military contracts. This is a violation of every conceivable standard of journalism — and possibly of federal law.