Join McCain re-Election Campaign ? Being the Republican nominee for President was one of the great honors of my life and an experience I will never forget. Some have wondered, after my hard fought presidential campaign, if I plan to run for re-election to the United States Senate.
Join my re-election team I want you to know that I do intend to seek re-election. The magnitude of the financial crisis that many American families are facing makes it clear to me that I want to continue to serve our country in the Senate.
The economic challenges currently confronting our nation are immense and unfortunately, the Democrats in Congress propose addressing these challenges through increased spending that wastes billions of taxpayers dollars and saddles our children and grandchildren with a staggering debt. Their proposals will not stimulate economic growth or create jobs. While the leader of the Democratic Party, President Obama, has pledged to change business as usual in Washington and spoken of bipartisanship, I have been saddened to watch as Congressional Democrats try to use their majority to advocate more of the same failed policies and wasteful spending of the past. With so much at stake, now is not the time to step away from my work in the Senate.
As always, I anticipate a tough re-election challenge. But with your help, we will counter those efforts and put forth an aggressive campaign by registering new voters, reaching out to Democrats, Independents and Republicans, and again earning the support of Hispanic and Native American voters in Arizona.
I am honored to serve the people of Arizona as their United States Senator. I would be most appreciative of your support of my re-election efforts and hope you will click here to join my re-election team
Being the Republican nominee for President was one of the great honors of my life and an experience I will never forget. Some have wondered, after my hard fought presidential campaign, if I plan to run for re-election to the United States Senate.
Join my re-election team I want you to know that I do intend to seek re-election. The magnitude of the financial crisis that many American families are facing makes it clear to me that I want to continue to serve our country in the Senate.
The economic challenges currently confronting our nation are immense and unfortunately, the Democrats in Congress propose addressing these challenges through increased spending that wastes billions of taxpayers dollars and saddles our children and grandchildren with a staggering debt. Their proposals will not stimulate economic growth or create jobs. While the leader of the Democratic Party, President Obama, has pledged to change business as usual in Washington and spoken of bipartisanship, I have been saddened to watch as Congressional Democrats try to use their majority to advocate more of the same failed policies and wasteful spending of the past. With so much at stake, now is not the time to step away from my work in the Senate.
As always, I anticipate a tough re-election challenge. But with your help, we will counter those efforts and put forth an aggressive campaign by registering new voters, reaching out to Democrats, Independents and Republicans, and again earning the support of Hispanic and Native American voters in Arizona.
I am honored to serve the people of Arizona as their United States Senator. I would be most appreciative of your support of my re-election efforts and hope you will click here to join my re-election team . Thank you for your consideration.
What does the real John McCain look like in real life after the election? - 11.12.2008
- Article Number: 13
What does the real John McCain look like in real life after the election? on the Jay Leno show, Jay really tried to get some actual information from him. We all wanted to see John McCain's real life story after the media fuss is over. He asked what it was like to go from major candidate for one of the world's most important offices, traveling with a huge entourage, compared to the day after the election, when he was seen that morning driving off by himself. Where was he going, by the way?
"Went down to get cup a coffee," he said. "Not the newspaper, I knew what it was going to say."
McCain obviously didn't want to go deep into explanations or offer any regrets.
He wouldn't venture an answer for his loss at the polls. "Personality flaw," he said.
"Maybe too many people saw me on the Jay Leno show." he joked
Jay Leno asked why the sense of humor he displayed on "Saturday Night Live" and elsewhere didn't come out generally in the campaign.
"I don't frankly think that a lot of people wanted a standup comic," he said. "They wanted to know how you're going to address the issues."
As in his concession speech, he said it was an honor to have run and wished the new administration well.
"It's time for America to join together and support the man who was just elected," he said. Oddly, nobody in the audience applauded that note of healing.
If it didn't aid McCain's legacy, it certainly boosted numbers for the "Tonight" show. It was the highest metered-market household ratings for any day of the week in 10 months, and the highest rated Tuesday since February 2007. More of his life and war stories. Add your comments below
The real life Mccain is TOO nice in the real world? - 11.11.2008
- Article Number: 12
Did you see John McCain's defeat speech. His life story again, being too nice. Ignoring his advisors who wanted him to attack Obama viciously. Instead in real life he is too gracious! That won't work in real life?
Soldier John McCain's True War story: How War Torture Worked on Me - 11.01.2008
- Article Number: 11
Soldier John McCain's True War story: How War Torture Worked on Me.
Senator John McCain is leading the charge against use of so-called "torture" techniques allegedly used by United States military interrogators in the current war, insisting that war torture practices like sleep deprivation and withholding medical attention are not only brutal - they simply don't work to persuade terrorist or war suspects to give accurate information.
Nearly forty years ago, however his war story is different - when John McCain was held as a war captive in a North Vietnam prison camp - some of the same war torture techniques were used on him. And John McCain has admitted at least twice that torture worked!
What do think is the real war story behind the story of his life. Torture OK or not? comment below.
Real Life True Story: The Great McCain Story You've Probably Forgotten - 10.27.2008
- Article Number: 10
Real Life True Story: The Great McCain Story You've Probably Forgotten, based on a real life anecdotal story from Michael Lewis' 1997 New York Times Magazine profile of McCain. Lewis had followed Senator John McCain on the campaign trail in 1996.
"By 7:30 we were on the road, and Senator John McCain was reminiscing about his early political career. When he was elected to the House in 1982, he said, he was "a freshman right-wing Nazi." But his visceral hostility toward Democrats generally was quickly tempered by his tendency to see people as individuals and judge them that way. John McCain was taken in hand by Morris Udall, the Arizona congressman who was the liberal conscience of the Congress and a leading voice for reform. "
"Mo reached out to me in 50 different ways," John McCain recalled. "Right from the start, he'd say: 'I'm going to hold a press conference out in Phoenix. Why don't you join me?' All these journalists would show up to hear what Mo had to say. In the middle of it all, Mo would point to me and say, 'I'd like to hear John McCain's views.' Well, hell, I didn't have any views. But I got up and learned and was introduced to the state." Four years later, when John McCain ran for and won Barry Goldwater's Senate seat, he said he felt his greatest debt of gratitude not to Goldwater—who had shunned him—but to Udall. "There's no way Mo could have been more wonderful," he says, "and there was no reason for him to be that way."
For the past few years, Udall has lain ill with Parkinson's disease in a veterans hospital in Northeast Washington, which is where we were heading. Every few weeks, Senator John McCain drives over to pay his respects. These days the trip is a ceremony, like going to church, only less pleasant. Udall is seldom conscious, and even then he shows no sign of recognition. John McCain brings with him a stack of newspaper clips on Udall's favorite subjects: local politics in Arizona, environmental legislation, Native American land disputes, subjects in which John McCain initially had no particular interest himself. Now, when the Republican senator from Arizona takes the floor on behalf of Native Americans, or when he writes an op-ed piece arguing that the Republican Party embrace environmentalism, or when the polls show once again that he is Arizona's most popular politician, he remains aware of his debt to Arizona's most influential Democrat.
One wall of Udall's hospital room was cluttered with photos of his family back in Arizona; another bore a single photograph of Udall during his season with the Denver Nuggets, dribbling a basketball. Aside from a congressional seal glued to a door jamb, there was no indication what the man in the bed had done for his living. Beneath a torn gray blanket on a narrow hospital cot, Udall lay twisted and disfigured. No matter how many times McCain tapped him on the shoulder and called his name, his eyes remained shut.
A nurse entered and seemed surprised to find anyone there, and it wasn't long before I found out why: Almost no one visits anymore. In his time, which was not very long ago, Mo Udall was one of the most-sought-after men in the Democratic Party. Yet as he dies in a veterans hospital a few miles from the Capitol, he is visited regularly only by a single old political friend, Senator John McCain. "He's not going to wake up this time," John McCain said. What a real life story of care and commitment!
On the way out of the parking lot, McCain recalled what it was like to be a nobody called upon by a somebody. As he did, his voice acquired the same warmth that colored Russell Feingold's speech when he described the first call from John McCain. "When you called Feingold … " I started to ask him. But before I could, he interrupted. "Yeah," he says, "I thought of Mo." And then, for maybe the third time that morning, McCain spoke of how it affected him when Udall took him in hand. It was a simple act of affection and admiration, and for that reason it meant all the more to McCain. It was one man saying to another, We disagree in politics but not in life. It was one man saying to another, party political differences cut only so deep. Having made that step, they found much to agree upon and many useful ways to work together. This is the reason McCain keeps coming to see Udall even after Udall has lost his last shred of political influence. The politics were never all that important.
I learned something new about John McCain's past life history this week.
I had heard that he and his wife had an adopted daughter and that Cindy McCain had brought her home as an infant after visiting Mother Teresa in India. There is more to this real life story.
What I did not know was that when they brought their little girl back to care for her and save her life, they also brought back another little baby girl as well. She was adopted by one of McCain's aides. The story comes from the Jerusalem Post:
Also little-known is the story of McCain's youngest child. As a result of a 1991 Cindy McCain visit to Mother Teresa's orphanage in Bangladesh, the McCain couple adopted an infant daughter dying from a host of health issues.
The orphanage could not provide the medical care needed to save the little girl's life, so the McCain family, already the parents of six children, brought the child home to America, and paid for desperately needed surgeries and years of rehabilitation.
As the story goes, that same child is their teenage daughter Bridget. In fact, there was a second infant girl brought back from the orphanage that John McCain saved. She ended up being adopted by one of McCain's aides, Wes Gullett, and his wife. "We were called at midnight by Cindy," Gullett stated, and "five days later we met our new baby daughter Nicki at the LA airport." Now for the rest of this life story. This fall, Nicki will be a high school junior. Even after years of expensive medical treatment for the child, Gullett says, "I never saw a hospital bill" for her care. It is an extraordinary man who commits himself to such generous and heroic acts; it is an extraordinary politician who won't utter a word about such acts for political aggrandizement.
We in the pro-life movement want to see our politicians really mean it when they say they are pro-life. How many candidates would adopt a severely ill child, bring home another very ill child, pay for the care of both and not blow their own horn about it? I can think of very few.What a story of real life heroism!
The pro-life movement has butted heads with Senator John McCain in a number of areas such as embryonic stem cell research and campaign finance reform but Senator John McCain has a very long record that consistently attests to his pro-life credentials. I hope that he will appoint justices in the mold of Roberts, Thomas, Scalia and Alito. I hope that he will continue to promote pro-life policies firmly established under Presidents Reagan and Bush I believe that Senator John McCain will advance the pro-life cause.
Barack Obama clearly is even more pro-abortion than Bill Clinton which, I'm sure, most of us didn't think was possible. When he was in the state legislature, Barack Obama voted against the Illinois version of the Born-Alive Infant Protection Act and spoke out against it. Just the opposite way that John and Cindy McCain who were willing to bring home two severely ill infants, adopt one and pay for the care of both.
Senator John McCain won't blow his own horn, but we will. What more can the pro-life movement need for proof than to find a candidate who puts his words into action and doesn't use those actions for political gain? A real life hero, a life story worth repeating.
Latest Story: John McCain Loves the Underdog position - 10.20.2008
- Article Number: 8
Latest Story: John McCain Loves the Underdog position Sen. John McCain said Sunday that he's "very happy" with the way his campaign is going, despite his "underdog" status in the polls.
Sen. John McCain says that "every time that I've gotten ahead, somehow I've messed it up." "We're going to be in a tight race and we're going to be up late on election night. I'm confident of that. I've been in too many campaigns, my friend, not to sense that things are headed our way," McCain said Sunday while on Fox News Live.
Sen. Barack Obama leads McCain by 6 points, if you believe CNN's latest national polls.
"I love being the underdog. You know, every time that I've gotten ahead, somehow I've messed it up," the Republican candidate said.
Asked if Sarah Palin has become a drag on his ticket, McCain said, "As a cold political calculation, I could not be more pleased."
"She has excited and energized our base. She is a direct counterpoint to the liberal feminist agenda for America. She has a wonderful family. She's a reformer. She's a conservative. She's the best thing that could have happened to my campaign and to America," he said.
In response to a question from Fox's Chris Wallace, McCain said he has considered the possibility that he could lose, but added, "I don't dwell on it."
"I've had a wonderful life. I have to go back and live in Arizona, and be in the United States Senate representing them, and with a wonderful family, and daughters and sons that I'm so proud of, and a life that's been blessed," he said.
"I'm the luckiest guy you have ever interviewed and will ever interview. I'm the most fortunate man on earth, and I thank God for it every single day."
McCain said that if things don't work out his way on Election Day, "Don't feel sorry for John McCain, and John McCain will be concentrating on not feeling sorry for himself."
CNN's latest poll of polls shows Obama drawing 49 percent of voters nationwide, while McCain stands at 43 percent. This is still too close to call. There are more stories behind the main story.
Obama on Sunday was campaigning in North Carolina, a once reliably Republican state in presidential contests that is now up for grabs.
The last Democratic presidential candidate to win North Carolina was Jimmy Carter in 1976. The most recent polls in the state have the contest deadlocked at 49 percent each. The story goes on
At his event in Fayetteville, Obama shot back at McCain, who has hinted that he thinks his rival's policies are "socialist." This is what McCain said
In an interview with Fox on Sunday, McCain retorted, "I think his plans are redistribution of the wealth. ... That's one of the tenets of socialism. But it's more the liberal left, which he's always been on."
Obama brushed off the charge Sunday, saying he just wants to give the middle class a tax cut.
"John McCain thinks that giving these Americans a break is socialism. Well, I call it opportunity, and there is nothing more American than that," Obama said Sunday.
McCain on Sunday was campaigning in Ohio, the state that put President Bush over the top in his re-election bid four years ago.
The Arizona senator had rallies scheduled in Westerville and Toledo, Ohio.
The most recent CNN poll of polls in Ohio suggests that 47 percent of voters there are backing Obama and 46 percent are supporting McCain.
What do you think the real story is... Add your comments below.
War Story of how war hero John McCain betrayed the Vietnamese peasant who saved his life - 10.12.2008
- Article Number: 7
How war hero John McCain betrayed the Vietnamese peasant who saved his life One of My Stories . In all the tales of wartime courage peppering John McCain's presidential campaign trail, perhaps the most outstanding example of selfless heroism involves not the candidate but a humble Vietnamese peasant. On October 26, 1967, Mai Van On ran from the safety of a bomb shelter at the height of an air raid and swam out into the lake where Lieutenant Commander McCain was drowning, stuck in his parachute cord after John McCain ejected from his Skyhawk bomber plane after it was hit by a missile. In an extraordinary act of compassion at a time when Vietnamese citizens were being killed by US aerial bombardments, he pulled the barely conscious John McCain to the lake surface and, with the help of a neighbor, dragged him towards the shore. What a stgory! Scroll down for more...
The furious mob that collected at the water's edge began to beat and stab the captured John McCain, Mr On drove them back. So the story goes.
Nearly thirty years later, a Vietnamese government commission confirmed the story that he was indeed the rescuer and, in a 1996 meeting set up in Hanoi, John McCain embraced and thanked Mr On and rewarded him with a Senate memento. From that time to his death at the age of 88 two years later, Mr On never heard from the senator again, and three years after their meeting, McCain published his life story, including his war stories, that makes no mention of his apparent debt to Mr On.
Apparently it is a snub Mr On took to his death, as the story goes. His widow, Bui Thi Lien, 71, said: In his last years, my husband was very sad sometimes. He would say, 'Mr McCain has forgotten me.' Mr McCain would be dead if it weren't for my husband. He would never have returned to his family and he wouldn't be in the presidential race today. On a visit to Britain to meet Gordon Brown, John McCain paid tribute to the role played by British troops in Iraq and Afghanistan - comments that were meaningful in the light of John McCain's own wartime exploits. In his 1999 autobiography, Faith Of My Fathers, which laid the basis for his first, unsuccessful run for president in 2000, John McCain wrote a Boy's Own-style narrative of his rescue: "When I came to, I was being hauled ashore on two bamboo poles. The crowd of several hundred Vietnamese gathered around me as I lay dazed before them, shouting wildly at me, stripping my clothes off, spitting on me, kicking and striking me repeatedly." What followed, according to John McCain's story , was five-and-a-half years of torture and brutal beatings as a prisoner of war - an account that has given a steely edge to his candidacy by establishing him as a true American war hero. But the story is at odds with another version uncovered by Vietnam veteran Chuck Searcy, who lives in Hanoi and is in charge of the Vietnam Veteran Memorial Fund. "In 1995, Mr On gave me a letter he wanted me to deliver to McCain," said Searcy. "'It said, 'I am the guy who pulled you out of the lake and I have followed your progress over time. I wish the best for you and your family and I hope some day you will be the leader of the United States.'" "I thought it was endearing. I sent the letter to John McCain's office and I got back a surly response from some assistant saying, 'Mr McCain isn't interested in these fanciful stories.'"
Indeed, claiming to have saved John McCain had by then become something of a cottage industry in Hanoi. The story gets more plausible, Searcy, 63, recalled: "There had been a lot of wild claims, but I asked the neighbours around the lake if it was true and they said that it was exactly how it had happened."
A moving story from John McCain, who was a P.O.W. in Vietnam. It's about a fellow prisoner Mike Christian who fashioned an American flag from bits and pieces of clothing. The POW's would say the Pledge of Allegiance on a regular basis. One day, the flag was discovered and Mike Christian was beaten by his captors. McCain says that Mike immediately began the task of making another flag. This story is true and taken from a speech that John McCain gave before the 1988 Republican National Convention.
As you may know, I spent five and one half years as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War. In the early years of our imprisonment, the NVA kept us in solitary confinement or two or three to a cell. In 1971 the NVA moved us from these conditions of isolation into large rooms with as many as 30 to 40 men to a room. This was, as you can imagine, a wonderful change and was a direct result of the efforts of millions of Americans on behalf of a few hundred POWs 10,000 miles from home.
One of the men who moved into my room was a young man named Mike Christian.
Mike came from a small town near Selma, Alabama. He didn't wear a pair of shoes until he was 13 years old. At 17, he enlisted in the US Navy. He later earned a commission by going to Officer Training School. Then he became a Naval Flight Officer and was shot down and captured in 1967.
Mike had a keen and deep appreciation of the opportunities this country-and our military-provide for people who want to work and want to succeed. As part of the change in treatment, the Vietnamese allowed some prisoners to receive packages from home. In some of these packages were handkerchiefs, scarves and other items of clothing. Mike got himself a bamboo needle. Over a period of a couple of months, he created an American flag and sewed on the inside of his shirt.
Every afternoon, before we had a bowl of soup, we would hang Mike's shirt on the wall of the cell and say the Pledge of Allegiance. I know the Pledge of Allegiance may not seem the most important part of our day now, but I can assure you that in that stark cell it was indeed the most important and meaningful event.
One day the Vietnamese searched our cell, as they did periodically, and discovered Mike's shirt with the flag sewn inside, and removed it. That evening they returned, opened the door of the cell, and for the benefit of all us, beat Mike Christian severely for the next couple of hours. Then, they opened the door of the cell and threw him in. We cleaned him up as well as we could.
The cell in which we lived had a concrete slab in the middle on which we slept. Four naked light bulbs hung in each corner of the room. As I said, we tried to clean up Mike as well as we could. After the excitement died down, I looked in the corner of the room, and sitting there beneath that dim light bulb with a piece of red cloth, another shirt and his bamboo needle, was my friend, Mike Christian. He was sitting there with his eyes almost shut from the beating he had received, making another American flag.
He was not making the flag because it made Mike Christian feel better. He was making that flag because he knew how important it was to us to be able to pledge allegiance to our flag and our country.
So the next time you say the Pledge of Allegiance, you must never forget the sacrifice and courage that thousands of Americans have made to build our nation and promote freedom around the world. You must remember our duty, our honor, and our country.
"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
Palin resigns as governor; leaves plans secret Marin Independent-Journal Former members of the John McCain campaign team, now dispersed across the country, traded perplexed e-mails and phone calls. But personal pressures have ...
Sarah Palin resigns as Alaska governor New Straits Times Palin, who was Republican John McCain's running mate in his failed 2008 presidential campaign, said she would step aside as governor and would be replaced ...
Palin resigns as governor; leaves plans secret WJLA Former members of the John McCain (web | news | bio) campaign team, now dispersed across the country, traded perplexed e-mails and phone calls. ...
Palin resigns as governor; leaves plans secret Waterloo Cedar Falls Courier Former members of the John McCain campaign team, now dispersed across the country, traded perplexed e-mails and phone calls. But personal pressures have ...
