Rice Refuses to Say She’ll Vote for McCain

Hmmm. I thought it was a given she was voting a straight Republican ticket this fall. Evidently not, and the fact that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice isn’t willing to say she will vote for McCain speaks volumes about her party’s candidate.

“Have you decided who to vote for?” CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked in an interview that aired Sunday on “Late Edition.”

“Wolf, uh, yes,” Rice said.

Asked if she wanted to share her decision, Rice simply responded, “No.”

In the wide-ranging interview, Rice praised Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign and said having him as the Democratic presidential nominee has been “great for our country.”

“I do think it says that we’ve come a long way,” she said when asked to respond to comments from her predecessor Colin Powell, who congratulated Obama for knocking down barriers for African Americans.

And as she declined to admit she’s voting for Obama (I assume), Rice made it clear she would never want to be McCain’s number two.

“I tell everybody who will listen … look, I’ve done my part, and I’ve got six months to sprint to the finish, and then I have other things that I want to do,” she said.

Firefighters Appalled at 9/11 Billboards

Firefighters are asking for offensive billboards in the Orlando area, that promote a web site selling a CD, to be taken down. The billboards blame the 9/11 attacks on Democrats while the inane song advertised doesn’t even mention the attacks. Instead, you get little bon mots like this:

Mike Meehan himself — this explains a lot.

The Democrat secular progressive move,
political correctness is killing us too.
They want to take the money from the hard workin’ man,
and give it to the lazy folks that don’t give a damn.

And this:

Republicans, we’re not perfect but we know the truth
We uphold the Constitution and the Golden Rule.
We believe a man’s freedom is a God given right,
the USA is the beacon to the whole world in sight.

Just flows, doesn’t it? The songwriter/billboard leaser, Mike Meehan, doesn’t get why people, including fellow Republicans, would be upset over his masterpiece.

“It’s just a silly little billboard,” he said.

The one that features smoke coming out of the building where more than 2,700 people died?

“Well, maybe not silly,” Meehan responded. “But I never thought it would go this far.”

But the International Association of Firefighters doesn’t see it the same way as Meehan and said so in a press release.

Firefighters: “The individual who designed and paid for these billboards deserves scorn. The company that agreed to run them should be ashamed.”

“There’s a big difference between honoring and remembering the fallen – fire fighters and civilians – and shamelessly plastering the image of the burning Twin Towers on a purely political billboard with an offensive statement currying favor for or against a political party. It is offensive to those who died on 9/11. It’s offensive to their families. It’s offensive to those of us in the fire service.

“Debilitating illnesses have stricken fire fighters and others among the 40,000 people – police, building trades, sanitation workers, victims, witnesses and others – who inhaled Ground Zero’s toxic soup of 400 chemicals. Thousands of New York fire fighters have suffered enormously and labor just to breathe. They are living victims who battle violent symptoms of respiratory illness each day.

“A study in 2006 found that more than 12,000 of our members in the International Association of Fire Fighters who work in New York lost 12 years’ worth of lung function in a year following the attacks.

“The individual who designed and paid for these billboards deserves scorn. The company that agreed to run them should be ashamed.”

If you would like to second that emotion, send an email to Mike Meehan at pleasedontvoteforademocrat@yahoo.com and Beech Outdoor Advertising via tricia@beechoutdoor.com.

Quote du Jour

Well, you know, God bless [George Bush], bless his heart, the president of the United States, a total failure, losing all credibility with the American people on the economy, on the war, on energy, you name the subject. And for him to be challenging Congress when we are trying to sweep up after his mess over and over and over again… At the end of the day, Congress will have passed — honored its responsibility to pass legislation starting with our Department of Defense bill. The president knows it. He needs something to talk about because he has no ideas.

— Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (b. 1940) on Friday, July 18, 2008