Mike Huckabee. “You know Sarah Palin got more votes as a mayor in Alaska than Joe Biden did for President

Is news coverage of Missouri rally. hope to find more video of it. Watch for the Huckabee comment

Nancy Pelosi to go to Hiroshima to apologize for A bomb ?

Not stated but its implied

SPACEWAR

US House speaker to make landmark Hiroshima visit

by Staff Writers
Tokyo (AFP) Aug 31, 2008
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is set this week to be the highest-ranking sitting US official to visit the site of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, which bitterly divides opinion six decades later.

No sitting US president or vice president has ever paid respects to the dead of the US nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, a sore point for many survivors in Japan.

Pelosi will travel to Hiroshima for a meeting of parliament speakers from the Group of Eight major industrial nations. Pelosi, who is second in line to the presidency, is a member of Barack Obama’s Democratic Party.

On Tuesday, Pelosi and the other speakers will lay flowers at a memorial in Hiroshima, hear testimony from a bomb survivor and hold discussions on disarmament, according to Japanese officials.

Kota Kiya, who was four years old when the atomic bomb devastated his hometown, welcomed the visit but said he hoped the leaders of nuclear weapons states would come instead.

“We wish that top leaders would visit Hiroshima and Nagasaki while they are in power, at least once, to see the atrocity of the nuclear bombings,” said Kiya, secretary general of the Hiroshima chapter of Hidankyo, the group of atomic bomb survivors.

On August 6, 1945, a single US bomb instantly killed more than 140,000 people in Hiroshima and injured tens of thousands more with radiation or horrific burns.

The United States dropped a second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki three days later, killing another 70,000 people. Japan surrendered less than a week later, ending World War II.

In Japan, it is an article of faith that the nuclear bombings were wrong. Last year, a defence minister was forced to resign after saying the attacks were inevitable.

In the United States, the decision to carry out history’s only nuclear attacks is more controversial, with many war veterans arguing the bombings prevented a ground invasion of Japan that would have cost many more lives.

“Any high-ranking official visiting an atomic site can only help to heighten awareness about the horror of nuclear weapons or power,” said Bonnie Urfer, co-director of US anti-nuclear group Nukewatch.

“Hawks within the US government can be expected to criticise House Speaker Nancy Pelosi while doves may quietly applaud the move,” Urfer said.

The Hiroshima visit was the work of Japan’s lower house Speaker Yohei Kono, a veteran politician who has long taken exception to Japan’s gradual drift away from its post-World War II pacifism.

The liberal Asahi Shimbun hailed Kono in an editorial last week, calling Pelosi’s visit to Hiroshima “very significant” in light of the “wide gap in perception between Japan and the United States” on the nuclear bombings.

The G8 comprises Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki regularly invite world leaders to visit, hoping to spread their message for the abolition of nuclear weapons.

China for the first time took part in Hiroshima’s annual ceremony on August 6 this year. It left Britain, France, North Korea and the United States as the declared nuclear states never to have attended.

While no sitting US presidents have visited the Hiroshima memorial, both Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon went in a private capacity when they were not in office.

The last time we had a sportscaster as President ? A fellow who was Governor of California

Chicago Tribune

Picking ESPN over C-SPAN

Rick Morrissey | In the wake of the news

September 1, 2008

Imagine a former TV sports reporter being a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Imagine someone running our country whose first dream in life was to be a sportswriter.

Would this be a good thing?

The initial, almost urgent thought is that knowing your way around a press box buffet line is not proper training for dealing with the likes of North Korea, though you haven’t stared down evil until you’ve eaten hamburgers cooked to NHL puck specifications. And possessing the ability to craft the sentence “Smitty Jones twirled a one-hit gem Friday” will not solve the education problem in this country.

But there are positives to being a sports media creature, too, as Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin surely knows. The fact that she worked briefly as a sports reporter for KTUU-TV in Anchorage and had earlier wanted to be a sportswriter automatically says a few things about her.

First of all, because she graduated from the University of Idaho with a bachelor’s degree in communications/journalism, she almost certainly can spell the word “potato.” So I’d say she’s ready.

Second of all—and this is critical—most of us in this business can’t balance our checkbooks. It’s why we went into journalism—not because of any altruistic ideas of saving the world or rooting corruption out of government. We didn’t want to take math in college.

You can view that as a negative if you like, but if something unfortunate were to befall presidential candidate John McCain and Palin became commander-in-chief, she might let her inner sportswriter take over and allow her husband to have at the national budget. How could it be worse for the current economy?

There is, of course, a YouTube video of the former Sarah Heath anchoring a sports broadcast for KTUU. It’s Alaska, so the lead story that night was the Iditarod dog-sled race, and it was 1988, so Palin’s big hair looked positively Mt. McKinley-ish. But she seemed knowledgeable about sports, and that shouldn’t go unappreciated by those of us who think our leaders should understand the scandal of, say, the designated hitter rule in the un- American League.

A story making the rounds in cyberspace is that Palin named one of her daughters Bristol because she loved ESPN, which is based in Bristol, Conn. Not true, Tom Kizzia, a writer for the Anchorage Daily News, told me Sunday. Bristol Bay is in southwest Alaska, and it’s the biggest wild salmon run in the world. It’s where the Palin family does its commercial fishing. Seventeen-year-old Bristol Palin was named for that area.

Sarah Palin does, however, have a son named Wrigley Fields. Oh wait, wrong story.

The bios do say she wanted to work at ESPN, and that puts her in company with about 100 million other people in this country, 99.5 million of whom are male. Perhaps it’s better she didn’t follow the ESPN career path. You can picture Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin turning to an aide and saying, “This ‘Booya’—what does she mean by it?”

(Speaking of ESPN, there’s a decent chance Chris Berman will make the unfortunate decision on election night to utter the sentence, “McCain and Palin could … go … all … the … way!”)

Palin has a solid sports background, which is a plus in the full-contact world of government work.

Ronald Reagan broadcast Cubs games for WHO Radio in Des Moines, and he went on to become the Great Communicator. Richard Nixon wanted to be a sportswriter, and he went on to … OK, bad example.

Palin was the starting point guard on her high school basketball team, which won a state championship in Alaska. She looks like she probably could have taken Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama to the hoop, if not post him up.

And she was a coach/manager when her kids were playing youth hockey.

So how does this translate into an effective vice president or, if the worst happens, president?

We reporters regularly face athletes and coaches who ignore us. A vice president very quickly gets used to being ignored by important people too. So, again, Palin is ready.

While the president is off jetting around the world, the vice president is often left to attend the 4-H Fair in Omaha, which Palin would understand is like covering a symposium on the tax implications of the Great Alaska Shootout while the Super Bowl is going on.

It all sounds laughable, but it could have been worse for Palin and us. She could have taken the normal path to politics. She could have been a lawyer.

As for Sen. Joe Biden, Obama’s running mate, he once co-sponsored a bill that would have made the NFL pay more for new stadium construction rather than put the burden on local municipalities.

On second thought, forget Palin. Biden for VP! Or sports columnist!