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Insider Report: Hillary OKs Gay Marriage; Giuliani Acts Special From NewsMax's Most Informed Sources
Headlines (Scroll down for complete stories): 1. Giuliani's Actions Speaking Loud Rudy Giuliani won't say if he's running for president in 2008, but his actions tell a different story. The former New York mayor recently hired fund-raiser Margaret Hoover, who used to work in the White House for Bush political guru Karl Rove. Hoover, the great-granddaughter of former President Herbert Hoover, was paid $10,000 last month as the new deputy finance director for Solutions America, Giuliani's political action committee. She reports directly to another former Bush campaign aide, Anne Dickinson, Giuliani's top fund-raiser. According to recent polls, the front-runners for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination are Giuliani, Condoleezza Rice, and John McCain. Head-to-head polls indicate that Giuliani would beat Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton in the general election.
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While Giuliani insists that he won't make a decision on a presidential run until next year, he has been traveling around the country making speeches, forging alliances with Republican stalwarts in key primary states, and raising money for GOP candidates. Just last month he donated $105,000 to GOP office seekers and causes, including $15,000 to candidates in Iowa and $5,000 to the New Hampshire Republican State Committee. And in the final week of the 2006 elections, he will be on the campaign trail stumping for Republican candidates in South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, and New Jersey before ending up in Iowa, where he'll hold rallies for First District Congressional candidate Mike Whalen and Jim Nussle, the GOP's nominee for governor. So far Giuliani has managed to avoid talking about divisive social issues like abortion and gay rights, which could put him at odds with most Republicans. What's more, his national reputation remains untarnished by criticism in New York that ground zero rescue workers were made sick by inhaling toxic dust, or about Bernard Kerik, his disgraced former police commissioner and business partner.
Editor's note: 2. Hillary Moves Left on Gay Marriage When it comes to same-sex marriage, Sen. Hillary Clinton has had a change of heart. The New York senator told a recent gathering of gay and lesbian activists in Manhattan that she won't oppose efforts to enact a same-sex marriage law in the state if Eliot Sptizer, the odds-on favorite to become the next governor, wants it enacted into law. Hillary confessed to the group that she's come a long way since she first ran for the Senate in 2000, when she opposed gay marriage and civil unions. She said that she changed her mind after "many long conversations with friends and others," and that her position "has certainly evolved" since she supported the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act. "I believe in full equality of benefits, nothing left out," she told the group.
"From my perspective there is a greater likelihood of us getting to that point in civil unions or domestic partnerships and that is my very considered assessment." Her position, she said, is consistent. "If you go the next step and say, I want what is called marriage, you're going to have a problem." But if that's what Spitzer and the legislature want, Hillary won't stand in their way. "I support states making the decision," she declared. Clinton defended her position on the Defense of Marriage Act as well as her decision not to speak during the marriage amendment debate this past June. She said that without the act which bars federal recognition of gay marriage and allows states to refuse to recognize such unions from other states, many more members of Congress would have voted for the constitutional amendment, and it just might have passed. Regarding her decision not to speak out against it when it came up for a vote on the Senate floor, Sen. Clinton explained that it was a matter of strategy. "I didn't want to dignify it." Editor's Note:
3. Inhofe Blisters Global Warming Alarmists Newsweek Magazine has finally admitted that it got it wrong on climate change 31 years ago. In an Oct. 23 article that appeared on the news weekly's Web site, senior editor Jerry Adler wrote that an April 1975 piece on global cooling had been "spectacularly wrong." In that article, the magazine told readers that the Earth was heading into a new Ice Age. It reported that there were "ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically." And it warned of a "drastic decline in food production" that would cause shortages affecting "just about every nation on Earth." Scientists, Newsweek said, were calling on governments to take immediate action to head off the coming catastrophe. The magazine even offered a possible solution — pour soot over the Arctic ice cap to help it melt. Newsweek's 31-year-old mistake was brought to light by Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., during a 50 minute speech on the floor of the Senate on Sept. 25. Inhofe, chairman of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, took Newsweek and the rest of the mainstream media to task for its hysterical reporting on climate change, pointing out that they have been scaring the public with dire predictions of climate related catastrophes for decades. "Since 1895, the media has alternated between global cooling and warming scares," Inhofe told his colleagues, adding that "from 1895 until the 1930s the media peddled a coming Ice Age. From the late 1920s until the 1960's they warned of global warming. From the 1950s until the 1970s they warned us again of a coming Ice Age." And he pointed out that over the years the media has repeatedly issued dire warnings about global overpopulation, resource scarcity, mass-starvation, and the death of the world's oceans. "None of these predictions came true, yet they never they never stopped the doomsayers from continuing to predict a dire environmental future," the Oklahoma Republican said. As for present-day claims of impending doom from global warming, Inhofe says they are yet another in a long series of scary predictions based on faulty science promoted by "left-wing environmental groups with a vested financial interest in hyping alarmism." University of Oklahoma geophysicist David Deming agrees. "The media hysteria on global warming has been generated by journalists who don't understand the provisional and uncertain nature of scientific knowledge," he says. Weathermen, the professor says, can't predict what the temperature will be in 30 days, so how can they forecast what it will be in 50 years? "They can't, because Earth's climate system is complex and poorly understood."
Meanwhile, Sen. Inhofe is calling on responsible journalists to break "the cycles of media hysteria." He points out that it won't be easy. "Hysteria sells — it's very profitable," says the senator. Editor's Note:
4. Rush Limbaugh Proves: I Never Maligned Obama Rush Limbaugh was right — it was Teddy Kennedy who first referred to Illinois Sen. Barack Obama as "Osama Obama." During his Oct. 23 broadcast, an indignant Limbaugh told listeners, "The Financial Times misquotes me in a story, claiming I am the one who called Barack Obama, ‘Obama Osama.'" To prove his point, Limbaugh played a sound byte from Sen. Kennedy's Jan. 11, 2005 luncheon speech at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. A questioner asked the senator from Massachusetts, "Senator Barack Obama of Illinois was elected with over 80 percent of the vote, and over a million of those voters were also President Bush voters. What did Senator Obama do that Senator Kerry and other Democrats not do?" Kennedy replied, "There you go. Why don't we just ask Osama bin Laden — Osama Obama — Obamamam what is — since he won by such a big amount." "So there you have it," Rush said. "There is the origin of it. It's even worse than I remembered it being. Osama bin Laden, Osama Obama, Obamamam. The man at the top of NewsMax magazine's 25 Most Influential Radio Hosts list had previously explained that he couldn't resist the opportunity to mock Sen. Kennedy, telling his listeners, "Folks, we had to do a parody tune out of this." [Editor's note: See the full list — Go Here Now].
Meanwhile, Democrats and the mainstream media have been blasting Limbaugh for linking Sen. Obama, a possible 2008 Democrat presidential nominee, with the terror mastermind. But don't blame Rush. He was only making fun of Teddy. Editor's Note: 5. San Francisco Mayor's Young Girlfriend Gavin Newsom, the San Francisco mayor who famously supports gay marriage, also has an eye for the young ladies; emphasis on young. Brittanie Mountz turned 20 last month, which means that she was still a teenager when the hunky 39-year-old mayor began chaperoning her around town. Meanwhile city hall reporters want to know if Newsom, who is divorced from Court TV's Kimberly Guilfoyle Newsom, has been plying the blonde ingenue with alcoholic beverages. Photos of underage Brittanie holding a wine glass at a recent department store gala where Newsom appeared, too, were recently posted on a San Francisco society photographer's Web site, but the photos were deleted as soon as reporters began asking questions about them. The questions enraged the mayor, who called the reporters "mean spirited." Mayoral spokesman Peter Ragone was quick to distance his boss from the flap, saying Newsom has never provided Mountz, a model by day and a restaurant hostess by night, with any alcohol. If she did have a drink in his presence, Ragone said, it would be news to the mayor, adding that "Brittanie is a friend of the mayor's. They did not attend the Bloomingdale's event together. Obviously there has been some uncertainty about her age. However, given what The [San Francisco] Chronicle has dug up on her, if she was in fact drinking, that is a mistake. If she was drinking, the mayor didn't notice." But anything goes in the City by the Bay, and most residents don't seem bothered by Newsom's new romance. "I haven't heard anyone say anything negative about the young woman he's seeing," says Chronicle gossip columnist Leah Garchik. "It's a live-and-let-live city, and we have a young handsome mayor. More power to them."
Even the mayor's political enemies think his May-October romance is nothing more than good-time gossip. Consultant Jack Davis, who is trying to drum up an opponent to run against Newsom next year, seems nonplussed about the relationship. "Of all the cities in the world, San Francisco would be the last place that would raise an eyebrow," he told the San Francisco Chronicle. "It might be an issue on a national stage, but certainly not locally." There are only two things that seem to bother the people of San Francisco about their mayor's romance: Should they marry, the young bride's new name would be Brittanie Mountz Newsom, and she's a registered Republican. "How dare he?" wonders one city official. "He knows how to pick 'em. You can count the young female Republicans in this town on one hand." Editor's Note: Editor's Notes:
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