Inside Politics

Arnold’s suggestion

California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger suggested in a German newspaper interview published Saturday that the Republican Party should move “a little to the left,” a shift that he said would allow it to pick up new voters.

Mr. Schwarzenegger, a Republican, has taken an unorthodox approach since winning office last year — standing by a promise to toe a conservative line on fiscal matters, while veering left on social issues, such as homosexual rights and the environment.

In an interview with Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily, Mr. Schwarzenegger said that “the Republican Party currently covers only the spectrum from the right wing to the middle, and the Democratic Party covers the spectrum from the left to the middle.”

“I would like the Republican Party to cross this line, move a little further left and place more weight on the center,” he was quoted as saying. “This would immediately give the party 5 percent more votes without it losing anything elsewhere.”

Mr. Schwarzenegger was guarded on suggestions that he harbors presidential ambitions, saying only that a debate on whether the Constitution should be amended to allow foreign-born citizens to run was “overdue,” the Associated Press reports.

ABC’s slant

“In a Sunday night ABC story, the brother and mother of soldiers killed in Iraq denounced Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld for having an auto-pen machine sign his letters of condolence,” the Media Research Center’s Brent Baker notes at www.mediaresearch.org.

“But while ‘World News Tonight/Sunday’ anchor Terry Moran portrayed the two as representative of how ‘some military families’ are ‘upset’ with Rumsfeld, the two are dedicated Bush and Rumsfeld haters with a political axe to grind,” Mr. Baker said.

“Ivan Medina spoke in June at a pro-‘Fahrenheit 9/11’ publicity event and in May took part in an anti-Rumsfeld protest where he charged: ‘This government lied to the military soldiers. Bush went to war to settle a family vendetta.’ Sue Niederer sported a ‘President Bush: You Killed My Son’ T-shirt when she was arrested for disrupting a September speech by first lady Laura Bush. In an interview with the far-left Counterpunch Web site, she urged harm to President Bush: ‘I wanted to rip the president’s head off.’ ”

Rest of the story

“The reporter who managed to get a National Guardsman serving in Iraq to question Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld about why his unit’s vehicles lacked sufficient armor coached the soldier using false information,” NewsMax.com reports.

“In fact, by the time Chattanooga Times Free Press reporter Edward Lee Pitts rehearsed Spc. Thomas ‘Jerry’ Wilson on what to say to Rumsfeld, the Pentagon had already up-armored 97 percent of the vehicles in Thomas’ 278th Regimental Combat Team, senior members of the Army’s combat systems development and acquisition team said Thursday.

Story Continues →