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WATCH VIDEOIt was not until he got a quiet word of correction in his ear from Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, who was traveling with Mr. McCain as part of a Congressional delegation on a nearly weeklong trip, that Mr. McCain corrected himself.
“I’m sorry,” Mr. McCain said, “the Iranians are training extremists, not Al Qaeda."
John Hagee : God Bless President Bush (2:11)
Democratic leaders agreed to a request by Republicans for the extraordinary session, on legislation opposed by President George W. Bush.
So what went wrong with Mr Romney's well-financed campaign?
Mr Romney had attempted to run as the legitimate heir of Ronald Reagan, one of the most popular Republican presidents in recent times, a "conservative's conservative."
He had the looks, the personality and the money to be a credible Republican presidential candidate.
And as a Republican governor in a Democratic state, he appeared to have the potential to reach out beyond the Republican base.
Credibility problem
But Mr Romney had a big credibility problem among Republican primary voters, who were not convinced by his conversion from a liberal Massachusetts governor to a conservative candidate for national office.
His "flip-flop" on a universal health care mandate, which he had introduced in Massachusetts but repudiated nationally, was one commonly cited example.
Conservatives were also suspicious about his changed views on social issues like abortion.
This served to alienate him from the Christian right, a key group within the Republican party, which was already suspicious of his Mormon religion.
In the primary elections on Tuesday, most Christian evangelicals backed Mike Huckabee, taking enough votes away from Mr Romney to give victory to John McCain in key states like California and New York.
Although he won a number of smaller states, especially those who chose their delegates by caucus, his weak showing in his home state of Massachusetts, which he only narrowly carried, was an early indication of his fading campaign.
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WATCH VIDEORadio talk show host Rush Limbaugh drew media attention to himself last week when he suggested he might not support McCain if he became the Republican nominee. Now Ann Coulter has upped the ante, telling Fox News host Sean Hannity that if John McCain is the Republican nominee, she's supporting Hillary Clinton.
"If he's our candidate, then Hillary's going to be our girl," Coulter asserted. "Because she's more conservative than he is. I think she would be stronger on the war on terrorism. ... I absolutely believe that. ... I will campaign for her if it's McCain."
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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A series of newsletters in the name of GOP presidential hopeful Ron Paul contain several racist remarks -- including one that says order was restored to Los Angeles after the 1992 riots when blacks went "to pick up their welfare checks."
CNN recently obtained the newsletters -- written in the 1990s and one from the late 1980s -- after a report was published about their existence in The New Republic.
None of the newsletters CNN found says who wrote them, but each was published under Paul's name between his stints as a U.S. congressman from Texas.
Paul told CNN's "The Situation Room" Thursday that he didn't write any of the offensive articles and has "no idea" who did.
Key vulnerabilities of Diebold machine identified within ten minutes by programmer
Prison Planet
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
"It's not who votes that counts. It's who counts the votes." Joseph Stalin.
Vote fraud expert Bev Harris has warned that New Hampshire's electronic voting machines are wide open to fraud and that even modestly skilled computer programmers were able to identify key vulnerabilities within ten minutes of assessing them as key Democrat and Republican primaries unfold today.
The contract for programming all of New Hampshire's Diebold voting machines, which combined will count 81 per cent of the vote today, is owned by LHS Associates, which also holds the contracts for Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont.
LHS is owned by John Silvestro, who has been at the center of a long-running public dispute in trying to deflect accusations made by hacker Harri Hursti that the machines can easily be rigged. "The exact same make, model and version hacked in the Black Box Voting project in Leon County is used throughout New Hampshire, where about 45 percent of elections administrators hand count paper ballots at the polling place, with the remaining locations all using the Diebold version 1.94w optical scan machine," writes Harris.
One area of disagreement between Hursti and Silvestro was the amount of expertise needed to exploit the Diebold 1.94w optical scan system. Silvestro claimed (in a strange contortion of reasoning) that he doesn't hire very skilled programmers, implying that this makes New Hampshire elections more secure.
In this You Tube video, Silvestro constantly interrupts Hursti's testimony in front of the New Hampshire legislative.
After purchasing a Diebold 1.94w machine, a computer repair shop employee picked at random by Black Box Voting was able to zero in on the system's vulnerable memory card within just ten minutes.
Harris points out that LHS is a private company that will count over four fifths of the New Hampshire vote with no oversight whatsoever.
LHS is not subject to public records requirements, as the government is, at least, not in New Hampshire. The control over memory card contents is absolute; when cards malfunction or get lost, LHS brings the replacements.
Since LHS maintains the machines, repairs the machines, and replaces the machines -- often on Election Day -- when they malfunction, they have intimate access to the chips, sockets, ports, communications devices and other electronic components.
A recent CNN report featured on Lou Dobbs' show highlights just how easy it is to hack a voting machine and change how votes are tallied with just rudimentary programming skills. Experts warn that it takes only a minute for an unsupervised machine to be inserted with a virus and hacked.
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