Dental Dig
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The latest from the Political Grapevine:
Poll Position
A new FOX News poll shows President Bush leading John Kerry shows that — while he still trails overwhelmingly among African-Americans — President Bush is nonetheless doing twice as well now (with 18 percent) than he was just before the 2000 election.
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Fired for Feisty Remarks?
The Washington bureau chief for Sinclair Broadcast Group — who said his company's plan to broadcast a program based on charges in an anti-Kerry documentary was "biased political propaganda" — has now been fired.
What's more, Jon Leiberman says Sinclair won't waive the non-compete agreement he signed when he joined the company — which means he can't work for any TV outlet in any market that has one of Sinclair's 62 stations. Still, he says, "I really feel like I can sleep at night, and I can be OK with my decision [to criticize Sinclair publicly]. ... I know I stood up for the principles of objectivity. In journalism, all we have is credibility and objectivity."
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Militia Monitors?
Iran's Basij militia — the hard-line branch of the Iranian army that insists President Bush is "the Great Satan" — has written a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, urging him to let their leaders send observers to the U.S. presidential election.
After all, the Basij militia says, "[T]he presence of observers from the Islamic republic of Iran, the most democratic regime in the world, is necessary to guarantee the smooth running of the American elections."
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And the militia says, "We want to ridicule the so-called democratic slogans of the American leaders."
Returned to Sender
London's Guardian newspaper, which last week urged Britons to send anti-Bush letters to voters in the U.S., has received some mail of its own from U.S. voters — many condemning the dental hygiene of the paper's readership.
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One letter calls Guardian readers "yellow-toothed pansies." Another calls them "mealy mouthed morons," and another says, "May you have to have a tooth capped."
— FOX News' Michael Levine contributed to this report