Briefly

Edwards says GOP shouldn’t link Iraq, 9/11

Detroit Democratic vice presidential candidate John Edwards on Sunday accused President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney of misleading Americans by implying a link between deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“Today, Secretary of State (Colin) Powell made clear that there is no connection between Saddam Hussein and the attacks on September the 11th,” Edwards said before an AFL-CIO rally. “From this day forward, this administration should never suggest that there is.”

“I have seen nothing that makes a direct connection between Saddam Hussein and that awful regime and what happened on 9/11,” Powell said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Steve Schmidt, a Bush-Cheney campaign spokesman, said Powell’s comments are consistent with those made by Bush, Cheney and the bipartisan commission that investigated the attacks.

However, the Kerry-Edwards campaign argued on Sunday that Cheney suggested such a link as recently as last week.

Speaking at a town-hall meeting in Cincinnati, Cheney recounted the invasion of Afghanistan after the attacks, in which the United States punished the Taliban for harboring al Qaeda. Then he said, “In Iraq, we had a similar situation.”

Saddam “provided safe harbor and sanctuary for terrorists for years,” including al Qaeda, Cheney said.

Hundreds of veterans protest Kerry campaign

Washington Chanting “Kerry lied,” hundreds of Vietnam veterans on Sunday rallied against fellow veteran and Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry.

Comrades died because of people like Kerry and Jane Fonda, asserted Larry Bailey, a U.S. Navy veteran and president of Vietnam Vets for the Truth.

With the U.S. Capitol as a backdrop, Bailey accused Kerry of lying three decades ago when he returned from Vietnam and gave testimony before the U.S. Senate in 1971 alleging widespread atrocities by American troops.

“We can tell him (Kerry) and spit in his eye while we’re doing it, ‘We served honorably and compassionately,’ ” Bailey said to cheers from the crowd of approximately 1,000.

Before the rally, a group of supporters held a news conference nearby to defend Kerry and call for an end to the TV ads attacking the military record of the Massachusetts senator.

“What we ought to be talking about is what’s happening today and that includes the best person to lead us out of the mess we’ve got ourselves in Iraq,” Retired Gen. Merrill “Tony” McPeak, a former chief of staff of the Air Force, told reporters.

Colorado considers splitting its electoral votes

Denver On Nov. 2, Colorado voters will consider a proposal to immediately scrap the state’s winner-take-all electoral vote system and allow candidates to keep a proportion of the delegates they win.

Only two other states divide electoral votes, Nebraska and Maine. Each gives two votes to the winner of each state, and the remaining votes are cast to show who won each congressional district.

Colorado would be the first state to allocate all its electoral votes proportionately according to the popular vote — something supporters say would make every vote count.

Republicans, who hold a 185,000 edge in registered voters over Democrats in Colorado, say the plan is a plot to take the state’s nine electoral votes from President Bush and give them to Democratic Sen. John Kerry.

Katy Atkinson, a GOP pollster, said Colorado could end up always splitting its votes 5-4, in effect giving it one electoral vote. That would make the state a political backwater no candidate would waste time visiting.

“If this succeeds, we will become the least influential state in the country,” said Atkinson, who helped found an opposition group that calls itself Coloradans Against a Really Stupid Idea.

Powell condemns draft, says it’s unlikely to return

Washington Secretary of State Colin Powell, once the nation’s highest-ranking soldier, reaffirmed his distaste Sunday for Vietnam War draft policies that allowed sons of the powerful to avoid combat.

Powell, an Army general and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, also said he does not expect the military draft to be reactivated “under any set of circumstances that I can see.”

The year that President Bush joined the National Guard, both Powell and John Kerry, Bush’s Democratic rival for the presidency, were young officers among hundreds of thousands of American troops in Vietnam.

In his 1995 autobiography, “My American Journey,” Powell characterized draft policies during most of the Vietnam era as “an antidemocratic disgrace.”

“I am angry that so many sons of the powerful and well-placed managed to wangle slots in Reserve and National Guard units,” he wrote.

Asked about that and Bush’s military career on “Fox News Sunday,” Powell said: “I disagree with the policies that were in place at that time. I didn’t think it was the right set of policies for the challenge the nation was facing.

“But those were the policies that were in place at that time. President Bush and Senator Kerry volunteered to serve their nations under the policies that were in place. They both served honorably, and they both were discharged honorably.”