2008 Presidential Election Weekly Poll

http://www.votenic.com

The Only Poll That Matters.
Results Posted Every Tuesday Evening.

Boy! Mike Gravel will do ANYTHING to get noticed.

Settle down status, those are road flares on his chest. Plus, that was funny...

I said at the time---Hillary's ad about trust---where she talked about a guy in his forties who called her and got his son a bone marrow transplant was heartwarming---but had nothing to do with trust or healthcare issues.

Okay, here's my take on this whole Hillary Clinton Campaign Office Siege thing.

I heard about it at the last minute during the day at the office, via Talking Point's Election Central online political blog. When I got home at 5 pm EST, I put the news on. CNN first, of course, because it's less neo-con than Fox News. CNN was saying that the suspect was upset about mental healthcare and he was a local man from New Hampshire. Fox News only stated that they thought the suspect was a local.

By 5:30 a hostage (female) was released, peacefully and calmly. CNN was now giving out the name of the suspect, one Leeland Eisenberg, of Somersville NH. When I flipped one channel up to Fox News, they were showing the hostage being released and stating they thought the suspect was one Troy Stanley, a local who was known to have a record.

By 5:45 another hostage (female) was about to be released, and Fox News was beginning to doubt the name of their suspect. They felt that perhaps it was a man named Leeland Eisenberg instead. According to Fox News, Leeland had a record too.

By 6:00 Wolf Blitzer was turning the situation into his War Room show and enjoying every minute of it. Shortly thereafter, the last hostage (male) was released and then we had a commercial break.

After the commercial break, the headline at the bottom of CNN's screen (shouldn't that be a bottomline?) stated that the police were standing outside the door of Clinton's campaign headquarters and had the building surrounded, and then the headline disappeared while Wolf talked for a few minutes, and the next thing I see is Leeland Eisenberg walking out of the campaign office and into the custody of the SWAT team waiting outside.

CNN airs the footage of Leeland giving himself up, getting handcuffed, and escorted to a police car, all the while raving about how "peaceful" and "textbook" and "perfect" this arrest turned out to be, even going so far as to say they wouldn't be surprised if it should be cited by the FBI and other agencies for training purposes.

Almost immediately after Leeland Eisenberg is driven from the scene in handcuffs, CNN releases the stunning news that they have indeed been in touch with "Lee" almost all afternoon after one of the hostages called them shortly after 1:30 pm saying she was being held hostage.

Shortly thereafter, Hillary gets on camera down in Washington, DC, and gives a 10-minute speech about the bravery of her campaign staff. Shortly afterwards, both Fox News and CNN mention her drop in the New Hampshire and Iowa polls. For the rest of the evening, CNN and Fox News analyze Leeland Eisenberg's state of mind as if they live in his brain and understand everything he is going through.

What a great job of news reporting, eh?

Fox News, of course, never gave CNN the credit for their half-assed knowledge of the story, and I can only hope that they plan to apologize to Troy Stanley and his family.

CNN repeatedly aired a picture of Lee Eisenberg, courtesy of "Fosters Daily Democrat", so I got online and googled Fosters Daily Democrat and found Lee is already on the home news page. When I did a search of Leeland Eisenberg on the local New Hampshire news website, I found several links to news items about Lee, all of them from 2007. Only once is he listed as being a drunk driver, by the way. I found no mention of the domestic abuse that CNN is touting about him, and I found one article and one letter to the editor about his argument with local police acsertaining to his anger over the local police's new habit of opening unlocked cars at night and leaving a flier in each car stating that local residents should lock their car doors at night.

Yet CNN and Fox News have been calling Lee Eisenberg a mentally ill man with a long history of abuse and a police record all night long.

I looked up poor Troy Stanley and found he has a stronger record than does Lee Eisenberg. That doesn't mean Troy deserved to be mentioned on Fox News for over an hour, now does it?

Meantime, Hillary soaks up the spotlight on the evening of what should've been her visit to DC for the Democratic National Convention dinner and flies off to New Hampshire to soak up the spotlight even more, all weekend.

Here is the link to the local news about Leeland Eisenberg, the "siege", and Troy Stanley. Just search their names in the search bar at the top of the Fosters homepage:

http://www.fosters.com/

One more thing I want to add: The person responsible for typing the daily police record at Fosters Daily Democrat has one hell of a sense of humor, LOL!

Jess wrote: "Who's willing to bet this whole thing was staged to boost Clinton's management crisis image?"

-- Normally I wouldn't give a conspiracy theory like this a second thought; however, it has been amazing to read and hear all the talk today about how she displayed leadership in the way she responded to the event. You'd think this was comparable to 9/11 the way some people have described her reaction.