Political Browser: Romney Says He'd Give Presidential Salary to Charity
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When you're worth $250 million, the annual presidential salary of $400,000 represents a bit less than two-tenths of 1 percent of your net worth.
So it may not have been a big stretch for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney to acknowledge, as he did yesterday, that he will give away an amount equal to his White House salary if elected president.
"I haven't really thought ahead that far. There are some questions I haven't forecasted, perhaps because that would seem presumptuous of me," he told reporters after an event in New Hampshire. "I presume I would take the salary and then I would donate at least that amount -- or more -- to charity."
As governor, Romney accepted a salary of $1, according to spokesman Kevin Madden. His fortune, reported at somewhere between $190 million and $250 million, was made largely as the founder of an investment company. The governor of Massachusetts is normally paid $135,000 a year.
-- Michael D. Shear
Sheehan's 'Resignation'
On the blog Daily Kos, Cindy Sheehan, the mother of a soldier who died in Iraq and became the face of the antiwar movement with her protest outside President Bush's Texas ranch, announced that she is leaving the limelight.
"This is my resignation letter as the 'face' of the American anti-war movement," Sheehan wrote on Memorial Day on the blog, a center for left-wing activism on the Web. She wrote her son had died "for nothing" and was "killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think."
Sheehan also criticized Democrats and the antiwar movement: "[W]hen I started to hold the Democratic Party to the same standards that I held the Republican Party, support for my cause started to erode and the 'left' started labeling me with the same slurs that the right used."
"Good-bye America . . . you are not the country that I love," she wrote, "and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can't make you be that country unless you want it."
