MLive.com – The Pentagon sponsored a first-of-its-kind war game last month focused not on bullets and bombs — but on how hostile nations might seek to cripple the U.S. economy, a scenario made all the more real by the global financial crisis.

The two-day event near Ft. Meade, Maryland, had all the earmarks of a regular war game. Participants sat along a V-shaped set of desks beneath an enormous wall of video monitors displaying economic data, according to the accounts of three participants.

“It felt a little bit like Dr. Strangelove,” one person who was at the previously undisclosed exercise told POLITICO.

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Bloomington Pantagraph – Democrat Barack Obama on Wednesday brushed aside Republican charges that his tax plan amounts to socialism, but acknowledged it involves “spreading around opportunity’’ so that wealthier Americans — like himself — pay a little more to help lower-rung workers. |

Obama noted that when President Bush’s tax cuts were first proposed, his opponent for the White House, Republican John McCain, opposed them as irresponsibly targeted.

“Was John McCain a socialist back in 2000?’’ Obama asked at a news conference. Responding to the late-campaign line of attack repeated daily by McCain and running mate Sarah Palin, he said: “I think it’s an indication that they have run out of ideas.’’

Obama commented at a news conference after meeting with foreign policy and military luminaries to discuss “urgent issues’’ facing the country from abroad, an attempt to inoculate himself against the fresh charge from the McCain side that he is too untested for the White House.

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