Category: politics

News of US politics

Ken Adelman leaves the sinking ship of McCain

Seth Anderson0 comment

First the Chicago Tribune, then Colin Powell, and now Ken Adelman! Soon only the brain dead will be supporting McCain1

Ken Adelman is a lifelong conservative Republican. Campaigned for Goldwater, was hired by Rumsfeld at the Office of Economic Opportunity under Nixon, was assistant to Defense Secretary Rumsfeld under Ford, served as Reagan’s director of arms control, and joined the Defense Policy Board for Rumsfeld’s second go-round at the Pentagon, in 2001. Adelman’s friendship with Rumsfeld, Cheney, and their wives goes back to the sixties, and he introduced Cheney to Paul Wolfowitz at a Washington brunch the day Reagan was sworn in.

In recent years, Adelman and his friends Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz fell out over his criticisms of the botching of the Iraq War. Still, he remains a bona-fide hawk (“not really a neo-con but a con-con”) who has never supported a Democrat for President in his life. Two weeks from now that’s going to change: Ken Adelman intends to vote for Barack Obama. He can hardly believe it himself.

[From FIRST COLIN POWELL, NOW…: George Packer: Online Only: The New Yorker]

Adelman’s reasoning for supporting Obama is mostly about temperament as well. Read for yourself

Footnotes:
  1. wait, isn’t that already true? [↩]

How John McCain came to pick Sarah Palin

Seth Anderson0 comment

Jane Mayer has an interesting piece of reporting, covering how two boatloads of conservative pundits made the trek up to visit with Sarah Palin in 2007. John McCain shouldn’t have listened to them, especially since so many conservatives now have second thoughts about Palin’s competence.

Amsterdam in Sitka

The selection of Palin thrilled the Republican base, and the pundits who met with her in Juneau have remained unflagging in their support. But a surprising number of conservative thinkers have declared her unfit for the Vice-Presidency. Peggy Noonan, the Wall Street Journal columnist, recently wrote, “The Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics. It’s no good, not for conservatism and not for the country. And yes, it is a mark against John McCain.” David Brooks, the Times columnist, has called Palin “a fatal cancer to the Republican Party.” Christopher Buckley, the son of National Review’s late founder, defected to the Obama camp two weeks ago, in part because of his dismay over Palin. Matthew Dowd, the former Bush campaign strategist turned critic of the President, said recently that McCain “knows in his gut” that Palin isn’t qualified for the job, “and when this race is over, that is something he will have to live with. . . . He put the country at risk.”

Palin initially provided the McCain campaign with a boost, but polls now suggest that she has become a liability. A top Republican close to the campaign said that McCain’s aides have largely kept faith with Palin. They have been impressed by her work ethic, and by what a quick study she is. According to the Republican close to the campaign, she has sometimes discomfited advisers by travelling with a big family entourage. “It kind of changes the dynamic of a meeting to have them all in the room,” he told me. John McCain’s comfort level with Palin is harder to gauge. In the view of the longtime McCain friend, “John’s personal comfort level is low with everyone right now. He’s angry. But it was his choice.”

[From How John McCain came to pick Sarah Palin.: The Insiders: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker]

Well worth reading the entire article

The Acorn Story

Seth Anderson0 comment

The New York Times editorializes about voter fraud, and lack of…

But for all of the McCain campaign’s manufactured fury about vote theft (and similar claims from the Republican Party over the years) there is virtually no evidence — anywhere in the country, going back many elections — of people showing up at the polls and voting when they are not entitled to.

Meanwhile, Republicans aren’t saying anything about another more serious voter-registration scandal: the fact that about one-third of eligible voters are not registered. The racial gaps are significant and particularly disturbing. According to a study by Project Vote, a voting-rights group, in 2006, 71 percent of eligible whites were registered, compared with 61 percent of blacks, 54 percent of Latinos and 49 percent of Asian-Americans.

Much of the blame for this lies with overly restrictive registration rules. Earlier this year, the League of Women Voters halted its registration drive in Florida after the state imposed onerous new requirements.

The answer is for government to do a better job of registering people to vote. That way there would be less need to rely on private registration drives, largely being conducted by well-meaning private organizations that use low-paid workers. Federal and state governments should do their own large-scale registration drives staffed by experienced election officials. Even better, Congress and the states should adopt election-day registration, which would make such drives unnecessary.

The real threats to the fabric of democracy are the unreasonable barriers that stand in the way of eligible voters casting ballots.

[From Editorial – The Acorn Story – NYTimes.com]

From my perspective, there should be a few changes made to the US election system.

  1. If you can get a drivers license or a social security card1 – you should be able to check off a box on your application, and simultaneously be registered to vote. Why all the restrictions?
  2. Also, the election should be a national holiday, or at least held on a weekend, so that there is encouragement for everyone to vote.
  3. The polls should always be open for a month before the actual election2.

Simple, right? Americans should all vote in election, and the government should encourage citizens to vote in as many ways as it can afford to.

Footnotes:
  1. our de-facto national id cards [↩]
  2. they are in Chicago, for the first time I know of [↩]

Duped into being a Republican

Seth Anderson0 comment

Is there any other reason one could reasonably claim to be a Republican? Other than being duped? Really?

– Dozens of newly minted Republican voters say they were duped into joining the party by a GOP contractor with a trail of fraud complaints stretching across the country.

Voters contacted by The Times said they were tricked into switching parties while signing what they believed were petitions for tougher penalties against child molesters. Some said they were told that they had to become Republicans to sign the petition, contrary to California initiative law. Others had no idea their registration was being changed.

“I am not a Republican,” insisted Karen Ashcraft, 47, a pet-clinic manager and former Democrat from Ventura who said she was duped by a signature gatherer into joining the GOP. “I certainly . . . won’t sign anything in front of a grocery store ever again.”

It is a bait-and-switch scheme familiar to election experts. The firm hired by the California Republican Party — a small company called Young Political Majors, or YPM, which operates in several states — has been accused of using the tactic across the country.

Election officials and lawmakers have launched investigations into the activities of YPM workers in Florida and Massachusetts. In Arizona, the firm was recently a defendant in a civil rights lawsuit. Prosecutors in Los Angeles and Ventura counties say they are investigating complaints about the company.

The firm, which a Republican Party spokesman said is paid $7 to $12 for each registration it secures, has denied any wrongdoing and says it has never been charged with a crime.

The 70,000 voters YPM has registered for the Republican Party this year will help combat the public perception that it is struggling amid Democratic gains nationally, give a boost to fundraising efforts and bolster member support for party leaders, political strategists from both parties say.

[From Voters say they were duped into registering as Republicans – Los Angeles Times]

Headaches

Seriously, are the Republicans that hard up for new voters that the only way to inflate their numbers is through lying? Wait, don’t answer.

and the real repercussions to this slimy act:

Those who were formerly Democrats may stop receiving phone calls and literature from that party, perhaps affecting its get-out-the-vote efforts. They also will be given only a Republican ballot in the next primary election if they do not switch their registration back before then.

Some also report having their registration status changed to absentee without their permission; if they show up at the polls without a ballot they may be unable to vote.

The Times randomly interviewed 46 of the hundreds of voters whose election records show they were recently re-registered as Republicans by YPM, and 37 of them — more than 80% — said that they were misled into making the change or that it was done without their knowledge.

Read more before the article goes behind pay-wall.

Vote Early

Seth Anderson0 comment

I’d say, if you have the opportunity1 why not vote early? Avoid lines, and find out if you have been kicked off the voting roles before the official election day, in time to fix any problems.

Thousands of voters across the country must reestablish their eligibility in the next three weeks in order for their votes to count on Nov. 4, a result of new state registration systems that are incorrectly rejecting them.

The challenges have led to a dozen lawsuits, testy arguments among state officials and escalating partisan battles. Because many voters may not know that their names have been flagged, eligibility questions could cause added confusion on Election Day, beyond the delays that may come with a huge turnout.

The scramble to verify voter registrations is happening as states switch from locally managed lists of voters to statewide databases, a change required by federal law and hailed by many as a more efficient and accurate way to keep lists up to date.

[From Thousands Face Mix-Ups In Voter Registrations – washingtonpost.com]


GPS tracking powered by InstaMapper.com

Footnotes:
  1. and assuming you aren’t a member of the mythical, and ridiculed, tribe of undecided voters [↩]

War Dead Project

Seth Anderson3 Comments

My aunt Michelle writes:

My husband Bob, who is an artist, a poet, a veteran, a registered Republican and something of a nut, decided last spring that he wanted to create something that would express his deep feelings about the Iraq war. Starting in August he began to write, with a black sharpie, the names of the more than 4,000 soldiers who were killed in the war. He pasted the names written on wallpaper liner to the wall in front of our house which faces the Pacific ocean and a busy pedestrian walk. Above the list he wrote: “These Are the Brave Men and Women Our Government Sent to Die in Iraq.” It took about a month to complete the project and he added a statement at the end of the list. As more die he adds their names to the list.

He placed a spiral notebook near the project and urged people to write down their reactions and thoughts. Passing walkers from several countries and varied political persuasions have left dozens of their ideas in the notebook.

[From War Dead Project]

Robert Contemplative
[a photo I took of Bob last summer, somewhere off the coast of Alaska]

If you don’t get a chance to stroll by, reflect, and add your own comments, here is Bob’s statement:

Dear Neighbors,I honor these dead, the over 30,000 American wounded, and the hundreds of thousands who have served during this war. A veteran myself I understand some of their sacrifice, and understand that U.S. Troops do not choose their missions. The government chooses the war, and we the people choose the government.

These deaths are doubly sad because in Iraq our government ordered an attack, invasion and now occupation against the will of its people*of a country smaller than California* which did not threaten us, did not attack us,* and was an enemy of both Iran and Al Qaeda. this war insults our American tradition that every nation (starting with our own, in 1776) has the right to choose its own government, a tradition which has made us a beacon for freedom. We do not bully small nations. We justly act when strong nations – Nazi German, the USSR and Iraq in 1991 for examples – invade weaker ones.

Yes, al Qaeda earned our wrath on 9/11. Iraq, though, had nothing to do with 9/11,* yet we spill our soldier’s blood and rain terror in Iraq. Terror? Consider: our war (not our troops, but our war) has killed over 87,000 Iraqi civilians,* meaning that, per capital, it has killed more Iraqi civilians every week for 5 years than we lost on 9/11. * Whether you call that “shock and awe” or terrorism, it is unworthy of America.This doesn’t diminish the valor of our men and women. They have properly done their duty to follow the orders of the government we elected. But if we support freedom, if we support America’s principles, we will now do our duty and choose a government that will end this war without pursuing a “victory” which could further disgrace us by killing or cowing those Iraqis who don’t support the government George Bush or John McCain* impose.On November 4, please vote to save our lives, our treasure and our sacred honor by demanding an end to this immoral war.

* You can check these facts. See the “Sources and Calculations” page in the comments book (see below)
SOURCES AND CALCULATIONS

*”over 30,000 american wounded”: see . the names on the wall are only of the dead, but their numbers match the official ones.
*”against the will of its people”: see reporting several polls over a long time for the BBC, ABC and other. This March’s, for example, showed 72% of all Iraqis (including Kurds) oppose continued occupation and 61% think our forces make their country less secure.

*”smaller than California”: See CIA Fact Book (you can google it) The CIA estimates Iraq’s present population at 28,221,180. California’s in 2000 was over33,000,000 and has grown since.
*”didn’t attack us”: See The 9/11 Commission, at “A Pentagon Study of 600,000 Iraqi Documents Finds No Link Between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.”

President Bush also acknowledged this:

“Q What did Iraq have to do with that?

THE PRESIDENT: What did Iraq have to do with what?

Q The attack on the World Trade Center?

THE PRESIDENT: Nothing except for it’ part of —and nobody has ever suggested in this administration that Saddam Hussein ordered the attack. Iraq was a—the lesson of September the 11th is, take threats before they fully materialize, Ken. Nobody has even suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq.”


*”starting with our own,in 1776”: see the Declaration of Independence
*”We were so menaced on 9/11 but not by Iraq.” See “didn’t attack us”, above
*Over 87,000 Iraqi civilians”: See This is a very conservative number. Most estimates are much higher, but iraqbodycount.org does not do estimates at all. It only counts verifiable violent deaths of noncombatants that are reported in the press or official reports, and cross checks those.
*”per capita, our war has killed more Iraqi civilians every week for five years than we lost on 9/11.” Here’s the calculation: On the five-year anniversary of our attack, March 20, 2008, the numbers were: The U.S. population was 301,139,947 (source CIA factbook). 2998 people (including military but not the terrorists) died in the 9/11 attacks (source Wikipedia), or .000996% of our population.Iraq’s population was 27,499,638 (source CIA factbook). (Those population numbers have grown slightly since then, in both countries). At that time, iraqbodycount had counted 81,874 Iraqi civilians killed. that’s .2977% of their population. Divide that by 5 years and again by 52 weeks per year and you bet .001145%, a greater per capita loss each week that we suffered on 9/11. Since March 18, over 5,000 more civilians have been killed, so if you repeat the math using today’s numbers you’ll find we have now inflicted a 9/11 a week for nearly 5 and a half year.
*”victory…John McCain”: See where Senator McCain clarifies his “100 years” in Iraq statements to the effect that he would be in favor of continuing to occupy Iraq that long, though he does not favor 100 years of American losses. See also Senator McCain’s web site,
*”our lives, our treasure and our sacred honor”: See the Declaration of Independence.

Michelle has been typing up people’s handwritten comments to the War Dead Project, and adding them to the blog. Check it out.

The Colonel vs FDR

Seth Anderson1 Comment

The Chicago Tribune has been a Republican-leaning newspaper for what seems like forever. The Chicago Tribune has not previously endorsed a Democratic nominee for President, ever. However, they did endorse Barack Obama for president, quite strongly, in fact.

On Nov. 4 we’re going to elect a president to lead us through a perilous time and restore in us a common sense of national purpose.

The strongest candidate to do that is Sen. Barack Obama. The Tribune is proud to endorse him today for president of the United States.

On Dec. 6, 2006, this page encouraged Obama to join the presidential campaign. We wrote that he would celebrate our common values instead of exaggerate our differences. We said he would raise the tone of the campaign. We said his intellectual depth would sharpen the policy debate. In the ensuing 22 months he has done just that.

Many Americans say they’re uneasy about Obama. He’s pretty new to them.

We can provide some assurance. We have known Obama since he entered politics a dozen years ago. We have watched him, worked with him, argued with him as he rose from an effective state senator to an inspiring U.S. senator to the Democratic Party’s nominee for president.

We have tremendous confidence in his intellectual rigor, his moral compass and his ability to make sound, thoughtful, careful decisions. He is ready.

The change that Obama talks about so much is not simply a change in this policy or that one. It is not fundamentally about lobbyists or Washington insiders. Obama envisions a change in the way we deal with one another in politics and government. His opponents may say this is empty, abstract rhetoric. In fact, it is hard to imagine how we are going to deal with the grave domestic and foreign crises we face without an end to the savagery and a return to civility in politics.

This endorsement makes some history for the Chicago Tribune. This is the first time the newspaper has endorsed the Democratic Party’s nominee for president.

Happy 4th of July

As a companion piece, a bit of newspaper history:

The most famous was the long-running feud between Tribune publisher Col. Robert R. McCormick and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

McCormick complained bitterly that Roosevelt’s New Deal was a socialistic boondoggle that he feared would destroy Americans’ personal freedoms and rights. At one point, the Colonel, as he was known around the Tower, had a photo “cooked up to argue that soon the Social Security plot would have every working man tagged and numbered like a prisoner of war,” according to historian Frank C. Waldrop.

In the 1936 presidential campaign, McCormick instructed telephone operators at Tribune Tower to answer all calls with a declaration of how many days remained to “save the Republic” by turning Roosevelt out of office.

The feud was very personal. Once, reported historian Richard Norton Smith, McCormick showed a Tribune financial writer a headline clipped from another newspaper. The story was about a nationwide series of fund-raising balls for a polio foundation organized by FDR. The headline: “President’s Balls To Come Off Tonight.”

“I suppose,” sighed McCormick, “that is rather too much to hope for.”

FDR once said of McCormick: “I think he must be a little touched in the head.”

The high–or low–point, depending on your point of view: In 1942, a livid Roosevelt briefly contemplated sending the Marines to occupy Tribune Tower because of a report in the newspaper that naval officials feared would tip the Japanese that the U.S. had broken their military code. Goaded by an adviser, FDR also briefly pressed for a charge of treason against McCormick, knowing a conviction could bring the death sentence. An investigation later cleared the Tribune and two of its staffers of violating an espionage law.

[From Behind the scenes: ‘Was there shouting?’ ‘Who really decided?’ — chicagotribune.com]

Fascinating stuff. Perhaps Colonel McCormick paid closer attention to his hemp farms than we know…

50 State Strategy

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Personally, I think Obama’s adherence to the 50 state strategy1 is what turned this election2. The stupidity of recent presidential elections focusing nearly all resources on a couple of pivotal states – Florida, Ohio – always has irked me. The nation is not quite as divided as some would claim: the red state blue state was a convenient metaphor, but never was reality. Each state was more purple than red or blue, and Obama was clever to realize that early on, and thus out-maneuvered Hillary in the primary season, and is out-maneuvering John McCain right now..

Speaking to U.S.

Matt Bai has a New York Times Magazine piece coming out this Sunday, discussing mostly Obama’s quest to capture the rural, white, under-educated vote. Quite interesting to political junkies like myself.

Obama, though, has talked from the beginning about running a “50-state” campaign, and he has spent considerable time and money in more culturally conservative parts of the country where Democrats rarely, if ever, venture, from Elko and Appalachia to Billings, Mont., and Las Cruces, N.M. To a large extent, this reflects Obama’s personal conviction about modern politics, which he first laid out in his 2004 convention speech when he talked about worshiping “an awesome God in the blue states” and having “gay friends in the red states.” He told me, when we talked, that Washington’s us-versus-them divisions had made it impossible for any president to find solutions to a series of generational challenges, from Iraq to global climate change. “If voters are similarly polarized and if they’re seeing two different realities, a Sean Hannity reality and a Keith Olbermann reality, then we’re not going to be able to get done the work we need to get done,” Obama said.

It is also true, however, that a series of circumstances beyond his control have conspired to make a truly national campaign more feasible for Obama than for any Democrat since Carter ran in the dark days after Watergate. First, of course, there is the national sense of despair over the Bush era, which has made the president more of a uniter than he ever intended and which has enabled Democrats to get a hearing in parts of the country where they were being run off the land 10 years ago. Then there’s the advent of the Internet as a veritable money vacuum, which has enabled Obama to raise more money than any Democrat in history (about $460 million, at last count), meaning he can afford to pour some resources into states he has only a remote chance of winning. Perhaps most important, though, Obama’s campaign has also been able to take advantage of a drawn-out Democratic primary campaign that came through all 50 states before it was over — a draining experience that nonetheless established networks of volunteers and newly registered Democratic voters in states that in any other year would have been overlooked. In three states — Texas, Indiana and North Carolina — more people voted in Democratic primaries this year than voted for Kerry on Election Day in 2004.

[From Magazine Preview – Will Gun-Totting, Churchgoing White Guys Pull the Lever for Barack Obama? – NYTimes.com]

The truth of the matter is that before LBJ’s presidency, and the confusion of the 1960s, white, rural Americans were reliably Democrats because the Republican party has long, long been the party of corporate America, and not the party of the little guy. Richard Nixon, Lee Atwater and their acolytes3 have cloaked Republican motives in a veil of cultural war, but perhaps the cloak is a bit threadbare this season.

Footnotes:
  1. Howard Dean’s project, among others [↩]
  2. with the caveat that the election isn’t quite over, yet [↩]
  3. Karl Rove especially, but others too [↩]

McCain top lieutenant Overcharging Pentagon

Seth Anderson0 comment

Speaking of Senator Corruption (R- AZ, running for president, maybe you’ve heard mention of him), a top McCain fundraiser has been gouging tax-payers, and screwing the Pentagon. In some circles, that is considered war profiteering, and is a hanging offense.

The Democratic chairman of a House investigative committee presented documents to the Pentagon on Thursday charging that a top Republican fund-raiser, Harry Sargeant III, made tens of millions of dollars in profits over the last four years because his contracting company vastly overcharged for deliveries of fuel to American air bases in Iraq.

In a written statement on Thursday, a lawyer for Mr. Sargeant, who is the finance chairman of the Florida Republican Party and a major fund-raiser for Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign, called the allegations “deeply disappointing” and asserted that they were not supported by the facts.

The contracting company, called the International Oil Trading Company, or I.O.T.C., was briefly in the news over the summer when a former partner filed a lawsuit against Mr. Sargeant in a Florida circuit court.

The former partner, a Jordanian named Mohammad al-Saleh, is a brother-in-law of King Abdullah II of Jordan. The court papers laid out his assertion that he obtained special governmental authorizations for the company to transport the fuel through Jordan and was then unlawfully forced out by Mr. Sargeant, who strongly disputed those allegations.

But the latest claims of impropriety by the company, presented by Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, in a letter to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, go much further. Mr. Waxman uses e-mail messages, company documents, Pentagon reports and other information to make the case that Mr. Sargeant repeatedly received contracts to deliver the fuel even though his company was not the lowest bidder.

In one case, the letter from Mr. Waxman, chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, asserts that Mr. Sargeant’s company submitted the highest of six bids, but received the contract anyway. In fact, Pentagon contracting officers complained that the company’s prices were unreasonably high and initially said they could not justify giving the work to Mr. Sargeant.

But for reasons the company was never able to explain, Mr. Waxman’s letter indicates, no other American company was given an authorization to transport the fuel through Jordan. And when the United States Central Command declared that the need for the fuel was urgent, the Pentagon was forced to award the contract to Mr. Sargeant’s company.

…

Mr. Sargeant is one of several dozen people who are listed on Senator McCain’s Web site as having raised $500,000 or more for him. He was the host of a fund-raiser for Mr. McCain at his mansion in Delray Beach, Fla., this year.

[From G.O.P. Donor Is Accused of Overcharging Pentagon – NYTimes.com]

I hope President Obama gives Henry Waxman free reign to continue his investigations into Bush-crony corruption, including John McCain’s friends like Sargeant, and corporations like Verizon.

And remember this story?

Mr. Sargeant came under scrutiny in August when media reports highlighted a cluster of more than $50,000 in unusual campaign contributions bundled together by Mr. Sargeant from a single extended family in California and a few of their friends. The donations set off questions of whether they might have been made by donors in name only who were reimbursed by someone trying to skirt contribution limits.

It turned out that the donations were not actually solicited by Mr. Sargeant but by another Jordanian business partner, Mustafa Abu Naba’a. The McCain campaign later said it would return all contributions solicited by Mr. Abu Naba’a and review all donations collected by Mr. Sargeant.

Ethics Not Important for McCain Ranch

Seth Anderson1 Comment

For all of McCain’s yammering about changing the culture of corruption in Washington, you’d think he’d start by cleaning up his own corruption first. I’m sure you could call up Verizon or AT&T and complain about your cellphone reception, and they’d install cell-phone towers in your remote location, free of charge, right?

Early in 2007, just as her husband launched his presidential bid, Cindy McCain sought to resolve an old problem – the lack of cellphone coverage on her remote 15-acre ranch near Sedona, Ariz., nestled deep in a tree-lined canyon called Hidden Valley.

Over the past year, she offered land for a permanent cell tower, and Verizon Wireless embarked on an expensive public process to meet her needs, hiring contractors and seeking county land-use permits.

Verizon ultimately abandoned its effort to install a permanent tower in August. Company spokesman Jeffrey Nelson said the project would be “an inappropriate way” to build its network. “It doesn’t make business sense for us to do that,” he added.

Instead, Verizon delivered a portable tower known as a “cell site on wheels” – free of charge – to the McCain property in June…

In July, AT&T followed suit, wheeling in a portable tower for free to match Verizon’s offer. “This is an unusual situation,” AT&T spokeswoman Claudia B. Jones said. …

Ethics lawyers said Cindy McCain’s dealings with the wireless companies stand out because her husband is a senior member of the Senate commerce committee, which oversees the Federal Communications Commission and the telecommunications industry. He has been a leading advocate for industry-backed legislation, fighting regulations and taxes on telecommunication services.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and his campaign have close ties to Verizon and AT&T. Five campaign officials, including manager Rick Davis, have worked as lobbyists for Verizon. Former McCain staff member Robert Fisher is an in-house lobbyist for Verizon and is volunteering for the campaign. Fisher, Verizon chief executive Ivan G. Seidenberg and company lobbyists have raised more than $1.3 million for McCain’s presidential effort, and Verizon employees are among the top 20 corporate donors over McCain’s political career, giving his campaigns more than $155,000.

McCain’s Senate chief of staff Mark Buse, senior strategist Charles R. Black Jr. and several other campaign staff members have registered as AT&T lobbyists in the past. AT&T Executive Vice President Timothy McKone and AT&T lobbyists have raised more than $2.3 million for McCain. AT&T employees have donated more than $325,000 to the Republican’s campaigns, putting the company in the No. 3 spot for career donations to McCain, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

“It raises the aura of special consideration for somebody because he is a member of the Senate,” said Stanley Brand, a former House counsel for Democrats and an ethics lawyer who represents politicians in both parties.

[From Exclusive: Verizon and AT&T Provided Cell Towers for McCain Ranch – Washington Post Investigations]

What a perfect description of John McCain: special consideration for some, and bupkis for the rest of us. The tower would be so infrequently used, it made no business sense, unless you are helping out your friend in Washington, D.C.

Three telecommunications specialists consulted by The Post said the proposed site covers so few users that it is unlikely to generate enough traffic to justify the investment. Robb Alarcon, an industry specialist who helps plan tower placement, said the proposed location appeared to be a “strategic build,” free-of-charge coverage to high-priority customers. A former Verizon executive vice president, who asked not to be named because he worked for the company, agreed with Alarcon, saying, “It was a VIP kind of thing.”

Escaped Red Guard

The Atlantic’s Joshua Green follows up (and please click through if you are interested in the topic, there are several primary documents hosted at The Atlantic)

What’s clear from the report is that the process of putting up a tower required a lot of work—in addition to consultants and archeologists and Indian tribes, it meant notifying all sorts of government agencies, as the report lays out. What’s also clear from the public record is that Verizon knew full well whose non-sacred Indian land this ranch belonged to. Though the formal, bureaucratic name for the McCain’s ranch seems to be “AZ 2 Hidden Valley Ranch,” Verizon’s internal map, obtained by The Atlantic (it was part of a Verizon engineer’s report on the property), refers to it as “John McCain’s cabin.” So while Cindy McCain may indeed have requested the tower over the web like an ordinary millionaire rancher with spotty phone reception, Verizon was well aware that she was anything but that. (As of this posting, Jeffrey Nelson, the Verizon spokesman, hadn’t returned my call.)

All of this suggests a number of things: Rogers looks to have been correct in stating that the Secret Service asked for, and received, temporary towers—but that doesn’t address the parallel issue of the permanent towers, long underway until just recently, that lay at the heart of the Post piece and in the public record. The McCains may not have asked Verizon for any special favors—but, wittingly or not, they sure look like they were about to receive them. To my mind, Verizon looks worst of all: the company is claiming that it abandoned the tower because it wouldn’t “make business sense to do it.” In a sense, this is self evident: you don’t have to look any further than a map of the area to see what a remote and sparsely populated place is “AZ 2 Hidden Valley Ranch.” And so the only reason to embark on the two-year process of lawyers, regulators, consultant, archeologists, and Indians is if you’re seeking a payoff of another kind.

Hot Headed MCain

Seth Anderson0 comment

There’s a difference between a tough-guy and being just a dick. McCain sounds more like the latter, especially when you consider his cowardice on the campaign trail.

John McCain made a quick stop at the Capitol one day last spring to sit in on Senate negotiations on the big immigration bill, and John Cornyn was not pleased.

Cornyn, a mild-mannered Texas Republican, saw a loophole in the bill that he thought would allow felons to pursue a path to citizenship.

McCain called Cornyn’s claim “chicken-shit,” according to people familiar with the meeting, and charged that the Texan was looking for an excuse to scuttle the bill. Cornyn grimly told McCain he had a lot of nerve to suddenly show up and inject himself into the sensitive negotiations.

“Fuck you,” McCain told Cornyn, in front of about 40 witnesses.

It was another instance of the Republican presidential candidate losing his temper, another instance where, as POW-MIA activist Carol Hrdlicka put it, “It’s his way or no way.”

There’s a lengthy list of similar outbursts through the years: McCain pushing a woman in a wheelchair, trying to get an Arizona Republican aide fired from three different jobs, berating a young GOP activist on the night of his own 1986 Senate election and many more.

[From McClatchy Washington Bureau | 09/07/2008 | McCain’s history of hot temper raises concerns]

John McCain is not presidential caliber.

Then there’s McCain’s sensitivity to the POW-MIA issue. So highly strung on the topic, you’d think there was some festering wound lingering just below the surface.

Back in Washington, families of POW_MIAs said they have seen McCain’s wrath repeatedly. Some families charged that McCain hadn’t been aggressive enough about pursuing their lost relatives and has been reluctant to release relevant documents.…

In 1992, McCain sparred with Dolores Alfond, the chairwoman of the National Alliance of Families for the Return of America’s Missing Servicemen and Women, at a Senate hearing. McCain’s prosecutor-like questioning of Alfond — available on YouTube — left her in tears.

Four years later, at her group’s Washington conference, about 25 members went to a Senate office building, hoping to meet with McCain. As they stood in the hall, McCain and an aide walked by.

Six people present have written statements describing what they saw. According to the accounts, McCain waved his hand to shoo away Jeannette Jenkins, whose cousin was last seen in South Vietnam in 1970, causing her to hit a wall.

As McCain continued walking, Jane Duke Gaylor, the mother of another missing serviceman, approached the senator. Gaylor, in a wheelchair equipped with portable oxygen, stretched her arms toward McCain.

“McCain stopped, glared at her, raised his left arm ready to strike her, composed himself and pushed the wheelchair away from him,” according to Eleanor Apodaca, the sister of an Air Force captain missing since 1967.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CazKanlYDg

Sarah Palin – Black Helicopter Mama

Seth Anderson0 comment

David Neiwert and Max Blumenthal went to Wasilla, Alaska to get more details about Sarah Palin’s secessionist pals. They interviewed several Wasilla residents, spent time researching primary documents at the local library1 and so on.

Helicopter with Camera

Essentially here’s what we found:

  • That Gov. Palin, when a Wasilla city council member, formed an alliance with some of the more radical far-right citizens in Wasilla and vicinity, particularly members of the secessionist Alaskan Independence Party who were allied with local John Birch Society activists. These activists played an important role in her election as Wasilla mayor in 1996.
  • Once mayor, one of Mrs. Palin’s first acts was to attempt to appoint one of these extremists (a man named Steve Stoll) to her own seat on the city council. This was a man with a history of disrupting city council meetings with intimidating behavior. She was blocked by a single city council member.
  • Afterward, Mrs. Palin fired the city’s museum director at the behest of this faction.
  • She fomented an ultimately successful effort to derail a piece of local gun-control legislation which would simply have prohibited the open carry of firearms into schools, liquor stores, libraries, courthouses and the like. The people recruited to shout this ordinance down included these same figures, notably the local AIP representative (who became the AIP’s chairman that same year).
  • She remained associated politically with the local AIP/Birch faction throughout her tenure as mayor on other issues, particularly a successful effort to amend the Alaska Constitution to prohibit local governments from issuing any local gun-control ordinances.

[From Orcinus]

The full report is hosted at Salon.com, take a gander at the New World Order foks, with their preoccupation with Black Helicopters, weaponry, and the like. Sarah Palin is most certainly not someone who should be anywhere near the levers of power in Washington, D.C. John McCain did a heck of a job vetting her, didn’t he?

and YouTube video from Max Blumenthal’s interview with Mark Chryson:

Max Blumenthal interviews former Alaskan Independence Party chair and longtime Palin pal Mark Chryson about his role in Palin’s political ascendancy. Chryson discusses his cooperation with Palin on legislation and campaign tactics, then offers his views on everything from the New World Order to Abraham Lincoln.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3iYUbbzBBU

Footnotes:
  1. presumedly, or wherever such government documents are maintained in Wasilla. [↩]

John Lewis calls out John McCain

Seth Anderson0 comment

As of today, per electoral-vote.com, Georgia’s 15 electoral votes are in John McCain’s column, but the polling is within a couple points. John Lewis is an influential Georgian politician, and knows first-hand of the side effects of racist demagoguery such as what is currently being spewed by the McCain-Palin camp.

Representative John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat and civil rights leader, said Saturday that Senator John McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, were “sowing the seeds of hatred and division” in a way that reminded him of former Gov. George Wallace and “another destructive period” in the nation’s history.

In a blistering statement reacting to the angry crowds at McCain-Palin rallies in the past week that have shouted “off with his head” and other insults about Senator Barack Obama, Mr. Lewis said: “During another period, in the not-too-distant past, there was a governor of the state of Alabama named George Wallace who also became a presidential candidate. George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights.

“Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.”

Mr. Lewis, who was referring to the 1963 church bombing by the Ku Klux Klan, added: “As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Senator McCain and Governor Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all. They are playing a very dangerous game that disregards the value of the political process and cheapens our entire democracy.”

Mr. McCain has cited Mr. Lewis as one of three people on whom he depends for sage advice.

[From Congressman Rebukes McCain for Recent Rallies – NYTimes.com]

Let us hope that Lewis’ criticism leads to a bit of movement in the polls for Obama. Racism is not dead, by any means, but even in the South, there are plenty of white voters who are sickened by the actions of the racist few.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7gutQPvAeM

Racist McCain

Seth Anderson2 Comments

I was afraid the Westbrook Pegler citation in Sarah Palin’s convention speech was going down the memory hole, but Frank Rich mentions it in his column today:

The tone was set at the Republican convention, with Rudy Giuliani’s mocking dismissal of Obama as an “only in America” affirmative-action baby. We also learned then that the McCain campaign had recruited as a Palin handler none other than Tucker Eskew, the South Carolina consultant who had worked for George W. Bush in the notorious 2000 G.O.P. primary battle where the McCains and their adopted Bangladeshi daughter were slimed by vicious racist rumors.

No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”

This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.

The operatives who would have Palin quote Pegler have been at it ever since. A key indicator came two weeks after the convention, when the McCain campaign ran its first ad tying Obama to the mortgage giant Fannie Mae. Rather than make its case by using a legitimate link between Fannie and Obama (or other Democratic leaders), the McCain forces chose a former Fannie executive who had no real tie to Obama or his campaign but did have a black face that could dominate the ad’s visuals.

[From Frank Rich – The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama – NYTimes.com]

Is John McCain a bigot? Maybe, maybe not, but his campaign surely is. If McCain was the leader he proclaims himself to be, he would be able to effortlessly lead those demagogues into the 21st century, away from the mindless racism that stems from fear of the unknown. But he isn’t, and he won’t.

Incompetents in Charge

swanksalot0 comment

Gee, ya think?

Reserved Light

Two weeks after persuading Congress to let it spend $700 billion to buy distressed securities tied to mortgages, the Bush administration has put that idea aside in favor of a new approach that would have the government inject capital directly into the nation’s banks — in effect, partially nationalizing the industry.

As recently as Sept. 23, senior officials had publicly derided proposals by Democrats to have the government take ownership stakes in banks.

The Treasury Department’s surprising turnaround on the issue of buying stock in banks, which has now become its primary focus, has raised questions about whether the administration squandered valuable time in trying to sell Congress on a plan that officials had failed to think through in advance.

It has also raised questions about whether the administration’s deep philosophical aversion to government ownership in private companies hindered its ability to look at all options for stabilizing the markets.

Some experts also contend that Treasury’s decision last month to not use taxpayer money to save Lehman Brothers worsened the panic that quickly metastasized into an international crisis.

[From White House Overhauling Rescue Plan – NYTimes.com]

2009 can’t come fast enough. Everyone who lost value in their pension and their 401(k) should sign up to tar-and-feather Bush and his lightweight cronies who mismanaged every crisis they every met, including this one.