Month: February 2008

Well I Never

by digby

I’m watching Tweety, Barnicle and the rest of the gang wring their little lace hankies over how terrible it is that the NY Times ran a story with innuendos about McCain’s personal life — on the front page no less. They are “very sad” about all this. I think I’m like to faint dead away with the sheer inappropriateness of it all.

Let’s take a little trip down memory lane, shall we?

MATTHEWS: Let’s talk about the front page of The New York Times today, at the very top of the fold. I mean, it’s right up there at the banner, the Clinton marriage, “For the Clintons, delicate dance of married and public lives.” This is the most teasing story I’ve come across in The New York Times in a long time, the paper of record. Let me give you some quotes:

“Mr. Clinton is rarely without company in public, yet the company he keeps rarely includes his wife.”

“When the subject of Bill and Hillary Clinton comes up, for many prominent Democrats these days, topic A is the state of their marriage.”

“Bill and Hillary Clinton have built largely separate lives.”

It’s a complicated story, Bob, but why do you think your paper — I know you don’t put the front page together. Why did Bill Keller put this story at the top of the newspaper today?

HERBERT: Well, you have to ask Bill, but I can tell you that in my travels, people are really interested in the state of this marriage and, frankly, I think, you know, with Hillary’s presumed presidential ambitions, the state of the marriage is going to actually be a factor in her chances of getting the Democratic nomination, and perhaps, you know, becoming president.

MATTHEWS: The question I have for you, Michael, is that I was up there in Philly today on your show — it was great to be on your show. Let me ask you about this story. Without getting too much into the goo of this story, which I’m sure we’ll get into at some point between now and 2008, here’s the question: Why today, why did The New York Times break from the gate? We all thought this story would begin to evolve sometime after the election when Hillary gets reelected in New York, in all probability. We’d be talking about her presidential campaign and, of course, every aspect of her life becomes fair game at that point. Why do you think the Times broke from the gate? This is May 23.

SMERCONISH: I think that it’s probably the one issue about Hillary that people are most interested in. If I were to open up the telephone lines in Philly and I were to question folks about the Hillary candidacy, this is going to be way up there, probably beyond Iraq. I thought it was significant that in a typical month, they spend 14 days together. You know what, Chris? Not me. I want to make clear, but I think there are a lot of guys out there married who are probably envious of that number.

MATTHEWS: Well, I’m not. Let me ask you this. Let me go back to Bob Herbert —

HERBERT: Neither am I, Chris.

[…]

MATTHEWS: We’re back with radio talk show host Michael Smerconish of Philadelphia and New York Times columnist Bob Herbert. Bob, let me read you something from your newspaper again today. This story at the front, top of the newspaper, the very top of the newspaper, it’s amazing, there it is at the top.

Quote: “Because of Mr. Clinton’s behavior in the White House, tabloid gossip sticks to him like iron fillings to a magnet.” This is The New York Times. “Several prominent New York Democrats, in interviews, volunteered that they became concerned last year over a tabloid photograph showing Mr. Clinton leaving BLT Steak in Midtown Manhattan late one night after dining with a group that included a Belinda Stronach, a Canadian politician. The two were among roughly a dozen people at a dinner, but it still was enough to fuel coverage in the gossip pages.”

[…]

MATTHEWS: It was very carefully reported. Let me read you a quote from the Clintons — the two, the senator and the former president. It’s quite an interesting quote here: “She is an active senator who, like most members of Congress, has to be in Washington for part of most weeks. He is a former president running a multimillion-dollar global foundation. But their home is in New York, and they do everything they can to be together there or at their house in D.C. as often as possible — often going to great lengths to do so. When their work schedules require that they be apart, they talk all the time.” That’s a very defensive, formalized statement, isn’t it, Bob?

HERBERT: I mean, I really don’t know. It sounds to me — I read it, and I didn’t look for a hidden agenda, honestly. I read that as —

MATTHEWS: OK. You don’t think it’s setting them up for a different lifestyle? I thought it was saying —

HERBERT: I read that as —

MATTHEWS: OK.

HERBERT: — a reasonable, accurate depiction of what’s going on.

MATTHEWS: Could it be — to avoid all this kind of speculation that we’re already involved in, and I take responsibility — well, I share it with The New York Times here — Michael, that what they’re really saying, the official spokespeople for these two impressive people, is that they’re saying, “Don’t count on Bill Clinton living in the White House if Hillary gets elected. He’s got to run a big, multimillion dollars — they say, the spokesmen say — foundation. He’s got a lot of responsibilities up in New York City at his office up there, so don’t count on him being like a househusband or a first gentleman.”

SMERCONISH: No way.

MATTHEWS: Is that what they’re setting up here?

SMERCONISH: No, what they were saying is that most guys escape to the golf course to get away from their wives, and in his case, she’s in the United States Senate, and that’s his excuse.

HERBERT: Well, I don’t think they’re saying that he won’t be, you know, the first husband. I mean, I think that Bill Clinton is such a political junkie that he won’t be able to stay away if Hillary is president.

MATTHEWS: Well, I hate being away from my wife more than a day or two, but thank you, Michael. You obviously don’t mind that at all. Anyway, Bob Herbert, you go home and face her.

The NY Times has been reporting tabloid stories for a long time now on its front page. This one is notable only because it’s about St John McCain, the honorable All American hero, who has been immune from media criticism for some years — and because it actually points to something dramatically unethical: doing favors for lobbyists for personal reasons.

If the cable gasbags are hanging their heads in mourning over the tarnishing of their manly hero, the right wing talkers are rending their garments:

Limbaugh was one of several influential conservatives who, to the delight and relief of the McCain campaign, immediately decided that the behavior of the Times — not the senator — should be the issue.

Ingraham began her show this morning with a brief dig at McCain’s years of cozying up to the mainstream media, but then declared: “You wait until it’s pretty much beyond a doubt that he’s going to be the Republican nominee, and then you let it drop — drop some acid in the pool, contaminate the whole pool. That’s what The New York Times thinks.”

Ingraham was deriding the front-page article suggesting McCain had a romantic relationship with a telecommunications lobbyist in 1999, when he was chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee.

Ingraham was among the conservatives who endorsed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney before he dropped out of the nomination race, and she has been among the high-profile talk show hosts who have been very critical of McCain.

McCain has been jokingly called “the senator from ‘Meet the Press’” because of his cozy relations with the elite media.

Ingraham said triumphantly, “I ask the McCain campaign this question: Do you think you need talk radio now? Do you think that talk radio’s important to set the record straight, or do you think a press conference, where the media is shouting question after question at you — do you think that’s going to put an end to all of this?”

Yeah, John, do you think you need talk radio now? Huh? I won’t be ignored, John…

This political culture is so incredibly screwed up.

.

John Weaver Is Not Jane Doe

by dday

Apparently, the talking point that the broadcast media all settled on today is that the McCain/Vicki Iseman story is irresponsible because it’s based entirely on unnamed sources.

Um, people?

The only on-the-record source the New York Times used in their John McCain story says he gave his quote to the paper in December and immediately shared it with the Arizona senator’s top strategists.

John Weaver, formerly McCain’s top strategist, tells Politico that after hearing repeatedly from Times reporters working on the story, he asked for written questions and then provided an e-mail response.

“They asked about the Union Station meeting and so I answered their questions,” Weaver says. “I forwarded it to Steve, Charlie and Mark within minutes of sending it to the Times.”

Steve Schmidt, Charlie Black and Mark Salter are all top advisers to McCain.

Weaver very simply said that Iseman was involved in the campaign and that could hurt McCain’s image as a straight-talking reformer. This doesn’t presume an intimate relationship, it presumes a relationship with a lobbyist. And this is a big problem.

Some wingnut welfare recipients are calling this the words of a “disgruntled staffer.” Some Republican hack on The Situation Room was asked directly “Do you mean John Weaver?” and she said “It hasn’t been disclosed.” Well, you know, yes it has.

And the floodgates ought to open once you recognize that McCain’s campaign and professional life are crawling with lobbyists:

McCain’s campaign staff had more lobbyists on it than any other back in June. And, after the staff massacre in July, the person he hired to be his new campaign manager (resurrecting his position from the failed 2000 campaign)? Uber-lobbyist Rick Davis. Who is Rick Davis? Try this on for starters:

“So now that very same Rick Davis will be taking over as campaign manager. Who is he? Fittingly for the most lobbyist-infested campaign in the race (on either side), Davis is yet another lobbyist. Davis founded Davis, Manafort & Freedman, Inc., through which he served clients ranging from Nigerian dictator Gen. Sani Abacha to “mafia-like” Argentine legislator Alberto Pierri. Davis has had a long association with McCain — one tangled up in webs of special influence. In 1999, while Davis was working for McCain, two of his firm’s clients, COMSAT and SBC, “had major (and controversial) mergers pending before the Federal Communications Commission in 1999, and both mergers were approved.” The FCC was under the legislative oversight authority of McCain’s Commerce Committee, yet McCain refused to recuse himself from the proceedings.

Davis was also a central figure in McCain’s Reform Institute scandal, an under-reported affair in which the “Maverick” Senator used a nonprofit, tax-exempt “reform” organization to trade political favors for corporate cash.”

He had plenty of lobbyists on his campaign back in 2000, too. This is the real problem here, a huge dent to the Straight Talk Express’ image. This is why Mitt Romney’s throwing up repeatedly today.

I agree that the focus ought to be on the fact that someone who claimed he’s completely free and clear of the culture of corruption you’d expect from a guy who’s spent 24 years in Washington is getting caught.

UPDATE: Yglesias:

Basically, in exchange for money and freebies, McCain sought to intervene in a federal regulatory process in favor of a company that had provided him with tens of thousands of dollars in cash and services. He could try to plead naiveté, but in light of the hot water he got into with the Keating Five affair, which had the exactly same structure, he clearly knew what he was doing and knew that it was wrong. Now whether or not some guy gets to buy some TV station in Pittsburgh or not isn’t a big deal as such, but it’s an example of how dubious McCain’s “straight talk” persona is. What’s more, I think we can all agree that the subversion of the basic functioning of the federal government (see, e.g., US Attorneys scandal, FEMA, etc.) has been a major problem during the Bush years and we see here that McCain takes a Bush-like attitude to the integrity of these processes.

Yep.

.

The Go To Guy

by digby

I’m probably less interested in the sex angle on the McCain story than some because I’m just generally not inclined to go there unless someone’s been evoking family values every five minutes. McCain is a lot like his pal Joe Lieberman in his holier-than-thou unctuousness, but it’s about his “honor and integrity” in terms of public ethical integrity, not so much his personal behavior, which he’s always admitted was less than perfect. It’s sad that it takes a juicy tabloid angle to make anybody notice these things, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s the shady public ethics that make this story is important.

The meat of this thing has to do with favors he did for this lobbyist in his position as Chairman of the Commerce Committee, and I frankly don’t care whether he did it for money or sex or just because she made him feel young again,it’s unethical and hypocritical coming from someone who’s running as a reformer.

Marcy Wheeler in her typically thorough fashion gets to the nub of it in her post about two of the big communications companies lobbyist Iseman represented and what they were up to — Paxson and Sinclair. Both of those names also jumped out at me when I looked at her client list because they are both big right wing media players.

Sinclair, you’ll recall, was involved in all those controversies in 2004, canceling a Nightline episode which silently ran the names of the Americans killed in Iraq and then running that rubbish Swift Boat documentary “Stolen Honor.” Marcy notes that McCain failed to condemn the documentary instead attributing any problems with it to “media consolidation.” And that ties back in to Iseman and Paxson:

I said that it was the height of hypocrisy for McCain to complain about media concentration, because his contribution to the consolidation of Paxson Communication–the company whose plane he was flying around on, in the company of Vicki Iseman–is well documented.

The Alliance for Progressive Action and the QED Accountability Project charge Senator John McCain with influencing Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval of a hotly contested three-way Pittsburgh public television license exchange and sale. The decision favors Paxson Communications, a contributor to McCain’s presidential bid. The community groups await a response from the General Counsel of the FCC to their late Monday request for an investigation of McCain’s unusual actions. On November 17, 1999 the Senator and Presidential candidate instructed the FCC commissioners to take action on the deal no later than December 15, 1999. “If in your judgment the Commission cannot meet this request, please advise me of this fact in writing, with a specific and complete explanation, no later than November 18, 1999,” wrote McCain. In a second letter, dated December 10, 1999, written to FCC Chair William Kennard, McCain was even more forceful in his resolution. He demanded, “if the license applications were not acted upon” that Chairman Kennard “…explain why.” Obviously feeling the pressure, the commissioners voted to approve the application. However, the FCC press release indicated that the 30-page opinion included four separate dissenting opinions. Kennard responded to McCain’s letter by saying, “It is highly unusual for the commissioners to be asked to publicly announce their voting status on a matter that is still pending.” He said such inquiries “could have procedural and substantive impacts on the Commission’s deliberations and, thus, on the due process rights of the parties.” [my emphasis]

This is the intervention that McCain’s advisors were allegedly so worried about in 1999, when he first ran for President.

When I read the NYT story last night, it was obvious that this story was a holdover from what now looks pretty clearly like a dodged bullet in the 2000 campaign. This Paxson stuff has been out there since then.

Read Marcy’s whole post and you’ll see that there are a lot of dots to be connected if anybody wants to slog through commerce committee documents. And read this one too about Conrad Black. The nexus of McCain and Iseman is the nexus of Republican politics and right wing media.

The press has always fawned over McCain. But it isn’t just because McCain likes to tell dirty stories from his Navy days to the boys on the bus, although that’s a potent inducement I’m sure. He also was, for many years, the powerful Chairman of the Commerce Committee which oversees the FCC and regulates media concerns. There were many reasons why media lobbyists, media moguls (and yes, ambitious, boss pleasing editors and reporters) would have been interested in cozying up to John McCain when the Republicans were in the majority, which is why McCain’s staffers were so upset that said lobbyist Iseman was bragging about doing that all over town.

Update: The New Republic posted the story today that is rumored to have forced the NYT to publish last night. The press has always been inexplicably protective of McCain, and judging by their squeamishness about pursuing even the corruption angle on this story, they still are.

Update II: Tucker Carlson just said that there has been a tacit agreement in the press dating from ten years ago that unless they had a pretty good reason they wouldn’t go after “bedroom habits.” If that’s true, it was certainly big of them to do it after they’d already drooled over the most intimate details of Clinton’s sex life all over the television and newspapers 24/7 for months. Typical.

Update III: It really is rich that McCain continues to pretend he’s a big reformer when his unpaid campaign manager, Rick Davis, is a lobbyist for shady Russian oligarchs and countries like Montenegro:

“… in August 2006, Davis was present again at a social gathering that was also attended by McCain and Deripaska, this time in Montenegro, another Eastern European country in which Davis’s firm was working. The three were among a few dozen people dining at a restaurant during an official Senate trip.

Davis was a paid consultant to the governing party in Montenegro and had advised it on a just-ratified independence referendum, Salter said. That was why he was at the dinner, he added.

Afterward, a group from the dinner took boats out to a nearby yacht moored in the Adriatic Sea, where champagne and pastries were served, partly in honor of McCain’s 70th birthday.

Perhaps an intrepid reporter would like to ask McCain whether that will have any influence on his decision making as president. Especially since the Balkans are blowing up again at this very minute. Via FDL

.

A Cult, You Say?

by dday

This “Obama is a cult” thing is starting to fly around in the media, and yet things like this go virtually unnoticed:

Few visitors will venture far from the usual sites to see a spectacular exhibit — just a short walk from the Mall — that so very much captures the spirit, the essence, the greatness of this shining city on a hill.

Yes, it’s the beautifully designed photo homage to one of our nation’s leaders, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Alphonso Jackson. The photo exhibit is boldly and proudly displayed in the lobby of HUD’s headquarters building, itself a dreadful gray relic of Great Society architecture.

Tour groups need not even go through the inviting metal detectors to admire 20 large, color photographs of the secretary, each about 2 feet by 3 feet. No fewer than five of them feature Jackson with President Bush– in the Rose Garden, in the Oval Office, chatting together, coming down the steps at the Capitol.

The photographs cover an entire wall of the lobby as you enter, passing two other photos, the smaller official ones, of Bush and his old buddy from Texas days, side by side to greet you.

I mean, we have a White House Chief of Staff who has a wall collection of pictures of Bush’s HANDS at key moments in his life.

And we’re talking about some OTHER politician leading a cult?

This, of course, is an example of the attacks we’re going to start seeing with regularity if Obama, as presumed, becomes the nominee. We’ll see more baseless insanity masquerading as analysis like this:

Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in New York City — a place to which people who wished to rebel against their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League. Or maybe a different arm of the CPUSA. But, for a white woman to marry a black man in 1958, or 60, there was almost inevitably a connection to explicit Communist politics.

Shorter National Review writer – I knew someone who knew someone who was part black and part Jewish, therefore Obama is a Communist!!!1! Almost as good as there was a poet from Hawaii named Frank who joined the Communist Party at some point, therefore…

These stories aren’t meant to convince anybody, they serve as a backdrop. It manifests itself when the right finds a bill or some policy paper that they can elevate into a full-fledged hissy fit, as they are now doing in a very off-the-radar-screen kind of way:

It isn’t a high-profile bill, but the Global Poverty Act has lit up the conservative blogosphere, and even Rush Limbaugh has gotten into the act.

Quietly approved by the House of Representatives last fall with bipartisan support, the bill, sponsored by Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., would require the president to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy to help reduce extreme global poverty.

Conservative critics, including Limbaugh, Tony Perkins — who heads the Family Research Council — and others, claim that the measure would cost U.S. taxpayers $845 billion over the next dozen or so years. They also charge that it would tie the United States to the United Nations Millennium Declaration, which, among others things, calls for banning “small arms and light weapons” and ratifying the Kyoto global-warming treaty, the International Criminal Court Treaty and the Convention on Biological Diversity […]

Smith says there’s no link and points out that there’s no additional spending mandated in his bill.

He said the attacks weren’t aimed at him but at Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, whom he recruited last year to be the bill’s chief Senate sponsor. Smith is the chairman of the Obama campaign in Washington state.

Limbaugh, according to a transcript of his radio show, last week called the bill an effort to “soak U.S. taxpayers again to fund global, liberal feel-good garbage.”

So it’s not enough that (insert liberal here) will steal our hard-earned money and give it to the undeserving poor in this country, it’s now that (insert liberal here) will steal our hard-earned money and give it to the undeserving poor all over the world. And with the background of “Obama is a Communist” from the far right, and probably worse from various email forwards and other sludge, the pieces fit together. Obama wants to realize Che’s vision and install one world government to destroy the American way of life and make us all wear burqas, even the men, while the lucky duckies in Benin live it up with our cash.

(By the way, isn’t Bush spending a week in Africa, the last place where he can show his face, to tout these kind of “handouts” like investment in decent medical care to stop the spread of AIDS and malaria?)

The progenitor of this “Obama is the Communist Robin Hood” attack that ties it up all in a bow is the same guy who’s been pushing many of the far-right attacks on Obama, including the one that he knew some Communist named Frank in Hawaii.

The dustup began last week when Cliff Kincaid, a columnist for Accuracy in Media (www.aim.org), a conservative news-media watchdog organization, dismissed the bill and linked it to an effort by Democrats to burnish Obama’s legislative credentials. His original column was widely distributed on Web sites ranging from www.fishingbuddy.com to www.capitolhillcoffeehouse.com.

On Wednesday, Kincaid ratcheted up his criticism.

“This is how the Washington game of spending more of your money works,” he wrote. “This is a budget buster that siphons your hard-earned tax dollars to the U.N. and the rest of the world.”

This guy is paid, and probably very well, by the wingnut noise machine to put these things out there into the ether and then find something to make the ridiculous sound plausible.

In fact, if there’s any group that characterizes the behavior of a cult – moving in lockstep, making up wild fantasy stories that they will themselves and others into believing, ignoring mountains of evidence to arrive at their conclusions – it’s the wingnut welfare crowd. Of course, that’s the cult of the “I-Know-Where-My-Bread-Is-Buttered.”

.

You Pass Five People On The Street. One Of Them Still Hearts Bush

by tristero

Bush at 19% approval. I have two reactions:

1. 19% is unbelievably high for this worst of all presidents (to date).

2. Why the #&#(# hasn’t he been impeached?

h/t Duncan.

It’s Not About The Sex

by digby

….it’s about the favors.

Lerxst notices a couple of interesting tid-bits in the NT Times story, like the fact that McCain’s lobbyist campaign manager has been working for free for months. I wonder if he expects anything in return?

And then there’s this classic:

“Unless he gives you special treatment or takes legislative action against his own views, I don’t think his personal and social relationships matter,” said Charles Black, a friend and campaign adviser who has previously lobbied the senator for aviation, broadcasting and tobacco concerns.

snap.

H/T to perlstein

Update: Demosthenes smells a ratfuck.

.

Arrogance Express

by digby

Back in the 2000 campaign when St John the Flyboy was every journalist’s favorite pol, a story emerged about him major sending letters on behalf of a contributor, Paxson Communications, to the FCC.

When The Boston Globe disclosed the Paxson intervention a few weeks after the Claremont summit, McCain handled the disclosure with aplomb, even chutzpah. The chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee argued that he had done nothing wrong and that the suspicion falling on him only reinforced his argument for campaign finance reform. “We’re all tainted,” McCain said. “We’re all under suspicion as long as Washington is awash in special interest money.”

The fanboys in the press loooved that answer. Senator Straight-Talk was just telling like it was, more in sorrow than in anger, showing that he too was subject to the same suspicion that other politicians were. But he, being the driver of the straight-talk express, was naturally above reproach.

Well, apparently there was more to the story. It turns out that McCain had a very cozy relationship with Paxson’s lobbyist, to the extent that some of his staff were worried that he was having an affair with her. (They both deny it, and I could not care less if it’s true.) But whatever it was, they were very close and McCain was apparently doing official favors for her.

The NY Times reports:

Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers. A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, in his offices and aboard a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity. When news organizations reported that Mr. McCain had written letters to government regulators on behalf of the lobbyist’s clients, the former campaign associates said, some aides feared for a time that attention would fall on her involvement. Mr. McCain, 71, and the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, 40, both say they never had a romantic relationship. But to his advisers, even the appearance of a close bond with a lobbyist whose clients often had business before the Senate committee Mr. McCain led threatened the story of redemption and rectitude that defined his political identity. It had been just a decade since an official favor for a friend with regulatory problems had nearly ended Mr. McCain’s political career by ensnaring him in the Keating Five scandal. In the years that followed, he reinvented himself as the scourge of special interests, a crusader for stricter ethics and campaign finance rules, a man of honor chastened by a brush with shame. But the concerns about Mr. McCain’s relationship with Ms. Iseman underscored an enduring paradox of his post-Keating career. Even as he has vowed to hold himself to the highest ethical standards, his confidence in his own integrity has sometimes seemed to blind him to potentially embarrassing conflicts of interest. Mr. McCain promised, for example, never to fly directly from Washington to Phoenix, his hometown, to avoid the impression of self-interest because he sponsored a law that opened the route nearly a decade ago. But like other lawmakers, he often flew on the corporate jets of business executives seeking his support, including the media moguls Rupert Murdoch, Michael R. Bloomberg and Lowell W. Paxson, Ms. Iseman’s client. (Last year he voted to end the practice.)

It goes on to outline just what a hypocrite McCain has been on this subject.

I don’t know if McCain is crooked. But you have to wonder, after his close call with the Keating Five and public association with campaign finance reform, how anyone could be so arrogant as to think he could get away with this stuff if he actually became the Republican nominee? After all we’ve seen of pages and blue dresses and wide stances, it’s nearly impossible to believe that candidates can think they’ll get away with hiding anything like this in this environment.

But apparently, he did. He has bought so fully into his media love that he seems to have believed that he wouldn’t be held to the same standards as other politicians. I guess he thought that nobody could ever believe he’d do anything dishonest. But now that another woman has been injected into this (by GOP operatives, I might add), his whole facade is in danger of crumbling. The press might have been willing to overlook the corruption angle, but the sex angle is just impossible for them to resist.

By the way, as this alleged relationship was happening (or shortly before) John McCain voted to impeach Clinton on both counts. One of those counts had to do with concealing his plan to help Monica Lewinsky land a job.

Update:

This story from December in the Washington Post, gave a preview of this story. It’s interesting that McCain hired Robert bennett to represent him in this matter. Doesn’t that seem like a bit much?

FWIW, the rumor is that another outlet was running a big story on this tomorrow and that’s why the Times finally jumped in.

.

Bang, Bang, Shoot, Shoot

by tristero

I believe him.:

Separately, a Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, dismissed suggestions that the operation was designed to test the nation’s missile defense systems or antisatellite capabilities, or that the effort was to destroy sensitive intelligence equipment.

“This is about reducing the risk to human life on Earth — nothing more,” Mr. Whitman said.

Absolutely. Nothing more. And if you think otherwise, you’re precisely the kind of dirty-minded cynic who, back in the day, thought anyone who bought Playboy was just interested in the pictures.

I mean, really, what has this country come to, when people start suspecting our government of testing its Star Wars defense – which is designed to shoot satellites out of the sky – simply because the government is going to try to shoot a satellite out of the sky? I mean, like how paranoid can you get? What next? Secret CIA torture chambers in friendly countries? Bribing journalists to print stories favorable to the administration? Oooh, scary!!!! As if the government didn’t know better.

Give me a break, folks. Just believe what they tell you. It’s the truth. Really.

The Sloophole

by dday

I need your help.

I know this is a national blog and my work at California’s progressive site Calitics doesn’t usually apply. But if we don’t fight back against this stuff in the states, we’ll end up having to do the same thing nationally.

The situation in California is pretty simple; you have a Republican governor who isn’t as “post-partisan” as advertised, a Democratic majority that is a bit too prone to bending over backwards, and a Republican minority that is batshit insane. Out here we grow our Republicans as anti-tax economic conservatives, with a splash of anti-immigrant rhetoric thrown in, but mainly Norquistian anti-tax “drown the government” types. We have a structural fiscal crisis that is only getting worse, with a budget deficit nearing $16 billion dollars. All of the tricky borrow-and-spend games that Schwarzenegger has played over the years are catching up to him, showing him to actually be a worse fiscal steward than his predecessor Gray Davis. He’s consistently touted a cuts-only approach to solving this budget gap, with practically no revenue additions whatsoever. This despite the fact that the state is perpetually in a state of financial disaster dating back to the property tax revolt of 1978; we simply don’t bring in enough money to cover the vital services needed for a functional society. There’s also this problem that any tax increases require a 2/3 majority, so a tiny sliver of the Legislature can block the desires of the many. As a result the state is falling into the toilet.

Twice in the past week, Republicans have blocked the one policy on which Schwarzenegger and the Democrats agreed on: fixing a loophole that allows yacht owners to avoid paying their sales tax. Let’s go back over that. This is not a tax increase. This is making sure that people who purchase yachts pay the same to the state that any citizen pays when they buy any other item. It’s funny how the loopholes are never for purchases at the 99 Cent store, isn’t it? Yet the Republicans saved the loophole once, got pilloried for it in the press, and promptly blocked it again, and in the most craven way possible. 16 Republicans just took a little walk and opted out of the vote rather than be on the record as down with yacht owners over the sick or the elderly.

Yacht buyers will continue to benefit from a loophole that allows them to avoid sales tax on their boats, after Republicans in the Assembly blocked an effort to close it Tuesday.

Closing the tax loophole — “sloophole” as it has come to be known by Democrats — takes a two-thirds majority vote in each house of the Legislature, which requires some Republicans to get on board. Not enough of them did Tuesday, so on a 47-18 vote by the 80-member Assembly, the move to scuttle the tax benefit failed.

Last week, lawmakers voted to cut schools, healthcare and welfare programs by $2 billion.

“It is unconscionable to cut education and welfare while not closing this loophole,” said Assembly Budget Committee Chairman John Laird (D-Santa Cruz). “Everyone needs to be part of a budget solution, including yacht owners.”

Political experts call this a “gift.” You have the Republican Party prioritizing the interests of yacht owners. Is there any better expression of the conservative movement in our new Gilded Age? Government must be limited, welfare must be limited, but the wealthy must get tax breaks and wealth must be distributed upwards. It’s worthless to even list their tired arguments (rich people would leave the state! We’ll bankrupt the yacht business! Uh, no.), but it’s crucial to understand why the Republicans think they can get away with this. After all, the constituency of yacht-owning tax cheats is relatively small, and the constituency of people who would be outraged at yacht-owning tax cheats is somewhat larger, even in supposedly Republican districts.

The main problem, as Dave Johnson notes, is that the political culture in California is painfully thin.

It is generally understood that the average citizen has been fed enough unanswered anti-tax and anti-government propaganda that they reflexively oppose taxes. (The operative word there is “unanswered.”) But this is a very different thing. This is a special exclusion, just for rich people, that one way or another has to be made up for by the rest of us! Why aren’t the people of California more upset about this?

The only conclusion I can reach is that the Republicans understand that regular people are not going to find out about this! And they may well be correct. Yes, the story was in a few newspapers, but really, who reads newspapers? This is not how large numbers of regular people get their information about politics in California. They get some of it from TV news, but I really fear that most people in California get their information about the issues facing the state from ads that run during prime-time television shows. And I think that conservatives understand this, while progressives/liberals do not quite “get it.”

For example, if regular people were accurately informed about California issue, then people would understand that most of the factors that were used as justifications for recalling Governor Gray Davis are today almost the same with Governor Schwarzenegger. One big difference I see is that the energy companies are not running an ad campaign blaming Governor Schwarzenegger for anything, they way they ran ads blaming Governor Davis for the energy-company-created energy shortage back then.

The problem that Johnson nails is that these depredations consistently go unanswered. The group with the most incentive to fight back against such a thing is the California Democratic Party. But they’re staffed with a bunch of part-time consultants; two of them are heading up this new pro-Hillary 527. So we have a nation-state of 38 million people, almost no state media, and an part-time Democratic opposition, which is fairly content with its legislative majorities and doesn’t have the manpower to do much of anything else.

This really frustrates me. We actually have the opportunity in 2008 to get very close to 2/3 majorities in both chambers of the Legislature and get rid of this thuddingly stupid 2/3 requirement once and for all, and considering that the top of the ticket will be bringing in all these new voters, it’s a very realizable goal. But you have to make the Republicans pay for their policies.

In true “we are the change we’ve been looking for” fashion, I put together a short message from the California Yachting Association thanking the state GOP for saving their tax loophole. The total budget for the ad was about $2.00 worth of gas:

The California Republican Party’s phone number is 916.448.9496. I’m asking you to call them, tell them you’re a yacht owner, and thank them for sticking up for them instead of those lucky duckie poor people or children or the sick.

My point is that it’s unbelievably easy to put Republicans in a corner on this type of stuff. And there’s a great deal of value in framing your opponent early and often. Literally nobody knows about the type of shenanigans the Republicans here are pulling, like the “sloophole”. If the California Democratic Party sees the “proof of concept,” that there are very simple ways to get this message out, maybe they’ll actually put some resources above my $2.00 in gas money toward it. A cable buy or radio ads could be very effective. So could showing up at every event with a Republican for the next year in a boat captain’s hat and giant cigarette holder and blue blazer and making a big stink out of the state GOP’s love for yacht owners (their state convention is at the Hyatt Embarcadero in San Francisco this weekend, if anyone wants to have some fun). This was the model of the only successful progressive campaign in recent memory. The nurses and firefighters and policemen hounded Arnold Schwarzenegger at every campaign stop in 2005, and destroyed his right-wing initiatives.

If it takes a grassroots strategy, so be it. But without informing voters about this kind of nonsense, and holding them accountable, nothing will get done.

So could you take a minute and call the California Republican Party for me?

916.448.9496

Contact form for the CRP website.

Thanks.

.

MSNBC No Evil

by digby

Apparently MSNBC’s agenda is to be as obnoxious as possible at least half the time.

Yesterday, we had two examples of jackass style “journalism” starting with Tucker Carlson, whose ratings are so low rated that his Youtubes actually have more viewers than his show, hosting his BFF, long time GOP dirty trickster Roger Stone. Roger, you may recall has formed a neat new political group called “Citizens United Not Timid, a 527 Organization To Educate The American Public About What Hillary Clinton Is.” (I’m sure the t-shirts are selling briskly.)

Here he is calling Hillary a hack who believes in virtually nothing (which is actually mild considering the t-shirts) — and raising the possibility of Barack being assassinated if he meets with foreign leaders. Really edifying stuff:

And then we have Matthews, the man who just a week ago publicly proclaimed that he gets a zing up his leg when he hears Obama speak, morphing into Sean Hannity and browbeating some poor obscure state senator from Texas for not knowing Barack’s legislative record:

CNN is generally better, although I must say that one of the blessings of the primary coming to a close with Senator Obama as the nominee would be that alleged Hillary expert Carl Bernstein could go back to drinking alone in front of the TV instead of appearing on it.

Here’s a little homework assignment from Digby: watch the movie “Network” again. We all need to get in shape for the general. Cable news actually seems to be getting worse.

.