Posted November 2, 2008 5:47 PM
by Jason George
COLUMBUS, Ohio -- At Gov. Sarah Palin's Sunday rallies, she's earned big responses by repeating the line that an independent organization has found that Sen. Barack Obama's proposed policies "would destroy 6 million jobs over the next decade."
A quick search though finds that the only thing destroyed is the truth in that statement.
The facts: The "independent organization" Palin cites is actually the Center for Data Analysis, which is part of The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank.
Further, the figure is what the Heritage Foundation believes would be the amount of potential jobs not created if Obama changes tax law (including repealing the Bush tax cuts.)
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27350530/
Woman retracts allegation she was assaulted for supporting Republican
msnbc.com staff and news service reports
updated 4:32 p.m. ET, Fri., Oct. 24, 2008
PITTSBURGH - A John McCain volunteer in Pittsburgh who said she was robbed and sexually assaulted because of her political views has admitted to fabricating the story and will be charged, police said Friday.
20-year-old Ashley Todd, of College Station, Texas, "stated that she made up the story which snowballed and got out of control," Pittsburgh police said in a statement, adding that she would be arrested and charged with filing a false police report.
"Ms. Todd stated that she was not robbed and there is no 6'4" black male attacker," the police added. "She indicated that she has had a prior mental problems and she does not remember how the backward letter "B" got on her face."
Todd had earlier agreed to take a polygraph test due to inconsistencies in her statements.
Among other things, police said photos and bank card information from an automated teller machine where the college student claimed she was robbed do not show her using the machine at the time, police said.
Other differences in her accounts are whether she lost consciousness, whether she remembers handing over money and how the man assaulted her, police said.
GOP candidates called herThe report of the attack prompted the Republican presidential candidate and his running mate, Sarah Palin, to call Todd expressing their concern. Barack Obama's campaign also issued a statement wishing Todd well and hoping the attacker would be swiftly brought to justice.
The Associated Press could not immediately locate Todd or her family.
Ethan Eilon, executive director of the College Republican National Committee, told reporters that Todd worked in New York for several months before moving to Pennsylvania two weeks ago to continue working for the group.
Eilon declined to comment on the investigation Friday or to help The Associated Press contact Todd. "We think this girl has endured enough and that this is going to be something for her and her family to work through," Eilon said before the arrest was announced.
In her initial account, Richard said, Todd attempted to use the ATM when the man approached her from behind, put a knife with a 4- to 5-inch blade to her throat and demanded money. She told police she handed the assailant $60 and walked away.
Todd told investigators that she suspected the man then noticed a John McCain sticker on her car, became angry and punched her in the back of the head, knocking her to the ground and telling her "you are going to be a Barack supporter," police said in a statement.
She said he continued to punch and kick her while threatening "to teach her a lesson for being a McCain supporter," police said. She said he then sat on her chest, pinned her hands down with his knees and scratched a backward letter "B" into her face using what she believed to be a dull knife.
The woman told police she didn't seek medical attention, but instead went to a friend's apartment nearby and called police about 45 minutes later.
Posted on Sun, Oct. 19, 2008
His aim is untrue in too many areas, so a longtime Republican is voting for Obama.
By Michael Smerconish - Inquirer
Inquirer Currents Columnist
I've decided.
My conclusion comes after reading the candidates' memoirs and campaign platforms, attending both party conventions, interviewing both men multiple times, and watching all primary and general-election debates.
John McCain is an honorable man who has served his country well. But he will not get my vote. For the first time since registering as a Republican 28 years ago, I'm voting for a Democrat for president. I may have been an appointee in the George H.W. Bush administration, and master of ceremonies for George W. Bush in 2004, but last Saturday I stood amid the crowd at an Obama event in North Philadelphia.
Five considerations have moved me:
Terrorism. The candidates disagree as to where to prosecute the war against Islamic fundamentalists. Barack Obama is correct in saying the front line in that battle is not Iraq, it's the Afghan-Pakistan border. Osama bin Laden crossed that border from Tora Bora in December 2001, and we stopped pursuit. The Bush administration outsourced the hunt for bin Laden and instead invaded Iraq.
No one in Iraq caused the death of 3,000 Americans on 9/11. Our invasion was based on a false predicate, so we have no business being there, regardless of whether the surge is working. Our focus must be the tribal-ruled FATA region in Pakistan. Only recently has our military engaged al-Qaeda there in operations that mirror those Obama was ridiculed for recommending in August 2007.
Last spring, Obama told me: "It's not that I was opposed to war [in Iraq]. It's that I felt we had a war that we had not finished." Even Sen. Joe Lieberman conceded to me last Friday that "the headquarters of our opposition, our enemies today" is the FATA.
Economy. We face economic problems that are incomprehensible to most Americans, certainly they are to me. This is a time to covet intellect, and that begins at the top. Jack Bogle, the legendary founder of the Vanguard Group, told me recently that McCain's assertion that the fundamentals of the economy were "strong" was the "stupidest statement of 2008." In light of the unprecedented volatility in the market, who can dispute Bogle's characterization and the lack of understanding that McCain's assessment portends?
VP. I opined here that Sarah Palin demonstrated the capacity to be president in her speech to the Republican convention. Sadly, there has been no further exhibition of her abilities, and she remains an unknown quantity. We are left questioning the judgment of a candidate who bypassed his reported preferred choices, Lieberman and former Gov. Tom Ridge, and instead yielded to the whims of the periphery of his party. With two wars and a crumbling economy, Palin is too big of a risk to be a heartbeat away from a presidency held by a 72-year-old man who has battled melanoma. Advantage Joe Biden.
Opportunity. In a speech delivered on Father's Day, Obama lamented that too many fathers are missing from the lives of too many children and mothers. Look no further than Philadelphia for proof that the nation has a fatherhood problem at the root of its firearms crisis. And no demographic is affected by this confluence of factors like the black community. Among the many elements needed to address this crisis are role models, individuals whom urban youth can aspire to emulate. Little more than a year ago, Charles Barkley told me: "I want young black kids to see Barack on television every day. . . . We need to see more blacks who are intelligent, articulate, and who carry themselves with great dignity." Obama can be that man.
Hope. Wednesday morning will come and an Obama presidency holds the greatest chance for unifying us here at home and restoring our prestige around the globe. The campaigns have foretold the kind of presidency we can expect from each candidate. Last Friday in Lakeville, Minn., McCain himself had to explain to a supporter who was "scared" of an Obama presidency that those fears were unfounded. Another told McCain that Obama was untrustworthy because he is an "Arab." Those exchanges were a predictable byproduct of ads against Obama featuring tag lines such as "Too Risky for America" and "Dangerous," and a failure to rein in individuals at McCain events who highlighted Obama's middle name, all against a background of Internet lore.
Last Saturday at Progress Plaza, I heard Obama say: "The American people aren't looking for somebody to divide this country; the American people are looking for someone to lead this country."
What people do for their 15 minutes amazes me!!
TOLEDO, Ohio - “Joe the plumber,” the new face of middle-class America after Sen. John McCain made him famous in Wednesday night’s presidential debate, isn’t technically a plumber, and he probably wouldn’t be adversely affected by Sen. Barack Obama’s tax plan. But the issues he raises are important and worth examining for their impact on small businesses.
Joe the plumber — Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, 34, of suburban Toledo, Ohio — is the first to say that he’s not the story and that no one should listen to him when it comes to tax policy.
“I just hope I’m not making too much of a fool of myself and can get some type of message out there as far as, you know, really watch actions and learn for yourself,” Wurzelbacher said Thursday outside his home. “Don’t take other people’s opinions.”
Wurzelbacher first came to attention over the weekend, when he engaged Obama, the Democratic presidential nominee, in a six-minute discussion of tax policy at a rally in Holland, Ohio. He told Obama that he was a plumber and was hoping to buy his boss’s business, which he said made $250,000 to $280,000 a year. He was concerned, he said, that Obama’s economic proposals would mean he’d be kicked into a higher tax bracket.
Wednesday night, McCain adopted Wurzelbacher as the representative of struggling middle-class Americans, addressing many of his comments directly to “Joe the plumber,” whom he misidentified as “Joe Wurzelburger.”
“The real winner last night was Joe the plumber. Joe’s the man,” McCain said Thursday at a campaign rally in Downington, Pa. “He won, and small businesses won across America. They won because Americans are not going to let Senator Obama raise taxes in a tough economy.”
‘There’s a lot I’ve got to learn’Legally speaking, Wurzelbacher isn’t a plumber, because he isn’t licensed by Toledo, Lucas County or the state of Ohio. A representative of the Toledo Building Inspection Division said a plumber must be registered with the state and only then can apply for a city plumbing contractor’s license.
Wurzelbacher said he worked under the license held by his boss, Al Newell of Newell Plumbing and Heating Co. of Toledo. Newell is a licensed plumbing contractor in Toledo, records show. But anyone working under Newell should have a journeyman’s plumbing license or an apprenticeship license, officials said.
Building Inspection officials said Newell was responsible for making sure that anyone working under him was licensed. The Toledo Plumbing Board of Control may consider sanctions against Wurzelbacher or Newell, officials told NBC affiliate WNWO of Toledo.
“There’s a lot I’ve got to learn” about the plumbing business, Wurzelbacher said Thursday.
Wurzelbacher also acknowledged that he had no specific plans for buying Newell’s business, saying he and Newell had simply talked about the idea from time to time. He might have difficulty making the purchase: Court records from his divorce show that Wurzelbacher made $40,000 in 2006.
Even if he did buy Newell Plumbing and Heating, Obama’s tax plan wouldn’t affect him. While Wurzelbacher told Obama that the business would be taxed at a higher rate because it grossed more than $250,000 a year, Ohio business records show the company’s estimated total annual revenue as only $100,000.
In any event, Obama’s tax plan specifies that the higher rate would apply only to revenue above the $250,000 threshold. For a company with revenue of $280,000, the top end of Wurzelbacher’s supposition, only the extra $30,000 would be taxed at a higher rate.
Joe says Obama would be ‘hurting others’Analysts calculated that the extra tax would amount to $900, which would likely be more than offset by separate provisions of Obama’s plan: a 50 percent tax credit for health care and elimination of the capital gains tax for small businesses.
“I’d have to look at your particular business, but you might end up paying lower taxes under my plan and my approach than under John McCain’s,” Obama told Wurzelbacher during their exchange last weekend.
At the time, Wurzelbacher replied, “Oh, yeah, I understand that.” But by Thursday, he had reconsidered.
“If you believed (Obama), I'd be receiving his tax cuts, but I don’t look at it that way,” he said. “He’d still be hurting others.”
Wurzelbacher, a registered Republican, refused to say whom he would vote for, insisting that “I want the American people to vote for who they want to vote for. I just want them to be informed when they make that vote.”
But he hinted that his choice would be McCain, the GOP standard-bearer, whom he said it would be “an honor” to meet. Asked about other issues by a covey of curious reporters, Wurzelbacher voiced strongly Republican opinions.
“Social Security’s a joke,” he said. “I have parents. I don’t need another set of parents called the government. Let me take my money and invest it how I please.”
On immigration: “I wish our borders were closed.”
And on the war in Iraq, which McCain has strongly supported: “I’m not sorry we’re in Iraq. ... It’s made us safer. I absolutely believe that.”
By JIM RUTENBERG
Published: October 12, 2008
The most persistent falsehood about Senator Barack Obama’s background first hit in 2004 just two weeks after the Democratic convention speech that arguably set him on the path to his presidential candidacy: “Obama is a Muslim who has concealed his religion.”
That statement was contained in a press release and it spun a complex tale about the alleged ancestry of Mr. Obama, who is Christian.
The press release was picked up by the conservative FreeRepublic.com Web site and spread virally and steadily as others elaborated on its claims over the years in e-mail messages, Web sites and, ultimately, books. It continues to be an engine that drives other false rumors about Mr. Obama’s background to this day, with one finding national, public voice on Friday, when a woman told Senator John McCain at a town-hall-style meeting, “I have read about him,” and “he’s an Arab.” Mr. McCain corrected her.
Until this month, the man who is widely credited with starting the cyber-whisper campaign that still dogs Mr. Obama was a secondary character in news reports, with deep explorations of his background largely confined to liberal blogs where he is a bête noir.
But an appearance in a documentary-style program on the Fox News Channel watched by three million people last week thrust the man, Andy Martin, and his past into the foreground. The Fox program allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government.
An examination of legal documents and election filings, and interviews with those from Mr. Martin’s past, revealed a man with a history of scintillating if not always factual claims, who has left a trail of animosity – including anti-Jewish comments -- among political leaders, lawyers and judges in three states over the course of more than 30 years.
A law school graduate, his admission to the Illinois state bar was blocked in the 1970s after a psychiatric finding of “moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.” Though he is not a licensed lawyer, Mr. Martin went on to become a prodigious filer of lawsuits, and he also made various unsuccessful attempts to run for public office in three states, as well as for president at least twice, in 1988 and 2000. Based in Chicago, he now identifies himself as an author and writer who focuses on his anti-Obama Web site and press releases.
Mr. Martin, in a series of interviews, did not dispute his influence in Obama rumors.
“Everybody uses my research as a take off point,” Mr. Martin said, adding, however, that some take his writings “and exaggerate them to suit their own fantasies.”
As to his background, he said, “I’m a colorful person, there’s always somebody who has a legitimate cause in their mind to be angry with me.”
When questions were raised last week about Mr. Martin’s appearance and claims on “Hannity’s America” on Fox News, the program’s producer said his views were expressed as his opinion and not necessarily fact, and, as such, were not unwarranted.
It was not his first turn on national television.
The CBS News program “48 Hours” devoted an hour-long program to his legal prowess in 1993 entitled, “See You in Court; Civil War, Anthony Martin Clogs Legal System with Frivolous Lawsuits.” He has filed so many lawsuits – and paperwork containing anti-Semitic slurs – a judge barred him from doing so in any federal court house without preliminary approval.
He prepared a run for Congress in Connecticut – where paperwork for one of his campaign committees listed as one purpose “to exterminate Jew Power.” He ran for the Florida State Senate and the United States Senate in Illinois. When running for president in 1999, he showed a television advertisement in New Hampshire that accused George W. Bush of cocaine use.
In the mid-1990s he was jailed in relation to an assault case in Florida.
His newfound prominence, and the persistence of his line of political attack -- updated regularly on his Web site and through press releases -- amazes those from his past.
“Well, that’s just a bookend for me,” said Tom Slade, a former chairman of the Florida Republican Party who says the party spent hundreds of thousands of dollars defending against lawsuits Mr. Martin brought for Mr. Slade’s refusal to support his bid for state office. “He’s crazy as a run-over dog. But he’s fearless.”
Given Mr. Obama’s unique background, which was the focus of his first book, it was perhaps bound to become fodder for some opposed to his candidacy.
Mr. Obama was raised mostly by his white mother, an atheist, and his grandparents, who were Protestant, in Hawaii. He hardly knew his father, a Kenyan from a Muslim family who variously considered himself atheist or agnostic, Mr. Obama wrote. For a few childhood years Mr. Obama lived in Indonesia with a stepfather he described as a nonpracticing Muslim.
Theories about Mr. Obama’s background have taken on a life of their own. But every independent analyst seeking the origins of the cyberspace attack winds up back at Mr. Martin’s first press release, posted on the Free Republic Web site in August 2004.
Its general outlines have turned up in a host of works that have expounded falsely on Mr. Obama’s heritage or supposed attempts to conceal it, including “Obama Nation,” the widely discredited best-seller about Mr. Obama by Jerome S. Corsi. Mr. Corsi, who has made anti-Muslim and anti-Catholic slurs for which he later apologized, opens with a quote from Mr. Martin.
“Martin gets credit for the idea of, call it ‘the sound bite narrative mien,”’ said Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University who has investigated the e-mail campaign’s circulation and origins. “What he’s generating gets picked up in other places, and it’s an example of how the Internet has given power to sources we would have never taken seriously at another point in time.”
Ms. Allen said that Mr. Martin’s original work found amplification in 2006, when a man named Ted Sampley wrote an article painting Mr. Obama as a secret practitioner of Islam. Quoting liberally from Mr. Martin, the article circulated on the Internet, and its contents eventually found their way into various e-mail messages, particularly an added claim that Mr. Obama had attended “Jakarta’s Muslim Wahabbi schools. Wahabbism is the radical teaching that created the Muslim terrorists who are now waging jihad on the rest of the world.”
Mr. Obama for two years attended a Catholic school in Indonesia, where he was taught about the Bible, he wrote in “Dreams of My Father,” and for two years went to an Indonesian public school open to all religions where he was taught about the Koran.
Mr. Sampley, coincidentally, is a Vietnam veteran and longtime opponent of Senator John McCain and Senator John Kerry, both of whom he accused of ignoring his claims that American prisoners were left behind in Vietnam. He previously portrayed Mr. McCain as a “Manchurian candidate” and again opposed him this year in a primary-season campaign that was roundly denounced as a smear.
Speaking of Mr. Martin’s influence on his Obama writings, Mr. Sampley said, “I keyed off of his work.”
It is perhaps ironic that Mr. Martin’s depictions of Mr. Obama as a secret Muslim have found resonance among some Jewish voters who have received e-mail messages containing various versions of his initial theory, often by new authors and with new twists.
In his original press release Mr. Martin wrote that he was personally “a strong supporter of the Muslim community.” But, he wrote of Mr. Obama, “It may well be that his concealment is meant to endanger Israel,” and, “His Muslim religion would obviously raise serious questions in many Jewish circles.”
Yet in various court cases, Mr. Martin had impugned Jews.
A motion he filed in a 1983 bankruptcy case called the overseeing judge “a crooked, slimy Jew who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race.”
In another motion, filed in 1983, Mr. Martin wrote, “I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did.”
During an interview, Mr. Martin denied some statements against Jews attributed to him in court papers, blaming malicious judges for inserting them.
But in his “48 Hours” interview in 1993 he affirmed a different anti-Semitic portion of the affidavit that included the line about the Holocaust, saying, “The record speaks for itself.”
On Friday, when asked about an assertion in his court papers that “Jews, historically and in daily living, act through clans and in wolf pack syndrome,” he said, “That one sort of rings a bell.”
He said he was not anti-Semitic. “I was trying to show that everybody in the bankruptcy court was Jewish and I was not Jewish,” he said, “and I was being victimized by religious bias.”
In discussing his denied admission to the Illinois bar, Mr. Martin said the psychiatric exam listing him as having a “moderately severe personality defect” was spitefully written by an evaluator he clashed with.
Kitty Bennett contributed reporting.
A version of this article appeared in print on October 13, 2008, on page A1 of the New York edition.
Extremists Mark Chryson and Steve Stoll helped launch Palin’s political career in Alaska, and in return had influence over policy. “Her door was open,” says Chryson — and still is
By Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert
Oct. 10, 2008 PALMER, Alaska — | On the afternoon of Sept. 24 in downtown Palmer, Alaska, as the sun began to sink behind the snowcapped mountains that flank the picturesque Mat-Su Valley, 51-year-old Mark Chryson sat for an hour on a park bench, reveling in tales of his days as chairman of the Alaska Independence Party. The stocky, gray-haired computer technician waxed nostalgic about quixotic battles to eliminate taxes, support the “traditional family” and secede from the United States.
So long as Alaska remained under the boot of the federal government, said Chryson, the AIP had to stand on guard to stymie a New World Order. He invited a Salon reporter to see a few items inside his pickup truck that were intended for his personal protection. “This here is my attack dog,” he said with a chuckle, handing the reporter an exuberant 8-pound papillon from his passenger seat. “Her name is Suzy.” Then he pulled a 9-millimeter Makarov PM pistol — once the standard-issue sidearm for Soviet cops — out of his glove compartment. “I’ve got enough weaponry to raise a small army in my basement,” he said, clutching the gun in his palm. “Then again, so do most Alaskans.” But Chryson added a message of reassurance to residents of that faraway place some Alaskans call “the 48.” “We want to go our separate ways,” he said, “but we are not going to kill you.”
Though Chryson belongs to a fringe political party, one that advocates the secession of Alaska from the Union, and that organizes with other like-minded secessionist movements from Canada to the Deep South, he is not without peculiar influence in state politics, especially the rise of Sarah Palin. An obscure figure outside of Alaska, Chryson has been a political fixture in the hometown of the Republican vice-presidential nominee for over a decade. During the 1990s, when Chryson directed the AIP, he and another radical right-winger, Steve Stoll, played a quiet but pivotal role in electing Palin as mayor of Wasilla and shaping her political agenda afterward. Both Stoll and Chryson not only contributed to Palin’s campaign financially, they played major behind-the-scenes roles in the Palin camp before, during and after her victory.
Palin backed Chryson as he successfully advanced a host of anti-tax, pro-gun initiatives, including one that altered the state Constitution’s language to better facilitate the formation of anti-government militias. She joined in their vendetta against several local officials they disliked, and listened to their advice about hiring. She attempted to name Stoll, a John Birch Society activist known in the Mat-Su Valley as “Black Helicopter Steve,” to an empty Wasilla City Council seat. “Every time I showed up her door was open,” said Chryson. “And that policy continued when she became governor.”
When Chryson first met Sarah Palin, however, he didn’t really trust her politically. It was the early 1990s, when he was a member of a local libertarian pressure group called SAGE, or Standing Against Government Excess. (SAGE’s founder, Tammy McGraw, was Palin’s birth coach.) Palin was a leader in a pro-sales-tax citizens group called WOW, or Watch Over Wasilla, earning a political credential before her 1992 campaign for City Council. Though he was impressed by her interpersonal skills, Chryson greeted Palin’s election warily, thinking she was too close to the Democrats on the council and too pro-tax.
But soon, Palin and Chryson discovered they could be useful to each other. Palin would be running for mayor, while Chryson was about to take over the chairmanship of the Alaska Independence Party, which at its peak in 1990 had managed to elect a governor.
The AIP was born of the vision of “Old Joe” Vogler, a hard-bitten former gold miner who hated the government of the United States almost as much as he hated wolves and environmentalists. His resentment peaked during the early 1970s when the federal government began installing Alaska’s oil and gas pipeline. Fueled by raw rage — “The United States has made a colony of Alaska,” he told author John McPhee in 1977 — Vogler declared a maverick candidacy for the governorship in 1982. Though he lost, Old Joe became a force to be reckoned with, as well as a constant source of amusement for Alaska’s political class. During a gubernatorial debate in 1982, Vogler proposed using nuclear weapons to obliterate the glaciers blocking roadways to Juneau. “There’s gold under there!” he exclaimed.
Vogler made another failed run for the governor’s mansion in 1986. But the AIP’s fortunes shifted suddenly four years later when Vogler convinced Richard Nixon’s former interior secretary, Wally Hickel, to run for governor under his party’s banner. Hickel coasted to victory, outflanking a moderate Republican and a centrist Democrat. An archconservative Republican running under the AIP candidate, Jack Coghill, was elected lieutenant governor.
Hickel’s subsequent failure as governor to press for a vote on Alaskan independence rankled Old Joe. With sponsorship from the Islamic Republic of Iran, Vogler was scheduled to present his case for Alaskan secession before the United Nations General Assembly in the late spring of 1993. But before he could, Old Joe’s long, strange political career ended tragically that May when he was murdered by a fellow secessionist.
Hickel rejoined the Republican Party the year after Vogler’s death and didn’t run for reelection. Lt. Gov. Coghill’s campaign to succeed him as the AIP candidate for governor ended in disaster; he peeled away just enough votes from the Republican, Jim Campbell, to throw the gubernatorial election to Democrat Tony Knowles.
Despite the disaster, Coghill hung on as AIP chairman for three more years. When he was asked to resign in 1997, Mark Chryson replaced him. Chryson pursued a dual policy of cozying up to secessionist and right-wing groups in Alaska and elsewhere while also attempting to replicate the AIP’s success with Hickel in infiltrating the mainstream.
Unlike some radical right-wingers, Chryson doesn’t put forward his ideas freighted with anger or paranoia. And in a state where defense of gun and property rights often takes on a real religious fervor, Chryson was able to present himself as a typical Alaskan.
He rose through party ranks by reducing the AIP’s platform to a single page that “90 percent of Alaskans could agree with.” This meant scrubbing the old platform of what Chryson called “racist language” while accommodating the state’s growing Christian right movement by emphasizing the AIP’s commitment to the “traditional family.”
“The AIP is very family-oriented,” Chryson explained. “We’re for the traditional family — daddy, mommy, kids — because we all know that it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. And we don’t care if Heather has two mommies. That’s not a traditional family.”
Chryson further streamlined the AIP’s platform by softening its secessionist language. Instead of calling for immediate separation from the United States, the platform now demands a vote on independence.
Yet Chryson maintains that his party remains committed to full independence. “The Alaskan Independence Party has got links to almost every independence-minded movement in the world,” Chryson exclaimed. “And Alaska is not the only place that’s about separation. There’s at least 30 different states that are talking about some type of separation from the United States.”
Next page: The War of Northern Aggression, or the Civil War, or the War Between the States — however you want to refer to it — was not about slavery
This has meant rubbing shoulders and forging alliances with outright white supremacists and far-right theocrats, particularly those who dominate the proceedings at such gatherings as the North American Secessionist conventions, which AIP delegates have attended in recent years. The AIP’s affiliation with neo-Confederate organizations is motivated as much by ideological affinity as by organizational convenience. Indeed, Chryson makes no secret of his sympathy for the Lost Cause. “Should the Confederate states have been allowed to separate and go their peaceful ways?” Chryson asked rhetorically. “Yes. The War of Northern Aggression, or the Civil War, or the War Between the States — however you want to refer to it — was not about slavery, it was about states’ rights.”
Another far-right organization with whom the AIP has long been aligned is Howard Phillips’ militia-minded Constitution Party. The AIP has been listed as the Constitution Party’s state affiliate since the late 1990s, and it has endorsed the Constitution Party’s presidential candidates (Michael Peroutka and Chuck Baldwin) in the past two elections.
The Constitution Party boasts an openly theocratic platform that reads, “It is our goal to limit the federal government to its delegated, enumerated, Constitutional functions and to restore American jurisprudence to its original Biblical common-law foundations.” In its 1990s incarnation as the U.S. Taxpayers Party, it was on the front lines in promoting the “militia” movement, and a significant portion of its membership comprises former and current militia members.
At its 1992 convention, the AIP hosted both Phillips — the USTP’s presidential candidate — and militia-movement leader Col. James “Bo” Gritz, who was campaigning for president under the banner of the far-right Populist Party. According to Chryson, AIP regulars heavily supported Gritz, but the party deferred to Phillips’ presence and issued no official endorsements.
In Wasilla, the AIP became powerful by proxy — because of Chryson and Stoll’s alliance with Sarah Palin. Chryson and Stoll had found themselves in constant opposition to policies of Wasilla’s Democratic mayor, who started his three-term, nine-year tenure in 1987. By 1992, Chryson and Stoll had begun convening regular protests outside City Council. Their demonstrations invariably involved grievances against any and all forms of “socialist government,” from city planning to public education. Stoll shared Chryson’s conspiratorial views: “The rumor was that he had wrapped his guns in plastic and buried them in his yard so he could get them after the New World Order took over,” Stein told a reporter.
Chryson did not trust Palin when she joined the City Council in 1992. He claimed that she was handpicked by Democratic City Council leaders and by Wasilla’s Democratic mayor, John Stein, to rubber-stamp their tax hike proposals. “When I first met her,” he said, “I thought she was extremely left. But I’ve watched her slowly as she’s become more pronounced in her conservative ideology.”
Palin was well aware of Chryson’s views. “She knew my beliefs,” Chryson said. “The entire state knew my beliefs. I wasn’t afraid of being on the news, on camera speaking my views.”
But Chryson believes she trusted his judgment because he accurately predicted what life on the City Council would be like. “We were telling her, ‘This is probably what’s going to happen,’” he said. “‘The city is going to give this many people raises, they’re going to pave everybody’s roads, and they’re going to pave the City Council members’ roads.’ We couldn’t have scripted it better because everything we predicted came true.”
After intense evangelizing by Chryson and his allies, they claimed Palin as a convert. “When she started taking her job seriously,” Chryson said, “the people who put her in as the rubber stamp found out the hard way that she was not going to go their way.” In 1994, Sarah Palin attended the AIP’s statewide convention. In 1995, her husband, Todd, changed his voter registration to AIP. Except for an interruption of a few months, he would remain registered was an AIP member until 2002, when he changed his registration to undeclared.
In 1996, Palin decided to run against John Stein as the Republican candidate for mayor of Wasilla. While Palin pushed back against Stein’s policies, particularly those related to funding public works, Chryson said he and Steve Stoll prepared the groundwork for her mayoral campaign.
Chryson and Stoll viewed Palin’s ascendancy as a vehicle for their own political ambitions. “She got support from these guys,” Stein remarked. “I think smart politicians never utter those kind of radical things, but they let other people do it for them. I never recall Sarah saying she supported the militia or taking a public stand like that. But these guys were definitely behind Sarah, thinking she was the more conservative choice.”
“They worked behind the scenes,” said Stein. “I think they had a lot of influence in terms of helping with the back-scatter negative campaigning.”
Indeed, Chryson boasted that he and his allies urged Palin to focus her campaign on slashing character-based attacks. For instance, Chryson advised Palin to paint Stein as a sexist who had told her “to just sit there and look pretty” while she served on Wasilla’s City Council. Though Palin never made this accusation, her 1996 campaign for mayor was the most negative Wasilla residents had ever witnessed.
While Palin played up her total opposition to the sales tax and gun control — the two hobgoblins of the AIP — mailers spread throughout the town portraying her as “the Christian candidate,” a subtle suggestion that Stein, who is Lutheran, might be Jewish. “I watched that campaign unfold, bringing a level of slime our community hadn’t seen until then,” recalled Phil Munger, a local music teacher who counts himself as a close friend of Stein.
“This same group [Stoll and Chryson] also [publicly] challenged me on whether my wife and I were married because she had kept her maiden name,” Stein bitterly recalled. “So we literally had to produce a marriage certificate. And as I recall, they said, ‘Well, you could have forged that.’”
When Palin won the election, the men who had once shouted anti-government slogans outside City Hall now had a foothold inside the mayor’s office. Palin attempted to pay back her newfound pals during her first City Council meeting as mayor. In that meeting, on Oct. 14, 1996, she appointed Stoll to one of the City Council’s two newly vacant seats. But Palin was blocked by the single vote of then-Councilman Nick Carney, who had endured countless rancorous confrontations with Stoll and considered him a “violent” influence on local politics. Though Palin considered consulting attorneys about finding another means of placing Stoll on the council, she was ultimately forced to back down and accept a compromise candidate.
Emboldened by his nomination by Mayor Palin, Stoll later demanded she fire Wasilla’s museum director, John Cooper, a personal enemy he longed to sabotage. Palin obliged, eliminating Cooper’s position in short order. “Gotcha, Cooper!” Stoll told the deposed museum director after his termination, as Cooper told a reporter for the New York Times. “And it only cost me a campaign contribution.” Stoll, who donated $1,000 to Palin’s mayoral campaign, did not respond to numerous requests for an interview. Palin has blamed budget concerns for Cooper’s departure.
Next page: “I think there was only one time when I wasn’t able to talk to her and that was because she was in a meeting”
The following year, when Carney proposed a local gun-control measure, Palin organized with Chryson to smother the nascent plan in its cradle. Carney’s proposed ordinance would have prohibited residents from carrying guns into schools, bars, hospitals, government offices and playgrounds. Infuriated by the proposal that Carney viewed as a common-sense public-safety measure, Chryson and seven allies stormed a July 1997 council meeting.
With the bill still in its formative stages, Carney was not even ready to present it to the council, let alone conduct public hearings on it. He and other council members objected to the ad-hoc hearing as “a waste of time.” But Palin — in plain violation of council rules and norms — insisted that Chryson testify, stating, according to the minutes, that “she invites the public to speak on any issue at any time.”
When Carney tried later in the meeting to have the ordinance discussed officially at the following regular council meeting, he couldn’t even get a second. His proposal died that night, thanks to Palin and her extremist allies.
“A lot of it was the ultra-conservative far right that is against everything in government, including taxes,” recalled Carney. “A lot of it was a personal attack on me as being anti-gun, and a personal attack on anybody who deigned to threaten their authority to carry a loaded firearm wherever they pleased. That was the tenor of it. And it was being choreographed by Steve Stoll and the mayor.”
Asked if he thought it was Palin who had instigated the turnout, he replied: “I know it was.”
By Chryson’s account, he and Palin also worked hand-in-glove to slash property taxes and block a state proposal that would have taken money for public programs from the Permanent Fund Dividend, or the oil and gas fund that doles out annual payments to citizens of Alaska. Palin endorsed Chryson’s unsuccessful initiative to move the state Legislature from Juneau to Wasilla. She also lent her support to Chryson’s crusade to alter the Alaska Constitution’s language on gun rights so cities and counties could not impose their own restrictions. “It took over 10 years to get that language written in,” Chryson said. “But Sarah [Palin] was there supporting it.”
“With Sarah as a mayor,” said Chryson, “there were a number of times when I just showed up at City Hall and said, ‘Hey, Sarah, we need help.’ I think there was only one time when I wasn’t able to talk to her and that was because she was in a meeting.”
Chryson says the door remains open now that Palin is governor. (Palin’s office did not respond to Salon’s request for an interview.) While Palin has been more circumspect in her dealings with groups like the AIP as she has risen through the political ranks, she has stayed in touch.
When Palin ran for governor in 2006, marketing herself as a fresh-faced reformer determined to crush the GOP’s ossified power structure, she made certain to appear at the AIP’s state convention. To burnish her maverick image, she also tapped one-time AIP member and born-again Republican Walter Hickel as her campaign co-chair. Hickel barnstormed the state for Palin, hailing her support for an “all-Alaska” liquefied gas pipeline, a project first promoted in 2002 by an AIP gubernatorial candidate named Nels Anderson. When Palin delivered her victory speech on election night, Hickel stood beaming by her side. “I made her governor,” he boasted afterward. Two years later, Hickel has endorsed Palin’s bid for vice president.
Just months before Palin burst onto the national stage as McCain’s vice-presidential nominee, she delivered a videotaped address to the AIP’s annual convention. Her message was scrupulously free of secessionist rhetoric, but complementary nonetheless. “I share your party’s vision of upholding the Constitution of our great state,” Palin told the assembly of AIP delegates. “My administration remains focused on reining in government growth so individual liberty can expand. I know you agree with that … Keep up the good work and God bless you.”
When Palin became the Republican vice-presidential nominee, her attendance of the 1994 and 2006 AIP conventions and her husband’s membership in the party (as well as Palin’s videotaped welcome to the AIP’s 2008 convention) generated a minor controversy. Chryson claimed, however, that Sarah and Todd Palin never even played a minor role in his party’s internal affairs. “Sarah’s never been a member of the Alaskan Independence Party,” Chryson insisted. “Todd has, but most of rural Alaska has too. I never saw him at a meeting. They were at one meeting I was at. Sarah said hello, but I didn’t pay attention because I was taking care of business.”
But whether the Palins participated directly in shaping the AIP’s program is less relevant than the extent to which they will implement that program. Chryson and his allies have demonstrated just as much interest in grooming major party candidates as they have in putting forward their own people. At a national convention of secessionist groups in 2007, AIP vice chairman Dexter Carter announced that his party would seek to “infiltrate” the Democratic and Republican parties with candidates sympathetic to its hard-right, secessionist agenda. “You should use that tactic. You should infiltrate,” Carter told his audience of neo-Confederates, theocrats and libertarians. “Whichever party you think in that area you can get something done, get into that party. Even though that party has its problems, right now that is the only avenue.”
Carter pointed to Palin’s political career as the model of a successful infiltration. “There’s a lot of talk of her moving up,” Carter said of Palin. “She was a member [of the AIP] when she was mayor of a small town, that was a nonpartisan job. But to get along and to go along she switched to the Republican Party … She is pretty well sympathetic because of her membership.”
Carter’s assertion that Palin was once a card-carrying AIP member was swiftly discredited by the McCain campaign, which produced records showing she had been a registered Republican since 1988. But then why would Carter make such a statement? Why did he seem confident that Palin was a true-blue AIP activist burrowing within the Republican Party? The most salient answer is that Palin was once so thoroughly embedded with AIP figures like Chryson and Stoll and seemed so enthusiastic about their agenda, Carter may have simply assumed she belonged to his party.
Now, Palin is a household name and her every move is scrutinized by the Washington press corps. She can no longer afford to kibitz with secessionists, however instrumental they may have been to her meteoric ascendancy. This does not trouble her old AIP allies. Indeed, Chryson is hopeful that Palin’s inauguration will also represent the start of a new infiltration.
“I’ve had my issues but she’s still staying true to her core values,” Chryson concluded. “Sarah’s friends don’t all agree with her, but do they respect her? Do they respect her ideology and her values? Definitely.”
By PETE YOST
WASHINGTON (AP) — GOP presidential nominee John McCain has past connections to a private group that supplied aid to guerrillas seeking to overthrow the leftist government of Nicaragua in the Iran-Contra affair.
McCain's ties are facing renewed scrutiny after his campaign criticized Barack Obama for his link to a former radical who engaged in violent acts 40 years ago.
The U.S. Council for World Freedom was part of an international organization linked to former Nazi collaborators and ultra-right-wing death squads in Central America. The group was dedicated to stamping out communism around the globe.
The council's founder, retired Army Maj. Gen. John Singlaub, said McCain became associated with the organization in the early 1980s as McCain was launching his political career in Arizona. Singlaub said McCain was a supporter but not an active member in the group.
"McCain was a new guy on the block learning the ropes," Singlaub told The Associated Press in an interview. "I think I met him in the Washington area when he was just a new congressman. We had McCain on the board to make him feel like he wasn't left out. It looks good to have names on a letterhead who are well-known and appreciated.
"I don't recall talking to McCain at all on the work of the group," Singlaub said.
The renewed attention over McCain's association with Singlaub's group comes as McCain's campaign steps up criticism of Obama's dealings with William Ayers, a college professor who co-founded the Weather Underground and years later worked on education reform in Chicago alongside Obama. Ayers held a meet-the-candidate event at his home when Obama first ran for public office in the mid-1990s.
Obama was roughly 8 years old when Ayers, now at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was working with the Weather Underground, which took responsibility for bombings that included nonfatal blasts at the Pentagon and U.S. Capitol. McCain's vice presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, has said that Obama "pals around with terrorists."
In McCain's case, Singlaub knew McCain's father, a Navy admiral who had sought Singlaub's counsel when McCain, a Navy pilot, became a prisoner of war and spent 5 1/2 years in North Vietnamese hands.
"John's father asked me for advice about what he ought to do now that his son had been shot down and captured," Singlaub recalled in one of two recent interviews. "I said, 'As long as you don't give any impression that you care more about him than you care about any of the other prisoners, he won't be treated any differently.'"
Covert arms shipments to the rebels called Contras, financed in part by secret arms sales to Iran, became known as the Iran-Contra affair. They proved to be the undoing of Singlaub's council.
In 1987, the Internal Revenue Service withdrew the tax-exempt status of Singlaub's group because of its activities on behalf of the Contras.
Elected to the House in 1982 and at a time when he was on the board of Singlaub's council, McCain was among Republicans on Capitol Hill expressing support for the Contras, a CIA-organized guerrilla force in Central America. In 1984, Congress cut off CIA funds for the Contras.
Months before the cutoff, top Reagan administration officials ramped up a secret White House-directed supply network and put National Security Council aide Oliver North in charge of running it. The goal was to keep the Contras operational until Congress could be persuaded to resume CIA funding.
Singlaub's private group became the public cover for the White House operation.
Secretly, Singlaub worked with North in an effort to raise millions of dollars from foreign governments.
McCain has said previously he resigned from the council in 1984 and asked in 1986 to have his name removed from the group's letterhead.
"I didn't know whether (the group's activity) was legal or illegal, but I didn't think I wanted to be associated with them," McCain said in a newspaper interview in 1986.
Singlaub does not recall any McCain resignation in 1984 or May 1986. Nor does Joyce Downey, who oversaw the group's day-to-day activities.
"That's a surprise to me," Singlaub said. "This is the first time I've ever heard that. There may have been someone in his office communicating with our office."
"I don't ever remember hearing about his resigning, but I really wasn't worried about that part of our activities, a housekeeping thing," said Singlaub. "If he didn't want to be on the board that's OK. It wasn't as if he had been active participant and we were going to miss his help. He had no active interest. He certainly supported us."
Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
October 06, 2008 12:22 PM
ABC News' Imtiyaz Delawala Reports: Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin invoked fear for the first time when discussing Sen. Barack Obama’s connection to former 60’s radical William Ayers.
“I am just so fearful that this is not a man who sees America the way that you and I see America -- as the greatest source for good in this world,” Palin said of Obama to 2,000 supporters at a rally in Clearwater, Florida this morning. “I'm afraid this someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country.”
“This, ladies and gentlemen, has nothing to do with the kind of change that anyone can believe in, not my kids, not for your kids,” Palin added.
While Palin had raised Obama’s connection to Ayers at rallies and fundraisers in the last two days, she had never said she was “fearful” in her remarks until this morning.
Obama has charged before that the McCain campaign would attempt to make voters “scared” of his candidacy.
“They know that you’re not real happy with them and so the only way they figure they’re going to win this election is if they make you scared of me,” Obama said at a rally in Rolla, MO on July 30. The McCain campaign dismissed the charge at the time, calling it “baseless.”
Palin also accused Obama of being “less than truthful” about his connection to Ayers, calling him one of Obama’s “earliest supporters” for hosting a 1995 meeting that launched Obama’s bid for the Illinois State Senate.“Barack Obama says that Ayers was just someone in the neighborhood. But that's less than truthful,” Palin said. “His own top advisor said that they were, quote, "certainly friendly." In fact, Obama held one of the first meetings of his political career in Bill Ayers's living room. And they've worked together on various projects in Chicago.”
Standing on stage in front of a riser of supporters wearing red, white and blue shirts to make out the image of an American flag, Palin told the crowd it “may get kind of rough” for the next 29 days before Election Day on Nov. 4.
“Florida, you know that you're gonna have to hang onto your hats because from now until Election Day, it may get kind of rough,” Palin said, prompting a supporter to yell out, "That's alright.”
After Palin’s attacks this weekend connecting Obama to Ayers, the Obama campaign today began hitting Sen. John McCain on his role in the Keating Five scandal, launching a 13-minute video called "Keating Economics: John McCain and the Making of a Financial Crisis."
In an interview with New York Times columnist William Kristol yesterday, Palin questioned why the McCain campaign was not also connecting Obama to his controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
"To tell you the truth, Bill, I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country," Palin told Kristol. The McCain campaign has said they will not go after the relationship because Obama has publicly disassociated himself from Wright.
October 6, 2008, 11:09 AM
Posted by Scott Conroy| 79
by kos Sun Sep 28, 2008 at 04:52:34 PM PDT
The congressional leadership has some sort of deal, 110 pages long (or so), that people are supposed to digest and vote on tomorrow. Whatever the details of the bill might be, the fact that the leadership of both parties have refused to take a breath and explore alternate and less costly (to the taxpayers) options is a disgrace. The only question is whether the rank and file will vote for this thing, and given that the voters aren't happy, we'll see what happens.
That aside, the Democratic leadership did a masterful job of destroying McCain last week, with a healthy assist from McCain's own Capitol Hill "allies". Truly. Let's look at the timeline:
September 17-18
Paulson and Bernanke meet with the Congressional leadership and lay out their doomsday scenario. Everyone runs around screaming because it's the end of the world. Or at least, the Bush Administration says its the end of the world.
As negotiations proceeded, Reid and Pelosi made clear that any bailout would have to be delivered with majority Republican support. No one was going to get hung out to dry just weeks before an election with a $700 billion bailout of Wall Street. The same went for John McCain.
Tuesday, September 23
McCain still hadn't weighed in on the bailout. Reid repeatedly called on McCain to explain his position, yet silence.
We need the Republican nominee for president to let us know where he stands and what we should do.
Reid wasn't asking McCain to head down to Washington, just to clarify his position. Pelosi was doing the same. And they were both doing it for obvious reasons -- political cover. At this point, nothing noble about it. As I said, no one wants to get hung out to dry with this stinker and it was critical that the Republicans be aboard any deal. If McCain had any issues, they needed to be out in the open so negotiators could address them.
Wednesday, September 24
But then McCain pulled his now-infamous political stunt, declaring that was "suspending" his campaign, canceling the Friday debate, and that he would head out to D.C. to set everyone straight. The bailout negotiators were stunned. Things were progressing in the delicate negotiations, the last thing they needed was the insertion of the presidential campaign into their deliberations.
Reid told McCain to stay away, while Pelosi said:
“I got a call yesterday … from Senator McCain, and he said that he was calling because nothing was happening, and there was no progress being made on all of this; he was calling a meeting, and would I come,” Pelosi told reporters.“I said, ‘Well, senator, I have good news for you. Quite a bit has been done. The deliberations are going forward, and we make progress every day, and I don't see any reason for us to come to a meeting based on a premise that nothing is being done, because plenty is’.”
“I got a call yesterday … from Senator McCain, and he said that he was calling because nothing was happening, and there was no progress being made on all of this; he was calling a meeting, and would I come,” Pelosi told reporters.
“I said, ‘Well, senator, I have good news for you. Quite a bit has been done. The deliberations are going forward, and we make progress every day, and I don't see any reason for us to come to a meeting based on a premise that nothing is being done, because plenty is’.”
Thursday, September 25
Upon questioning about the plan that he was swooping in to "save", McCain admitted that he hadn't read the plan yet. All three pages of it.
So his ignorant ass shows up, showboating for the cameras, and trashes a deal almost in place.
The fact is that, by 2pm yesterday, the House and Senate Democrats had settled their most important differences, the White House had caved on CEO pays, and the two sides were coming close to dealing with the bailout's oversight mechanism, its posture toward homeowners, and whether taxpayers would get ownership stakes in taken-over companies. Then McCain airdrops in --well, he's not actually in DC yet, so it was a virtual airdrop -- and it compresses the timeline even more.
Democrats flood the airwaves to complain about McCain's "political stunt", calling it a "hail mary", and accusing McCain of putting his campaign before the interests of the nation. The country may not be liking what was being cooked up in DC, but they weren't liking McCain's showboating either.
As for the White House meeting, that McCain had insisted on?
"On the Trail," here's CNN's Candy Crowley.CANDY CROWLEY, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: It's about leadership. John McCain's urgent hard-charging effort to look like he's taking control, up against Barack Obama's effort to look cool and in control, above the fray.OBAMA: Right now, there has to be a sense of urgency on the part of everybody because this is putting jobs at risk, economic growth at risk, small businesses at risk, the financial markets and people's retirement accounts over time, potentially, at risk. So we've got to move rapidly.CROWLEY: Fresh off that big White House meeting, Obama did not directly accuse McCain of mucking up a tentative bailout plan. He is more nuanced than that.OBAMA: What I've found, and I think was confirmed today, is that when you inject presidential politics into delicate negotiations, it's not necessarily as helpful as it needs to be. Just because there's a lot of glare of the spotlight, there's the potential for posturing or suspicions.CROWLEY: Obama can afford to stay cool while Washington heats up. He has plenty of help from his Capitol Hill surrogates, who have been tearing into McCain for him.SEN. HARRY REID (D-NV), MAJORITY LEADER: I would suggest anyone at that meeting that tried to understand what John McCain said at the meeting couldn't. He was the last person to speak at the meeting, talked for a couple of minutes, and really didn't say anything substantive.
"On the Trail," here's CNN's Candy Crowley.
CANDY CROWLEY, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: It's about leadership. John McCain's urgent hard-charging effort to look like he's taking control, up against Barack Obama's effort to look cool and in control, above the fray.
OBAMA: Right now, there has to be a sense of urgency on the part of everybody because this is putting jobs at risk, economic growth at risk, small businesses at risk, the financial markets and people's retirement accounts over time, potentially, at risk. So we've got to move rapidly.
CROWLEY: Fresh off that big White House meeting, Obama did not directly accuse McCain of mucking up a tentative bailout plan. He is more nuanced than that.
OBAMA: What I've found, and I think was confirmed today, is that when you inject presidential politics into delicate negotiations, it's not necessarily as helpful as it needs to be. Just because there's a lot of glare of the spotlight, there's the potential for posturing or suspicions.
CROWLEY: Obama can afford to stay cool while Washington heats up. He has plenty of help from his Capitol Hill surrogates, who have been tearing into McCain for him.
SEN. HARRY REID (D-NV), MAJORITY LEADER: I would suggest anyone at that meeting that tried to understand what John McCain said at the meeting couldn't. He was the last person to speak at the meeting, talked for a couple of minutes, and really didn't say anything substantive.
But you know what was most incredible about all of this?
No Republicans pushed back. No one got McCain's back. None seriously argued that McCain was moving the negotiations forward or otherwise contributing to the effort in any meaningful, non-self-serving political way.
So while Democrats were eager and able to craft the narrative, Republicans tacitly approved it with their silence. It was clear that they themselves were also unhappy with McCain's behavior. As for the McCain campaign, they seemed befuddled by it all.
But the return to Washington on Thursday brought a new low for the campaign. The White House meeting McCain had called for devolved into dissension and argument. One McCain adviser said the senator walked into a Democratic "buzz saw."McCain's ability to reach across the aisle and bring his colleagues to consensus -- something he brags about repeatedly on the campaign trail -- appeared to have vanished Thursday."Thursday was a disaster," said a top aide who had been part of the planning. "The vision on Wednesday did not play out as we thought."
But the return to Washington on Thursday brought a new low for the campaign. The White House meeting McCain had called for devolved into dissension and argument. One McCain adviser said the senator walked into a Democratic "buzz saw."
McCain's ability to reach across the aisle and bring his colleagues to consensus -- something he brags about repeatedly on the campaign trail -- appeared to have vanished Thursday.
"Thursday was a disaster," said a top aide who had been part of the planning. "The vision on Wednesday did not play out as we thought."
Did they really think that Democrats would allow him to swoop in, say nothing, things would magically resolve themselves, and he wold be able to claim credit? Really?
Friday, September 26
Negotiations, stalled much of Thursday, seemed to pick up. But they weren't going to get done by Friday night. And McCain, who had claimed he wouldn't do the debate until there was a deal, was suddenly force to "blink" -- a cardinal sin in wingnut circles -- and head out to Mississippi for the debate.
Democrats were relentless on message and refused to give McCain any obvious (or perceived) victories, while Republicans left their nominee flail with no backup support.
The results? A big Obama surge in the polls.
Michael Isikoff and Holly Bailey
From the magazine issue dated Oct 6, 2008
Few advisers in John McCain's inner circle inspire more loyalty from him than campaign manager Rick Davis. McCain and his wife, Cindy, credit the shrewd, and sometimes volatile, Republican insider with rescuing the campaign last year when it was out of money and on the verge of collapse. As a result, McCain has always defended him—even when faced with tough questions about the foreign lobbying clients of Davis's high-powered consulting firm. "Rick is a friend, and I trust him," McCain told NEWSWEEK last year.
Last week, though, McCain's trust in Davis was tested again amid disclosures that Freddie Mac, the troubled mortgage giant that was recently placed under federal conservatorship, paid his campaign manager's firm $15,000 a month between 2006 and August 2008. As the mortgage crisis has escalated, almost any association with Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae has become politically toxic. But the payments to Davis's firm, Davis Manafort, are especially problematic because he requested the consulting retainer in 2006—and then did barely any work for the fees, according to two sources familiar with the arrangement who asked not to be identified discussing Freddie Mac business. Aside from attending a few breakfasts and a political-action-committee meeting with Democratic strategist Paul Begala (another Freddie consultant), Davis did "zero" for the housing firm, one of the sources said. Freddie Mac also had no dealings with the lobbying firm beyond paying monthly invoices—but it agreed to the arrangement because of Davis's close relationship with McCain, the source said, which led top executives to conclude "you couldn't say no."
The McCain campaign told reporters the fees were irrelevant because Davis "separated from his consulting firm … in 2006," according to the campaign's Web site, and he stopped drawing a salary from it. In fact, however, when Davis joined the campaign in January 2007, he asked that his $20,000-a-month salary be paid directly to Davis Manafort, two sources who asked not to be identified discussing internal campaign business told NEWSWEEK. Federal campaign records show the McCain campaign paid Davis Manafort $90,000 through July 2007, when a cash crunch prompted Davis and other top campaign officials to forgo their salaries and work as volunteers. Separately, another entity created and partly owned by Davis—an Internet firm called 3eDC, whose address was the same office building as Davis Manafort's—received payments from the McCain campaign for Web services, collecting $971,860 through March 2008.
In an e-mail to NEWSWEEK, a senior McCain official said that when the campaign began last year, it signed a contract with Davis Manafort "in which we purchased all of [Davis's] time, and he agreed not to work for any other clients." The official also said that though Davis was an "investor" in 3eDC, Davis has received no salary from it. As to why Davis permitted the Freddie Mac payments to continue, the official referred NEWSWEEK to Davis Manafort, which did not respond to repeated phone calls. One senior McCain adviser said the entire flap could have been avoided if the campaign had resisted attacking Barack Obama for his ties to two former Fannie Mae executives, which prompted the media to take a second look at Davis. "It was stupid," the adviser said. "A serious miscalculation and an amateurish move." Still, this adviser said, McCain's faith in his campaign manager remains unswerving.
But I spent a lot of time digging through this and need to lay it down simply so I can move on.. Maybe some historian somewhere will dig it up when investigating where and when and how this crises began...
Perhaps some may take away from this the small part that it politically relevant and that is that the person responsible for removing the legislation that kept this type of speculation under control, could be our next Secretary of the Treasury if John McCain gets elected: that would be Phil Gramm. This is the story of how the bill was sneaked through the halls of Congress without nary a vote...nay without nary a debate....
It is common knowledge to some, but many discovering it for the first time, are outraged....
The bill is the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. Two versions of it were introduced in both houses; the House on December 14th, 2000; the Senate on December 15, 2000.
Both were introduced in the Agriculture Departments of their respective houses, because the agricultural commodities were the primary recipients of the deregulation. For that reason, two Democrats from Farm States signed onto the bill in the Senate: Tim Johnston from South Dakota, and Tom Harkin from Iowa, as well as one House Democrat...John J. LaFalce from Buffalo, New York...
Embedded in this bill were riders which freed up derivative securities to become deregulated as well.
Both bills were killed on arrival by both committees by sending them down to their respective sub-committees during the dying days of the 106th Legislative session....
At the same time, debate was ongoing over HR 4577, properly known as the Omnibus Bill, which was a giant bill providing funding for Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and related agencies from September 30th, 2000 to September 30th, 2001. It was placed on the floor as of June 1st of 2000, and the House version was passed on June 14thand the Senate version was cleared on June 30th. From there it went into conference committee....where it sat, and sat, and sat...
The last day of session for the 106th Congress was December 15th, 2000. Just 3 days before, America had learned that the Supreme Court had nixed the ballot count challenge made by the Democrats, and that George W. Bush would become the next president.... Clinton was still president and had to sign the new budget. On that last day the Conference Committee offered the Omnibus Bill onto the floor to be voted up or down as it was... Everybody was anxious to head out of Washington for the holidays, and in the Senate it was passed on an unanimous voice assent, and in the House, it was overwhelmingly passed....On that date, the large Omnibus Bill was cleared for the signature of the President, just shy of two and three quarters of a month late after funding had expired....
Buried in that Omnibus Bill was HR5660, the undebated and unsigned Bill that was buried by the respective Agricultural committees in both the House and Senate just the day before.
That is how it became law... Included in that bill was something that became known as theEnron Loophole. It was use of this loophole which allowed Enron to shut power down to California, and then charge higher prices to meet pent up demand.... Wendy Gramm was the Enron officer responsible for this action..She was Phil Gramm's wife..
If one looks at the bills HR5660 and SB3283 which were killed in committee and then cross references them with the HR4577 inclusion in the gigantic (11,000 page) Omnibus Page, one finds some interesting discrepancies.
In both original bills, when one looks at the table of contents, ... Section 208 is missing... the sequence runs from 206, 207, 209, 210.... In the final document, 208 is where it should be...( an astute reader has shown that one can link to 207 and continue scrolling to reach through to 208). So you may wonder what was missing... is it important or is it politically sensitive enough that it might benefit from not being seen?
The missing section which does not show up in the syllabus of the original bills, covers the changes made to the act of 1933 and 1934 which were enacted to prevent another Great Depression from never happening again... It is not long, so I am publishing it in full...
(a) AMENDMENTS TO THE SECURITIES ACT OF 1933-
(1) TREATMENT OF SECURITY FUTURES PRODUCTS- Section 2(a) of the Securities Act of 1933 (15 U.S.C. 77b(a)) is amended–
(A) in paragraph (1), by inserting `security future,’ after `treasury stock,’;
(B) in paragraph (3), by adding at the end the following: `Any offer or sale of a security futures product by or on behalf of the issuer of the securities underlying the security futures product, an affiliate of the issuer, or an underwriter, shall constitute a contract for sale of, sale of, offer for sale, or offer to sell the underlying securities.’;
(C) by adding at the end the following:
`
(16) The terms `security future’, `narrow-based security index’, and `security futures product’ have the same meanings as provided in section 3(a)(55) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.’.
(2) EXEMPTION FROM REGISTRATION- Section 3(a) of the Securities Act of 1933 (15 U.S.C. 77c(a)) is amended by adding at the end the following:
`(14) Any security futures product that is–
(A) cleared by a clearing agency registered under section 17A of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 or exempt from registration under subsection (b)(7) of such section 17A; and
`(B) traded on a national securities exchange or a national securities association registered pursuant to section 15A(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.’.
(3) CONFORMING AMENDMENT- Section 12(a)(2) of the Securities Act of 1933 (15 U.S.C. 77l(a)(2)) is amended by striking `paragraph (2)’ and inserting `paragraphs (2) and (14)’.
(b) AMENDMENTS TO THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934-
(1) EXEMPTION FROM REGISTRATION- Section 12(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (15 U.S.C. 78l(a)) is amended by adding at the end the following: `The provisions of this subsection shall not apply in respect of a security futures product traded on a national securities exchange.’.
(2) EXEMPTIONS FROM REPORTING REQUIREMENT- Section 12(g)(5) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (15 U.S.C. 78l(g)(5)) is amended by adding at the end the following: `For purposes of this subsection, a security futures product shall not be considered a class of equity security of the issuer of the securities underlying the security futures product.’.
(3) TRANSACTIONS BY CORPORATE INSIDERS- Section 16 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (15 U.S.C. 78p) is amended by adding at the end the following:
(f) TREATMENT OF TRANSACTIONS IN SECURITY FUTURES PRODUCTS- The provisions of this section shall apply to ownership of and transactions in security futures products.’.
For me had I been looking over these bills in committee, this title:
AMENDMENTS RELATING TO REGISTRATION AND DISCLOSURE ISSUES UNDER THE SECURITIES ACT OF 1933 AND THE SECURITIES EXCHANGE ACT OF 1934.
would have shown up as a red flag... With its omission, one would flip through 265 pages and say lets bury it in committee...
As if to show just how controversial and sensitive these inserts were at that time, here is a portion of the reply (March 9, 2000) by the SEC after perusing the draft of the GAO's report covering this issue....
Although the agencies have worked diligently, cooperated closely, and approached the negotiations in good faith, we have not yet reached a detailed consensus on how to regulate single stock futures and the markets and intermediaries that trade them. The procedural and jurisdictional issues raised by the trading of single stock futures are extremely challenging and we believe that further discussions are necessary to achieve a full resolution.........
The SEC appreciates the profound and widespread consequences attached to the trading of single stock futures and believes it would be irresponsible to permit such products to trade without fully resolving all outstanding issues. Therefore we strongly believe that single futures should not be permitted to trade in the United States until a comprehensive framework has been developed and implemented. The adoption to the temporary or piecemeal fixes to the fundamental regulatory disparities (ie insider trading,margin, customer suitability) is not an appropriate remedy -- In fact, it could damage the integrity of our capital and derivatives markets and result in regulatory arbitrage.
If it had been me, and had I wanted to pass a piece of financial regulation that was not approved by the SEC, I certainly know that I would try to hide it.
Now according to some sources, these parts were written by lobbyists for Enron and then given to Gramm to be inserted into legislation... Somehow through Gramm's position on the Conference committee, it was able to be unknowingly slipped into law...much to the chagrin of Californians who later shelled out 40 billion for electricity more than they should have....
Since legislation is sneaked through Congress this way all the time, no matter how immoral; it is not illegal... this practice will probably not stop with this admission that it took place. However, the magnitude of the scale with which we today are faced.. the immensity of asking for a loan amounting to two years of the entire spending of every governmental program... just in order to survive,.... puts an ominous aura surrounding this one sneaky, backhanded, transaction eight years ago.
If historians ever look back for the silver bullet that quelled this once great superpower at the time of its peak, if they don't point to the Bush election, they will eventually find themselves investigating the way this sneaky, backhanded legislation was passed, for "it" is what legally allowed deals worth hundreds of billions to be openly traded, with no real equity to back them up.....
McCain Camp Takes Issue With Times Coverage
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: September 22, 2008
The McCain campaign lashed out at The New York Times on Monday, accusing it of dropping its journalistic standards and being “150 percent in the tank” for Senator Barack Obama.
In a conference call with reporters, Steve Schmidt, Senator John McCain’s senior campaign adviser, was asked about an article in The Times on Monday reporting that Mr. McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, had been paid nearly $2 million by Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac to head a group devoted to defend the mortgage giants against the imposition of stricter regulations.
Asked about the article, Mr. Davis, who was on the call, said the group’s sole function was to promote home ownership. But Mr. Schmidt criticized The Times for its coverage.
“Whatever the New York Times once was, it is today not by any standard a journalistic organization,” Mr. Schmidt said. He added, “This is an organization that is completely, totally, 150 percent in the tank for the Democratic candidate, which is their prerogative to be.”
He added, “Everything that is read in The New York Times that attacks this campaign should be evaluated by the American people from that perspective.”
Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, responded in a statement: “The New York Times is committed to covering the candidates fully, fairly and aggressively. It’s our job to ask hard questions, fact-check their statements and their advertising, examine their programs, positions, biographies and advisers. Candidates and their campaign operatives are not always comfortable with that level of scrutiny, but it’s what our readers expect and deserve.”
http://blip.tv/file/1284017/
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and CHARLES DUHIGG
Published: September 21, 2008
Senator John McCain’s campaign manager was paid more than $30,000 a month for five years as president of an advocacy group set up by the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to defend them against stricter regulations, current and former officials say.
Mr. McCain, the Republican candidate for president, has recently begun campaigning as a critic of the two companies and the lobbying army that helped them evade greater regulation as they began buying riskier mortgages with implicit federal backing. He and his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, have donors and advisers who are tied to the companies.
But last week the McCain campaign stepped up a running battle of guilt by association when it began broadcasting commercials trying to link Mr. Obama directly to the government bailout of the mortgage giants this month by charging that he takes advice from Fannie Mae’s former chief executive, Franklin Raines, an assertion both Mr. Raines and the Obama campaign dispute.
Incensed by the advertisements, several current and former executives of the companies came forward to discuss the role that Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager and longtime adviser, played in helping Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac beat back regulatory challenges when he served as president of their advocacy group, the Homeownership Alliance, formed in the summer of 2000. Some who came forward were Democrats, but Republicans, speaking on the condition of anonymity, confirmed their descriptions.
“The value that he brought to the relationship was the closeness to Senator McCain and the possibility that Senator McCain was going to run for president again,” said Robert McCarson, a former spokesman for Fannie Mae, who said that while he worked there from 2000 to 2002, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac together paid Mr. Davis’s firm $35,000 a month. Mr. Davis “didn’t really do anything,” Mr. McCarson, a Democrat, said.
Mr. Davis’s role with the group has bubbled up as an issue in the campaign, but the extent of his compensation and the details of his role have not been reported previously.
Mr. McCain was never a leading critic or defender of the mortgage giants, although several former executives of the companies said Mr. Davis did draw Mr. McCain to a 2004 awards banquet that the companies’ Homeownership Alliance held in a Senate office building. The organization printed a photograph of Mr. McCain at the event in its 2004 annual report, bolstering its clout and credibility. The event honored several other elected officials, including at least two Democrats, Gov. Edward G. Rendell of Pennsylvania and Representative Artur Davis of Alabama.
In an interview Sunday night with CNBC and The New York Times, Mr. McCain noted that Mr. Davis was no longer working on behalf of the mortgage giants. He said Mr. Davis “has had nothing to do with it since, and I’ll be glad to have his record examined by anybody who wants to look at it.”
Asked about the reports of Mr. Davis’s role, a spokesman for Mr. McCain said that during the time when Mr. Davis ran the Homeownership Alliance, the senator had backed legislation to increase oversight of the mortgage companies’ accounting and executive compensation. The legislation, however, did not seek to change their anomalous structure as private companies with federal support.
The spokesman, Tucker Bounds, also noted that the Homeownership Alliance included nonprofit organizations like Habitat for Humanity and the Urban League. “It’s not controversial to promote homeownership and minority homeownership,” Mr. Bounds said. More than a half-dozen current and former executives, however, said the Homeownership Alliance was set up mainly to defend Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by promoting their role in the housing market, and the two companies paid almost the entire cost of the group’s operations.
“They were financed largely, possibly exclusively, by Fannie and Freddie,” said William R. Maloni, a Democrat who is a former head of industry relations for Fannie Mae. “We thought it would be helpful to have someone who was a broadly recognized Republican to be the face of the organization, and that person became Rick Davis.” Mr. Maloni added, “Rick, for that purpose, turned out to be quite good.” (Several executives said Mr. Davis’s compensation was not unusual for the companies’ well-connected consultants.)
The federal bailout of the two mortgage giants has become an emblem of what critics say is the outdated or inadequate regulatory system that allowed the financial system to slide into crisis this summer.
At the time that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac recruited Mr. Davis to run the Homeownership Alliance in 2000, they were under new pressure from private industry rivals and deregulation-minded Republicans who argued that the two companies’ federal sponsorship gave them an unfair advantage and put taxpayers at risk. Critics of the companies had formed their own Washington-based advocacy group, FM Watch. They were pushing for regulations that would deter the companies from expanding into new areas, including riskier and more profitable mortgages.
Mr. Davis had recently returned to his lobbying firm from running Mr. McCain’s unexpectedly strong 2000 Republican primary campaign, which elevated Mr. McCain’s profile as a legislator and Mr. Davis’s as a lobbyist.
“You can say what you want about free-market distortions, but people like the system because it gets them into houses cheap,” Mr. Davis said to Institutional Investor magazine in 2000, adding that he would run the advocacy group out of his Alexandria, Va., lobbying firm.
The organization also hired Public Strategies, a communications firm that included former Bush adviser Mark McKinnon. Mr. Davis wrote letters and gave speeches for the group. In April 2001, he sent out a press release headlined, “It’s Tax Day — Do You Know Where Your Deductions Are? For Most Americans, They’re in Your Home.”
But by the end of 2005, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were recovering from accounting problems and re-examining costs, former executives said. The companies decided the Homeownership Alliance had outlived its usefulness, and it disappeared.
So, John McCain will help bring about positive change to the "strong" fundamentals of our economy?
Please read the entire article, and let me know what you think.....
John McCain (R-AZ)
Alan Cranston (D-CA)
Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ)
John Glenn (D-OH)
Donald W. Riegle (D-MI)
The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The five senators, Alan Cranston (D-CA), Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ), John Glenn (D-OH), John McCain (R-AZ), and Donald W. Riegle (D-MI), were accused of improperly aiding Charles H. Keating, Jr., chairman of the failed Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which was the target of an investigation by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB).
After a lengthy investigation, the Senate Ethics Committee determined in 1991 that Alan Cranston, Dennis DeConcini, and Donald Riegle had substantially and improperly interfered with the FHLBB in its investigation of Lincoln Savings. Senators John Glenn and John McCain were cleared of having acted improperly but were criticized for having exercised "poor judgment".
All five of the senators involved served out their terms. Only Glenn and McCain ran for re-election, and they were both re-elected. In 2008, McCain accepted the nomination of the Republican Party for President.
The U.S. Savings and Loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s was the failure of 747 savings and loan associations (S&Ls) in the United States. The ultimate cost of the crisis is estimated to have totaled around $160.1 billion, about $124.6 billion of which was directly paid for by the U.S. taxpayer.[1].
The concomitant slowdown in the finance industry and the real estate market may have been a contributing cause of the 1990-1991 economic recession. Between 1986 and 1991, the number of new homes constructed per year dropped from 1.8 million to 1 million, the lowest rate since World War II.[2]
The Keating Five scandal was prompted by the activities of one particular savings and loan: Lincoln Savings and Loan Association of Irvine, California. Lincoln's chairman was Charles Keating, who ultimately served five years in prison for his corrupt mismanagement of Lincoln.[3] In the four years since Keating's American Continental Corporation (ACC) had purchased Lincoln in 1984, Lincoln's assets had increased from $1.1 billion to $5.5 billion.[4] Such savings and loan associations had been deregulated in the early 1980s, allowing them to make highly risky investments with their depositors' money, a change of which Keating took advantage.[4] Lincoln's investments took the form of buying land, taking equity positions in real estate development projects, and buying high-yield junk bonds.[5]
Corruption allegations
The core allegation of the Keating Five affair is that Keating had made contributions of about $1.3 million to various U.S. Senators, and he called on those Senators to help him resist regulators. The regulators backed off, to later disastrous consequences.
Beginning in 1985, Edwin J. Gray, chair of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB), feared that the savings industry's risky investment practices were exposing the government's insurance funds to huge losses.[5] Gray instituted a rule whereby savings associations could hold no more than ten percent of their assets in "direct investments",[5] and were thus prohibited from taking ownership positions in certain financial entities and instruments.[6] Lincoln had become burdened with bad debt resulting from its past aggressiveness, and by early 1986,[5] its investment practices were being investigated and audited by the FHLBB:[7] in particular, whether it had violated these direct investment rules; Lincoln had directed FDIC-insured accounts into commercial real estate ventures.[4] By the end of 1986, the FHLBB had found that Lincoln had $135 million in unreported losses and had surpassed the regulated direct investments limit by $600 million.[5]
Keating had earlier taken several measures to oppose Gray and the FHLBB, including recruiting a study from then-private economist Alan Greenspan saying that direct investments were not harmful,[5] and getting President Ronald Reagan to make a recess appointment of a Keating ally, Atlanta real estate developer Lee H. Henkel Jr., to an open seat on the FHLBB.[5] But by March 1987, Henkel had resigned, upon news of his having large loans due to Lincoln.[5] Meanwhile, the Senate had changed control from Republican to Democratic during the 1986 Congressional elections, placing several Democratic senators in key positions, and starting in January 1987, Keating's staff was putting pressure on Cranston to remove Gray from any FHLBB discussion regarding Lincoln.[8] The following month, Keating began large-scale contributions into Cranston's project to increase California voter registration.[8] In February 1987, Keating met with Riegle and began contributing to Riegle's 1988 re-election campaign.[9]
It appeared as though the government might seize Lincoln for being insolvent.[6] The investigation was, however, taking a long time.[7] Keating was asking that Lincoln be given a lenient judgment by the FHLBB, so that it could limit its high risk investments and get into the safe (at the time) home mortgage business, thus allowing the business to survive. A letter from audit firm Arthur Young & Co. bolstered Keating's case that the government investigation was taking a long time.[10] Keating now wanted the five senators to intervene with the FHLBB on his behalf.
By March 1987, Riegle was telling Gray that "Some senators out west are very concerned about the way the bank board is regulating Lincoln Savings," adding somewhat ominously, "I think you need to meet with the senators. You'll be getting a call."[9] Keating and DeConcini were asking McCain to travel to San Francisco to meet with regulators regarding Lincoln Savings; McCain refused.[10][6] DeConcini told Keating that McCain was nervous about interfering.[6] Keating called McCain a "wimp" behind his back, and on March 24, Keating and McCain had a heated, contentious meeting.[10]
On April 2, 1987, a meeting with chairman Gray of the FHLBB was held in DeConcini's Capitol office, with Senators Cranston, Glenn, and McCain also in attendance.[6] DeConcini started the meeting with a mention of "our friend at Lincoln."[6] Gray told the assembled senators that he did not know the particular details of the status of Lincoln Savings and Loan, and that the senators would have to go to the bank regulators in San Francisco that had oversight jurisdiction for the bank. Gray did offer to set up a meeting between those regulators and the senators.[6]
On April 9, 1987, a two-hour meeting[4] with three members of the FHLBB San Francisco branch was held, again in DeConcini's office, to discuss the government's investigation of Lincoln.[10][6] Present were Cranston, DeConcini, Glenn, McCain, and additionally Riegle.[6] The regulators felt that the meeting was very unusual and that they were being pressured by a united front, as the senators presented their reasons for having the meeting.[6] McCain said, "One of our jobs as elected officials is to help constituents in a proper fashion. ACC [American Continental Corporation] is a big employer and important to the local economy. I wouldn't want any special favors for them.... I don't want any part of our conversation to be improper." Glenn said, "To be blunt, you should charge them or get off their backs," while DeConcini said, "What's wrong with this if they're willing to clean up their act? ... It's very unusual for us to have a company that could be put out of business by its regulators."[6] The regulators then revealed that Lincoln was under criminal investigation on a variety of serious charges, at which point McCain severed all relations with Keating.[6] Glenn continued to help Keating after that revelation, by setting up a meeting with then-House Majority Leader Jim Wright, which turned out to be the only questionable thing Glenn did throughout the whole affair.[11]
The San Francisco regulators finished their report in May 1987 and recommended that Lincoln be seized by the government due to unsound lending practices.[6][4] Gray, whose time as chair was about to expire, deferred action on the report, saying that his adversarial relationship with Keating would make any action he took seem vindictive, and that instead the incoming chair should take over the decision.[5] Meanwhile Keating filed a lawsuit against the FHLBB, saying it had leaked confidential information about Lincoln.[5] The new FHLBB chair was M. Danny Wall, who was more sympathetic to Keating and took no action on the report, saying its evidence was insufficient.[4][6] In September 1987, the Lincoln investigation was removed from the San Francisco group and in May 1988, a new audit of Lincoln began in Washington.[6]
News of the April meetings between the senators and the FHLBB officials first appeared in National Thrift News in September 1987, but was only sporadically covered by the general media for the next year and a half.[12]
Failure of Lincoln and investigation of the senators
Lincoln stayed in business; from mid-1987 to April 1989, its assets grew from $3.91 billion to $5.46 billion.[5] During this time, the parent American Continental Corporation was desperate for cash inflow to make up for losses in real estate purchases and projects.[13] Lincoln's branch managers and tellers convinced customers to replace their federally-insured certificates of deposit with higher-yielding bond certificates of American Continental; the customers later said they were never properly informed that the bonds were uninsured and very risky given the state of American Continental's finances.[13]
American Continental went bankrupt in April 1989, and Lincoln was seized by the FHLBB on April 14, 1989.[4] More than 21,000 mostly elderly investors lost their life savings. This total came to about $285 million.[citation needed] The federal government was liable for $2 billion to cover Lincoln's losses when it seized the institution.[13]
Keating was hit with a $1.1 billion fraud and racketeering action, filed against him by the regulators.[4] Asked whether his contributions had bought him influence, Keating said: “I want to say in the most forceful way I can: I certainly hope so.”[14]
In September 1989, several Republicans from Ohio filed an ethics complaint against Glenn, charging that he had improperly intervened on Keating's behalf.[15] When the former chairman of the FHLBB went public about all five of the senators' assistance to Keating, that set off a series of investigations by the California government, the United States Department of Justice, and the Senate Ethics Committee. The initial charges against the five Senators were made in October 1989 by Common Cause, a public interest group.[16][17] By November 1989, the matter was getting large-scale press attention and the senators became known as the "Keating Five".[18][19] All the senators denied they had done anything improper in the matter, and said Keating's contributions made no difference to their actions.[15] The senators' initial defense of their actions rested on Keating being one of their constituents; McCain said, "I have done this kind of thing many, many times," and said the Lincoln case was like "helping the little lady who didn't get her Social Security."[18]
The Ethics Committee's investigation focused on all five senators and subsequently lasted 22 months,[16] with 9 months of active investigation and 7 weeks of hearings.[20] It reported on the other four senators in February 1991, but delayed its final report on Cranston until November 1991.[20]
Much of the press attention to the Keating Five focused on the relationships of each of the senators to Keating.
Cranston had received $39,000 from Keating and his associates for his 1986 Senate re-election campaign. Furthermore, Keating had donated some $850,000 to assorted groups founded by Cranston or controlled by him, and another $85,000 to the California Democratic Party.[4] Cranston considered Keating a constituent because Lincoln was based in California.[18]
DeConcini had received about $48,000 from Keating and his associates for his 1988 Senate re-election campaign.[4] In September 1989, DeConcini stated he would return the money.[4] DeConcini considered Keating a constituent because Keating lived in Arizona; they were also long-time friends.[18]
Glenn had received $34,000 in direct contributions from Keating and his associates for his 1984 presidential nomination campaign, and a political action committee tied to Glenn had received an additional $200,000.[4] Glenn considered Keating a constituent because one of Keating's other business concerns was headquartered in Ohio.[18]
McCain and Keating had become personal friends following their initial contacts in 1981,[10] and McCain was the closest socially to Keating of the five senators.[21] Like DeConcini, McCain considered Keating a constituent as he lived in Arizona.[18] Between 1982 and 1987, McCain had received $112,000 in political contributions from Keating and his associates.[22] In addition, McCain's wife Cindy McCain and her father Jim Hensley had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators. McCain, his family, and their baby-sitter had made nine trips at Keating's expense, sometimes aboard Keating's jet. Three of the trips were made during vacations to Keating's opulent Bahamas retreat at Cat Cay. McCain did not pay Keating (in the amount of $13,433) for some of the trips until years after they were taken, when he learned that Keating was in trouble over Lincoln.[6][23]
Riegle had received some $76,000 from Keating and his associates for his 1988 Senate re-election campaign.[4] Riegle later announced in April 1988 he was returning the money.[5] Riegle's constituency connection to Keating was that Keating's Hotel Pontchartrain was located in Michigan.[18]
The Senate Ethics Committee's report regarding the Keating matter came out in August 1991, and addressed each of the five senators.[24]
The Senate Ethics Committee ruled that Cranston had acted improperly by interfering with the investigation by the FHLBB.[24] He had received more than a million dollars from Keating, had done more arm-twisting than the other Senators on Keating's behalf, and was the only Senator officially rebuked by the Senate in this matter.[25]
Cranston was given the harshest penalty of all five Senators. In November of 1991, the Senate Ethics Committee voted unanimously to reprimand Cranston, instead of the more severe measure that was under consideration: censure by the full Senate. Extenuating circumstances that helped to save Cranston from censure were the fact that he was suffering from cancer, and that he had decided to not seek reelection, according to the Chairman of the Ethics Committee, Democratic Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama. The Ethics Committee took the unusual step of delivering its reprimand to Cranston during a formal session of the full Senate, with almost all 100 Senators present.[16]
Cranston was not accused of breaking any specific laws or rules, but of violating standards that Heflin said “do not permit official actions to be linked with fund-raising.” The Ethics Committee officially found that Cranston’s conduct had been “improper and repugnant”, deserving of "the fullest, strongest and most severe sanction which the committee has the authority to impose." The sanction was in these words: "the Senate Select Committee on Ethics, on behalf of and in the name of the United States Senate, does hereby strongly and severely reprimand Sen. Alan Cranston.”[16]
After the Senate reprimanded Cranston for repugnant conduct, Cranston took to the Senate floor to deny key charges against him. In response, Senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, the Republican Vice-Chairman of the Ethics Committee, charged that Cranston’s response to the reprimand was “arrogant, unrepentant and a smear on this institution," and that Cranston was wrong to imply that everyone does what Cranston had done. Alan Dershowitz, serving as Senator Cranston's attorney, alleged that other Senators had merely been better at “covering their tracks.”[16] Likewise, political historian Lewis Gould has written that, “the real problem for the 'Keating Three' who were most involved was that they had been caught.”[26]
The Senate Ethics Committee ruled that Riegle and DeConcini had acted improperly by interfering with the investigation by the FHLBB.[24]
DeConcini later charged that McCain had leaked to the press sensitive information about the investigation that came from some of the closed proceedings of the Ethics Committee.[6] McCain denied doing so, although one congressional investigator concluded that McCain had been one of the main leakers during that time.[6]
The Senate Ethics Committee ruled that the involvement of Glenn in the scheme was minimal, and the charges against him were dropped.[24] He was only criticized by the Committee for "poor judgment."[27]
The Ethics Committee ruled that the involvement of McCain in the scheme was also minimal, and he too was cleared of all charges against him.[25][24] McCain was criticized by the Committee for exercising "poor judgment" when he met with the federal regulators on Keating's behalf.[6] The report also said that McCain's "actions were not improper nor attended with gross negligence and did not reach the level of requiring institutional action against him....Senator McCain has violated no law of the United States or specific Rule of the United States Senate."[28] On his Keating Five experience, McCain has said: "The appearance of it was wrong. It's a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators, because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do."[6]
After McCain became a leading Republican contender for the U.S. presidency in the 2000s several retrospective accounts of the controversy contended that McCain was included in the investigation primarily so that there would be at least one Republican target.[29][30][31][11] Glenn's inclusion in the investigation has been attributed to Republicans who were angered by the inclusion of McCain, as well as committee members who thought that dropping Glenn (and McCain) would make it look bad for the remaining three Democratic Senators.[29][31] Democrat Robert S. Bennett, who was the special investigator during the scandal, suggested to the Senate Ethics Committee that it pursue charges against neither McCain nor Glenn, saying of McCain, "that there was no evidence against him."[30] The Vice Chairman of the Ethics Committee, Senator Warren Rudman of New Hampshire, agreed with Bennett, but the Chairman, Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama, did not agree.[11]
Regardless of the level of their involvement, both senators were greatly affected by it. McCain would write in 2002 that attending the two April 1987 meetings was "the worst mistake of my life".[32] Glenn has described the Senate Ethics Committee investigation as the low point of his life.[7]
Not everyone was satisfied with the Senate Ethics Committee conclusions. Fred Wertheimer, president of Common Cause, which had initially demanded the investigation, thought the treatment of the senators far too lenient, and said, "The U.S. Senate remains on the auction block to the Charles Keatings of the world."[33] Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, called it a "whitewash".[33] Jonathan Alter of Newsweek said it was a classic case of the government trying to investigate itself, labelling the Senate Ethics Committee "shameless" for having "let four of the infamous Keating Five off with a wrist tap."[34] Margaret Carlson of Time suspected the committee had timed its first report to coincide with the run-up to the Gulf War, minimizing its news impact.[33] One of the San Francisco bank regulators felt that McCain had gotten off too lightly, saying that Keating's business involvement with Cindy McCain was an obvious conflict of interest.[35]
Keating and Lincoln Savings became convenient symbols for arguments about what had gone wrong in America's financial system and society,[36] and were featured in popular culture references.[37][36] The senators did not escape infamy either.[35] By spring 1992, a deck of playing cards was being marketed, called "The Savings and Loan Scandal", that featured on their face Charles Keating holding up his hand, with images of the five senators portrayed as puppets on his fingers.[36][6] Polls showed that most Americans believed the actions of the Keating Five were typical of Congress as a whole.[20]
Cranston left office in January of 1993, and died in December of 2000. DeConcini and Riegle continued to serve in the Senate until their terms expired, but they did not seek re-election in 1994. DeConcini was appointed by President Bill Clinton in February 1995 to the Board of Directors of the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation. [38]
Glenn did choose to run for re-election in 1992, and it was anticipated that he would have some difficulty winning a fourth term in the Senate. However, Glenn handily defeated Lieutenant Governor R. Michael DeWine for one more term in the Senate before retiring in 1999.
After 1999, the only member of the Keating Five remaining in the U.S. Senate was John McCain, who had an easier time gaining re-election in 1992 than he anticipated,[39] and who ran for president in 2000 and became the Republican presidential nominee in 2008. McCain survived the political scandal in part by becoming friendly with the political press.[39]
The scandal was followed by a number of attempts to adopt campaign finance reform—spearheaded by U.S. Sen. David Boren (D-OK)—but most attempts died in committee. A weakened reform was passed in 1993. Substantial campaign finance reform was not passed until the adoption of the McCain-Feingold Act in 2002.
MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. -- Introducing her running mate today in Minneapolis, Palin said that her revoked invitation to next week's "Stop Iran" rally is the fault of "Democrat partisans" who politicized the event.
"Some Democrat partisans put politics first and now no elected official will be able to appear at that Stop Iran Rally," Palin told the crowd. "Iran's pursuit of these weapons should concern all Americans, this should not be a matter for partisan politics."
Yesterday, First Read reported that the group's invitation to Palin, which was revoked yesterday along with invitations to all political figures, was originally extended by Jewish leader Malcolm Hoenlein, an associate of Palin advisor Mark Wallace.
Hoenlein tells NBC/NJ that Palin was invited -- with the approval of all the event organizers -- after efforts to secure a Republican senator to speak were unsuccessful. He said there was no initial effort to reach out to the Obama campaign because they already had a prominent Democrat on board -- Hillary Clinton, who canceled the appearance after hearing of Palin's intention to attend.
(Today, Palin lauded Clinton's original agreement to appear at Monday's event, noting that she "appreciates" the one-time presidential candidate's commitment to the cause.)
Acknowledging the concern of some members that the group could lose its tax-exempt status if Palin attended without a Democratic counterpart, Hoenlein said that an offer was made to the Obama campaign, which designated Rep. Robert Wexler to speak for them. The group announced in a press release yesterday that "In order to keep the focus on Iranian threats and to ensure that this critical message not be obscured, the organizers of the rally have decided not to have any American political personalities appear. "
John McCain and Sarah Palin win the election in the fall?Immediately after John and Sarah are sworn in , Sara declares John McCain has a career shortening case of dementia. Medical doctors agree and she's made President on Jan. 21, 2009. She puts all the Blue States and Red States up for sell on Ebay because they are too expensive to support..a broker has to be called in and they're sold at a tremendous loss. Mexico buys all the Blue States thru a Broker, James Carville and Assoc. Inc. and Canada buys all the Red States thru Carly Fiorina's Clientèle Internationale LLC Brokers. Alaska secedes from the Union and Sarah moves under “The Reformers Movement Act” all of Washington D.C. to Juneau, Alaska in three months. First order of business in Sarahington D.P. (new name District of Palin) is to build a 90 ft. fence on the border of Alaska and Canada...to keep the riff-raff out. All moose and caribou are hunted to extinction within weeks. All salmon fishing is given exclusive rights to one company. God is made to preach in all schools. Pitbulls become the only dog allowed to breed in The United States of Alaska. Tanning booths and beds are proven to destroy CO2 and stop global warming if left on 24/7. After 2 years the lower 48 states, The United States of Canico (Mexico and Canada combined) under President Barack Obama go through the biggest expansion in economic history.
President Palin embargoes all oil and natural gas to Canico hoping to bring that young country to it's knees. A major explosion happens at the largest natural gas and oil reserves in Alaska, fracturing the fault lines splitting Alaska in two pushing the planet off it's tilt angle of rotation. Another “Ice Age” begins...... Morale of this story...If you have a lot of gas be very careful and don't blow it our way Alaska.We need Obama/Biden more than ever....
Monday, September 15, 2008
WASHINGTON (AFP) — Republicans John McCain and Sarah Palin stand accused Monday of trying to "lie" their way into the White House with discredited claims and advertising -- and it's not just outgunned Democrats crying foul.
Non-partisan fact-check operations, newspapers and opinion columnists are also charging McCain, once a darling of the press, of cloaking the election in sleaze and unfairly smearing Democrat Barack Obama.
With the United States locked in two foreign wars, punished by its thirst for Middle Eastern oil and with the economy plummeting, the race was consumed for two days last week by McCain camp claims Obama called Palin a "pig."
US election campaigns and hardball advertising always push the limits of truth and often amount to outright distortion -- the Obama camp has not hesitated to blur McCain's record too.
Campaigns and experts usually steer clear of blatantly accusing a candidate of lying, but the term is being bandied about following McCain's latest hard-hitting assault on Obama's character and defense of Palin's record.
Last week, the McCain campaign accused Obama of wanting to teach sex education in kindergarten. In reality, the bill he voted for as an Illinois lawmaker mandated warnings for young children about sexual predators.
Palin was accused of saying she visited Alaskan troops in Iraq when it emerged her trip was to an Iraq/Kuwaiti border post.
She is also taking heat for repeatedly saying she blocked a notorious multi-million dollar project to build a bridge to a sparsely-inhabited island in her state which she initially backed and of not fully returning all the federal dollars doled out for it.
"Generally those come out as outright lies, not just not incorrect," said Larry Powell, a professor of communications of the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
The McCain camp is also now being accused in news reports of embellishing attendance figures at campaign rallies.
The Obama camp derided the volley of accusations as "disgusting lies" and questioned McCain's honor.
Newspapers and independent fact-checking groups also accused Republicans of peddling untruths.
"The claim is simply false," said FactCheck.org of the sex education ad.
The St Petersburg Times complained: "McCain's straight talk has become a toxic mix of lies and double-speak.
"It is leaving a permanent stain on his reputation for integrity."
Republicans, like President George W. Bush's guru Karl Rove, have been playing hard knocks-style politics for more than 20 years, often taking a Democrat's perceived strength and turning it into a liability.
Ironically, McCain was a victim of such treatment, bowed out embittered by the 2000 primary campaign against Bush and apparently not willing to take the high road again.
Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota Sunday said Democrats were descending into "hysteria." Another top McCain aide Carly Fiorina said McCain's foes were panicking and accused them of unfairly exploiting McCain's age.
McCain himself denied on Friday that his attacks were rooted in untruth.
"Actually, they are not lies," McCain said on the ABC show "The View."
"This is a tough campaign."
Whatever its morality, the final judgement on McCain's strategy will be dictated by whether it works.
An earlier negative barrage that branded Obama an empty "celebrity" seemed to jolt the Democrat last month, changing a race McCain appeared to be losing.
Latest broadsides slowed Obama again: for every hour he spends defending himself, he is not talking about the failing economy or comparing McCain to Bush.
"They are trying to put Obama on the defensive... to make a whiner out of him," said Powell.
Latest polls give McCain a slight edge, but can a scorched earth policy work all the way through to November 4?
"If that is the only thing they are doing, then they would be in serious trouble," said Kathleen Kendall, a communications professor at the University of Maryland.
"A lot of things are happening at once," she said, mentioning positive advertisements the campaign is running and speeches by McCain on issues. Palin is also reinvigorating Republicans.
Obama's response is also critical.
"I love this country too much to let them take over another election with lies and phony outrage," he said before launching a fight-back.
But he does not seem comfortable in the political gutter.
"He doesn't want to go as sulphorously negative as his opponents are if he can avoid it," said Bruce Buchanan, of the University of Texas at Austin.
McCain's aides are like "guerrilla fighters fighting those who are following Marquis of Queensbury rules," he said.
June 9, 2008
From Rogue Government:
“Fresh off of the 2008 Bilderberg Meeting, it looks as if New York Federal Reserve president Timothy Geithner is set to push a new agenda in the world of central banking that was likely decided upon at Bilderberg. Geithner yesterday, wrote an article in the Financial Times calling for a global regulatory banking framework. In addition, Geithner called for the Federal Reserve to have an instrumental role in this new framework. Geithner cites all of the problems that were actually created by the central bankers in the first place as the rationale for having greater centralized power. It is interesting Geithner decides to write this piece right after the Bilderberg Meeting where some of the most powerful figures in the world of central banking attended. Not only did Geithner attend, but the attendee list included Ben Bernanke the Federal Reserve Chairman, Henry Paulson the U.S. Treasury Secretary, Jean-Claude Trichet the president of the European Central Bank, Robert Zoellick the president of the World Bank and other high profile bankers. With the who’s who of central banking attending the Bilderberg Meeting, it is highly unlikely that what Geithner is proposing in his Financial Times article was not discussed at the Bilderberg Meeting. It is no secret that the true objective of the Bilderberg Meeting is to steer the world into accepting a global government. By establishing a new global regulatory banking framework, this will inch the planet ever closer to a one world currency operating in a cashless society where microchips are used to facilitate transactions. Make no mistake about it, this system will not be good, because it will be controlled by a bunch of criminal psychopaths like the one’s who attended the 2008 Bilderberg Meeting….
… What Geithner is proposing is entirely insane but this is the same tactic that the financial elites used to establish the Federal Reserve back in 1913. They created a crisis and said that the crisis happened because they didn’t have enough power to prevent it. The Panic of 1907 which was used to justify the passage of the Federal Reserve Act was actually caused by JP Morgan and assorted elite financial interests. They did this so they could use the crisis as an excuse to centralize their control and power over the banking system. Through the Federal Reserve, banks were finally consolidated under its umbrella through the Great Depression which was deliberately caused by the tight monetary policies implemented by the central bank. Throughout the 1920s money was made plentiful, but following the stock market crash of 1929, the Federal Reserve tightened the money supply which put hundreds of community banks out of business and allowed the central bankers to consolidate control over the nation’s banking system.
Geithner is using the excuse of the current financial crisis that was caused by the Federal Reserve and the world’s assorted central banks in order to again consolidate more power for the banking cartel. It is simply history repeating itself, only this time it is on a much larger scale….
… What Geithner doesn’t say in his article is that the current global financial crisis was caused by the Federal Reserve and the world’s various central banks. Alan Greenspan intentionally set interest rates at incredibly low levels after the 9/11 attacks. This encouraged lenders to lend out money using all sorts of creative financing packages. It also encouraged borrowers to borrow money from the lenders because of the cheaper money. These policies lead to the continued devaluation of the U.S. Dollar and the U.S. housing crisis which have been the main drivers behind most of the economic problems we are currently seeing.
Geithner wants us to believe that giving the Federal Reserve and the rest of this private banking system more power is what’s needed to resolve all of the economic problems that were caused by the central bankers themselves. How stupid does Geithner and the rest of the global elite think we are? We have a historical track record of central bankers creating economic problems and bringing in phony solutions to expand their control. We need decentralization and free markets to resolve the economic problems that have been created by these people, not more centralized power….
… the global elite are planning to push forward their cashless society grid agenda with the use of implantable microchips. The implantable microchips would be sold as a way for people to easily move through the militarized control grid that they’ve setup via the bogus terror war…. The central bankers would need a global regulatory framework for the banking system so they can move closer to a global currency operating in a cashless society.
This is some incredibly scary stuff. Of course there was not one word of the 2008 Bilderberg Meeting in any major U.S. media outlets. The corporate controlled media maintained a blackout on any coverage of this incredibly important yearly meeting of the global elite….”
