For McCain's Lobbyists-- Bailout... Or Bail?

Art by McCain's Lobbyists

Over the years I haven't agreed with Newt Gingrich on much but he was correct this morning when he warned Republican members of Congress that the Bush Regime's bailout/corporate giveaway is going to be a dead loser on Election Day Gingrich warned that bipartisan polling shows that Americans do not trust the Bush Regime to do the right thing and that they want Congress to stand up and take responsibility away from them. "[Elected officials] are going to go home and say, ‘I didn’t have any choice’ and people are going to say, ‘Ok, I need to get somebody new who has a choice.’ Because this is really a bad idea.”

The poll, conducted Sept. 16-21 with a 3% margin of error by Democratic pollster Doug Schoen and Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway suggests an overwhelming number of voters do not support the government’s bailout proposal, with 68% of respondents saying they’d rather see the companies go in to bankruptcy even if it harms investors and the stock market versus the 19% who said they preferred government action.

Gingrich said he believes lawmakers who vote for the bailout will face backlash at the ballot box in November and down the road. “I think that this bailout plan is going to break against anybody who votes for it, and I think it’s going to break against them more next time [2010] than this time [2008] and if it passes-- because I think it is going to be a nightmare to implement-- I think it is going to be filled with corruption, inefficiencies, and bureaucracies,” he said.

As Ken pointed out earlier, Bush has dispatched Darth Cheney to Capitol Hill in the role of enforcer. Is it working? After hearing two really extreme, lunatic fringe conservatives from Texas, Joe Barton and Jeb Hensarling, railing against the Bush Regime plan on the radio today, I rushed home to see how the Inside the Beltway media was playing it. (Barton was talking about how Gawd created the world in 7 days and that there was no need to rush into the plan in 5-- wackorama all the way.) Late this afternoon The Politico was describing Cheney's meeting with Republican members of Congress as "a bloodbath and "an unmitigated disaster." Boehner, tap-dancing as usual, said his caucus doesn't like the proposal but they had to support it because they can't do "nothing." Doing nothing is what crazies of the extreme right want-- that and lowering taxes on the wealthy some more-- and doing something constructive and fair-- where proposals from Dodd, Frank and Kucinich are headed-- is something Boehner and the Regime refuse to consider. "No golden parachutes, no deal," is what Paulson threatened.

There was a time when Dick Cheney could turn back a Republican revolt on Capitol Hill.

That time is gone.

The vice president traveled to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to silence a chorus of GOP complaints about Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s $700 billion plan. But House Republicans who walked into a closed-door meeting with Cheney steaming over the plan walked out just as angry, and they described what happened in between as both “a bloodbath” and “an unmitigated disaster.”

Texas Rep. Joe Barton took the unusual step of telling reporters gathered outside the Cannon Caucus Room that he had confronted Cheney “respectfully” about his concerns-- a level of dissent Republicans once considered heresy under the Bush administration.

Another lawmaker present-- who spoke on the condition of anonymity-- said that Cheney, White House chief of staff Joshua Bolten and economic policy adviser Keith Hennessey “were in worse shape when they left than when they came in.”

Cheney’s inability to turn around members of his own party said plenty about how congressional Republicans view the Bush White House these days-- but maybe even more about their discomfort with a bailout plan many of them see as an attack on their free market principles.

“It’s a sad fact, but Americans can no longer trust the economic information they are getting from this administration,” South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint said in a comment posted on Politico’s Arena forum.

“There is tremendous unease over the federal government assuming the assets that these financial institutions cannot price or manage,” said Alabama Rep. Spencer Bachus, the ranking Republican on the committee drafting the legislation.

It wasn’t clear Tuesday whether Republicans were willing to take responsibility for killing the Paulson plan-- but neither were they eager to take responsibility for passing it, either.

Republican leaders are now hoping Democrats load the legislation with unrelated measures that would give them the political cover to oppose it, members and aides said. At the same time, party leaders are using back channels in the business community to gauge member support for a “clean” bill.

This is playing out in the context of a presidential election that is looking worse and worse for the Republicans by the day. Most Americans, and rightfully so, blame them and their policies for the catastrophe. It didn't help McCain's cause today when the NY Times exposed his crooked lobbyist Rick Davis as being on the payroll of Freddie Mac until just a few days ago, thereby also exposing another flat out lie by McCain, this one that Davis hasn't gotten a cent from Freddie Mac in years. "Davis’s firm," according to the Times, "received the payments from the company, Freddie Mac, until it was taken over by the government this month."

But what makes this revelation even worse for McCain is that Freddie Mac employees are saying the payments were made to Davis primarily to placate McCain himself!

They said they did not recall Mr. Davis’s doing much substantive work for the company in return for the money, other than speak to a political action committee of high-ranking employees in October 2006 on the approaching midterm Congressional elections. They said Mr. Davis’s firm, Davis & Manafort, had been kept on the payroll because of Mr. Davis’s close ties to Mr. McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, who by 2006 was widely expected to run again for the White House.
Mr. Davis took a leave from Davis & Manafortfor the presidential campaign, but as a partner and equity-holder continues to benefit from its income. No one at Davis & Manafort other than Mr. Davis was involved in efforts on Freddie Mac’s behalf, the people familiar with the arrangement said.

A Freddie Mac spokeswoman said the company would not comment.

Jill Hazelbaker, a spokeswoman for the McCain campaign, did not dispute the payments to Mr. Davis’s firm. But she said that Mr. Davis had stopped taking a salary from his firm by the end of 2006 and that his work did not affect Mr. McCain.

“Senator McCain’s positions on policy matters are based upon what he believes to be in the public interest,” Ms. Hazelbaker said in a written statement.

Please name one time a crooked politician, caught in this kind of a scam said anything other than what McCain is saying, that everything he does-- even the bribes he and his henchmen take-- are always in the public interest. It's what Ney said when he was sentenced to prison. It's what Cunningham said when he was sentenced to prison. It's what indicted GOP criminals Tom DeLay, Rick Renzi, John Doolittle and Ted Stevens are still saying while they're negotiating to stay out of prison. Tonight Newsweek confirmed what the Times reported, reporting that since 2006 Freddie Mac has passed along at least $345,000 to Davis and that the arrangements were made because of an implied threat about McCain's power. The FBI is investigating Davis' role.

And what did McCain and the GOP deliver to what FDR used to call "banksters" for all these millions and millions of dollars in pay-offs? Let's watch McCain and his cronies explain exactly what they did for the money they were given: