Joe Klein Claims McCain Is Not A Crook, Not Breaking Any Laws, But...

In commenting on today's shocking story in the NY Times about McCain's ties to the gambling industry, Time Magazine's Joe Klein writes that McCain isn't actually breaking any laws. What he leaves out is that McCain and the rest of the crooked members of Congress write the laws to make their own patterns of behavior "legal." Keep in mind, for example, that so far this year Big Oil has "donated" $22,543,340 to members of Congress, almost all of it to Republicans and to nominal Democrats from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party (DNC and Blue Dog garbage like Dan Boren and Mary Landrieu). McCain, who is Big Oil's great white hope for a continuation of the policies that have enslaved American workers and consumers to their whims (and high prices), has accepted $1,663,590 from them. Even though these gargantuan sums-- more than the combined contributions Big Oil has made to their half dozen most devoted Republican shills who always push their agenda, John Cornyn (R-TX- $535,200), Steve Peace (R-NM- $283,034), James Inhofe (R-OK- $270,050), Miss McConnell (R-KY- $238,000), Pat Roberts (R-KS- $148,700), and Joe Barton (R- $146,441)-- are clearly bribes, the way Congress has written the bribery statutes, there is nothing illegal about McCain being financed by Big Oil, by lobbyists ($843,216 this year alone), by the booze industry ($466,036, their favorite member of Congress by far), by the crooks who brought us the mortgage crisis and Wall Street Meltdown (over $30,000,000) ... or by the gambling industry ($260,025). But...

A lifelong gambler, Mr. McCain takes risks, both on and off the craps table. He was throwing dice that night not long after his failed 2000 presidential bid, in which he was skewered by the Republican Party’s evangelical base, opponents of gambling. Mr. McCain was betting at a casino he oversaw as a member of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, and he was doing so with the lobbyist who represents that casino, according to three associates of Mr. McCain.

The visit had been arranged by the lobbyist, Scott Reed, who works for the Mashantucket Pequot, a tribe that has contributed heavily to Mr. McCain’s campaigns and built Foxwoods into the world’s second-largest casino. Joining them was Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s current campaign manager. Their night of good fortune epitomized not just Mr. McCain’s affection for gambling, but also the close relationship he has built with the gambling industry and its lobbyists during his 25-year career in Congress.

As a two-time chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee, Mr. McCain has done more than any other member of Congress to shape the laws governing America’s casinos, helping to transform the once-sleepy Indian gambling business into a $26-billion-a-year behemoth with 423 casinos across the country. He has won praise as a champion of economic development and self-governance on reservations.

...Mr. McCain portrays himself as a Washington maverick unswayed by special interests, referring recently to lobbyists as “birds of prey.” Yet in his current campaign, more than 40 fund-raisers and top advisers have lobbied or worked for an array of gambling interests-- including tribal and Las Vegas casinos, lottery companies and online poker purveyors.

When rules being considered by Congress threatened a California tribe’s planned casino in 2005, Mr. McCain helped spare the tribe. Its lobbyist, who had no prior experience in the gambling industry, had a nearly 20-year friendship with Mr. McCain.

By attacking the Times, which endorsed McCain in the primary and has given him years of unwarranted heroic coverage, as being biased against him, McCain has been able to bully them into pulling their punches against him over and over. For example, they refer to his disgraceful role in whitewashing his Senate colleagues in the Abramoff scandal as burnishing his image as a reformer. McCain's committee would have us believe that Abramoff was a horrible briber-- which is true-- but that he bribed... no one in the Senate. McCain is a crook and has been from the very beginning of his career. He's taken and continues to take, immense sums of money from special interests to vote for their initiatives at the expense of the taxpayers. The media, including the Times thinks nothing of regurgitating his hype machine's epic deceptions. Finally, the Times has started doing its job in exposing some of McCain's hypocrisy:

... interviews and records show that lobbyists and political operatives in Mr. McCain’s inner circle played a behind-the-scenes role in bringing Mr. Abramoff’s misdeeds to Mr. McCain’s attention-- and then cashed in on the resulting investigation. The senator’s longtime chief political strategist, for example, was paid $100,000 over four months as a consultant to one tribe caught up in the inquiry, records show.

McCain, of course, claims he stands up selflessly for Indians at grave risk to his career, exactly what he claims, blinking furiously, whenever he's caught with his greasy fingers in the cookie jar. But as public support for tribal casinos has diminished, Senator Selflessness has backed away. "But he has rarely wavered in his loyalty to Las Vegas, where he counts casino executives among his close friends and most prolific fund-raisers," some of whom have raised millions of dollars for McCain's efforts to capture the White House. No one expects McCain to turn the White House into a casino but "in May 2007, as Mr. McCain’s presidential bid was floundering, he spent a weekend at the MGM Grand on the Las Vegas strip. A fund-raiser hosted by J. Terrence Lanni, the casino’s top executive and a longtime friend of the senator, raised $400,000 for his campaign. Afterward, Mr. McCain attended a boxing match and hit the craps tables."

DWT has covered McCain's serious gambling addiction before. The Times had steered clear until today, although they soft-peddle the seriousness of his behavior.

For much of his adult life, Mr. McCain has gambled as often as once a month, friends and associates said, traveling to Las Vegas for weekend betting marathons. Former senior campaign officials said they worried about Mr. McCain’s patronage of casinos, given the power he wields over the industry. The officials, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity.

“We were always concerned about appearances,” one former official said. “If you go around saying that appearances matter, then they matter.”

The former official said he would tell Mr. McCain: “Do we really have to go to a casino? I don’t think it’s a good idea. The base doesn’t like it. It doesn’t look good. And good things don’t happen in casinos at midnight.”

“You worry too much,” Mr. McCain would respond, the official said.

Now, back to Joe Klein. "We've known for months," he writes, "that McCain was a high-rolling craps player. What we didn't know about was his extensive ties to the lobbyists who work the Indian gambling issue, his willingness to do their bidding, take their money and advice. There is nothing illegal here. McCain even bucks the gaming interests at time-- opposing betting on college football games in Vegas, for example. But there is much that is unseemly." Much more-- and "unseemly" certainly doesn't come close to defining McCain's life of corruption.

Some of the most amazing stuff is the etymology of the Jack Abramoff investigations--which was apparently dumped in McCain's lap by a lobbyist who was one of Abramoff's competitors.

... Finally, the notion that McCain loves craps-- as opposed to skill games like blackjack or poker-- is just too perfect. As a sometime novelist, I can assure you that you couldn't create a character whose public behavior is marked by wild, peremptory gambles and whose private avocation was shooting craps. It would be too obvious. The question is, will McCain's weird public risk-taking-- the nomination of Palin, the bizarre "suspension" of his campaign last week-- come to be seen as a problem for him as a prospective President. But his behavior as Chairman of the Indian Affairs Subcommittee is certainly disappointing-- and about as far from being a maverick, or a reformer, as you can get.

Did McCain's Keating Five Corruption And Savings And Loan Bailout Lead Directly To His Involvement In The Current Wall Street Meltdown?

With McCain's voting record and his relentless activities on behalf of ideology-driven deregulation, as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, coming into focus because of the Wall Street meltdown and his confused and confusing answers about his culpability, it is probably a good time to go back into McCain's sordid history of corruption and pull back the carefully tacked up curtains of the Keating Five Scandal.

As we mentioned yesterday, the only lessons McCain seems to have learned from a near-death experience with that first scandal, was covering his tracks more carefully and using a media hype machine to paint himself as a "reformer" instead of as the crooked operator he's always been.
He might be able to hide his severe illness-- illness that is likely to make an unprepared and supremely unqualified lunatic fringe kook from Alaska president if McCain wins in November-- under thousands and thousands of dollars in makeup sessions, but he can't hide his voting record and he can't hide the record of lobbyist payments his crooked campaign manager, Rick Davis, has sucked up from every bad actor in the Wall Street meltdown.

Back to the Keating Five Scandal that McCain learned so little from. He was the only real crook in the whole scandal and although the Senate Ethics Committee let him off with an "admonition," the federal regulators, have testified that McCain was the worst crook of the whole lot and the only senator whose actions should have landed him in prison. Had McCain been tried, convicted and imprisoned back then, there's a good chance that admirers and followers of his, like Bob Ney, Duke Cunningham, Tom DeLay, Rick Renzi, John Doolittle, Virgil Goode, and dozens of other crooked Republicans might now have gone down that same road. Please take a look at the video that exposes McCain's involvement:

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:

Rock'n'Roll vs John W. McCain's Racist Campaign

Red Rocker, 61, hearts McCranky

When the McCain campaign first decided to use the Heart classic, "Barracuda," to mythologize the toughness of their moose-shooting but otherwise inadequate vice presidential stunt, the Wilson sisters may have been horrified but they reacted in a measured way. Since politely asking McCain's lobbyist-driven campaign to stop using their song didn't have any effect, they have upped the ante a bit. Courtesy of TRex, who says he got it from Gawker (though I can't find it on either site):

Unfortunately, you continue to blast "Barracuda" in defiance of our wishes. God knows why we thought you’d listen to us, two strong, creative women-- I guess we’re all just “trollop-faced” cunts to you. Speaking of Cinday, who can blame her for hitting the pills? We’d need a Demoral epidural to live through five minutes of her conjugal duties-– you sloshing your saggy ass between her legs and chomping at her breasts with your little yellow teeth. We’d rather rim Meat Loaf. Seriously.)

Now that's an escalation from this kind of stuff. And it isn't only Heart who McCain is pissing off. He's stealing music right and left and, other than KKK-oriented country artists, like half of Big and Rich, and buck toothed rednecks, no one wants their songs sullied by being identified with McCain's racist campaign. Van Halen was understandably angry when longtime Republican and one-time Van Halen singer Sammy Hagar encouraged McCain's camp to use embarrassingly mediocre "Right Now," from an era when the band was having a severe creative lull. This story I was able to find at Gawker:

John McCain's first mistake was trying to seem "hip" and "with it" by blasting Van Halen's atrocious song "Right Now" at a stump stop in Ohio. His second mistake was not getting permission to play the treacly Sammy Hagar track from the band, the members of which are not so old that they actually support the grim candidate. The band's publicist says, "Permission was not sought or granted nor would it have been given." It's like the time when Reagan's campaigners totally misunderstood "Born in the USA" and tried to use it as their theme song until Bruce Springsteen told them to cut the crap.

I'm guessing McCain would rather see stories about disgruntled rockers in the press than stories about how his campaign manager was paid a couple million dollars by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae for access to McCain's saggy ass so they could "persuade" him to keep the Senate from regulating the banking industry.

Don't forget our Blue America Pick A Senate Candidate Contest where all of them understand the dynamics between unbalanced power and the need for government to protect individual consumers and workers from the predatory excesses of unbridled capitalism and Bush-style fascism.

McCain's Campiagn Manager, Lobbyist Rick Davis, Pocketed $600,000 For Selling Off 8,000 Jobs In Ohio-- With McCain's Help

Since our discussion with Ohio Democratic congressional candidate Jane Mitakides last month, we've been trying to show the relationship between Republican economic policies and inordinate job losses for Americans, particularly in the case of Ohio, whose blind loyalty to Republican politicians has been rewarded with worse job losses than any other state in the country.

But now it turns out that it wasn't just bad Republican economic and trade policies that are responsible for the loss of over 8,000 jobs in Mitakides' district-- it's currently represented by aggressive "free" trader and Bush rubber stamp Mike Turner-- but corrupt lobbying practices as well. The chief lobbyist for the German company that is causing this mess? Rick Davis, not just one of the 200 lobbyists working to elect McCain, but his campaign chair. And Senator McCain greased the skids for his pal Davis to be able to pull of this deal-- and make around $600,000.

McCAIN REMOVES ANOTHER OF HIS CORRUPT LOBBYSISTS FROM THE DRIVERS SEAT OF THE DOUBLE TALK EXPRESS-- OR DID HE?

Steve Schmidt now in charge of all McCain's negative messaging

As McCain's campaign manager, shady lobbyist Rick Davis has caused McCain endless problems and is a walking reminder that McCain's entire campaign is infested with the sleaziest congregation of Inside the Beltway special interest lobbyists ever assembled for any political campaign. He has been McCain's connection to the Russian Mafia and a key player in the developing Telecom scandals. Today Davis announced that although he would remain a key player in McCain's operation-- especially where it comes to the major donors at the heart of everything McCain does-- the day to day work (and the media spotlight) would go to Schwarzenegger's former campaign manager Steve Schmidt. He "will coordinate the campaign's daily pro-McCain and anti-Obama message but also will have an increased role in shaping most every facet of the organization including scheduling, policy, coalitions and surrogates."

Now, accounts diverge on the exact nature of the new chain of command. One top McCain source said that Schmidt "assumed full operational control of the campaign today" and described Davis as "a general manager."

But Charlie Black, another top adviser, said Davis was still in charge.

"Steve is going to function under Rick as a [chief operating officer]," Black said. "Rick still has authority over all things. Steve works for Rick."

But Black made sure to not diminish Schmidt's elevated role in the campaign.

"He'll be the maestro who conducts the symphony," Black said of Schmidt's position in driving McCain's message.

Yet McCain sources say Schmidt's imprint will be felt beyond a campaign message that, until recently, had not been clearly defined.

A handful of his fellow Bushworld veterans are also taking on more high-profile roles.

UPDATE... AHHH... IT WAS A SHAKE-UP

Tomorrow's NY Times says McCain was "responding to Republican concerns that his candidacy was faltering" and that's why he decided to centralize the power structure and put in the Rove character.

The elevation of Steve Schmidt — who worked closely with Karl Rove — at Mr. McCain’s headquarters represented a sharp diminishment of the responsibilities of Rick Davis, who has been Mr. McCain’s campaign manager since the last shake-up nearly a year ago.

The shift was approved by Mr. McCain after several of his aides, including Mr. Schmidt, went to him about 10 days ago and warned him that he was in danger of losing the presidential election unless he revamped his campaign operation, two officials close to the campaign said.

The move of Mr. Schmidt is the latest sign of increasing influence of veterans of Mr. Rove’s shop in the McCain operation. Nicolle Wallace, communications director for Mr. Bush in the 2004 campaign (and in his White House), has joined the campaign as a senior adviser, and will travel with Mr. McCain every other week.

Greg Jenkins, another veteran of Mr. Rove’s operation who is a former Fox News producer and director of presidential advance in the Bush White House, was hired by Mr. Schmidt last week after a series of what Mr. McCain’s advisers acknowledged were poorly executed campaign events.

Mr. Rove, who was Mr. Bush’s senior political adviser until he left the White House last year, was said by Mr. McCain’s advisers to have offered advice in recent days to Mr. Schmidt and others on how to get Mr. McCain’s campaign on track, but has stayed mostly on the periphery. Mr. Rove is aware, his associates said, that his own legacy could be helped should Mr. McCain win the presidency.

Is he still denying he's the embodiment of 4 more disastrous years?