Miss McConnell In A Tizzy

Neither of these China suck-ups is Chinese

Miss McConnell, who was booted out of the Army after just one week for fondling a private enlisted man's private parts, has some kind of a Republican "marriage" to former Bush Labor Secretary Elaine Chao. This kind of stuff isn't allowed to be written about in the Village. Outré, outré, outré... so outré. It's like when people used to talk about Florida Republican Congressman Mark Foley having a hankering for teenaged boys or Idaho Republican Senator Larry Craig enjoying himself regularly in public toilets. "How dare you!" the Villagers would bellow. "How dare you!" No, not at Foley or Craig... at anyone who wrote about it. It's just not how we do things... in the Village. No doubt! But we call the old pervert from Kentucky Miss McConnell anyway. Enjoy it... or ignore it.

May 20 is my sister's birthday. I think it was a 2007 post on May 20 when we first started looking seriously into Miss McConnell getting wealthy from his business dealings with Red China. It was the first of many.

Yesterday during a live blog session with Kentucky activists about Tuesday's gubernatorial primary, there was a brief conversation about how the Bush Regime's chief Senate obstructionist Mitch McConnell is a closet queen. Cliff Schecter pointed out, perhaps facetiously, that McConnell sometimes emerges from the closet to do business with his Chinese communist partners. "A review of financial assets held over the past six years by Elaine L. Chao and her husband, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, reveals that the labor secretary-designate serves as director of an insurance company that jointly owns a Lippo Group subsidiary with the Chinese government... McConnell, has received steady campaign contributions during his years in the Senate from Lippo partner American International Group Inc., and its chairman, Maurice 'Hank' Greenberg."

McConnell "is China's biggest Republican booster in the Senate, fighting to liberalize trade with Beijing."

The Post story claims that "dead pets and melamine-tainted food notwithstanding, change will prove difficult, policy experts say, in large part because U.S. companies have become so dependent on the Chinese economy that tighter rules on imports stand to harm the U.S. economy, too." There is no mention of Mitch McConnell and the agenda he and his "wife," U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, have pushed, quite relentlessly, an agenda that has helped to make them enormously wealthy and powerful... at the expense of some dead dogs and cats and some people getting sick. The Post claims that so many U.S. companies are involved with China now that there is little that can be done about it. That's how McConnell and Chao planned it.

Trading with the largely unregulated Chinese marketplace has its risks, of course, as evidenced by the many lawsuits that U.S. pet food companies now face from angry consumers who say their pets were poisoned by tainted Chinese ingredients. Until recently, however, many companies and even the federal government reckoned that, on average, those risks were worth taking. And for some products they have had little choice, as China has driven competitors out of business with its rock-bottom prices.

China's less-than-stellar behavior as a food exporter is revealed in stomach-turning detail in FDA "refusal reports" filed by U.S. inspectors: Juices and fruits rejected as "filthy." Prunes tinted with chemical dyes not approved for human consumption. Frozen breaded shrimp preserved with nitrofuran, an antibacterial that can cause cancer. Swordfish rejected as "poisonous."

The always cynical and self-serving McConnell was key in rejecting a bill that would have allowed senior citizens to purchase inexpensive Canadian drugs because, he claimed, the U.S. couldn't guarantee their safety. When someone brings up the safety of Chinese products to McConnell he turns into a veritable dragon lady, screaming and hissing and cursing about "Free Trade."

McConnell, Chao and the Bush Regime are literally allowing their partners in Communist China to poison the American public. "So pervasive is the U.S. hunger for cheap imports, experts said, that the executive branch itself has repeatedly rebuffed proposals by agency scientists to impose even modest new safety rules for foreign foods. 'Sometimes guidances can get through, but not regulations,' said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group. Guidances, which the FDA defines as 'current thinking on a particular subject,' are not binding. Under the Bush administration in particular, DeWaal said, if a proposed regulation does get past agency or department heads, it hits the wall at the White House Office of Management and Budget."

Yesterday the Villagers were all up in arms because someone at ProgressKentucky, a state good government PAC, tweeted something inartfully about Elaine Chao being Chinese (which she is). "Liberal" Villagers like nothing more than pinning the racism tag on progressives. There was inartfulness but no racism, none. Zero. ProgressKentucky is doing yeoman's work against McConnell's reelection but the Villagers want a pound of flesh now for the outrage, the outré, outré, outré. This was the PAC's first spirited defense yesterday:

Mitch McConnell’s campaign manager, Jesse Benton, has accused Progress Kentucky of race-baiting by retweeting a Twitter message that mentioned McConnell’s wife’s nationality.

“Progress Kentucky strongly denies that the organization has engaged in any such thing,” said Shawn Reilly, executive director of Progress Kentucky. “Benton’s statements are an attempt to divert attention from the fact that Mitch McConnell has engaged in the selling of the American middle class overseas for decades.”

Here are the facts:

In 1997, McConnell pushed for trade relations favorable to China resulting in American jobs going overseas. McConnell and his father-in-law James S.C. Chao, who is president of Foremost Maritime Corporation, met “privately with Chinese officials, including Jiang Zemin, then general secretary of the Communist Party of China. (Chao’s father and Jiang were schoolmates in China.),” according to the Herald-Leader.

On November 9, 2006, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao formally thanked Chao in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, for his role in developing the Chinese shipbuilding industry "at a rapid pace."

In January 2013, the Courier-Journal reported that eight members of the Chao’s family each gave $10,000 to the Kentucky Republican Party in the final weeks of 2012.

“When the Premier of China publicly thanks an industrialist for his role in developing Chinese industry, then that industrialist and his family contribute $80,000 to the Kentucky Republican Party, it is fair to question whether McConnell is selling out the middle class of America,” said Reilly.

Personally, James S. C. Chao has contributed $15,500 to Mitch McConnell's campaigns, $30,000 to the Kentucky Republican Party, and $17,500 to the Republican National Committee.

   Senator Mitch McConnell has a conflict of interest that many are afraid to talk about, and Progress Kentucky is not.

That isn't what the Villagers define as a pound of flesh. It just pissed them off even more. Pissed, pissed, pissed. Yesterday ended with another press release from ProgressKentucky, the apology the Villagers demanded-- but won't ever be satisfied with:

Progress Kentucky is dedicated to ensuring the people of Kentucky have the kind of representation in the US Senate they deserve. In an effort to educate KY voters as to the varied interests of Sen. McConnell we provided information about connections between the senator and business and government interests in China. This information included an inappropriate comment on the ethnicity of the former Secretary of Labor, Elaine Chao, the senator’s wife.

We apologize to the secretary for that unnecessary comment and have deleted the tweets in question. In addition, we have put a review process in place to ensure tweets and other social media communications from Progress KY are reviewed and approved prior to posting.

Senator McConnell’s record deserves a thorough and legitimate airing. We believe that after fair examination of it Kentuckians will agree that Senator McConnell has been wrong over and over on the issues that matter. We will continue to inform Kentucky voters the important issues at stake in this election.

Here's a self-aggrandizing clown who hasn't bothered to find out what really happened. I don't follow him but it was retweeted by the NRSC, which is how I did see it:

West Virginia's Senate Race: A Big Ugly Mess... Centered Around "Cocaine Mitch" McConnell

In his latest ad, West Virginia Republican Don Blankenship strike back at Mitch McConnell by refersring to himl as "cocaine Mitch"-- as in "Ditch Cocaine Mitch." Catchy. The primary is next Tuesday and McConnell is spending millions to make sure Blankenship loses. And it's working. Blankenship's polling has gone down from 1st to 3rd since McConnell's ad campaign went into full swing. Blankenship was formerly referring to McConnell as "a swamp captain," so this is a decision to get more aggressive with the very disliked head of the DC establishment Republicans.

McConnell controls a shady SuperPAC-- the Mountain Families PAC-- which is spending money in the primary to destroy Blankenship with TV ads reminding voters that he is a "convicted criminal," who lived a lavish lifestyle while ignoring mine safety laws. "Don Blankenship," one ad concludes, "was about the money. "West Virginia families paid the price." A million dollars in vicious ads like this have tanked Blankenship's campaign and made it a lot easier for popular conservative Democrat Joe Manchin to keep his seat.

The name-calling is intense. One of McConnell's former staffers, Josh Holmes, long rumored to be a McConnell lover, accused Blankenship of being "mentally ill" and Blankenship himself asserting that McConnell is in thrall to China, due to his Chinese father-in-law's shipping company, Foremost Maritime Corporation, which has financed McConnell's career and personal wealth. In fact, it was on one of the family ships, the Ping May, that the 90 pounds of cocaine was found-- being smuggled from Colombia to Holland. Recent polling has shown that McConnell is the most hated and toxic politician in America.

A decade before McConnell, a notorious closet queen, "married" Elaine Chao (a beard), her criminal father, James Chao, started donating to/bribing McConnell. In 2014, Lee Fang, in a report for for The Nation explains how McConnell benefitted from his relationship with his father-in-law (the cocaine smuggler).

The Republican Senate minority leader’s personal wealth grew seven-fold over the last ten years thanks in large part to a gift given to him and his wife in 2008 from James Chao worth between $5 million and $25 million (Senate ethics forms require personal finance disclosures in ranges of amounts, rather than specific figures). The gift helped the McConnells after their stock portfolio dipped in the wake of the financial crisis that year, and ensured they could pay off more than $100,000 in mortgage debt on their Washington home.

The generous gift made McConnell one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, with a net worth averaging around $22.8 million, according to The Washington Post’s review of his financial disclosures.

Following the gift, McConnell sent a letter of congratulations to an auditorium of Chinese officials in Shanghai who were gathered for an event honoring James Chao’s wife (McConnell’s mother-in-law, Ruth Mulan Chu Chao, who passed away in 2007). The Shanghai Mulan Education Foundation, created in her honor, regularly hosts students from the University of Louisville, where McConnell has a leadership academy bearing his name that sends students on trips to China.

The ties between McConnell and his in-laws have come under scrutiny before. In 2001, they were probed in depth by the New Republic in an article that charged that McConnell led an effort to soften his party’s criticism of China. Through James Chao, who was a classmate of Jiang Zemin, the president of China in the ’90s, McConnell and his wife met with Jiang several times, both in Beijing and in Washington. McConnell subsequently tempered his criticism of Chinese human rights abuses, and broke with hawks like Senator Jesse Helms to support Most Favored Nation trading status with China. As Foremost established closer ties with mainland China, McConnell endorsed the position that the United States should remain “ambiguous” about coming to the defense of Taiwan. In 1999, McConnell and his wife appeared at the University of Louisville with Chinese Ambassador Li Zhaoxing. Li used the opportunity to bash congressional leaders for rebuking China over its repression of the Falun Gong religious sect. “Any responsible government will not foster evil propensities of cults by being over-lenient,” Li reportedly said at the event with McConnell and Chao. Rather than distance himself from the remarks, McConnell reportedly spoke about his “good working relationship” with Li.

...McConnell has positioned himself over the years as a tough on drugs politician. In 1996, McConnell was the sole sponsor of the Enhanced Marijuana Penalties Act, a bill to increase the mandatory minimum sentencing for those caught with certain amounts of marijuana. A press release noted that his bill would make “penalties for selling marijuana comparable to those for selling heroin and cocaine.”

In recent weeks, McConnell has touted his role in calling for more federal money to be used for drug enforcement.

Blankenship, whose own fiancée is from China, has been on the campaign trail telling West Virginia Republican voters that McConnell "has a lot of connections in China" and that his wife, now Trump's Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, is "from China, so we have to be really concerned that we are in truth" when it comes to putting America’s interests first. Meanwhile, McConnell's former lover, Holmes, noted that Blankenship had used a "racial blast" against the Taiwan-born Chao, whom he described as "the dictionary definition of the American dream... The one consistency we've seen over the last decade is that the death rattle of a primary candidate is always a tendency to attack other Republicans because they know reporters will report it. At this point what's clear is that voters are writing him off and so he knows that by attacking McConnell he'll get attention."

McConnell knows Manchin will easily defeat Blankenship, which is why he's doing all he can to make sure he loses next week's primary. As of the April 18th FEC reporting deadline Blankenship had raised $3,517,000, as much as the 2 generic GOP establishment candidates, Patrick Morrisey and Evan Jenkins combined. 99.94% of what Blankenship has "raised" ($3,515,000) came from his own bank account. McConnell's Mountain Familes PAC has spent $1,328,456 attacking Blankenship and McConnell's Senate Leadership Fund has kicked in another hundred grand. Meanwhile Schumer got into the act by spending $1,833,351 to help Blankenship, persuaded that he will be the easiest Republican for Manchin to beat. Sounds like a vile mess? Of one thing there is no doubt: the winner of the West Virginia Senate race in November will be a conservative who puts special interests ahead of working families' interests. The game may be expensive-- but it is definitely rigged.

McConnell on China: “You Wake Up One Day And Look Around And You Can’t Find A Communist With A Flashlight”

The Cincinnati Enquirer is the dominant newspaper for northern Kentucky and publishes a Kentucky edition every day. This morning’s Mitch McConnell exposé by Curtis Ellis and Harry Wu isn’t only going to be read by folks in Ohio. And the basic premise that Ellis and Wu are making— that McConnell has enriched himself while in the U.S. Senate through his dealings with Communist China— aren’t new to Kentuckians. Even here at DWT we’ve been covering McConnell’s funny business with China regularly since 2007.

China has funneled immense sums of money into McConnell’s career through the Chamber of Commerce and through his crooked father-in-law, an agent for the Chinese Communists. McConnell and his “wife,” Bush’s vehemently anti-worker Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, have powerful and very profitable ties to the highest echelons of the Chinese Communist Party— and those ties have brought them considerable benefits, both politically and financially. With the Chinese Communists poised to crack down hard on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, McConnell still doesn’t understand— or doesn’t want to understand the nature of the tyrannical regime in Beijing he owns his fortune— and his power— to. As Wu and Ellis assert, love is blind when it comes to McConnell and the Chinese communists.

Sen. Mitch McConnell is one of the strongest supporters of free trade and closer ties with China. Some say his attitude is a result of his marriage to Elaine Chao. After all, Jiang Zemin, China's former Communist Party boss and dictator, is a close family friend of the senator's wife, and Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao praised her father for building up China's industry. Jiang Zemin, the hard-liner who took power following the Tienanmen Square massacre, is notorious for his repression of religious minorities and Tibet.

It would be easy to blame McConnell's wife for his pro-China stance.

But it would be wrong.

It would be wrong because President Bill Clinton wasn't married to Elaine Chao when he asked Congress to treat Communist China as a "Most Favored Nation" and make it safe for corporations to move American factories there. Conservatives warned of China's threat to our national security, but McConnell ignored these concerns and voted to open the door to more investment in the communist country, as Clinton asked.

It would be wrong because Al Gore was not married to Chao when he took illegal campaign contributions from foreign nationals in the Chinagate scandal. The man convicted of laundering campaign money for Gore also directed dollars to McConnell. (He eventually returned the money.)

It would be wrong because the CEO of Loral Space and Communications wasn't married to Chao when his company told China how to improve its missile guidance systems. Loral could save money by using Chinese rockets to launch communications satellites into orbit, and they wanted to make sure the rockets didn't crash on takeoff. The Pentagon said the information Loral provided placed America at greater risk.

It would be wrong because the CEO of AIG insurance wasn't married to Chao when he wanted to set up shop in China and sought Washington's help. AIG lobbied hard to get Congress to ignore China's record on human rights and national security issues. They shoveled contributions into congressional campaign coffers – McConnell received tens of thousands of dollars from AIG and the top contributors to the US-China Business Council. AIG became the first Western insurance company to do business in China, and then went on to collect $182 billion in the Wall Street bailout.

And George W. Bush wasn't married to Chao, either, when he nominated her to be labor secretary despite concerns about her "business relationship with communist China." Besides her family friendship with Beijing's communist bosses, Chao had ties to the company at the center of the Chinagate money laundering scandal, another firm in partnership with an intelligence-gathering front for the People's Liberation Army, and an Internet company, Multacom, subsequently linked to a notorious Chinese cyberespionage ring. Bush remained faithful even after Chao told an interviewer U.S. companies aren't moving offshore for cheap foreign labor, but because American workers are sloppy, lack "good personal hygiene" and have "anger-management" issues.

No, McConnell's problem isn't that he's married to Elaine Chao. It's that he's married to the Washington-Wall Street establishment that will do anything to stay in power and sees China as a "strategic partner" and money-making opportunity.

Love is blind, and it's love of money, not a woman, that makes McConnell and his friends in Washington unable to see the threat communist China poses to our people and our nation.

Maybe McConnell doesn’t share attitudes like these with Chao but the former Labor Secretary wasn’t an advocate for American workers when she was in Bush’s cabinet. She always defended Big Business moving jobs off shore— and not only for the slave wages. Chao lectured American workers that “U.S. employers say that many workers abroad simply have a better attitude toward work. American employees must be punctual, dress appropriately and have good personal hygiene. They need anger-management and conflict-resolution skills, and they have to be able to accept direction. Too many young people bristle when a supervisor asks them to do something."

McConnell never did an honest day’s work in his entire miserable life but since becoming a senator in 1984 he’s managed to amass $11.97 million, making him the 32nd richest Member of Congress.

The Senate minority leader has now been among the 50 wealthiest lawmakers for six consecutive years, since he won re-election to a fifth term. And in 2013, he saw his minimum net worth jump almost 30 percent, to a hair less than $12 million.

The Kentucky Republican’s reportable assets nearly tripled in 2008 thanks to a $5 million gift that he and his wife, former Labor Secretary Elaine L. Chao, received from her father, James, soon after the death of her mother. (After emigrating in the 1960s, the senator’s father-in-law founded a successful international trading business, now called the Foremost Group, specializing in importing Chinese-made goods to the United States.) The money has been invested ever since in a tax-exempt money market fund that remains the McConnells’ most significant asset by far.

The fact that McConnell has become so much better-off during his three decades in Congress has recently become an issue in his highly competitive re-election campaign. His Democratic challenger, Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, aired a television ad in August alleging the incumbent had overstayed his welcome in the Senate by becoming “a multimillionaire in public office” while opposing minimum wage increases, fighting unemployment insurance extensions and supporting “tax breaks that send Kentucky jobs overseas.”

McConnell has not listed any liabilities for several years, and the bulk of the most recent increase in the value of his assets is attributable to investment gains by Chao. One of her mixed investment funds increased in value by at least $500,000, while the disclosure forms for the first time mentioned a pension investment fund in which she’s invested at least $500,000. Chao also received deferred compensation of at least $250,000 from Protective Life Corp., a life insurance business where she was on the board of directors.

A Senate Without Mitch McConnell, Would Be A Much Better Senate, A Much Better America

This is the picture you can win

Yesterday we started a contest to win a copy of this beautiful print above, Nancy Ohanian's Congressional Terrorist. We're asking readers who would like a chance to win it to contribute to Betsy Sweet's campaign on this page by 6:00 PM (ET). One person who donates-- any amount-- will be randomly selected to win the print. Why? Because if Betsy replaces Susan Collins in Maine's Senate seat next year, that will be one giant step towards excising the evil that defines the driver of that truck in the picture... Moscow Mitch, the embodiment-- in some ways even more than Trump-- of all that's wrong with American politics.

Yesterday, Bob Moser went into details of what exactly is wrong with Mitch McConnell is an essay he wrote for Rolling Stone: Mitch McConnell: The Man Who Sold America. Moser wants to know if "after 40 years of scorched-earth politics and bowing to special interests, will Mitch McConnell finally pay the price?" Don't we all want the answer to that?

Fittingly enough, it was hot as blazes in Kentucky when Mitch McConnell slunk back home for Congress’ annual summer recess. One week earlier, Robert Mueller had testified that Russia was meddling in the 2020 U.S. elections. McConnell, the Senate majority leader, responded by shooting down Democrats’ efforts to bring two election-security bills to a vote-- bills that McConnell, in his familiar fashion, had previously sentenced to quiet deaths after they passed the House. In the hailstorm of opprobrium that followed, McConnell had been tagged by “Morning Joe” Scarborough with the indelible nickname “Moscow Mitch.” The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank called him a “Russian asset.” Twitter couldn’t decide whether he was #putinsbitch or #trumpsbitch. The Kentucky Democratic Party was selling red “Just Say Nyet to Moscow Mitch” T-shirts, emblazoned with an image of the senator’s jowly visage in a Cossack hat, as fast as they could print them up.

McConnell would undoubtedly have preferred to cool his heels in his Louisville home and let the storm subside. But he couldn’t afford that luxury. The biggest political event of the year in Kentucky, the Fancy Farm Picnic, happens on the first Saturday every August, and McConnell knew he had to show his face and speak. Fancy Farm, a 139-year tradition in the tiny western Kentucky town (population 458) it’s named for, is simultaneously one of America’s most charming political gatherings and one of its most brutal... Last summer, after months of waving through President Trump’s judicial nominees, McConnell opened his remarks with a typically pointed jab-- “Father, I’ve been preparing for my visit to the parish by performing as many confirmations as I can”-- then stood back, his thin lips curling up slightly into the look of smug satisfaction that happens whenever he’s gotten one over on the liberals.

This year, it was no use. Even before “Moscow Mitch” became a thing, Kentucky Democrats were smelling blood. McConnell has been unpopular in his home state for years, but his approval rating plunged in one poll to a rock-bottom 18 percent-- with a re-election campaign looming in 2020. In January, he had raised red flags among Republicans and -Democrats alike when he took a key role in lifting sanctions on Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a Putin ally under FBI investigation for his involvement in 2016 election-meddling; three months later, Deripaska’s aluminum company, Rusal, announced a $200 million investment in Kentucky. A billboard funded by a -liberal group was subsequently erected on a busy stretch of I-75: “Russian mob money . . . really, Mitch?”

More recently, reports emerged that McConnell’s wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, had set up a pipeline in her department to funnel grants to Kentucky to lift her husband’s political prospects. And as Trump’s trade war with China escalated, uncomfortable old stories began to recirculate about how McConnell “evolved” after he met his future wife in the early Nineties, going from being a fierce China hawk to a potent ally on Capitol Hill. Chao’s father, James-- a Chinese American shipping magnate and close friend of former People’s Republic dictator Jiang Zemin-- gave McConnell and his wife a huge gift in 2008 that boosted the senator’s net worth from less than $8 million to nearly $20 million. While “Beijing Mitch” doesn’t have quite the same ring as his new moniker, McConnell’s change of heart on Russia was hardly without precedent. (McConnell declined to comment for this story.)

Plus, McConnell made an unusual blunder in July. When a group of former coal miners suffering from black-lung disease caravaned to Washington to ask the senator for help, he met with them for only two minutes, leading to terrible headlines. As Fancy Farm got underway, coal miners in Harlan County were holding a protest that made news throughout the state. Their company had declared bankruptcy without warning and was refusing to pay their final paychecks, and the miners were blocking the tracks to prevent rail cars from shipping $1 million worth of the coal. As the protest stretched into late August, the site became a 24-hour encampment, attracting activists and food donations from around the country, and was visited by nearly every Kentucky politician except McConnell. Practically every story featured the miners cursing the senator. “He’s not pro-coal,” said miner Collin Cornette. “I don’t even think he’s pro-Kentucky.”

Not surprisingly, Democrats and progressive activists swarmed Fancy Farm this year, hopelessly outnumbering the Republicans. Even with a closely contested governor’s race in the offing, most folks came to taunt their senior senator and revel in his troubles. You can’t blame them: For almost four decades, McConnell has been ruthlessly mowing down his opponents with big-money negative campaigns and transforming the GOP into the state’s dominant party. And while many Kentuckians once took pride in having such a mighty mover-and-shaker in Washington, they’ve become increasingly appalled by what he’s done with his power: ensuring that big donors have undue influence in elections, turning Congress into a strictly partisan battlefield, and serving as the indispensable wingman for Trump. The crowd is teeming with Cossack hats and homemade signs with messages like “Putin for senator-- cut out the middle man.” Before the speechifying, I run into Bennie J. Smith, a civil-rights activist and jazz musician making a long-shot bid for the Democratic nomination to unseat McConnell, and he assesses the mood: “I’d say the crowd is pretty evenly divided the way Kentucky is: Some don’t like him, and some hate him.”

... “After suffering under Barack Obama, we are roaring back,” he seems to be saying. “I saved the Supreme Court for a generation by blocking President Obama’s nominees, and now the Washington liberals responded by targeting me. They handpicked Amy McGaffe-- I mean, McGrath,” he continues, delivering the kind of line aimed at his leading 2020 opponent that usually gets the Republicans cheering. But they can barely hear, and the “Moscow Mitch!” chant is only growing louder. As McConnell’s six allotted minutes go on, his jowls redden; his voice cracks and rasps as he gestures toward the baying Democrats, offering a preview of his 2020 campaign message. “They want to turn America into a socialist country,” he says. “Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell are not going to let that happen. That’s why I call myself the ‘Grim Reaper.’ I’m killing their socialist agenda.” When he finishes, he flashes a cheeky thumbs up toward the Democrats.

In one sense, it’s vintage McConnell: defiant, sarcastically cutting, smugly self-satisfied. But the fury of the crowd has rattled him. After a few more speakers, McConnell makes a stealthy exit out the back, avoiding reporters and detractors to speed back to Louisville. But this summer, trouble follows him everywhere — and the aftermath of Fancy Farm will only add to his woes. This is the day of the El Paso massacre, and the archprotector (and benefactor) of the NRA will soon be besieged with calls to bring the Senate back into session to pass background checks and a red-flag law. His normally crack campaign team will make matters worse as the news comes in from Texas, tweeting out a photo of a graveyard they’d erected in a corner of Fancy Farm, with tombstones bearing the names of all the Democrats he’s defeated, along with McGrath and Merrick Garland, the Obama Supreme Court nominee McConnell infamously blocked. The next morning, to add injury to insult, McConnell will take a tumble and fracture his shoulder on his patio.

For so many years, McConnell has seemed maddeningly invincible. But now, just a few years after achieving his lifelong goal of becoming Senate majority leader, it appears that every political sin the man has committed on his relentless march to power is coming back to haunt him at once. He has welcomed infamy, and now it has arrived on its own terms, bringing with it a previously unthinkable possibility: Could 40 years’ worth of devil’s bargains finally be catching up with Mitch McConnell?

For all the damage he’s inflicted on American democracy, for all the political corpses he’s left in his wake, Mitch McConnell has never betrayed an ounce of shame. To the contrary, like the president he now so faithfully serves, McConnell has always exuded a sense of pride in the lengths to which he’s gone to achieve his ambitions and infuriate his enemies. Unlike Trump, however, McConnell, 77, has always been laser-focused on politics. At age 22, when he interned for Sen. John Sherman Cooper, a genteel Republican of an era long gone, McConnell determined to not only follow his mentor’s path but to surpass him and become Senate majority leader. “It dawned on me early-- let’s put it that way,” he told Jonathan Martin of the New York Times. Most senators dream of the White House; all McConnell ever wanted was that gavel, that particular form of power.

...[I]n the political world of Mitch McConnell, convictions and campaign pledges were fungible things, easily tossed aside. Throughout his career, as the Republican Party veered right, and then further right, McConnell moved with it. “It’s always been about power, the political game, and it’s never been about the core values that drive political life,” John Yarmuth, Kentucky’s lone Democratic congressman, told Alec MacGillis, author of the 2014 McConnell biography The Cynic. “There has never been anything that interested him other than winning elections.”

...Just as he’d originally run as a pro-choice, pro-labor, pro-civil-rights Republican, McConnell had a long history of calling for removing big money from politics. In 1973, not long after he was elected chairman of the Jefferson County Republican Party, he’d written an op-ed for the Courier-Journal calling for “truly effective campaign finance reform”-- lowering contribution limits, mandating public disclosure of donors, even capping how much a candidate could spend in a race. He’d later laugh this off, claiming he’d been “playing for headlines” to distract folks from the Watergate scandal. But in 1987, midway through his first term, McConnell floated a constitutional amendment to end what he called the “millionaire’s loophole”-- the ability for wealthy Americans to spend limitless money on their own campaigns.

The proposal went nowhere, and in his second term, McConnell made a 180-degree turn and set himself down a path to becoming the most outspoken and influential opponent of campaign-finance restrictions in American history. At the same time, he began to master the art of tactical obstructionism. Democratic Sens. David Boren and George Mitchell had proposed a bill that included both spending limits and public financing for campaigns. While some Republicans were hesitant to speak out against a measure designed to tamp down on corruption, McConnell took the lead, blocking the bill by reviving the use of the filibuster, which still carried unsavory associations with segregationist efforts to block civil-rights measures in the Sixties. “Filibustering is sometimes presented as an obstructionist tactic by its opponents,” McConnell would later say, “but in my view, if legislation as awful as this bill is brought up for consideration, there is a duty to obstruct its passage.”

...Contrary to popular recollection, McConnell didn’t utter his infamous quote-- “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president”-- until the eve of the 2010 midterms. In his book, McConnell insisted the reporter took the quote out of context, twisting it into something unpatriotic and cynical. But then, just a few paragraphs later, he wrote about the Tea Party revolution: “To my great delight, it seemed as if we were moving in the direction of holding Obama to one term.”

At first, McConnell’s Senate minority-- with just 40 Republicans-- was too small to block Obama at every turn. When his dispirited colleagues met in the weeks before Obama’s inauguration, McConnell rallied them around a strategy: Stick together as a bloc and use parliamentary maneuvers to filibuster, or at least delay, every major piece of legislation the president proposed. Some Republicans were worried about the political repercussions of obstruction, but McConnell convinced them if they could deny the president victories, his popularity would wane-- the public would come to blame him, not Congress, for the failures. To show the way, McConnell led the opposition to Obama’s efforts to close Guantanamo Bay, both denying him the chance to fulfill an important campaign promise and reviving questions about Democrats’ toughness on foreign policy.

McConnell wheedled and cajoled waffling senators to prevent a single Republican vote from being cast for Obama’s biggest legislative priority, the Affordable Care Act, ensuring that its passage would be seen, and debated in the future, as a strictly partisan affair. But the most enduring legacy of McConnell’s strategy would be his dramatic break with tradition on the president’s judicial nominees. While only 68 nominees had been denied confirmation over the previous 40 years, Republicans successfully filibustered 79 nominees during Obama’s first term alone.

McConnell was too much of a Washington operator to be considered a hero of the new right-wing insurrection inspired by the shock of a black man’s presidency. He privately fumed about the tea partyers who ousted establishment Republicans in primaries. But McConnell, the onetime moderate whose real ideology was now anybody’s guess, had become, in the words of The Atlantic’s James Fallows, “the most effective purely partisan figure” in modern times.

McConnell’s work finally paid off in 2014, when Republicans won the Senate and made him majority leader at last, but he could not control the broader consequences of the upheavals his quest for power had set in motion. His all-out war on Obama’s agenda, his transformation of the Senate into a hyperpartisan arena, and his devious obstructionism helped set the table for Trump-- and, simultaneously, conceivably, for McConnell’s own downfall.

McConnell was hardly bowled over by the idea of Trump as president. “It’s pretty obvious he doesn’t know a lot about the issues,” McConnell dryly remarked during the 2016 campaign. After Trump won, Washington reporters rubbed their hands in glee, keeping watch for signs of high-level clashes between the spectacularly ill-matched Republican leaders. The closest they came to a satisfying public “feud,” though, was in the aftermath of the failure of Republicans’ alternative to Obamacare in the summer of 2017, when Trump blamed McConnell and vice versa. But after McConnell bit his lip and declined to join the chorus of condemnation over Trump’s appalling response to the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, then teamed with the administration to pass the president’s first budget bill over strong conservative objections, the two began singing from the same hymnal. By 2018, at a rally in Kentucky, they were praising each other to the skies. “Aren’t we proud of President Trump?” McConnell proclaimed. Trump called McConnell “one of the most powerful men in the world,” and lauded him as “Kentucky tough”-- which would become the slogan for McConnell’s 2020 campaign.

Most of all, Trump came to appreciate the “big, beautiful present” McConnell had given him by leaving scores of judicial seats open for the new president to fill, delighting Trump’s evangelical base and giving him something to brag about during his rocky first year. McConnell never stopped giving the president gifts-- passing tax cuts for wealthy Americans, declaring the “case closed” on collusion with Russia in the 2016 elections while the Intelligence Committee was still investigating, and refusing to bring election-security bills up for a vote. Almost single-handedly, McConnell, while reportedly continuing to “abhor” Trump’s ignorance and lack of discipline, gave the administration legitimacy, along with a record to run on in 2020. McConnell’s efforts have led some to liken him to Hindenburg, the German president who enabled Hitler’s rise. Asked about the comparison, McConnell scoffed, “To expect Republican elected officials not to try to achieve as much as they possibly can . . . out of pique over presidential behavior is nonsense.”

While McConnell’s role as Trump’s chief accomplice has made him the archvillain of Democrats nationally, he is detested back home for broader reasons. At Fancy Farm, one of the folks I meet is Jen Thompson, an artist and farmer from Paducah who’d come to holler at McConnell-- but admits she’d once been a supporter. “I’m 47,” she says. “When I was first able to vote, in 1996, I voted for Mitch. He was already getting powerful in Washington, and I bought into the idea that he could do a lot of good for us. But eventually it dawned on me, like a lot of people, this guy really doesn’t give a crap about us. He’s all about stockpiling his own squirrel-nut factory for his winter. Public records are public records, and you can see how his trajectory has gone toward wealth. Back home, I’m still making the same amount of money I was making! I think he’s got a real good chance of being booted this time.”

She was getting at something that explains McConnell’s dismal approval rating in Kentucky-- and that could cause him fits in his run for re-election next year. When he last ran, defeating Secretary of State Alison Grimes by 15 points in 2014, McConnell had plenty of power in Washington, but nowhere near the national notoriety he’s achieved since becoming majority leader and handmaiden to Trump’s agenda. The more power he’s accrued, the more folks back home are inclined to wonder: How come Kentucky isn’t reaping any benefits from it?

The Democrats competing to challenge McConnell next year say they plan to pound that question home. “While McConnell has gone from being one of the poorest senators to one of the richest, he has left Kentucky behind,” says Broihier, the newspaper editor who’s running a grassroots campaign. He ticks off some grim statistics: “We’re 47th in poverty, 44th in employment, 43rd in education. We’re number five in diabetes and teen pregnancy. We’re number one in pollution from [coal] plants. If the measure is what you’ve done for your constituents, it’s a pretty easy case to make.”

The early front-runner for the nomination, Amy McGrath, plans to hammer that message home as well. “Mitch McConnell has been in office 34 years now,” she says, “and for many people in Kentucky, their lives have not only not gotten better, they’ve gotten worse. He’s let our signature industries like tobacco go away, without any plan for replacing the lost jobs. He’s known the coal industry would decline, for decades, and now we have an entire region, eastern Kentucky, where there’s not a lot of opportunity. And it’s easy to see why: You go 30 minutes outside of Lexington to the east, you lose cellphone coverage. Businesses might want to come here, but you know what? They come, they see there’s no infrastructure, and they turn right around and leave.”

McGrath, a former Marine fighter pilot who fell just shy of unseating a Republican in Congress last year, has raised buckets of money-- $7 million in the first six weeks of her campaign, demonstrating the other challenge McConnell will be facing next year: Democrats nationally are dying to throw money at anyone who might be able to unseat him.

In his past two campaigns, McConnell outraised his opponents by $10 million and $12 million, an almost insurmountable advantage for even the most appealing candidate to overcome. It’s unlikely that he’ll enjoy that kind of edge in 2020. Ditch Mitch, a PAC founded by Ryan Aquilina, a digital strategist for progressive campaigns, has already raised $3 million to supplement the Democratic effort to oust McConnell. “We see ourselves as a necessary complement,” Aquilina says, “considering that McConnell is going to raise jumbo-jet cash and spend it all going negative.”

McConnell’s opponent in 2020 will surely make an issue of where his campaign money comes from, too-- since it’s almost exclusively from corporate donors from outside Kentucky. Only nine percent of his haul in the most recent fundraising came from individual donors back home; the vast majority, as usual, derived from a roster of big corporate interests-- including United Parcel Service, the Blackstone Group, Eli Lilly & Co., and the private-prison GEO Group.

“This is a winnable race, if you try to make it catered to Kentuckians,” says Matt Jones, the popular host of Kentucky Sports Radio who’s also considering a run. “This is a blue-collar, anti-establishment state. People are religious, but they’re not Bible Belters. There’s a long history of fighting for workers’ rights here. People say voters aren’t going to go for Trump and then vote for a Democrat down-ballot. But that’s misunderstanding Kentucky.” Aquilina agrees: “The reason people voted for Trump here is the same reason they hate McConnell.”

Which means McConnell won’t have the luxury of distancing himself one iota from the president between now and next November; Trump’s approval ratings in Kentucky are more than 20 points higher than his own. As demonstrated by his hasty dismissal of those election-security bills in July, the senator has no choice but to keep himself tethered to Trump and hope to ride his coattails-- a situation that, for a control freak like McConnell, cannot be comforting.

That’s what it’s come to for Mitch McConnell. Four decades of clawing his way to power, by any means at his disposal, and now his political life, which is his only life, ultimately rests in the hands of the most erratic character ever to occupy the Oval Office. No one can doubt that McConnell will run a campaign, as always, that is lavishly funded and equal parts savvy and cutthroat. But the conditions, created largely by the senator himself, are ripe for a reckoning. And if it comes, it will be an ironic and fitting denouement to one of the most destructive political careers in American history.

HOW MUCH HAS MITCH McCONNELL BEEN PAID TO ALLOW THE CHINESE COMMUNISTS TO DUMP THEIR POISONOUS PRODUCTS ON AMERICA?

Things have quieted down a bit since Bush Regime incompetence-- now apparently accepted by most Americans as an immutable fact of Nature-- contributed to the deaths of thousands of pets. As one federal agency after another has been politicized, ideologicized and made incapable of carrying out basic functions, disasters they were designed to prevent have multiplied. Why should Bush's FDA be expected to do a better job than Bush's FEMA?

Today's Washington Post asks a crucial question every American should ask next time they go into a voting booth and consider voting for a Republican-- or for a Democrat who acts like one: Why doesn't the U.S. stop the importation of tainted food from China? It's a page 1 story so, presumably, some of our elected officials might notice it.

Dried apples preserved with a cancer-causing chemical.

Frozen catfish laden with banned antibiotics.

Scallops and sardines coated with putrefying bacteria.

Mushrooms laced with illegal pesticides.

These were among the 107 food imports from China that the Food and Drug Administration detained at U.S. ports just last month, agency documents reveal, along with more than 1,000 shipments of tainted Chinese dietary supplements, toxic Chinese cosmetics and counterfeit Chinese medicines.

For years, U.S. inspection records show, China has flooded the United States with foods unfit for human consumption. And for years, FDA inspectors have simply returned to Chinese importers the small portion of those products they caught-- many of which turned up at U.S. borders again, making a second or third attempt at entry.

Now the confluence of two events-- the highly publicized contamination of U.S. chicken, pork and fish with tainted Chinese pet food ingredients and this week's resumption of high-level economic and trade talks with China-- has activists and members of Congress demanding that the United States tell China it is fed up.

Dozens of people in Panama have died from using toothpaste made in China. Like today's Post report, yesterday's NY Times carried a report that should make every American who doesn't grow his own food and medicine to wake up and take note. "Diethylene glycol, a poisonous ingredient in some antifreeze, has been found in 6,000 tubes of toothpaste in Panama, and customs officials there said yesterday that the product appeared to have originated in China... Diethylene glycol is the same poison that the Panamanian government inadvertently mixed into cold medicine last year, killing at least 100 people. Records show that in that episode the poison, falsely labeled as glycerin, a harmless syrup, also originated in China. There is no evidence that the tainted toothpaste is in the United States, according to American government officials."

There may be no evidence that there is but if that is the case, it's because we've been lucky-- so far. It certainly isn't because we've been protected by our government, not from an incompetent executive branch hell-bent on proving that "big government" is incompetent-- one of the Bush Regime's only accomplishments-- and not from the legislative branch controlled by pocket-lining crooks like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

Yesterday during a live blog session with Kentucky activists about Tuesday's gubernatorial primary, there was a brief conversation about how the Bush Regime's chief Senate obstructionist Mitch McConnell is a closet queen. Cliff Schecter pointed out, perhaps facetiously, that McConnell sometimes emerges from the closet to do business with his Chinese communist partners. "A review of financial assets held over the past six years by Elaine L. Chao and her husband, Kentucky Sen. Mitch McConnell, reveals that the labor secretary-designate serves as director of an insurance company that jointly owns a Lippo Group subsidiary with the Chinese government... McConnell, has received steady campaign contributions during his years in the Senate from Lippo partner American International Group Inc., and its chairman, Maurice "Hank" Greenberg."

McConnell "is China's biggest Republican booster in the Senate, fighting to liberalize trade with Beijing."

The Post story claims that "dead pets and melamine-tainted food notwithstanding, change will prove difficult, policy experts say, in large part because U.S. companies have become so dependent on the Chinese economy that tighter rules on imports stand to harm the U.S. economy, too." There is no mention of Mitch McConnell and the agenda he and his "wife," U.S. Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, have pushed, quite relentlessly, an agenda that has helped to make them enormously wealthy and powerful... at the expense of some dead dogs and cats and some people getting sick. The Post claims that so many U.S. companies are involved with China now that there is little that can be done about it. That's how McConnell and Chao planned it.

Trading with the largely unregulated Chinese marketplace has its risks, of course, as evidenced by the many lawsuits that U.S. pet food companies now face from angry consumers who say their pets were poisoned by tainted Chinese ingredients. Until recently, however, many companies and even the federal government reckoned that, on average, those risks were worth taking. And for some products they have had little choice, as China has driven competitors out of business with its rock-bottom prices.

China's less-than-stellar behavior as a food exporter is revealed in stomach-turning detail in FDA "refusal reports" filed by U.S. inspectors: Juices and fruits rejected as "filthy." Prunes tinted with chemical dyes not approved for human consumption. Frozen breaded shrimp preserved with nitrofuran, an antibacterial that can cause cancer. Swordfish rejected as "poisonous."

The always cynical and self-serving McConnell was key in rejecting a bill that would have allowed senior citizens to purchase inexpensive Canadian drugs because, he claimed, the U.S. couldn't guarantee their safety. When someone brings up the safety of Chinese products to McConnell he turns into a veritable dragon lady, screaming and hissing and cursing about "Free Trade."

McConnell, Chao and the Bush Regime are literally allowing their partners in Communist China to poison the American public. "So pervasive is the U.S. hunger for cheap imports, experts said, that the executive branch itself has repeatedly rebuffed proposals by agency scientists to impose even modest new safety rules for foreign foods. 'Sometimes guidances can get through, but not regulations,' said Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group. Guidances, which the FDA defines as 'current thinking on a particular subject,' are not binding. Under the Bush administration in particular, DeWaal said, if a proposed regulation does get past agency or department heads, it hits the wall at the White House Office of Management and Budget."



UPDATE: WHAT ABOUT DEMOCRATS WHO VOTE FOR THESE BAD TRADE POLICIES?

I'm glad you asked. There are Democrats, more than a few, in league with corrupt Republicans like McConnell and Bush and out to screw the American people in return for cold hard cash, sometimes directly into their pockets and sometimes in the form of "legal" bribes (campaign contributions). Today, David Sirota has a brilliant piece up at Working Assets that explains Triangulation and how unscrupulous Democratic pols sometimes act just like... Republicans.

The term "triangulation" in politics means a set of leaders trying joining with their opponents to pass measures that run counter to those leaders' own supporters. Typically, triangulation is practiced by presidents against their own parties in Congress, with the master of triangulation being President Bill Clinton who, among other things, rammed welfare reform and NAFTA "over the dead bodies" of rank-and-file Democratic lawmakers and the progressive movement. Can congressional leaders can pull the same move? Unfortunately, we're going to find out very soon, as congressional Democratic leaders are very clearly attempting to triangulate against their own party on the three issues the party ran on to win Election 2006.

Although David convincingly discusses some Democrats' faithlessness on lobbying reform and on Iraq-- and I suggest everyone read the entire story (linked above)-- I want to focus on how Democratic politicians, in conjunction with the worst Republican bribe-takers like McConnell-- are selling out voters in the trade policies they are working on with the 100% corporately-oriented Bush Regime.

On trade, Public Citizen has shown that the Democratic Party relied on candidates who ran against lobbyist-written trade deals in order to win many of the crucial conservative-leaning districts that were necessary to win the congressional majority. Yet, as we've seen over the last week, a handful of senior Democratic leaders are joining with the Bush White House in an attempt to ram an ultra-secret free trade deal through Congress, acknowledging that in order to be successful, they will rely on all Republicans and just 25 percent of Democratic lawmakers. As rank-and-file Democratic lawmakers and organizations representing millions of workers, farmers and small businesses have raised objections to the deal, Reuters reports today that Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) is digging in, saying that if he knew what he knew now about how serious rank-and-file Democratic opposition to lobbyist-written trade policy was, he would have tried to negotiate the deal in even more secrecy than it was negotiated in in the first place.

On Bill Moyers' terrific PBS report on Friday about the secret deal, author John R. MacArthur says the motivations for the triangulation on trade are obvious. "This is like the NAFTA campaign of the '90s, an attempt by the Democratic leadership-- in those days it was the Clintons-- to raise money from Wall Street."

This drive to triangulate on trade has now reached a point where the handful of Democrats who made the deal are publicly attacking those rank-and-file Democratic lawmakers, labor, environmental, health, human rights, religious, consumer protection and agricultural groups raising questions about the deal. On Friday, Reuters reported that Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) "offered no apology" for negotiating the deal in secret or for continuing to conceal the legislative text of the deal. Instead, he went on the attack, saying the only thing he would do differently would be to "ignore a lot of people that really were just wasting my time." He claimed innocently that "I cannot see how anybody would be upset" by the deal, even though as Public Citizen shows today, the list of reforms to current trade policies that fair trade groups forwarded to Democratic leaders many months ago was almost entirely brushed aside by Rangel, as were proposals for a whole new framework for global trade deals.

TRIANGULATION STRATEGY: The dynamics set up a situation whereby the Democratic congressional leadership and less than half of all Democratic lawmakers (as during NAFTA) join with all Republicans to ram a free trade package through Congress over the objections of the progressive movement and rank-and-file Democrats who ran against lobbyist-written trade policies in 2006.

The major culprits? Rahm Emanuel, of course, as well as Rangel and Hoyer. We'll have the list of Democrats who decide to behave like Mitch McConnell-- as soon as the votes are cast.

Mitch McConnell-- The Cocaine Connecton

Florida Republican Trey Radel, a former Hate Talk Radio host and former U.S. congressman, got kicked out of his House seat for dealing cocaine in Washington. The FBI is covering up their own drug abuse investigation of another GOP coke freak, Ohio's David Joyce. Staffers tell me that there are "over a dozen" prominent Republican congressmen who use cocaine regularly. "Peter Russo didn't have anything on these GOP hypocrites," one told me, referencing a Pennsylvania Democratic congressman who came to an untimely first season end in House of Cards.

No one has ever told me that Mitch McConnell, whose private life I have looked into a lot-- he's a closet case who was kicked out of the Army after a few days for fondling a private's privates-- is a cocaine user. That doesn't mean he isn't; it just means no one has told me that he is. In fact, McConnell plays the role of an anti-drug law-and-order Republicano; he sponsored a bill to increase the mandatory minimum sentencing for marijuana use. But the immense wealth he's accumulated since getting into the Senate-- he's the 11th richest senator with a net worth estimated at $11.97 million-- may have had more to do with drug smuggling than was previously understood.

This week one of America's top investigative journalists, Lee Fang, published the results of his work on McConnell's cocaine connection in The Nation. Turns out there was more of a reason why McConnell is so "pro-coal" than anyone ever suspected. His crooked in-laws, who have made him a multimillionaire, were using coal shipping as a front.

Before the Ping May, a rusty cargo vessel, could disembark from the port of Santa Marta en route to the Netherlands in late August, Colombian inspectors boarded the boat and made a discovery. Hidden in the ship’s chain locker, amidst its load of coal bound for Europe, were approximately 40 kilograms, or about 90 pounds, of cocaine. A Colombian Coast Guard official told The Nation that there is an ongoing investigation.

The seizure of the narcotics shipment in the Caribbean port occurred far away from Kentucky, the state in which Senator Mitch McConnell is now facing a career-defining election. But the Republican Senate minority leader has the closest of ties to the owner of the Ping May, the vessel containing the illicit materials: the Foremost Maritime Corporation, a firm founded and owned by McConnell's in-laws, the Chao family.

Though Foremost has played a pivotal role in McConnell's life, bestowing the senator with most of his personal wealth and generating thousands in donations to his campaign committees, the drug bust went unnoticed in Kentucky, where every bit of McConnell-related news has generated fodder for the campaign trail. That's because, like many international shipping companies, Chao's firm is shrouded from public view, concealing its identity and limiting its legal liability through an array of tax shelters and foreign registrations. Registered through a limited liability company in the Marshall Islands, the Ping May flies the Liberian flag.

McConnell's ties to the Chaos go back to the late 1980s, when James Chao began donating to the senator. In 1993, McConnell married James's daughter, Elaine Chao, a Republican activist and then-former Reagan administration official who would later serve as Secretary of Labor in the George W. Bush cabinet. James Chao emigrated to the United States from Taiwan, and founded the Foremost Maritime Corporation upon settling in New York. The company has grown significantly over the years, from acting as maritime agent during the Vietnam War to controlling a fleet of approximately 16 dry bulk cargo ships in operation today.

Foremost acts as a shipping agent, purchasing vessels made primarily in China and coordinating shipment of commodities. Records reviewed by The Nation reveal that Foremost transports corn, chemicals, and other goods to cities throughout the world. The company has offices in New York and Hong Kong.

Some of the goods shipped by Foremost echo themes of the McConnell campaign. At a Young Professionals Association of Louisville event this month, McConnell stressed his opposition to carbon dioxide limits imposed by the federal government that would impact the domestic coal market. He argued that such efforts would be fruitless given the role of coal in developing countries and the rising coal trade. Foremost ships routinely transport coal from ports in Australia and Colombia, countries with cheap coal, for export to Asia and Europe.

The firm, however, leaves a faint online trace. Foremost's website FMCNY.com is blank. 

Records and court documents obtained by The Nation show that the ownership of the company's vessels-- with names such as Ping May, Soya May, Fu May, and Grain May-- is obscured through a byzantine structure of tax entities. Most of Foremost's vessels are flagged in Liberia, which ensures that crew members of Foremost's ships work under Liberia's maritime labor laws, which critics note allow for intimidation in the workplace and few protections for labor unions. In addition, a Liberian "flag of convenience" allows ship owners to pay lower tonnage taxes than ships that fly the U.S. flag. Maritime companies have increasingly used the Marshall Islands to register their vessels. The jurisdiction boasts of “no taxation, lax regulation, and no requirements for disclosure of many corporate details-- even to the United States government,” according to a report in the World Policy Journal.

The recent seizure of cocaine on a Foremost coal ship came as authorities in Colombia have stepped up anti-drug trafficking enforcement in the region. The Nation spoke to Luis Gonzales, an official with the Colombian Coast Guard in Santa Marta, who told us that the Ping May's crew were questioned as part of an ongoing investigation, but that no charges have yet been filed. His team found the cocaine in forty separate packages.

Contacted by telephone, a representative of Foremost said he is “obviously going to have no comment on this one.”

McConnell has benefitted in many ways from his relationship with his in-laws.

The Republican Senate minority leader’s personal wealth grew seven-fold over the last ten years thanks in large part to a gift given to him and his wife in 2008 from James Chao worth between $5 million and $25 million (Senate ethics forms require personal finance disclosures in ranges of amounts, rather than specific figures). The gift helped the McConnells after their stock portfolio dipped in the wake of the financial crisis that year, and ensured they could pay off more than $100,000 in mortgage debt on their Washington home.

The generous gift made McConnell one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, with a net worth averaging around $22.8 million, according to the Washington Post’s review of his financial disclosures.

Following the gift, McConnell sent a letter of congratulations to an auditorium of Chinese officials in Shanghai who were gathered for an event honoring James Chao’s wife (McConnell’s mother-in-law, Ruth Mulan Chu Chao, who passed away in 2007). The Shanghai Mulan Education Foundation, created in her honor, regularly hosts students from the University of Louisville, where McConnell has a leadership academy bearing his name that sends students on trips to China.

The ties between McConnell and his in-laws have come under scrutiny before. In 2001, they were probed in depth by the New Republic in an article that charged that McConnell led an effort to soften his party’s criticism of China. Through James Chao, who was a classmate of Jiang Zemin, the president of China in the ’90s, McConnell and his wife met with Jiang several times, both in Beijing and in Washington. McConnell subsequently tempered his criticism of Chinese human rights abuses, and broke with hawks like Senator Jesse Helms to support Most Favored Nation trading status with China. As Foremost established closer ties with mainland China, McConnell endorsed the position that the United States should remain “ambiguous” about coming to the defense of Taiwan. In 1999, McConnell and his wife appeared at the University of Louisville with Chinese Ambassador Li Zhaoxing. Li used the opportunity to bash congressional leaders for rebuking China over its repression of the Falun Gong religious sect. “Any responsible government will not foster evil propensities of cults by being over-lenient,” Li reportedly said at the event with McConnell and Chao. Rather than distance himself from the remarks, McConnell reportedly spoke about his “good working relationship” with Li.

Last Friday, McConnell dipped into his personal fortune to lend his own campaign $1.8 million for the final week before the election. Members of the Chao family and employees of Foremost have also given over $90,000 in contributions to McConnell over the years.

Requests for comment to the McConnell team about the Ping May cocaine incident have gone unanswered.

McConnell has positioned himself over the years as a tough on drugs politician. In 1996, McConnell was the sole sponsor of the Enhanced Marijuana Penalties Act, a bill to increase the mandatory minimum sentencing for those caught with certain amounts of marijuana. A press release noted that his bill would make “penalties for selling marijuana comparable to those for selling heroin and cocaine.”

In recent weeks, McConnell has touted his role in calling for more federal money to be used for drug enforcement.

And then there's the stuff like this, which, hopefully, isn't over the heads of voters Tuesday:

MITCH McCONNELL IN TROUBLE BACK HOME-- AND THERE ISN'T EVEN A DEMOCRAT OPPONENT YET!

All these Inside the Beltway prognosticators are always putting up their predictions about which Senate and House are vulnerable and which are "safe." These folks are so conservative and out of touch that they are virtually always wrong. Normally they trail reality by several months. It drives me nuts when big DC organizations quote them when allocating funds to candidates. A few days ago I was reading one of the lists of safe Senate seats complied by one of these Einsteins. Mitch McConnell was rated as a sure hold for the Republicans. And McConnell may win his seat again in 2008-- but I wouldn't bet on it; and "safe" is far from what that race should be rated by anyone whose been awake in the last year.

Even today's Moonie Times recognizes that McConnell's base of support has all but eroded away as he played the role of Bush's chief obstructionist in the Senate. McConnell has managed to lead filibusters against every piece of progressive legislation passed in the House-- and then call the Congress a "Do Nothing Congress." The man has no shame. But the reasons he has less and less backing in Kentucky are for other things.

He and his wife, Bush's anti-labor Labor Secretary are practically lobbyists for China and are huge boosters for shipping American jobs-- even Kentucky jobs, like in the case of the Fruit of the Loom factory in Campbellsville-- and for the free importation of poisonous and deadly Chinese products into America. McConnell and his wife-of-convenience have become extremely wealthy since entering government service. Like so many Republican members of Congress, public service has been an absolute gold mine. Some, like Randy "Duke" Cunningham and Bob Ney are already in prison. It is likely that they will be followed by the entire Alaska congressional delegation, the former Republican House Majority Leader (Tom DeLay), John Doolittle (R-CA), Rick Renzi (R-AZ), Jerry Lewis (R-CA), and as many as a dozen other egregiously crooks GOP lawmakers.

But McConnell has plenty to worry about before his corruption comes to the fore. Everyone is always asking for proof he was thrown out of the military for fondling a private's privates. Looks like that will be available soon, something that is bound to be uncomfortable for a homophobic hypocrite like McConnell. You can rest assured the Washington Times doesn't bring that up. Instead they talk about the growing unpopularity of Bush's Iraq occupation, which is largely associated, as it should be, with McConnell (see video below). In fact, many Kentucky Republicans are urging Larry Forgy to challenge McConnell in the primary.
Forgy knows that McConnell's weakest point isn't so much that he's in bed with other men or with Bush, but that he's in bed with China.

"The average Kentuckian feels we are giving away this country with both hands-- jobs are going, essentially the primacy of the people who made this country great is going, and Mitch McConnell is lumped with the Washington types on this," Mr. Forgy said.

"And the war in Iraq is less troublesome in Kentucky than in many other places, but it is not popular here, and Republican voters see Mitch's views as too close to the president's on the war," said Mr. Forgy, a Lexington lawyer.

... McConnell registered a 48 percent approval rating last month in a SurveyUSA poll.

Not a single Republican Senator was re-elected last year with a SUSA approval below 50% a year before the election. Jim Talent (R-MO), Mike DeWine (R-OH), Rick Santorum (R-PA), Conrad Burns (R-MT), George Macacawitz Allen (R-VA) and Lincoln Chafee (R-RI) were all defeated, some with approval rating higher than McConnell's. And McConnell has been the ultimate Bush Regime rubber stamp, not just on Iraq and Bush's devastating trade policies, but also on immigration, a very unpopular stand among Republicans in Kentucky.

A county party chairman who supports Mr. McConnell but asked not to be identified said Mr. McConnell's re-election next year is uncertain -- despite the Capitol Hill clout he brings Kentucky -- unless he shows the folks back home he understands their distrust of Washington on enforcing immigration laws.

The chairman said he has tried to tell Mr. McConnell that he needs to assure the party's base that he opposes Mr. Bush's immigration bill.

The Kentucky Republican Party, torn by the immigration issue, was further fractured when critics claimed Mr. McConnell had acted behind the scenes to back an ultimately unsuccessful primary challenge by former Rep. Anne Northup against Gov. Ernie Fletcher earlier this year. The Fletcher faction of the state Republican Party is backing the "draft Forgy" campaign.