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JOHN McCAIN .
NOVEMBER 2008
MCCAIN LIES ABOUT SPREADING THE
WEALTH
MCCAIN SAT DOWN WITH PINOCHET
"WITHOUT PRECONDITIONS"
HOW THE GOP AND MEDIA MISLED PUBLIC
ABOUT ACORN & SUBPRIME LOANS
THE REPUBLICAN LIE ABOUT SUBPRIME
LOANS
OCTOBER 2008
CINDY MCCAIN EARNS 105 TIMES MORE
THAN JOE THE PLUMBER
MCCAIN ISN'T A MAVERICK; HE'S
A MUGWUMP
MCCAIN'S VIOLENT PAL G GORDON
LIDDY
A LETTER TO JOE THE PLUMBER
VERIZON, ATT IN SWEETHEART DEAL
FOR MCCAIN
MCCAIN'S CLASS ACT
An apparently contented McCain
at an event co-sponsored by ACORN
MCCAIN PUSH POLLS SPREAD LIES
ABOUT OBAMA
SCIENCE FOR AGED PRESIDENTIAL
CANDIDATES
MCCAIN'S ECONOMIC DOUBLESPEAK
THE MEANING OF MCCAIN'S TONGUE
JUT
AT THE TABLE WITH AN ANGRY MCCAIN
Michael Kinsley, Daily
Beast - Until
recently this [McCain] anger business didn't bother me much.
There is a lot to be angry about. Furthermore, I was not confident
that McCain's anger passed the whose-ox-is-gored test: As an
Obama supporter, would I be equally alarmed if my preferred candidate
had anger issues? (Which some folks say he does, by the way.)
Then I heard the following story.
It comes in an email from
my friend Jeff Dearth, a media investment banker and former publisher
of The New Republic. We also went to junior high and high school
together in Michigan. He would not make this up. In 2005, Jeff
attended a magazine industry conference at a casino hotel in
Puerto Rico. The guest speaker was McCain. . .
McCain's game is craps.
So is Jeff Dearth's. Jeff was at the table when McCain showed
up and happily made room for him. Apparently there is some kind
of rule or tradition in craps that everyone's hands are supposed
to be above the table when the dice are about to be thrown. McCain-"very
likely distracted by one of the many people who approached him
that evening," Jeff says charitably-apparently was violating
this rule. A small middle-aged woman at the table, apparently
a "regular," reached out and pulled McCain's arm away.
I'll let Jeff take over the story:
"McCain immediately
turned to the woman and said between clenched teeth: 'DON'T TOUCH
ME.' The woman started to explain...McCain interrupted her: 'DON'T
TOUCH ME,' he repeated viciously. The woman again tried to explain.
'DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? DO YOU KNOW WHO YOU'RE TALKING TO?' McCain
continued, his voice rising and his hands now raised in the 'bring
it on' position. He was red-faced. By this time all the action
at the table had stopped. I was completely shocked. McCain had
totally lost it, and in the space of about ten seconds. 'Sir,
you must be courteous to the other players at the table,' the
pit boss said to McCain. "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? ASK ANYBODY
AROUND HERE WHO I AM."
This being Puerto Rico,
the pit boss might not have known McCain. But the senator continued
in full fury-"DO YOU KNOW WHO YOU'RE TALKING TO? DO YOU
KNOW WHO I AM?"-and crisis was avoided only when Jeff offered
to change places and stand between McCain and the woman who had
touched his arm.
ANGRY MCCAIN
DID MCCAIN FUDGE HIS INCOME TAX
RETURN?
Martha Miller, Huffington
Post - I am a
tax attorney, so a tax return means more to me than it would
to most. I reviewed McCain's tax returns as a basic check on
the candidates. You can look at McCain's 2006 and 2007 tax returns
for yourself. The tax returns are below a lot of verbiage about
his charitable activities.
According to a New York
Times article of September 27, 2008 "For McCain and Team,
a Host of Ties to Gambling," reported by Jo Becker and Don
VanNatta Jr., McCain gambled at the MGM Grand in May 2007. Apparently
McCain is a habitual gambler; he usually plays craps. He even
says, "I am a gambling man."
Gambling has tax implications.
According to IRS Publication 17, "Your Federal Income Tax",
2007 edition, page 89 "Gambling Winnings. You must include
your gambling winnings in income on Form 1040, line 21. If you
itemize your deductions on Schedule A (Form 1040), you can deduct
gambling losses you had during the year, but only up to the amount
of your winnings." In other words, you can't subtract your
losses from your winnings and just not report. You have to report
the winnings, and then claim the losses.
But McCain's tax returns
say nothing about gambling winnings or losses.
As a casino gambler, McCain
is likely to have lost more than he won. But by not reporting
his winnings, the different percentage calculations built into
the tax calculation are thrown off, and if he gambled much at
all, he has underpaid his tax. The amount of understatement of
tax may be minimal, but that's not the point.
The real purpose of preparing
his tax return and omitting the gambling winnings is so that
people would not know how much he gambled. If he won $200,000
playing craps in Las Vegas, it would make a difference in the
way voters viewed his suitability as a presidential candidate.
There are circumstances
under which the tax returns could be correct, such as McCain
gambled once in 2007, not at all in 2006, and lost everything
the one time he gambled. Such an explanation is unlikely in light
of McCain's alleged long history of gambling.
Stephen Rose, Huffington
Post - McCain is a documented craps player. He has been known
to play craps on impulse for 14 hours at a stretch. . .
Connie Bruck puts it like
this: "The moment the car stopped at McCain's hotel in downtown
New Orleans, he set out at his usual fast clip for Harrah's,
across the street. McCain is an avid gambler. Wes Gullett, a
close friend who worked for McCain for years, told me that they
used to play craps in Las Vegas in fourteen-hour stints, standing
at the tables from 10 a.m. to midnight. 'Craps is addictive,'
McCain remarked, and he headed for the fifteen-dollar-minimum-bet
tables."
Michael Scherer and Michael
Weisskopf say: "Over time he gave up the drinking bouts,
but he never quite kicked the periodic yen for dice. In the past
decade, he has played on Mississippi riverboats, on Indian land,
in Caribbean craps pits and along the length of the Las Vegas
Strip. Back in 2005 he joined a group of journalists at a magazine-industry
conference in Puerto Rico, offering betting strategy on request.
'Enjoying craps opens up a window on a central thread constant
in John's life,' says John Weaver, McCain's former chief strategist,
who followed him to many a casino. 'Taking a chance, playing
against the odds.' Aides say McCain tends to play for a few thousand
dollars at a time and avoids taking markers, or loans, from the
casinos, which he has helped regulate in Congress. 'He never,
ever plays on the house,' says Mark Salter, a McCain adviser.
The goal, say several people familiar with his habit, is never
financial. He loves the thrill of winning and the camaraderie
at the table.
"Only recently have
McCain's aides urged him to pull back from the pastime. In the
heat of the G.O.P. primary fight last spring, he announced on
a visit to the Vegas Strip that he was going to the casino floor.
When his aides stopped him, fearing a public relations disaster,
McCain suggested that they ask the casino to take a craps table
to a private room, a high-roller privilege McCain had indulged
in before. His aides, with alarm bells ringing, refused again,
according to two accounts of the discussion. He clearly knows
that this is on the borderline of what is acceptable for him
to be doing," says a Republican who has watched McCain play.
'And he just sort of revels in it.'
MEET THE MCCAIN ECONOMIC COUNCIL
SEPTEMBER 2008
STUPID JOHN MCCAIN TRICKS
MCCAIN WOULD NAME SUBPRIME BOOSTER
CUOMO TO SEC SPOT
MEET THE MCCAIN ECONOMIC
COUNCIL
Progress Report - Looking at the members of McCain's
"economic council those who advise the campaign on economic
issues -- it becomes clear why he is so divorced from the bad
economy. Some of his economic advisers helped create the housing
crisis, some abused corporate loopholes to hide billions in corporate
profits, and some simply refuse to admit that there is anything
seriously wrong with the economy. A look at some of McCain's
economic gurus:
Former senator Phil Gramm
is known as McCain's "Econ Brain." Recently, he has
called America "a nation of whiners" who are in a "mental
recession." While in the Senate, he was behind the Commodity
Futures Modernization Act and the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. The
former made legal "the mortgage swaps distancing the originator
of the loan from the ultimate collector," while the latter
"destroyed the Depression-era barrier to the merger of stockbrokers,
banks and insurance companies." As The Nation wrote, "those
two acts effectively ended significant regulation of the financial
community." After leaving Congress, Gramm worked for the
Swiss bank UBS. Politico reported that while at UBS, "Gramm
lobbied Congress, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department
about banking and mortgage issues in 2005 and 2006. During those
years, the mortgage industry pressed Congress to roll back strong
state rules that sought to stem the rise of predatory tactics
used by lenders and brokers to place homeowners in high-cost
mortgages." McCain has also voted against discouraging predatory
lending practices.
As CEO of Hewlett-Packard,
Carly Fiorina exploited a corporate loophole to hold more than
$14 billion in profits overseas, a loophole that McCain is against
closing. She was forced out of HP after a merger with Compaq
failed to bring Hewlett the profits that Ms. Fiorina had forecast,
resulting in tumbling shares. She is also a defender of outsourcing,
which she calls "right-shoring," and has said that
"there is no job that is America's God-given right anymore."
While McCain has recently condemned "golden parachutes"
-- excessive compensation for exiting CEOs - by saying, "CEOs
that led us into this mess are walking away with over $20 million,
and we're not going to let that happen as president…They
deserve nothing," Fiorina walked away from HP with a $21
million severance package, which, with another $21 million in
options, brought her $42 million. In a 2007 interview with Fortune,
Fiorina said that "what we ought not to do is regulate or
legislate CEO compensation."
Rick Davis: After the
bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, McCain and his running
mate, Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK), published an op-ed in the Wall
Street Journal that called lobbyists "primary contributors"
to the crisis. One of these lobbyists though, is McCain's own
campaign manager, Rick Davis, who " served as president
of an advocacy group led by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that defended
the two companies against increased regulation." Davis challenged
even the smallest reform measures intended to make sure that
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were being held more accountable for
their actions. This helped the mortgage giants, "consistently
[beat] back congressional efforts to increase oversight, even
after a major accounting scandal in 2003 resulted in a $400 million
fine for Fannie.
McCain, Donald Luskin
believes that "things today just aren't that bad,"
and everyone should "quit doling out that bad-economy line."
In a Washington Post op-ed last Sunday, he wrote that "we
have surely become a nation of exaggerators" regarding the
economy, despite agreeing that "the foreclosure rate is
the worst since the Great Depression." Luskin claimed that
"unemployment is up a bit," when it is at a five-year
high of 6.1 percent. He also asserted that the housing crisis
is "over."
THE DIFFERENCE IN THE MCCAIN &
OBAMA TAX PLANS
MCCAIN WAS BORN WITH A SILVER
THERMOMETER IN HIS MOUTH
HEALTHCARE BLOG - Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) emphasizes
freedom, personal choice and responsibility when promoting his
plan to reform America's health care system. He's not calling
for an incremental approach but "nothing short of a complete
reform of the culture of our health system and the way we pay
for it will suffice.". . .
The man who wants to reduce
state-regulated health insurance and hard-won consumer protections
has never spent a day of his life outside the cozy blankets of
publicy-sponsored government health coverage.
John Sidney McCain III
was born in the Panama Canal Zone on Aug. 29, 1936 while his
father was a Navy admiral. From this birth and throughout his
childhood, Navy physicians cared for McCain.
After high school, McCain
enrolled in the U.S. Military Academy, where the naval health
care continued until he retired from the Navy in 1981. . .
After his naval retirement,
he went straight to the U.S. House of Representatives after winning
the 1982 election for Arizona's 1st congressional district. After
serving two terms, he was elected to the Senate in 1986, where
he has been ever since. Throughout that time, he qualified for
the generous Federal Employees Health Benefits Program. On his
65th birthday in 2001, McCain qualified for Medicare.
MCCAIN AND THE POLITICS OF MORTALITY
CINDY MCCAIN'S HALF-SISTER: "I'M
VOTING FOR BARACK OBAMA"
THE STORY THE AMERICA MEDIA WON'T
TELL: THE WIFE JOHN MCCAIN LEFT BEHIND
Sharon Churcher, Daily
Mail, UK - McCain
likes to illustrate his moral fiber by referring to his five
years as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam. And to demonstrate his
commitment to family values, the 71-year-old former US Navy pilot
pays warm tribute to his beautiful blonde wife, Cindy, with whom
he has four children.
But there is another Mrs.
McCain who casts a ghostly shadow over the Senator's presidential
campaign. She is seldom seen and rarely written about, despite
being mother to McCain's three eldest children. And yet, had
events turned out differently, it would be she, rather than Cindy,
who would be vying to be First Lady. She is McCain's first wife,
Carol, who was a famous beauty and a successful swimwear model
when they married in 1965. She was the woman McCain dreamed of
during his long incarceration and torture in Vietnam's infamous
'Hanoi Hilton' prison and the woman who faithfully stayed at
home looking after the children and waiting anxiously for news.
CHECKING OUT MCCAIN'S TEMPER
David
Lightman and Matt Stearns, McClatchy Newspapers - John McCain made
a quick stop at the Capitol one day last spring to sit in on
Senate negotiations on the big immigration bill, and John Cornyn
was not pleased. Cornyn, a mild-mannered Texas Republican, saw
a loophole in the bill that he thought would allow felons to
pursue a path to citizenship. McCain called Cornyn's claim "chicken-s---,"
according to people familiar with the meeting, and charged that
the Texan was looking for an excuse to scuttle the bill. Cornyn
grimly told McCain he had a lot of nerve to suddenly show up
and inject himself into the sensitive negotiations. "F---
you," McCain told Cornyn, in front of about 40 witnesses.
. .
There's
a lengthy list of similar outbursts through the years: McCain
pushing a woman in a wheelchair, trying to get an Arizona Republican
aide fired from three different jobs, berating a young GOP activist
on the night of his own 1986 Senate election and many more.
MCCAIN AND THE POLITICS OF MORTALITY
Alexander
Burns, Politico
- Since John McCain announced that first-term Alaska Gov. Sarah
Palin would be his running mate, Democrats have been quick to
point out that the 44-year-old governor could soon be just "a
heartbeat away from the presidency." The veiled reference
to McCain's advanced age is hard to miss.
It's a
macabre point to raise on the night when Palin will speak to
the convention here - but a look at the actuarial tables insurance
companies use to evaluate customers shows that it's not an irrelevant
one. According to these statistics, there is a roughly 1 in 3
chance that a 72-year-old man will not reach the age of 80, which
is how old McCain would be at the end of a second presidential
term. And that doesn't factor in individual medical history,
such as McCain's battles with potentially lethal skin cancer.
. .
The odds
of a 72-year-old man living four more years, or one full White
House term, are better. But for a man who has lived 72 years
and 67 days (McCain's age on Election Day this year), there is
between a 14.2 and 15.1 percent chance of dying before Inauguration
Day 2013, according to the Social Security Administration's 2004
actuarial tables and the authoritative 2001 mortality statistics
assembled by the National Association of Insurance Commissioners.
Going
by the Social Security Administration's tables, that's nearly
ten times the likelihood that a man aged 47 years and 92 days
(Barack Obama's age on Election Day this year) will die before
Jan. 20, 2013.
Using
the NAIC tables instead, which factor in the fact that Obama
has been a smoker for most of his adult life, a non-smoker McCain's
age is still six times as likely to die in the next four years
as a smoker Obama's age.. . .
Actuaries
are quick to point out that mortality statistics describe broad
population trends. They insist the models can't necessarily be
applied to individual people. . .
McCain
has acknowledged in the past that his advanced age would be a
factor in the presidential campaign, particularly when it came
to choosing a running mate.
In April,
the Arizona senator told radio host Don Imus: "I'm aware
of [the] enhanced importance of this issue given my age."
AUGUST
2008
MCCAIN CAN'T REMEMBER HOW MANY
HOUSES HE OWNS
MCCAIN WOULD SLASH VETERANS' HEALTHCARE
THE
MCCAIN STORY THE MEDIA HASN'T TOLD YOU
Phoenix News Times 2000 - [Senator McCain's]
wife and -- more important -- his father-in-law, James Willis
Hensley, are very wealthy people. Like his father and grandfather
before him, McCain was a career Navy officer. His earning power
and his inheritance were modest. At its peak, his pay as a captain
was about $45,000.
But he
retired from the military in 1980, divorced his first wife, wed
Arizona native Cindy Lou Hensley and moved here to plunge into
the world of politics. His first job in Arizona was as a public
affairs agent for Hensley & Company, one of the nation's
largest beer distributors. He was paid $50,000 in 1982 to travel
the state, touting the company's wares. But he was promoting
himself as much as he was Budweiser beer. A better job description
might have been "candidate."
In 1982,
Cindy drew more than $700,000 in salary and bonuses from Hensley-related
enterprises as her husband was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives
in his first political campaign. . .
From Day
1, Hensley money has enabled McCain to be a full-time politician,
free from financial concerns. . .
John McCain's
political allegiances to liquor purveyors and his father-in-law's
interests are subtle. That narrative is marked by a pattern of
patronage.
The Hensley
saga, meanwhile, swirls with bygone accounts of illicit booze,
gambling, horse racing, deceit and crime. James Hensley embarked
on his road to riches as a bootlegger.
It was
December 6, 1945. World War II had ended a few months earlier.
Joseph
F. Ratliff was just about to wrap up another day as office manager
at United Distributors Company when two of his bosses, Eugene
and James Hensley, paid a visit to Ratliff at the company's Tucson
liquor distribution warehouse around 5 p.m.
The Hensley
brothers were partners with a powerful Phoenix businessman named
Kemper Marley, who had cornered a large share of Arizona's wholesale
liquor business after Prohibition was lifted in 1933.
Ratliff
had gone to work for United Distributors in September 1944. His
job was to oversee shipments of whiskey into and out of the United
Distributors' warehouse by keeping track of invoices, filing
tax and sales reports with the federal government and monitoring
cash flow.
During
and after World War II, the sale of whiskey was tightly regulated
by the federal government. Demand for whiskey was high, particularly
on the black market, where prices were more than double the regulated
market price.
"'Well,'
Gene Hensley says, 'It is five o'clock, why don't you go home?
It is time to close,'" Ratliff told Assistant United States
Attorney E.R. Thurman in sworn testimony in March 1948.
Ratliff
went home.
Upon his
return to the warehouse the next morning, Ratliff found a disturbing
sight.
"When
the warehouse man came down and opened the warehouse, I started
out through the warehouse to go to the men's room, and I noticed
there was two rows of whiskey there the night before that wasn't
on the floor that morning. So I went back to the office. I thought
we had been robbed."
In his
office, Ratliff found another surprise.
"There
was a bunch of invoices in my desk that had been made out after
I had left the office, apparently," Ratliff testified.
The invoices
appeared to be related to the whiskey -- about 50 cases -- that
had disappeared from the warehouse overnight.
Ratliff
went outside to empty some trash and noticed "a pile of
empty whiskey cases out there." Tangled up in the pile of
boxes were federal tax serial labels that were supposed to remain
with the liquor when sold to a retailer.
Ratliff
recognized the handwriting on the invoices as belonging to then-25-year-old
James Hensley, who had become general manager of the Tucson operation
in June 1945 after a three-year stint in the military. James
Hensley had served as a bombardier on a B-17 and was shot down
over the English Channel on his 13th mission.
Ratliff
wasn't sure what was going on until later that day, when James
Hensley returned to his office.
"He
came in and paid me for those invoices," Ratliff testified.
"Cash sales."
Ratliff
dutifully marked the invoices as paid.
The seven
invoices prepared by James Hensley -- after the warehouse was
closed -- indicated the liquor had been sold and delivered to
seven establishments in southern Arizona. . .
In fact,
none of the liquor went to the retailers named in the invoices
prepared by James Hensley. Nobody but James Hensley knows where
it really went, and he never told authorities. He declined repeated
requests to be interviewed for this story.
What is
certain is that what occurred that December day was standard
operating procedure for the Hensley brothers between April 1945
and January 1947. During this period, a 1948 federal criminal
indictment charged, the Hensleys made approximately 1,284 false
entries related to the sale of thousands of cases of liquor by
their two companies -- United Sales Company in Phoenix and United
Distributors in Tucson.
Ratliff's
testimony eventually led to James and Eugene Hensley's conviction
on federal conspiracy charges "with the intent and design
to hide and conceal from the United States of America, the names
and addresses of the person or persons to whom the said distilled
spirits were sent, and the prices obtained from the sale thereof."
A federal
jury in U.S. District Court of Arizona in March 1948 convicted
James Hensley on seven counts of filing false liquor records
in addition to the conspiracy charge. Eugene was convicted on
23 counts of filing false statements and the conspiracy count.
Eugene was sentenced to one year in prison, and James to six
months. Neither brother testified during the trial, relying instead
on their lawyers, who included Louis B. Whitney, a prominent
attorney who served as mayor of Phoenix from 1923 through 1925.
After
a two-week stint in the Maricopa County jail, the men were released
on bond on May 17, 1948, pending an appeal to the U.S. 9th Circuit.
The appeals court affirmed the conviction on February 8, 1949.
Two weeks
later, a judge sentenced Eugene to one year in a federal prison
camp near Tucson, but suspended James' sentence, placing him
on probation instead. Both men were fined $2,000. United Sales
and United Distributors were also convicted and fined $2,000.
The criminal
convictions had little immediate impact on the brothers' fortunes.
James
Hensley profited handsomely from his association with liquor
magnate Kemper Marley, a man police suspect ordered the 1976
murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles, who had written
about Marley's business and political dealings. The man convicted
of placing a bomb beneath Bolles' car testified that Marley also
wanted former Arizona governor and then-attorney general Bruce
Babbitt murdered because Babbitt had filed an antitrust lawsuit
against the liquor industry in 1975. (Marley, who died in 1990,
was never charged in the Bolles case. Babbitt is now U.S. Secretary
of the Interior.)
By 1955,
James Hensley had launched a Budweiser distributorship in Phoenix,
a franchise reportedly bestowed upon him by Marley, who was never
indicted in the 1948 federal liquor-law-violation case -- or
a subsequent one -- despite his controlling financial role in
the liquor distribution businesses.
James
Hensley's conviction didn't deter the State of Arizona from granting
him a wholesale liquor license in the mid-1950s. The Arizona
Department of Liquor Licenses and Control turned a blind eye
to repeated liquor-law violations at the company. State liquor
regulators did nothing when James Hensley failed to disclose
his federal felony conviction on a sworn 1988 disclosure statement
to the department and the City of Phoenix.
Today,
Phoenix-based Hensley & Company is the nation's fifth-largest
beer wholesaler -- a privately held business that 80-year-old
James Hensley still controls. He built the Budweiser distributorship
into at least a $200 million-a-year business, with annual sales
of more than 20 million cases of beer.
James
Hensley owns nearly all of the voting stock, and most of the
rest of the closely held securities are in trusts for his grandchildren
or owned by his daughter, 45-year-old Cindy Hensley McCain --
wife of U.S. Senator and presidential hopeful John McCain. .
.
Although
Hensley wealth has helped propel McCain's political career, the
senator will never get his hands directly on the Hensley fortune
because of an ante-nuptial agreement he signed before his 1980
marriage.
A centerpiece
in McCain's remarkable and sudden rise to national prominence
is his promise of campaign-finance reform.
Yet McCain
has relied heavily on the financial contributions from big corporate
donors -- with the liquor and beer industry near the top of the
list. McCain won -- one could say bought -- his first election
to the House of Representatives in 1982 with lavish sums of Hensley
beer money. . .
Since
1982, Hensley & Company employees have donated almost $200,000
to federal political candidates and campaigns. . .
Liquor
spirited from the Hensley brothers' warehouses helped fuel a
lively nightlife at some of the Valley's most exclusive clubs
in the mid-1940s. The Green Gables, the Silver Spur and the Cowman's
Club were recipients of black-market shipments, according to
testimony presented at the 1948 federal trial of the Hensleys
and their two companies, United Sales Company in Phoenix and
United Distributors in Tucson.
Jack Baldwin,
a salesman and supervisor at United Sales, testified at the 1948
federal trial that Eugene Hensley regularly instructed him to
draw up false invoices, transfer scores of cases of liquor offsite
and deliver premium whiskeys to selected black-market clients.
Baldwin
testified he was ordered by Eugene Hensley in September 1946
to kick in a door at the United Sales' warehouse on North 19th
Avenue and take five cases of scotch for a black-market sale
to the Green Gables.
In other
instances, Baldwin testified that he took as many as 50 cases
of whiskey from the United Sales warehouse and stashed them on
the back porch of his central Phoenix home for later delivery
to black-market buyers.
"I
can name you 20 deals like that," Baldwin testified. . .
"Why
would you make invoices that did not show the true fact situation?"
Assistant U.S. Attorney Thurman asked.
"The
liquor went someplace else," Baldwin stated.
"Under
whose direction did you make these invoices?"
"Gene
Hensley," Baldwin replied.
"After
these were made out, these particular invoices, what did you
do with them?"
"I
took them home, burned them usually," Baldwin stated. .
.
Sometimes
the Hensleys sold liquor to unlicensed individuals who would
transport up to 55 cases at a time to states including Oklahoma
and Utah. Carl "Kid" Carter from Ogden, Utah, purchased
dozens of cases of whiskey at a time, loaded them into a late-1930s
sedan, covering the illicit cargo with a blanket before heading
home, 600 miles north. . .
While
the bootlegging operation was in full swing, the Hensleys and
Marley dissolved their partnerships and created two corporations
in September 1946 -- United Sales Incorporated in Phoenix, and
United Distributors Incorporated in Tucson. At the time of incorporation,
Eugene Hensley, 32, was president of the companies, while James
Hensley, 25, served as secretary. Kemper Marley, 39, was listed
as vice president of both companies.
Despite
Marley's title, federal prosecutors stated that Marley had purchased
control of the companies in January 1946.
Over the
years, Marley built the companies, which became United Liquors,
into Arizona's largest wholesale liquor distributorship. Along
with his vast land holdings, political, gambling and prostitution
ties, Marley built a fortune worth more than $39.2 million by
1980.
On February
26, 1953, James Hensley once again found himself charged with
federal liquor crimes. This time, the government alleged that
James Hensley and other officers of United Liquor Company and
United Liquor Supply Company falsified records to reduce the
company's tax bill.
On the
opening day of the trial in federal court in Tucson, Judge James
A. Walsh granted a motion by Hensley's attorney -- former Maricopa
County Attorney Lynn Laney -- to dismiss all charges against
Hensley and other individuals. The case continued against the
two companies.
The government
alleged the companies falsely stated that about 400 cases of
whiskey were transferred from Tucson to Phoenix on December 30,
1950, and December 30, 1951, to avoid paying higher liquor taxes
levied in Pima County, where Tucson is located. The government
charged that the liquor never left the Tucson warehouses.
On the
third day of the four-day trial, Kemper Marley -- owner of United
Liquor and United Liquor Supply -- unexpectedly took the stand
as a defense witness. Prosecutors successfully halted his testimony,
claiming it was immaterial and irrelevant.
Defense
attorneys argued that although the liquor was never transferred
to Maricopa County, all taxes were nevertheless paid to Maricopa
County, therefore nothing further was owed. Defense attorney
Joseph Jenckes said the companies were simply trying to meet
their tax obligations in the most practical way, according to
an October 17, 1953, story in the Arizona Daily Star.
The next
day, a jury acquitted the two companies on all 11 counts.
In December
1952, James Hensley joined his brother Eugene in the purchase
of Ruidoso Racing Association in south central New Mexico. Prior
to the purchase, Eugene Hensley operated a couple of nightclubs
in Phoenix, including Hensley's Horseshoe Bar on Van Buren Street,
with his first wife, Billy.
The New
Mexico venture proved to be more trouble for the Hensley brothers,
who became embroiled in a controversy with the New Mexico Racing
Commission over hidden ownership.
The commission
was concerned about the Hensley brothers' ties to Phoenix gambler
Clarence E. "Teak" Baldwin (no relation to Jack Baldwin).
The commission asked the New Mexico State Police to investigate
in 1953.
According
to a March 26, 1977, article in the Albuquerque Journal, the
1953 New Mexico State Police report stated that Teak Baldwin
was a "bookmaker for leading tracks." According to
the Journal article, the police report stated that the Hensleys'
Arizona liquor business partner, Kemper Marley, "is reputed
to be the financial backer for the bookies. . . ."
The Journal
story appeared shortly after a group known as Investigative Reporters
& Editors -- spurred to action by the murder of Don Bolles
-- unleashed a series of 23 stories on organized crime, land
fraud and political corruption in Arizona.
The Journal
reported that the 1953 New Mexico State Police investigation
stated that Marley "owned a wire service formerly operated
in connection with bookmaking of the Al Capone gang."
The Journal
also reported that the state police report included a transcript
of a phone conversation between an officer in Santa Fe and a
Phoenix police officer who said, "... Our confidential files
built up on Baldwin (and others) was loaned to some officials
and never returned. We've never been able to locate them."
With the
police report in hand, the New Mexico Racing Commission grilled
the Hensley brothers in May 1953 about their ties to Baldwin.
While the brothers were forthright in disclosing their liquor
business ties with Marley and their subsequent federal felony
convictions, they told the commission that Teak Baldwin had nothing
to do with the track.
Eugene
Hensley told the commission in May 1953 that Baldwin steered
him to look at the track as a possible investment. Former commission
chairman Tom Closson told the Hensleys "the commission would
not have Baldwin connected in any way, shape or form down there
[Ruidoso Downs]," the Journal reported.
The Hensleys
denied that Baldwin had any interest in the track, the Journal
reported.
But two
years later, according to the Journal, records indicated that
Baldwin actually had a one-third stock interest in the track
with the Hensleys. . .
In April
1955, James Hensley sold his interest in Ruidoso Downs, for which
he was listed as secretary-treasurer, and had no apparent connection
to the track thereafter.
Eugene
Hensley's problems at Ruidoso Downs were just beginning. In 1963,
Eugene Hensley was sued by minority partners for $415,000. The
partners alleged Eugene Hensley used track money to make improvements
to his Scottsdale home, used the track's airplane for personal
pleasure and built and operated a guest house for his personal
use. The lawsuit was settled the same year after Eugene Hensley
agreed to return 1,000 shares of Ruidoso Racing Association stock
that was by then worth $350,000.
The civil
suit was prelude to an eight-count federal criminal indictment
filed against Eugene Hensley in 1966, alleging income tax evasion.
Eugene Hensley was convicted on all counts in a scandalous trial
that revealed he had purchased several automobiles using track
money and given them to his wife and a girlfriend.
Despite
his 1966 conviction and subsequent five-year prison sentence,
Eugene Hensley remained free on bond and continued to control
operations at Ruidoso Downs until the New Mexico Racing Commission
banned him from the track in 1968. After his criminal appeals
were denied, Eugene Hensley entered a federal prison in La Tuna,
Texas, in 1969.
That same
year, Eugene Hensley sold his remaining interest in the track
to NewCo Industries Incorporated, which immediately signed a
20-year concession contract with Emprise Corporation of Buffalo,
New York.
Emprise
had documented ties to organized crime, and was the concessionaire
at Arizona dog tracks. One of the company's strongest Arizona
supporters reportedly was the Hensleys' old business partner
-- Kemper Marley.
In the
early 1970s, Arizona racing officials began to clamp down on
Emprise after the company was convicted and fined $10,000 in
U.S. District Court in Los Angeles for its hidden ownership in
the Frontier Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. The IRE series reported
that as a defendant in that case, Emprise was linked to several
prominent organized crime figures.
Emprise
reorganized in Arizona as Ramcorp and was allowed to keep its
lucrative concession contracts while its Los Angeles conviction
was appealed. But all the company's proceeds from dog tracks
were funneled through a trustee, former Mesa rancher and farmer
Dwight Patterson.
Patterson,
according to the IRE, urged then-Arizona governor Raul Castro
to appoint Kemper Marley to the three-member Arizona Racing Commission,
a position Marley reportedly was eager to get. Marley would replace
Robert Kieckhefer, who had been an opponent of Emprise.
Castro
received more than $19,000 during his 1974 gubernatorial campaign
from Marley, and another $5,000 from Marley's daughter -- colossal
sums at the time for an Arizona political campaign. Castro appointed
Marley to the racing commission in 1976.
Arizona
Republic reporter Don Bolles wrote a series of stories documenting
Marley's questionable performance in appointive posts he'd previously
held. Bolles' stories doomed Marley's appointment, forcing him
to resign soon after being named to the Racing Commission.
On June
2, 1976, Bolles was mortally wounded by a car bomb. Before lapsing
into unconsciousness, Bolles uttered the words, "Adamson,
Emprise, Mafia." He died 11 days later.
John Harvey
Adamson confessed to luring Bolles to a Phoenix hotel parking
lot and placing a bomb beneath the reporter's car. The bomb,
Adamson testified, was detonated by James Robison, a Chandler
plumber. Adamson testified he was hired to kill Bolles by Max
Dunlap, a Phoenix contractor and close associate of Marley's.
Marley had extended a $1 million loan to Dunlap, which had not
been repaid. Adamson said Dunlap hired him to kill Bolles because
Marley was upset over Bolles' stories.
Adamson
served a 20-year prison sentence and has since been released.
Dunlap was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced in
1994 to life in prison. Robison was convicted, but his case was
later overturned on appeal and he was acquitted in a 1993 retrial.
In 1981,
Marley filed a libel suit against IRE for a 1977 story that linked
Marley to organized crime and the Bolles murder. Marley sought
a "six-figure" award for compensatory damages and a
"seven-figure" punitive award. A jury ruled that Marley
had not been libeled by the stories. However, the jury ruled
that IRE had inflicted "emotional distress" on Marley.
The jury awarded Marley $15,000 in punitive damages, a fraction
of the damages he was seeking.
Marley
died in 1990 at age 83.
He was
never charged in the Bolles case and denied any involvement.
After
selling his interest in Ruidoso Racing Association, James Hensley
turned his attention to a wholesale beer distributorship he reportedly
founded in 1955 in Phoenix with 12 employees. . .
Some liquor
industry observers say Hensley was given the Budweiser distributorship
by his old business associate Kemper Marley, but a search of
public records has not confirmed this theory. What the records
do show is five decades of steady growth for Hensley's enterprise
under the lax supervision of the Arizona Department of Liquor
Licenses and Control. . .
One can
only speculate how a convicted felon who falsified federal liquor
records managed to obtain a state and federal wholesale liquor
license within a few years of his 1949 conviction and 1953 indictment.
But apparently, Hensley did. . .
However,
it is extremely unlikely that a person with a similar conviction
today would get a federal liquor license, says Allison Stevens,
ATF Phoenix Area supervisor. . .
State
records show James Hensley applied for another liquor license
in 1988. This time, Hensley did not disclose his federal conviction
when asked specifically on the form whether he had ever been
convicted of a felony. James Hensley signed the sworn and notarized
statement that warned false information "could result in
criminal prosecution.". . .
Hensley
& Company is reported to be the 12th largest privately owned
company in Arizona, with nearly 500 employees and a sales and
delivery fleet of more than 300 vehicles, according to a September
1999 article in the trade journal Beverage World. . .
Company
records show that as of January 1996 James Hensley controlled
through a trust 2,110 shares of stock, of which at least 1,655
shares were voting stock. Cindy McCain owned the largest block
of stock with 7,436 shares, but only 177 shares were voting.
Her three
children, John, James and Meghan, each had 1,370 shares -- including
336 voting shares each -- held in trust. An adopted child, Bridget,
had 600 non-voting shares.
The company
placed a value for tax purposes of $1,467 per share on the stock
in 1996, making Cindy McCain's stake in the company worth $11
million. The trusts for the four children are worth about $7
million. Delgado, meanwhile, controlled 4,572 shares of non-voting
stock worth $6.7 million.
The Hensley
& Company stock is only part of the McCain clan's wealth.
According to Senator McCain's financial disclosure statement
for calendar year 1998, Cindy McCain controls more than $1 million
worth of Anheuser-Busch stock that generated between $15,000
and $50,000 in dividends. Cindy McCain and her children also
report owning real estate in Mesa, Sedona and Yuma worth more
than $2.5 million. . .
Senator
McCain's personal wealth is tied completely to his wife.
Tom Fitzpatrick,
Phoenix New Times, 1992 - McCain is the perfect example of evil
masquerading as good. He made an advantageous marriage to the
daughter of state beer baron Jim Hensley, the Budweiser distributor.
This made him an instant millionaire.
Hensley
is a man who understands loyalty. In his earlier days, he and
his brother took falls for his then-boss Kemper Marley. Hensley
and his brother were convicted. Their rewards were exclusive
distributor territories in Phoenix and Tucson. Since then they
have become inordinately wealthy.
Marley,
now deceased, was one of the state's richest men. His name surfaced
as the power behind the 1976 car-bomb murder of Arizona Republic
reporter Don Bolles.
At Marley's
funeral, Frank Sinatra's signature tune "My Way" was
played by the organist over the objections of the church's pastor.
The man responsible for this unusual tribute was Max Dunlap,
whose trial for Bolles' murder is scheduled to begin next month.
It is
no longer fashionable in local journalistic circles to mention
McCain's close friendship with Charlie Keating. It's a shame
they had a falling out. They seemed to have so much in common
and enjoyed each other's company so much.
They met
in 1981 when McCain moved to Arizona. Keating was a World War
II pilot. McCain made nine vacation trips to Keating's home in
the Bahamas from 1984 to 1986. The trips were made free of charge
on jets provided by Keating.
Because
the ethical violation was so obvious, McCain was eventually forced
to pay $13,433 for the flights to Keating's company, American
Continental Corporation.
He escaped
ethical censure because the trips were made while he was a member
of the House of Representatives and the trips didn't come to
light until he was a member of the Senate, which conveniently
declared it had no jurisdiction.
The House
couldn't act, either, for the same reason. Keating contributed
$112,000 to McCain's 1982 and 1984 House campaigns and his 1986
Senate run. McCain's father-in-law and his wife also took advantage
of the chance to make a lucrative shopping-center investment
with Keating.
NY Times,
2000 - In his rise to political influence, Mr. McCain, who had
no ties to Arizona until he married Cindy Hensley and moved here
in 1981, also won the critical blessing of the city's business
establishment through his close friendship with another of the
state's power brokers, Darrow Tully, the publisher then of the
state's dominant newspaper, The Arizona Republic. ''Duke'' Tully
led an ad hoc group of business executives and self-appointed
political kingmakers known as the Phoenix 40, whose backing helped
Mr. McCain in that first Congressional race and assured his Senate
victory four years later. . .
Mr. Tully
was a far different patron from Mr. Hensley. A swaggering, fun-loving
6-foot-4, he was comfortable with business executives and politicians
alike. Mr. Tully, an accomplished pilot, loved to regale people
with tales of his exploits flying jet fighters in the Korean
and Vietnam wars. His house and office were filled with photographs
of him alongside all manner of military aircraft.
''He'd
point to his teeth and say, 'See these? They're steel. I lost
the others when I crashed,' '' recalled Pat Murphy, a former
columnist and editor at The Republic. . .
The Phoenix
40 was an unofficial group made up of the city's leading businessmen
-- bankers, partners from the largest law firms, chief executives
and, of course, executives of newspapers. The group was created
in the early 1970's by Eugene C. Pulliam, the conservative founder
of Central Newspapers and grandfather of former Vice President
Dan Quayle.
The goal
was to promote policies that its members felt were good for the
city and state as Arizona expanded from a quiet rural state to
a Sun Belt powerhouse.
It was
also the closest thing to a political machine in Phoenix, and
anointment by the Phoenix 40 almost invariably translated into
victory at the polls.
Mr. Merrill,
the Arizona State professor and political observer, said the
power was exercised quietly and effectively.
''When
you control the major newspaper, the TV stations and the people
who make most of the political contributions,'' Mr. Merrill said,
''you have enormous influence''
Mr. Tully
harnessed that influence to Mr. McCain's political career from
the outset, leapfrogging him over Republicans who had waited
patiently for a shot at Mr. Rhodes's seat in 1982.
''There
was a lot of resentment among Mesa Republicans, none of whom
had ever heard of John McCain until he was suddenly the designated
hitter,'' said Terry Goddard, a Democrat and former mayor of
Phoenix. . .
But the
newspaper publisher who had helped so much was not there to savor
the victory. The day after Christmas 1985, after rumors began
to circulate that Mr. Tully was not all he claimed, he acknowledged
that he had never served in the military, and he resigned from
the newspaper and left Arizona. But the war hero for whom he
had done so much was well launched on his political career.
The Arizona
Republic, 1989 - Sen. John McCain had more than a constituent
relationship with Charles H. Keating, Jr. prior to 1987 . . .
The McCains - sometimes with their daughter and baby sitter -
made at least nine trips at Keating's expense from August 1984
to August 1986 aboard either Keating's American Continental Corporation's
jet or chartered planes and helicopters owned by Resorts International.
Three of the trips were for vacations at Keating's luxurious
retreat in the Bahamas."
MCCAIN WASN'T TORTURED; JUST ASK
BUSH & CHENEY
DOUGLAS BRINKLEY KNOWS TEDDY ROOSEVELT
AND JOHN MCCAIN IS NO TEDDY ROOSEVELT
JOHN MCCAIN SAYS HE'LL CONSULT
JOHN LEWIS IF ELECTED; WHY HAS HE WAITED 22 YEARS?
MCCAIN'S POPULARITY RIDES ON PUBLIC
NOT BEING TOLD ABOUT HIM
MCCAIN'S SON BAILS FROM BANK BOARD
HE JOINED IN FEBRUARY
MCCAIN IS AN ADDICTIVE GAMBLER
Stephen Rose, Huffington
Post - McCain
is a documented craps player. He has been known to play craps
on impulse for 14 hours at a stretch. Of the game of craps, Anthony
Holden comments, "We poker players don't call poker gambling.
It is a game of skill. Craps is an absurd game of luck. You may
have thrilling short term wins but only madmen play craps."
. . . How serious is the gambling urge for McCain? What does
the love of craps say about his "realism" regarding
actual battles and conflicts? Would McCain be willing to gamble
with human lives?
Connie Bruck puts it like
this: "The moment the car stopped at McCain's hotel in downtown
New Orleans, he set out at his usual fast clip for Harrah's,
across the street. McCain is an avid gambler. Wes Gullett, a
close friend who worked for McCain for years, told me that they
used to play craps in Las Vegas in fourteen-hour stints, standing
at the tables from 10 a.m. to midnight. 'Craps is addictive,'
McCain remarked, and he headed for the fifteen-dollar-minimum-bet
tables."
Michael Scherer and Michael
Weisskopf say: "Over time he gave up the drinking bouts,
but he never quite kicked the periodic yen for dice. In the past
decade, he has played on Mississippi riverboats, on Indian land,
in Caribbean craps pits and along the length of the Las Vegas
Strip. Back in 2005 he joined a group of journalists at a magazine-industry
conference in Puerto Rico, offering betting strategy on request.
'Enjoying craps opens up a window on a central thread constant
in John's life,' says John Weaver, McCain's former chief strategist,
who followed him to many a casino. 'Taking a chance, playing
against the odds.' Aides say McCain tends to play for a few thousand
dollars at a time and avoids taking markers, or loans, from the
casinos, which he has helped regulate in Congress. 'He never,
ever plays on the house,' says Mark Salter, a McCain adviser.
The goal, say several people familiar with his habit, is never
financial. He loves the thrill of winning and the camaraderie
at the table.
"Only recently have
McCain's aides urged him to pull back from the pastime. In the
heat of the G.O.P. primary fight last spring, he announced on
a visit to the Vegas Strip that he was going to the casino floor.
When his aides stopped him, fearing a public relations disaster,
McCain suggested that they ask the casino to take a craps table
to a private room, a high-roller privilege McCain had indulged
in before. His aides, with alarm bells ringing, refused again,
according to two accounts of the discussion. He clearly knows
that this is on the borderline of what is acceptable for him
to be doing," says a Republican who has watched McCain play.
'And he just sort of revels in it.'
MCCAIN WASN'T TORTURED; JUST ASK
BUSH & CHENEY
Daily
Kos - From Andrew Sullivan's The Daily Dish: "In all the
discussion of John McCain's recently recovered memory of a religious
epiphany in Vietnam, one thing has been missing. The torture
that was deployed against McCain emerges in all the various accounts.
It involved sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment,
stress positions, long-time standing, and beating. Sound familiar?
"According
to the Bush administration's definition of torture, McCain was
therefore not tortured. Cheney denies that McCain was tortured;
as does Bush. So do John Yoo and David Addington and George Tenet.
In the one indisputably authentic version of the story of a Vietnamese
guard showing compassion, McCain talks of the agony of long-time
standing. A quarter century later, Don Rumsfeld was putting his
signature to memos lengthening the agony of "long-time standing"
that victims of Bush's torture regime would have to endure. These
torture techniques are, according to the president of the United
States, merely "enhanced interrogation."
Sullivan's
coup de grace: "In the Military Commissions Act, McCain
acquiesced to the use of these techniques against terror suspects
by the CIA. And so the tortured became the enabler of torture.
Someone somewhere cried out in pain for the same reasons McCain
once did. And McCain let it continue."
RECOVERED HISTORY: MCCAIN &
THE KEATING FIVE SCANDAL
OBAMA & MCCAIN: LIFE WITHOUT
FATHER
MCCAIN: SAYING ONE THING, DOING
ANOTHER
JULY
2008
McCAIN KNOWS WHAT MALIKI WANTS
BETTER THAN MALIKI DOES
RUMSFELD REFUSES TO ENDORSE MCCAIN
ANOTHER PROBLEM FRIEND OF MCCAIN
WHY MCCAIN'S HEALTH CARE PLAN
WON'T WORK
MCCAIN CALLS SOCIAL SECURITY A
"DISGRACE"
WHAT JOHN MCCAIN THINKS IS FUNNY
Wonkette
John McCain's always had a hearty arsenal of "cocktail party
jokes," including several about killing Iranian civilians
with either bombs or exported American cancer, and another about
Chelsea Clinton being ugly because her father is Janet Reno's
penis. These jokes, however, can't shake a stick at the latest
gem someone has unearthed from a 1986 copy of the Tucson Citizen,
one that got him in a tit-bit of trouble at the time"
"Did
you hear the one about the woman who is attacked on the street
by a gorilla, beaten senseless, raped repeatedly and left to
die? When she finally regains consciousness and tries to speak,
her doctor leans over to hear her sigh contently and to feebly
ask, 'Where is that marvelous ape?'"
TOP
MCCAIN CAMPAIGN ADVISOR CALLS AMERICA "A NATION OF WHINERS"
Progress
Report
In an interview with the Washington Times, former Sen. Phil Gramm,
the so-called "econ brain" of presidential candidate
Sen. John McCain, remarked that the United States has "sort
of become a nation of whiners." "Thank God the economy
is not as bad as you read in the newspaper every day." "You've
heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession,"
he said.
McCain
said that Gramm "does not speak for me," despite the
fact that Gramm's comments mirror what McCain said in April:
"A lot of our problems today, as you know, are psychological."
Gramm
played a key roll in gutting many of the institutions designed
to keep the economy sound. Serving Chairman of the Senate Banking
Committee between 1999 and 2001, he "routinely turned down
Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt's requests
for more money to police Wall Street." Later, he "pushed
to end oversight" of energy futures trading for a key campaign
contributor and his wife's onetime employer, Enron. Around the
same time, "Gramm pushed through a historic banking deregulation
bill that decimated Depression-era firewalls between commercial
banks, investment banks, insurance companies, and securities
firms." The financial maneuvers enabled by Gramm's legislative
measures would become the heart of the subprime meltdown.
More recently,
it was revealed that Gramm was "being paid by a Swiss bank
to lobby Congress about the U.S. mortgage crisis at the same
time he was advising McCain about his economic policy."
SENATOR MCCAIN CALLS SOCIAL SECURITY
A "DISGRACE"
Dean
Baker, Prospect
- At a forum day, after wrongly claiming that Social Security
won't be there when young workers retire, McCain went on to say:
"Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day
retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today.
And that's a disgrace. It's an absolute disgrace, and it's got
to be fixed."
Of course
present-day retirees have always been paid their benefits from
the taxes paid by current workers. That has been true from Social
Security's inception. Some folks might have thought Senator McCain's
description of Social Security as a "disgrace" was
worth a mention somewhere in the media, but the NYT, Washington
Post, WSJ, and USA Today don't seem to have noticed.
WHY MCCAIN'S HEALTH CARE PLAN
WON'T WORK
NY
Times In
late April, Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, announced that
if elected president he would seek to insure people . . . by
vastly expanding federal support for state high-risk pools like
Maryland's, or by creating a structure modeled after them. .
.
Though
high-risk pools have existed for three decades, they cover only
207,000 people in a country with 47 million uninsured, according
to the National Association of State Comprehensive Health Insurance
Plans. Premiums typically are high, as much as twice the standard
rate in some states, but are still not nearly enough to pay claims.
That has left states to cover about 40 percent of the cost, usually
through assessments on insurance premiums that are often passed
on to consumers.
Health
economists say it could take untold billions to transform the
patchwork of programs into a viable federal safety net. The McCain
campaign has made only a rough calculation of how many billions
would be needed and has not identified a source for the financing
beyond savings from existing programs. Finding the money will
only get more difficult now that Mr. McCain has pledged to balance
the federal budget by 2013, which already requires a significant
reduction in the growth of spending.
Mr. McCain's
proposal stands in sharp relief to that of his Democratic rival,
Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, who wants to require insurers
to accept all applicants, regardless of their health. That is
now the law in five states, including New York and New Jersey.
MCCAIN'S HEALTH PLAN WOULD COST
WOMEN MORE
MCCAIN LIE OF THE WEEK
Think
Progress This
week, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) is traveling through Colombia,
making a push for a free-trade agreement. In an interview with
ABC from Cartagena, McCain was asked about his now infamous statement
that he doesn't understand economics well. McCain quickly interrupted
the interviewer, denying he ever said this:
Q: You
have admitted that you're not exactly an expert when it comes
to the economy and many have said -
McCAIN:
I have not. I have not. Actually, I have not. I said that I am
stronger on national security issues because of all the time
I spent in the military. I'm very strong on the economy. I understand
it. I have a lot more experience than my opponent.
In fact,
McCain and his advisers have repeatedly admitted that he is weak
on economic issues:
- "The
issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as
I should," McCain said. "I've got Greenspan's book."
[December 2007]
- Seeking
to explain his shift on economic issues, McCain claimed: "I
didn't pay nearly the attention to those issues in the past.
I was probably a 'supply-sider' based on the fact that I really
didn't jump into the issue." [January 2000]
- Carly
Fiorina, a top McCain adviser, acknowledged that McCain has said
he knows little about the economy, noting that "he did say
it one time, no question, maybe twice." [6/10/08]
The McCain
campaign has conjured up a variety of dodges on the topic. Last
January, when Tim Russert asked him about his "I still need
to be educated" claim, McCain said, "I don't know where
you got that quote." Adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin said McCain's
admitted lack of economics knowledge was an example of his "wonderful
self-deprecating sense of humor." Last month, McCain said
the media took the comments "out of context."
JUNE 2008
MCCAIN CALLS FOR 45 MORE NUCLEAR
POWER SITES, OBAMA WAFFLES
MCCAIN FLIP FLOPS TEN TIMES IN
TWO WEEKS
MAY 2008
MCCAIN HAS CO-CHAIR TIED TO FIRM IN TROUBLE
FOR ROLE IN TAX HAVENS
MCCAIN WOULD END OIL DRILLING
MORATORIUM
MCCAIN HELPED PASS UNCONSTITUTIONAL
MILITARY COMMISSIONS ACT; OBAMA OPPOSED IT
THREE BOOKS ON MCCAIN
MCCAIN'S NEW STAFFER THINKS PRESIDENTS
SHOULD HAVE 'NEAR DICTATORIAL' POWERS OVER FOREIGN POLICY
GLENN GREENWALD,
SALON Bill
Kristol proudly announces that one of his Weekly Standard staff
members, Michael Goldfarb, was just named the Deputy Communications
Director of the McCain campaign. Last April, this newest McCain
official participated in a conference call with former Senator
George Mitchell, during which Mitchell advocated a timetable
for withdrawal from Iraq. Afterwards, this is what Goldfarb wrote
about what he thinks are the powers the President possesses in
our country:
"Mitchell's
less than persuasive answer [to whether withdrawal timetables
'somehow infringe on the president's powers as commander in chief?']:
'Congress is a coequal branch of government...the framers did
not want to have one branch in charge of the government.'
"True enough,
but they sought an energetic executive with near dictatorial
power in pursuing foreign policy and war. So no, the Constitution
does not put Congress on an equal footing with the executive
in matters of national security."
MCCAIN GETS THE WMD ISSUE DEAD WRONG
THINK PROGRESS
In his new book, former White House press secretary Scott McClellan
charges that the Bush administration manipulated information
in a "propaganda" campaign before the Iraq war, making
the faulty claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Asked about the
book today, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) defended the administration's
actions in the run-up to the war, suggesting there was no manipulation
involved. McCain claimed, "I have not seen the book or the
comments. But I know why I supported it [the war] because I believed
Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction as did every intelligence
agency in the world and every assessment. "
McCain's statement
is wildly off the mark. The Bush administration did set up its
own intelligence shops to disseminate faulty intelligence about
Iraq's alleged WMD. But "every" agency in the "world"
did not buy the spin - several U.S. agencies were highly skeptical:
State Department's
Bureau of Intelligence and Research: Concluded that the "activities
we have detected do not add up to a compelling case that Iraq
is currently pursuing what [the INR] would consider to be an
integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weapons."
Department of
Energy: Concluded aluminum tubes said to be used for nuclear
centrifuges were "likely intended for small artillery rockets."
International
Atomic Energy Agency: On March 7, 2003, IAEA chief Mohamed El-Baradei
reported there was "no evidence that Saddam Hussein had
any nuclear weapons or was in the process of acquiring them."
Hans Blix, chief
U.N. weapon's inspector: In Jan. 2003, Blix told the U.N. Security
Council that his inspection teams had not found any "smoking
guns" after visiting some 125 Iraqi sites.
HOW MCCAIN HAS SUPPORTED BUSH
SOURCE: CQ
IS
JOHN MCCAIN A HUMANOID CYLON?
AARON RUTKOFF - Could Battlestar
Galactica character Saul Tigh possibly be based on the life of
John McCain? Naval aviator? Check. Member of a military family?
Check. Held in captivity by the enemy? Check. Tortured? Physically
disfigured by the ordeal? Double check. Favors hawkish military
policies? Check. * Reputation as a carouser, rabble rouser and
ladies' man? Check. Married to a blonde? Check. Married to a
blonde with ties to alcohol? Check. Also - this is the clincher
- Tigh has a secretary named Kennedy, and McCain has a secretary
named Lincoln.
MCCAIN GOT SWEETHEART DEAL FOR BIG BACKER
GREAT THOUGHTS OF JOHN MCCAIN'S PREACHER
PAL
BEN SMITH, POLITICO
When Sen. John McCain was forced to distance himself from Pastor
John Hagee earlier this year, he denounced the pastor's attacks
on Catholicism. But asked why he wouldn't "repudiate"
Hagee's endorsement of him, McCain found something to praise.
"I'm grateful for his commitment to the support of the state
of Israel, and I'm very grateful for many of his commitments
around the world, including to the independence and freedom of
the state of Israel," he told CNN's Campbell Brown on April
29. . .
Hagee, who leads
the evangelical group Christians United for Israel, is a proponent
of U.S. aid and support for Israel, and he is a major ally of
Israeli conservatives who reject any "land for peace"
formula in dealing with the Palestinians. But Hagee is viewed
with distrust by some Jews and Israelis because his brand of
Christian Zionism closely links support for Israel to the end
of the world and the conversion of the Jews to Christianity.
Hagee's predictions
are very clear. Armageddon, the final battle, could begin, he
wrote in his 2007 book "Jerusalem Countdown," "before
this book gets published." The Antichrist "will be
the head of the European Union," he writes.
Using geographical
calculations based on the Book of Revelation, he writes that
Israel will be covered in "a sea of human blood" in
the final battle. The Jews, however, will survive the battle,
Hagee says, long enough to have "the opportunity to receive
Messiah, who is a rabbi known to the world as Jesus of Nazareth."
"They will
be blessed beyond their wildest imagination," he writes.
A spokesman for
McCain, Brian Rogers, said, "John McCain's commitment to
the state of Israel is clear, and he respects Pastor Hagee's
commitment as well.
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John
McCain's lifetime
voting record, as measured by the League of Conservation Voters,
reveals a senator who did not vote consistently for the measures
supported by environmental groups. His lifetime score is 24%,
compared with 86% for either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.
In 2007, he scored a zero, out of a possible 100, primarily because
he missed votes on failing measures that might have passed if
he had been on the Senate floor and not out campaigning. This
year, he's championed a gas tax holiday that major economists,
environmentalists and think-tank analysts have derided, in part
because it will encourage more oil consumption at a time when
the nation needs to find a way to reduce its dependence on oil.
Daily Green |
THE MINISTER
THE MEDIA IS HIDING FROM YOU
FORGET ABOUT JEREMIAH WRIGHT,
MCCAIN'S PREACHER PAL JOHN HAGEE IS FAR MORE INTERESTING
TEN THINGS TO KNOW ABOUT JOHN MCCAIN
THE SORT OF APPOINTEES YOU CAN
EXPECT IF MCCAIN WINS
MCCAIN'S HEALTH PLAN: FOLLOW THE
BOUNCING SEMANTICS
ANOTHER REASON OBAMA & MCCAIN
ARE WRONG TO OPPOSE SINGLE PAYER
MR CLEAN COMES UP WITH DIRTY TRICK
OF THE MONTH
FIND THE REAL MCCAIN
GREAT THOUGHTS OF MCCAIN'S PREACHER
PAL
3 YEARS AGO MCCAIN WAS READY TO
DUMP IRAQ
MCCAIN BAWLS OUT NY TIMES REPORTER
FOR ASKING GOOD QUESTION
RENZI IS SECOND MCCAIN OFFICIAL
TO FACE FEDERAL CHARGES
REPUBLICANS HIRE EXPERTS ON HOW
TO HANDLE BI-ETHNIC OR WOMAN CANDIDATE
MCCAIN SURROUNDED BY LOBBYISTS
NY TIMES STORY ON MCCAIN AND HIS
LOBBYIST FRIEND
NY TIMES STORY ON MCCAIN AND HIS
LOBBYIST FRIEND
DID BUSH ORDER KANGAROO COURT
TRIAL TO HELP MCCAIN?
MCCAIN VOTES AGAINST WATERBOARDING
BAN
MCCAIN DOESN'T KNOW WHETHER CONDOMS
HELP STOP THE SPREAD OF HIV BUT WILL GET BACK TO YOU WHEN HE
FINDS OUT
MCCAIN AND THE KEATING FIVE
MEET THE REAL JOHN MCCAIN
RECOVERED HISTORY: REMEMBERING
THE REAL MCCAIN
MCCAIN BAWLS OUT AIDES FOR MAKING
HIM WEAR 'GAY SWEATERS'
MCCAIN HIRES NIXON'S JEW HUNTER
SUNDAY TALK SHOWS HAVE STRONG
CONSERVATIVE BIAS
MCCAIN:
WE LOSE WAR AND 'THEY WILL FOLLOW US HOME'
APRIL 2008
QUESTIONS FOR JOHN MCCAIN THAT WON'T
GET ASKED
From Perspectives
Do you agree
with Pastor John Hagee that war with Iran is the fulfillment
of biblical prophecy?
Doesn't your
legendary temper make you too dangerous to be trusted with the
presidency of the United States?
Doesn't your
confusion regarding basic facts about the war in Iraq, including
repeatedly citing a nonexistent Al Qaeda-Iran alliance, make
you unfit for command?
What is your
religion, really? . . . In June 2007, McClatchy reported, "McCain
still calls himself an Episcopalian." In August 2007, as
ABC reported, your campaign staff identified you as "Episcopalian"
in a questionnaire prepared for ABC News' August 5 debate. But
as the primary in evangelical-rich South Carolina neared, in
September 2007 you said of your religious faith, "It plays
a role in my life. By the way, I'm not Episcopalian. I'm Baptist."
But in March 2008, Pastor Dan Yeary of your North Phoenix Baptist
Church refused to comment on why you have refused to finally
undergo a baptism ceremony. Congressional directories still list
you as an Episcopalian.
Why did you flip-flop
on the Bush tax cuts you twice opposed?
With the economy
tanking, shouldn't Americans be concerned over your past statements
that "the issue of economics is not something I've understood
as well as I should?"
America Blog: ABC's George Stephanopoulos is arguing
that he brought up the issues during last night's debate that
Obama will likely face in the fall campaign. . . Okay, I'm game.
McCain is going on Stephanopoulos' show this Sunday, so I'm hoping
Stephanopoulos will be pushing McCain hard on the following issues.
. . Adultery. McCain reportedly was seeing his second wife while
still married to his first wife. And, then we have the issue
of the blond lobbyist who looks like McCain's second wife. America
deserves answers. . . Does John McCain require his mistresses
to wear a flag pin?. . .I hope we'll be seeing some hard hitting
questions about McCain being simply too old. . . McCain had skin
cancer a few years ago. He now has some enormous thing on the
side of his face that no one is talking about. I want to know
why we shouldn't be worried that John McCain is going to get
sick and die in office. . . Cindy McCain's drug addiction. What
message does it send to America's children to have a drug addict,
who actually stole drugs, as first lady?
MCCAIN AGAINST
PORK, EXCEPT THE KIND HE LIKES
PROGRESS REPORT
Sen. John McCain has repeatedly made a major campaign promise
to veto any bill that comes to his desk as president if it contains
earmarks. "I'll veto every bill that has a pork-barrel project
on it," he has said.. McCain has failed to note, however,
that earmarks have paid for projects that he supports, such as
U.S. aid to Israel. Confronted with this reality this week, McCain's
campaign quickly granted an exception for Israel. McCain "will
ensure America remains committed to the security of Israel, including
maintaining America's assistance levels," a spokesperson
said.
It is surprising
then that McCain was unaware that his earmark plan would obliterate
U.S. funding assistance for Israel. McCain's chief economic adviser
Douglas Holtz-Eakin has said that McCain embraces the Congressional
Research Service's definition of the term "earmarks."
All told, $14.4 billion, or two thirds of all foreign assistance,
would be eliminated if McCain stuck with this proposal."
U.S. assistance
to Israel is not the only casualty in McCain's anti-earmark pledge.
CRS's earmark definition also includes funding for military family
housing. What's more, tens of millions in military housing are
directed to McCain's home state of Arizona. Will McCain now grant
another exception for much-needed military housing, further eroding
his promise to veto "every bill that has a pork barrel project?"
Or will he deride it as "outrageous" Washington spending?
McCain's earmark
numbers simply do not add up, leaving two-thirds of his tax proposal
unfunded.
MEET THE OTHER
JOHN MCCAIN
MICHAEL KRANISH, BOSTON GLOBE, JAN 27 Senator Thad Cochran
of Mississippi, who has known Senator John McCain for more than
three decades, on Wednesday endorsed Mitt Romney for president.
Cochran said his choice was prompted partly by his fear of how
McCain might behave in the Oval Office.
"The thought
of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine,"
Cochran said about McCain by phone. "He is erratic. He is
hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me."
McCain's run-ins
with other Republican senators are legendary. Senator Charles
Grassley of Iowa said in an interview that he was so upset by
a McCain tirade that he didn't speak to him for two years. Grassley,
who said he will make no endorsement, nonetheless says McCain
is the most qualified among the five GOP candidates to be president.
. .
McCain supporters
say the senator more recently has tamed his temper as well as
his political style. For example, they note that while McCain
in 2000 said some religious conservative leaders were "agents
of intolerance," the senator made a point of courting some
of the same leaders in this campaign. . .
RON KESSLER,
2006
Back in 1999, McCain allowed reporters from the Arizona Republic,
New York Times, and The Associated Press to review 1,500 pages
of his medical and psychiatric records from his service in the
military. McCain would not allow reporters to copy the records.
Only a few papers ran details relating to his temper.
The documents,
which include the results of annual psychiatric exams after he
was released from a North Vietnamese prison in 1973, indicate
McCain was not diagnosed with any psychiatric disorder and had
adjusted well to his ordeal. McCain's imprisonment began in October
1967 when he was shot down over Hanoi. However, in response to
the question, "What traits do you have that others object
to?" McCain answered, "Quick temper.". . .
A July 5 NewsMax
article quoted former Sen. Bob Smith, a New Hampshire Republican
who served with McCain on the Senate Armed Services Committee,
as saying, "I have witnessed incidents where he has used
profanity at colleagues and exploded at colleagues . . . He would
disagree about something and then explode. It was incidents of
irrational behavior. We've all had incidents where we have gotten
angry, but I've never seen anyone act like that."
McCain's outbursts
often erupted when other members rebuffed his requests for support
during his bid in 2000 for the Republican nomination for president,
the story said. "People who disagree with him get the f***
you,'" said former Rep. John LeBoutillier, a New York Republican
who had an encounter with McCain when he was on a POW task force
in the House.
"He had
very few friends in the Senate," said former Sen. Smith,
who dealt with McCain almost daily. "He has a lot of support
around the country, but I don't think he has a lot of support
from people who know him well.". . .
At other times,
McCain is simply nasty, those who know him say. Last February,
McCain sent Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., a mocking letter, saying
he wanted to "apologize" for "assuming" Obama's
private assurances of working together were sincere.
"I'm embarrassed
to admit that after all these years in politics, I failed to
interpret your previous assurances as typical rhetorical gloss
routinely used in politics to make self-interested partisan posturing
appear more noble," McCain said sarcastically. "Again,
sorry for the confusion, but please be assured I won't make the
same mistake again.". . .
Democrat Paul
Johnson, the former mayor of Phoenix, saw McCain's temper up
close. "His volatility borders in the area of being unstable,"
Johnson has said. "Before I let this guy put his finger
on the button, I would have to give considerable pause."
"I think
he is mentally unstable and not fit to be president," former
congressman LeBoutillier said.
Many have thought
that McCain might have developed his out-of-control temper while
a POW. But as described in his military records, McCain's anger
pre-dated his captivity.
Only a few news
outlets, like the Phoenix New Times in Arizona and the National
Journal have run an Associated Press story reporting McCain's
1998 joke suggesting that Chelsea Clinton was ugly and that Janet
Reno and Hillary Clinton were lesbians. "Why is Chelsea
Clinton so ugly?" McCain said at a GOP fund-raiser in Washington.
"Because Janet Reno is her father."
In a major exception
to what it called the "fawning" treatment the national
media give McCain, the Arizona Republic, in a front page article
and separate editorial in October 1999, said it wanted the nation
to know about the "volcanic" temper McCain had unleashed
on top state officials. "McCain often insults people and
flies off the handle," the editorial said. Moreover, he
is often "sarcastic and condescending." The paper said
that it was "time the rest of the nation learned about the
John McCain we know in Arizona." The editorial said there
is reason to "seriously question" whether McCain has
the "temperament" to be president.
WONKETTE - In 1995, at the Capitol,
McCain had a "scuffle" with 92-year-old Republican
Senator Strom Thurmond. That's right, McCain tried to beat up
the one person who was even older than McCain himself.
. . . When two Arizona medical doctors met with McCain to discuss
a local endangered squirrel, "He slammed his fists on his
desk, scattering papers across the room . . . He jumped up and
down, screaming obscenities at us for at least 10 minutes. He
shook his fists as if he was going to slug us."
MARCH 2008
MCCAIN'S CO-CHAIR
HELPED CAUSE FISCAL CRISIS
POLITICO The
general co-chairman of John McCain's presidential campaign, former
Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), led the charge in 1999 to repeal a
Depression-era banking regulation law that Democrat Barack Obama
claimed contributed significantly to today's economic turmoil.
"A regulatory
structure set up for banks in the 1930s needed to change because
the nature of business had changed," the Illinois senator
running for president said in a New York economic speech. "But
by the time [it] was repealed in 1999, the $300 million lobbying
effort that drove deregulation was more about facilitating mergers
than creating an efficient regulatory framework."
Gramm's role
in the swift and dramatic recent restructuring of the nation's
investment houses and practices didn't stop there.
A year after
the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act repealed the old regulations, Swiss
Bank UBS gobbled up brokerage house Paine Weber. Two years later,
Gramm settled in as a vice chairman of UBS's new investment banking
arm.
Later, he became
a major player in its government affairs operation. According
to federal lobbying disclosure records, Gramm lobbied Congress,
the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department about banking and
mortgage issues in 2005 and 2006.
During those
years, the mortgage industry pressed Congress to roll back strong
state rules that sought to stem the rise of predatory tactics
used by lenders and brokers to place homeowners in high-cost
mortgages.
For his work,
Gramm and two other lobbyists collected $750,000 in fees from
UBS's American subsidiary. In the past year, UBS has written
down more then $18 billion in exposure to subprime loans and
other risky securities and is considering cutting as many as
8,000 jobs.
FEBRUARY 2008
MCCAIN WELCOMES
SUPPORT FROM EXTREMIST PREACHER
THINK PROGRESS
- Hard-line conservative Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians
United for Israel, endorsed John McCain. Hagee said that McCain
"is a man of principle, [who] does not stand boldly on both
sides of any issue." McCain, who had been courting the endorsement
for over a year, said that he was "very honored by Pastor
John Hagee's endorsement.". . . McCain's acceptance of Hagee's
endorsement was condemned today by conservative William Donohue,
president of the Catholic League. Calling Hagee a "bigot,"
Donahue said the right-wing pastor has waged "an unrelenting
war against the Catholic Church" by "calling it 'The
Great Whore,' an 'apostate church,' the 'anti-Christ,' and a
'false cult system.'"
Hagee holds many
other radical beliefs. In a 2006 address to CUFI, Hagee declared:
"The United States must join Israel in a pre-emptive military
strike against Iran to fulfill God's plan for both Israel and
the West… a biblically prophesied end-time confrontation
with Iran, which will lead to the Rapture, Tribulation, and Second
Coming of Christ.
Speaking to the
2007 AIPAC conference, Hagee compared supporters of a two-state
solution in the Middle East to Nazis. Hagee also echoed right-wing
Israeli politician Binyamin Netanyahu, telling the audience that
"Iran is Germany and Ahmadinejad is the new Hitler."
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/02/28/hagee-mccain-endorsement/
MCCAIN GETS HIS OWN 'YES WE CAN'
VIDEO'
THE DANGEROUS MYTH OF JOHN McCAIN
JOHANN HARI, SEATTLE POST INTELLIGENCER
- A lazy, hazy myth has arisen out of the mists of New Hampshire
and South Carolina. Across the pan-Atlantic press, the grizzled
71-year-old Vietnam vet, John McCain, is being billed as the
Republican liberals can live with. He is "a bipartisan progressive,"
"a principled hard liberal," "a decent man"
-- in the words of liberal newspapers. His fragile new frontrunner
status as we go into Super Tuesday is being seen as something
to cautiously welcome, a kick to the rotten Republican establishment.
But the truth is that McCain
is the candidate we should most fear. Not only is he to the right
of Bush on a whole range of subjects, he is also the Republican
candidate most likely to dispense with Hillary Clinton or Barack
Obama. . .
Rage seems to be at the core of his personality: describing his
own childhood, McCain has written: "At the smallest provocation
I would go off into a mad frenzy, and then suddenly crash to
the floor unconscious. When I got angry I held my breath until
I blacked out." But he claims he was transformed by his
experiences in Vietnam -- a war he still defends as "noble"
and "winnable," if only it had been fought harder.
. .
MCCAIN AND THE KEATING FIVE
WIKIPEDIA - McCain's upwards
political trajectory was jolted when he became enmeshed in the
Keating Five scandal of the 1980s. In the context of the Savings
and Loan crisis of that decade, Charles Keating Jr.'s Lincoln
Savings and Loan Association, a subsidiary of his American Continental
Corporation, was insolvent due to some bad loans. In order to
regain solvency, Lincoln sold investment in a real estate venture
as a FDIC insured savings account. This caught the eye of federal
regulators who were looking to shut it down.
It is alleged that Keating contacted five senators to whom he
made contributions. McCain was one of those senators and he met
at least twice in 1987 with Ed Gray, chairman of the Federal
Home Loan Bank Board, seeking to prevent the government's seizure
of Lincoln. Between 1982 and 1987, McCain received approximately
$112,000 in political contributions from Keating and his associates.
In addition, McCain's wife and her father had invested $359,100
in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain
met with the regulators. McCain, his family and baby-sitter made
at least nine trips at Keating's expense, sometimes aboard the
American Continental jet. After learning Keating was in trouble
over Lincoln, McCain paid for the air trips totaling $13,433.
Eventually the real estate venture
failed, leaving many broke. Federal regulators ultimately filed
a $1.1 billion civil racketeering and fraud suit against Keating,
accusing him of siphoning Lincoln's deposits to his family and
into political campaigns. The five senators came under investigation
for attempting to influence the regulators. In the end, none
of the senators were convicted of any crime, although McCain
was rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee for exercising "poor
judgment" for intervening with the federal regulators on
behalf of Keating.
On his Keating Five experience,
McCain said: "The appearance of it was wrong. It's a wrong
appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with
a group of regulators, because it conveys the impression of undue
and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCain
MEET THE REAL JOHN MCCAIN
JOSHUA HOLLAND, ALTERNET - McCain's
political colleagues know another side of the action hero --
a volatile man with a hair-trigger temper, who shouted at Sen.
Ted Kennedy on the Senate floor to "shut up," called
his fellow Republican senators "shithead," "fucking
jerk," "asshole," and joked in 1998 at a Republican
fundraiser about the teenage daughter of President Clinton, "Do
you know why Chelsea Clinton is so ugly? Because Janet Reno is
her father." [In 2006], McCain suddenly rushed up to a friend
of mine, a prominent Washington attorney, at a social event,
and threatened to beat him up because he represented a client
McCain happened to dislike, and then, just as suddenly, profusely
and tearfully apologized.
And McCain's problems run far
deeper than his irascibility and some gaffes on the stump. His
real challenge is that his popularity -- his viability -- rests
almost entirely on two narratives that have absolutely no connection
with reality: his reputation as a straight-talking "maverick"
and a moderate, and his "brave" support for Bush's
troop escalation, a policy that's led to the widely-embraced
but wholly false idea that "the surge is working.".
. .
The reality is that John McCain
is the antithesis of the principled straight-talker. When he
was asked in a recent debate whether, as president, he would
sign into law the comprehensive immigration reform bill that
he's championed for the past three years, he responded: "No,
I would not, because we know what the situation is today."
Yes, the situation today is that he's running for the Republican
nomination.
As journalist and blogger Steve
Benen noted, that's only one of a number of measures that McCain
has worked hard to pass and is now saying he'd oppose:
- McCain used to champion the
Law of the Sea convention, even volunteering to testify on the
treaty's behalf before a Senate committee. Now, if the treaty
comes to the Senate floor, he's vowed to vote against it.
- McCain was a co-sponsor of
the DREAM Act, which would grant legal status to illegal immigrants'
kids who graduate from high school. In 2007, to make the far-right
base happy, he voted against the bill he had taken the lead on.
- In 2006, McCain sponsored legislation
to require grassroots lobbying coalitions to reveal their financial
donors. In 2007, after receiving "feedback" on the
proposal, McCain told far-right activist groups that he now opposes
the measure he'd backed.
- McCain used to support major
campaign-finance reform measures that bore his name. In June
2006, McCain announced his opposition to a major McCain-Feingold
provision.
http://www.alternet.org/election08/75845/?page-entire
JANUARY 2007
MCCAIN HIRES HAROLD FORD BASHER
JACK MCENANY, LOST NATION - Sen.
John McCain ? (R-AZ) has tapped GOP consultant Terry "Call
me, Harold" Nelson as his national campaign manager. Wal-Mart
found Nelson's anti-Harold Ford ad so objectionable they canned
him from his consulting contract. Nelson has a reputation as
a win-at-any-cost kind of guy. Nelson is also named, but not
charged, in Tom Delay's money-laundering debacle that drove him
from Congress. Nelson was Deputy Chief of Staff at the RNC at
the time, and reportedly played a role in the scheme. So much
for McCain the campaign finance reformer, the guy who'll bring
us all together.
JUNE 2006
THE REAL JOHN MCCAIN
Things John McCain has done this
sesson:
Opposed raising minimum wage
Supported any-consumer bankruptcy act
Supported cuts in Social Security
Supported cuts in Amtrak
Supported Alaskan oil drilling
Supported nominations of Negroponte, Gonzalez, Chertoff and Hayden
Supported Roberts and Alioto nomination to the Supreme Court
Supported Patriot Act
Supported Mexican boarder fence
APRIL 2006
THE MCCAIN ILLUSION
THINK PROGRESS - In 2004, Sen.
John McCain (R-AZ) said he opposed a constitutional ban on same-sex
marriage: Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona broke forcefully
with President Bush and the Senate GOP leadership Tuesday evening
over the issue of same-sex marriage, taking to the Senate floor
to call a constitutional amendment that would effectively ban
the practice unnecessary - and un-Republican. "The constitutional
amendment we're debating today strikes me as antithetical in
every way to the core philosophy of Republicans," McCain
said. But yesterday, ABC reported that McCain confided to Jerry
Falwell that he would support such an amendment: "McCain
'reconfirmed' to Falwell that he would support a federal constitutional
amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman
if a federal court were to strike down state constitutional bans
on gay marriage.
In 2000, McCain called Falwell
one of America's "agents of intolerance;" now he has
agreed to give the commencement address at Falwell's Liberty
University on May 13.
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/03/29/mccain-gay-marriage
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