McCain's Lobbyist Hypocrisy

By Cernig

McCain says he wants lobbyists out of politics while employing a whole bunch of them in key campaign positions. Whodathunkit?

Republican presidential candidate John McCain has condemned the influence of "special interest lobbyists," yet dozens of lobbyists have political and financial ties to his presidential campaign — particularly from telecommunications companies, an industry he helps oversee in the Senate.

Of the 66 current or former lobbyists working for the Arizona senator or raising money for his presidential campaign, 23 have lobbied for telecommunications companies in the past decade, Senate lobbying disclosures show.

McCain has netted about $765,000 in political donations from those telecom lobbyists, their spouses, colleagues at their firms and their telecom clients during the past decade, a USA TODAY analysis of campaign-finance records shows.

It's unclear how much more money those lobbyists have raised for McCain. Eighteen of them are listed by the campaign as "bundlers," which are major fundraisers. McCain doesn't disclose how much each bundler has raised — unlike Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, who categorize their bundlers by the amount they raise.

McCain is the top recipient of campaign donations from telecom companies in this election cycle with $165,000 and received another $400,000 from internet companies and $453,000 from lobbyists so far.

McCain's been a vocal supporter of telecoms and internet companies in his position as a senior member of the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees the telecom industry and the Federal Communications Commission.

He has repeatedly pushed industry-backed legislation since 2000, particularly during a second stint as committee chairman from 2003 through 2005. His efforts to eliminate taxes and regulations on telecommunications services won him praise from industry executives.

And there certainly seems to be a link between his support for the industry and his campaign team:

People who lobbied for telecom companies on those issues include McCain's campaign manager, his deputy manager, his finance chief, his top unpaid political adviser and his Senate chief of staff. Telecom companies have paid the lobbying firms that employed those top five McCain advisersmore than $4.4 million since 1999, lobbying records show.

The McCain campaign, of course, denies that he does favors in return for campaign back-scratching. But given those facts that denial looks very slim. It appears to be a case of "do what I say, not what I do".

I know it won't get as much attention, but it could be argued that the revelation of these lobbyist connections should be even more damaging than the recent uproar over "Obama's pastor". After all, what can Obama do even if he secretly agrees with Wright ( a highly doubtful proposition to begin with) - pack his cabinet with white-hating zealots? But if McCain packs his cabinet and the White House with revolving-door lobbyists it actually could (and probably would) affect government policy. Closing the revolving door being lobbying and government, which has led to so much corruption and mutual back-scratching, is one of the things McCain is supposed to stand for - but his choice of campaign team says otherwise.

"Help, We're Being Repressed!"

By Cernig

The UK Sunday Herald's veteran political reporter Iain MacWhirter absolutely nails the hypocrisy inherent in the system - where bankers can demand state "socialist" welfare and no-one calls them on it.

COME BACK Karl Marx, all is forgiven. Just when everyone thought that the German philosopher's critique of capitalism had been buried with the Soviet Union, suddenly capitalism reverts to type. It has laid a colossal, global egg and plunged the world economy into precisely the kind of crisis he forecast.

The irony, though, is that this time it isn't the working classes who are demanding that the state should take over, but the banks. The capitalists are throwing themselves on the mercy of government, demanding subsidies and protection from the capitalist market - it's socialism for the banks. Hedge fund managers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your bonuses.

On Friday, the heads of the big five British banks demanded - and got - another £5 billion in "emergency liquidity" from the Bank of England to add to the £5bn they received earlier in the week. But like militant shop stewards they complained it wasn't enough. "Look how much the banks are getting in Europe and America," they whinged. Hundreds of billions of dollars and euros are being thrown at banks in an attempt to save them from themselves.

The quaint idea that loss-making companies should fail, to ensure the health and vitality of the capitalist system, has quietly been discarded. The banks, we are told, are "too big to fail", which means that they have to be taken into public ownership - like Northern Rock - or have their debts underwritten by government, like Bear Stearns, which comes to much the same thing. The central banks are also cutting interest rates to try to boost banking profits, and this is making currencies such as the dollar increasingly unstable.

Which takes us back to Marx. The crisis that is rocking the world is a classic example of the kind of shocks and dislocations that Marx said were an essential feature of a competitive capitalist economy.

...So what happens now? Or as Lenin said, What Is To Be Done? Well, not Communism for a start. Central control and outright state ownership along Soviet lines is no longer a viable political option - an undemocratic public monopoly is almost as bad as a private one. The fact that the banks are currently in league with western governments to create a kind of financial communism is doubly disturbing.

Instead of just propping up bankrupt banks, the governments should be democratising them - mobilising their assets to stimulate the productive economy, repairing infrastructure, researching and developing new markets, and refitting western economies to combat climate change. It needs a kind of green New Deal - an update on Roosevelt's imaginative policies of the 1930s fought tooth and nail by the banks.

They want unlimited access to public money to save themselves from the consequences of their own actions; welfare for the wealthy. This is above all a political, not an economic problem. There needs to be a political mobilisation of public opinion to force the banks and the government to bring the people into the equation.

MacWhirter laments the fact that in the UK the party that used to be the source of such calls, the Labour party, has been bought out by the banks. I can only agree. Unfortunately, here in the U.S., you've never really had such a party in the first place. And you're "supreme executive power" doesn't even have the excuse of some watery tart throwing a sword at him for his belief that he is King.

Telecom immunity is just the beginning

By Libby

Lambert picked up on a story yesterday that didn't get enough notice. The Senate apparently intends to turn excusing corporate criminality into a cottage industry.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) has sponsored an unusual [not for long!] provision at the urging of the nation’s banks granting them immunity against an active patent lawsuit, potentially saving them billions of dollars.

Adopted with little fanfare [I’ll bet!] , the amendment would prevent a small Texas company called DataTreasury from collecting damages from banks for infringing on its patented method for digitally scanning, sending and archiving checks. The patents were upheld last summer by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office after they were challenged.

The provision, passed without dissent by the Senate Judiciary Committee [Nice work, Senator Leahy!] in July and inserted into legislation scheduled for a vote by the full Senate this month, is a rare [but not for long!] attempt by Congress to intervene in ongoing litigation, congressional experts say.

Maybe somebody should remind them that their job is to draft laws, not interfere in active lawsuits. They seem to have forgotten, perhaps in their haste to tally up their corporate campaign contributions. [via]

McCain Kisses Base Ass On Torture

By Cernig

Yes, the great maverick puckered up and planted a big one on the collective posterior of extreme Right torture fandom today.

Today, the Senate brought the Intelligence Authorization Bill to the floor, containing a provision from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) that establishes one interrogation standard, requiring the intelligence community to abide by the same standards as articulated in the Army Field Manual and banning waterboarding.

Just hours ago, the Senate voted in favor of the bill, 51-45.

Earlier today, ThinkProgress noted that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), a former prisoner of war, has spoken strongly in favor of implementing the Army Field Manual standard. When confronted today with the decision of whether to stick with his conscience or cave to the right wing, McCain chose to ditch his principles and instead vote to preserve waterboarding

Apparently, McCain's experience as a POW is only for telling stories at campaign stops. But at least Lockheed - the company that owns the company that provides priately contracted interrogators at Gitmo - will be happy and keep McCain's campaign funds flowing.

In the annals of political flip-flopping, this is one of the headliners. Such an utter lack of principle as to be able to turn on a dime and deny what he himself has been saying for years means no-one who isn't part of the goose-stepping Right - especially leader's of other Western nations - will ever believe a word out of his mouth again. Ferchrissakes, don't let this man anywhere near the Oval Office.

The Rule Of Men

By Cernig

The Senate voted 31-67 to give retroactive immunity to telecoms corporations anabling Bush's surveillance programs. TPM Muckraker notes:

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) took to the floor last night to give a speech asking, "This is our defining question, the question that confronts every generation: The rule of law, or the rule of men?" The resounding answer: the rule of men.

and lists the Dem crossovers.

Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Evan Bayh (D-IA), Daniel Inouye (D-HI), Tim Johnson (D-SD), Herb Kohl (D-WI), Mary Landrieu (D-LA), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), Mark Pryor (D-AR), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), Ken Salazar (D-CO), Tom Carper (D-DE), Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), Jim Webb (D-VA), Ben Nelson (D-NE), Bill Nelson (D-FL), Kent Conrad (D-ND), and Debbie Stabenow (D-MI).

Obama lived up to his promise to vote for stripping the telecom corps. of their immunity. Clinton didn't show up.

And I thought I was already in a bad mood today.

President Blair?

By Cernig

I have spent a long time regretting my one and only vote for Tory Blur, in his first election victory. I started to regret it the moment I saw that his first action on election was to run to Margaret Thatcher's side for advice - not the signature move of anyone who honestly believed the kind of thing Blair had been saying. Nowadays the man's lust for power and money and willingness to say or do anything to attain it gives me the dry heaves.

Today the Guardian reports:

Tony Blair has been holding discussions with some of his oldest allies on how he could mount a campaign later this year to become full-time president of the EU council, the prestigious new job characterised as "president of Europe". Blair, currently the Middle East envoy for the US, Russia, EU and the UN, has told friends he has made no final decision, but is increasingly willing to put himself forward for the job if it comes with real powers to intervene in defence and trade affairs.

I've a word of advice for my European friends.

Nooooooooooooooooooooo.

John Avaricious

By Cernig

John Avaricious Aravosis. When the Right moans about latte-sipping liberals, this is the kind of thing they mean.

According to AP, congressional leaders have reached a deal on those economic stimulus checks. And rather than being geared towards helping the economy, they're apparently geared towards redistributing wealth (that would be our wealth) to the poor. What a surprise. Folks in the middle (i.e, those who are not rich or poor) are screwed by the Democrats (and Republicans) yet again. Let me give you the details that just leaked, and again this may not be the final deal, but it sure sounds like it.

...That's because far too often the Democrats don't give a damn about anybody who isn't a minority or starving to death (both valid causes to be sure, but are they the ONLY causes out there?). If you're in the middle, you're on your own.

I mean, wtf? The poor are getting so much help that they're now richer than middle-class jerks like Avaricious now? I'm here to tell you, from experience, that isn't the case. As for saying that aiding the poor is just as bad as aiding the rich...that's got to be the most stupid bit of false moral equivalence I've ever heard.

His commenters aren't being kind, in the main, with the most apposite being that now would be the wrong time to hold that AmericaBlog fundraiser. As Wolfrum at Shakes' Sis points out, the wingnuts will lap up this greedy rant. James at the Mahatma X Files gets closest to my own view. I am so far from agreeing with Avarosis that he's from a different dimension. If I ever accidentally link to or blogroll this latte-sipping leech from this day on, please bash me over the head until I come to my senses.

Update Kevin Drum has a rather saner version of what lies behind the rebate story:

Basically, Republicans insisted that all aspects of the plan had to take the form of "income tax rebates," which automatically excludes the poor and favors the well off. It also does a lousy job of stimulating the economy, but who cares about that? Pelosi managed to improve things a bit, but as long as George Bush is in office we still have to make our ritual obeisances to voodoo economics.

Who's Afraid Of Congress? No-one

By Cernig

Glenn Greenwald posts to his usual high standards today as he notes the lack of consequences for ignoring Congressional subpoenas - a lack entirely engineered by Congressional Democrats themsleves.

Since the White House announced to the world that it considered Congress' subpoenas to be laughable and worthless, what has happened? Exactly what Miers and Bolton knew would happen if they ignored the subpoenas: absolutely nothing of any consequence. Both Committees voted to issue contempt citations to the two officials, but Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi -- for months and months -- have refused to bring the matter to the floor for a full vote, a requirement for a witness to be held in contempt.

And there's more of the same on the way because Pelosi and Reid think that contempt citations would "would 'step on their message' of bipartisan unity in the midst of the stimulus package talks". Despite Congress' investigative role being at least as important as its legislative one in the eyes of the Framers and other likeminded political theorists, the Dem leadership are unwilling to live up to their duty - unless it happens to involve baseball.

The Bush administration aren't the only ones who have nothing but contempt for this spinelessness. Count me in too.

Ostrich Partisanship

By Cernig

Kevin Drum has some news which is downright depressing:

In CQ Politics this week, David Nather recaps the Bush administration's enormous expansion of executive power and then asks whether any of the candidates running for election in 2008 are likely to give up that power if they win office. It turns out he had a hard time getting anyone to go on the record about it:..."Only one of the candidates — Edwards — answered the questions, although Clinton's campaign touched on some of the issues in a separate exchange."

I said we should be asking exactly this question over and over until all the candidates gave answers to hang them by.

I'm sure you understand why the Republican candidates didn't want to answer - they luvz them some Executive Authoritay but it would be political suicide to say so. But the Dems?

The most charitable reason I can imagine is that they think any stance at all would be used to attack them from left or right, which translates as saying they don't have the courage of their convictions and don't want to be seen as weak on leadership. Ptooey! The worst explanation is that they have just as little intention as the GOP crowd of rolling back the Bush Years' powergrab. Perhaps even Edwards, who comes across to me as taking a leaf from Tony Blair's campaign playbook of populism-with-his-fingers-crossed (as well as taking lessons from Blair's smiling instructor).

This is just as depressing as discovering that 8 out of the top 10 receivers of military campaign dollars for '08 are Democrats.

But there's one thing I am even more depressed about - once the nominees are selected, somewhere around 99% of the pundits and bloggers who have criticised their own crowd of wannabe-Dubyas during the primaries will about face and lockstep into the future with their party's Chosen One as they claim that the person they would never have voted for in the primaries is the one true choice for American Idol President, 2008. At which point I may puke, or I may bang my head against a wall from sheer frustration. Or both.

Perry Bites the Hand That Fed Him

By Cernig

Rick Perry, the very model of a modern Republican politico, is at it again.

Fresh from his Freudian slip over his social conservative leanings towards Huckabee even while he endorses Guiliani, Perry has now back-stabbed Dubya, his old boss and running mate back when Perry was freeloading Bush's campaign machine to become Lieutenant Governor of Texas.

Here's the video of Perry : "George was never a fiscal conservative".



The Austin Statesman reports:

Perry, who spoke in Nelson's living room after a drive through several inches of fresh snow, cast Giuliani as someone who could work with Democrats to make progress in Washington where "it ain't working today. They are spending too much money, it takes too long and they're doing more harm than good."

Perry called Giuliani a fiscal conservative, unlike Bush, who preceded Perry as governor.

Perry, responding to a party guest's suggestion that federal spending could kill candidates with voters, said that as governor, Bush consistently signed into law budget increases.

"Let me tell you something," Perry said: "George Bush was never a fiscal conservative. Never was. ... Wasn't when he was in Texas. ... I mean, '95, '97, '99, George Bush was spending money."

Perry turned to his press secretary, Robert Black, who had joined him at the Iowa stop.

"Do you agree?" the governor asked.

Black nodded.

Perry also dammed Bush with faint praise, saying he was "better than Al Gore"... the man he endorsed over Clinton back when Perry was a Democrat.

This venal flip-flopping in a frantic effort to hitch himself to someone's - anyone's - coat-tails and take a ride to power has earned Perry the contempt of even some Texan Republicans. Over at Red State, "haystack" writes:

in the name of my beloved Lone Star State the Governor is using salary dollars I pay him to run on up to Iowa to be Rudy's toothless pit bull as well. Check that last...I should have said coiffed little toy poodle.

Well, Bush had Blair - will Rudy come to wish he didn't have Rick?

Reid about to sell out on FISA

By Libby

Glenn Greenwald is raising the alarm and FDL has the phone numbers but for those unversed in legalese or who like me, get dizzy trying to follow the procedural sleight of hand, I thought Booman had the most understandable explanation for the cheap trick Reid is about to pull on the FISA bill.

Bottom line. Reid is about to try to pull a fast one. Not only is he failing to honor Dodd's hold, he's setting up the vote on three competing bills to virtually assure that telecom immunity will be passed and he is planning to hide behind the usual mealymouthed excuse of the damned 60 vote threshold. Don't let him get away with it.

Better to call, but if you can't do that, please use his web form and let him know you won't be fooled again. I just sent a polite but blistering email myself, in addition to calling.

America - Constitution Optional

By Cernig

What would the destroyed CIA tapes of interrogations have shown? Kevin Drum knows, in at least one case - that of an al-Qaeda operative named Abu Zubaydah. Both James Risen's State of War and Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine make mention of him. The upshot, Kevin writes, is that:

here's what the tapes would have shown: not just that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative, but that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative who was (a) unimportant and low-ranking, (b) mentally unstable, (c) had no useful information, and (d) eventually spewed out an endless series of worthless, fantastical "confessions" under duress. This was all prompted by the president of the United States, implemented by the director of the CIA, and the end result was thousands of wasted man hours by intelligence and and law enforcement personnel.

Read the whole post for the background to Kevin's conclusions. You can see why they were destroyed.

Andrew Sullivan, in another must-read post, notes that the extreme Right are just fine with leaving the rule of law and American decency bleeding in a ditch.

It's refreshing, actually. I just listened to Charles say that the torture of terror suspects in 2002 was justified because the United States was flying blind and had no knowledge of what al Qaeda was planning. He won't say "torture", of course, although the law is clear that it is torture. (He and Fox News keep referring to the notion of "harsh interrogation techniques". I think they realized that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" was a little too close to the Gestapo's euphemism for comfort.) And he then said that destroying the tapes was justified because you don't want them coming up on YouTube, do you? So there you have it: the government has a right to torture when it feels like it and the right to destroy the evidence because it would incriminate them and hurt the image of the United States. Again, I keep pinching myself that I am actually hearing these things on the television.

I realize, of course, that that's the actual argument that Bush and Cheney make to themselves behind closed doors. I guess it's refreshing, if a little chilling, to hear a proud defense of lawlessness and violence at the heart of a constitutional republic on national television. But there are several critical and revealing premises behind it. The first is that the United States has effectively withdrawn from the Geneva Conventions. To say that the president can waive them at any time if he sees fit is to say that the United States is not bound by its treaty obligations. The second is that the president is not bound by any law or treaty governing the laws of warfare. Bush and Cheney won't say this because if they did, the jig would be up. The Constitution is extremely clear that the laws of warfare are determined by the Congress, not the president. So it's up to the Beltway Boys to defend the suspension of the rule of law and the legalization of torture as executive prerogatives, in violation of the Constitution. Hey: we're at war. The Constitution is now optional.

This, folks, is your country. Not a single one of the Republican frontrunners would change it (and some would say it's doubtful that the Democratic frontrunners would either). What are you going to do about it? It's your responsibility, after all.

Deregulation busted the bubble

By Libby

Paul Krugman sees our future and it's not pretty. The word recession is on the lips of those in the know.

Why was this allowed to happen? At a deep level, I believe that the problem was ideological: policy makers, committed to the view that the market is always right, simply ignored the warning signs. We know, in particular, that Alan Greenspan brushed aside warnings from Edward Gramlich, who was a member of the Federal Reserve Board, about a potential subprime crisis.

The bottom line is that policy makers left the financial industry free to innovate — and what it did was to innovate itself, and the rest of us, into a big, nasty mess.

Avedon has a must read post on this. She quotes Krugman and marks the point where it all went wrong.

This time, market players seem truly horrified - because they've suddenly realized that they don't understand the complex financial system they created.

Well, I understand perfectly. I understand that the regulations they threw out were created precisely to prevent crap like this, and I felt the chill to my bones the minute I realized Reagan was undoing all the little safety catches that had been protecting our economy. Bastards. We've had arsonists running the show.

This should be a lesson to all the 'small government' advocates. When you employ a slash and burn strategy on regulatory control to foster the growth of 'free markets,' all you end up with is an economy in smoldering ruins.

ENDA, incomplete, passes House

by shamanic

I saw Andrew Sullivan's celebratory post about ENDA passing the House last night, but noticed he didn't mention whether it included transgender folks in the language.

Of course it didn't, and I'm 100% with Melissa and Pam when I say that really, really sucks.

After the 2004 election, I learned what it's like to wake up in America with your fundamental rights restricted by a bigoted hijacking of the voting process. Soon, I may wake up knowing what it's like to get some legal protections granted on the backs of those who were still too politically unpalatable to be included.

This is some ugly stuff, and there isn't any part of me that's glad that ENDA passed without including the gender revolutionaries in it. Why do we have to fight this fight over and over again?