« Josh Marshall Wins 2007 George Polk Award | Main | A Compendium of Crime »
The Power of Prayer?
Mike Huckabee says that he got into the race at the instruction of God. As they say, the Lord works in mysterious ways. The New York Times has just broken a story that has to be at least a partial answer to Huckabee's fervid prayers.
Seems that back in John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign, his staffers became so alarmed that he might be having an affair with Vicki Iseman, a 32-year old lobbyist, that they intervened with him, and one of his highest ranking aides met with the woman and told her to stay away from McCain.
And for someone who has gotten up pretty high on the high horse of ethics and rectitude, McCain carried all kinds of water for telecommunications bills that explicitly benefitted companies that were clients of Iseman's lobbying firm.
Read of the Times piece. I have heard that the Times had this story BEFORE this year's Iowa caucuses, and sat on it after mega-lobbyist-lawyer Bill Bennett met with Times editors. What is it with these people at the Times? In 2004, they sat on the story about Bush's illegal wiretapping for months before the November election, knowing perfectly well that the story would blow a big hole in Bush's re-election campaign,Just how cynical do you have to be to have even the slightest chance of understanding what's really going on in the land of big media and lobbying?
6 Comments
Leave a comment
Not registered? Click on 'Sign-in' above and then select 'Sign up' in the lower right corner. Don't forget to click on the link in the confirmation email that will be sent to your email address.
wow this is everywhere I go! Just opened my email and first thing I saw
BREAKING: NYT Exposes McCain Affair With Lobbyist
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/022008Z.shtml
Jim Rutenberg, Marilyn W. Thompson, David D. Kirkpatrick and Stephen Labaton, reporting for the New York Times, write: "A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, in his offices and aboard a client's corporate jet.
Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself - instructing staff members to block the woman's access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity."
Sent it around .. just in case .. even before eating & though exhausted
Check out blog http://www.silencedmajority.blogs.com - good old Kayakbiker had already put it up, with a picture of her in her evening gown, looking pretty similar to his trophy wife
Then checking here & you all are on top of it.
Isn't St. John part of the Moral Majority party?
Check this out - there was wind of the scandal earlier
http://www.evangelicalsformitt.org/front_page/am_spec_nyt_covers_up_mccain_a_1.php
You're right, Dick. The Times has this habit, at least under Bill Keller, of sitting on stories that voters have a need to know about. I believe that his decision to sit on the NSA story absolutely impacted the 2004 election.
The sex angle of the McCain story seems pretty tame to me, but the money/love for access angle might be more interesting.
From a "framing" perspective, it matters that the Comcast lead story (for lots of computer users like me who see it lst thing when they open it) says McCain Denies Romantic Ties With Lobbyist - because even though he denies it, McCain Romantic Lobbyist are all in the same HEADLINE and will also be seen in alot of Google searches from here on out.
He is a hypocrite.
More on McCain from Joe Conason:
http://www.observer.com/2008/crooked-talk-iraq-cost
Yet although the senator from Arizona is obviously no chicken hawk, he carefully avoids “straight talk” about the real costs of this war in dollars and debt. Like every other politician who agrees with the Bush policy of prolonged war and occupation, he still pretends that we can spend hundreds of billions of dollars on this endless misadventure without collecting enough tax revenue to pay the actual costs.
Hundreds of billions? Sorry, but that vague estimate is probably far too modest, according to a new book by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda J. Bilmes. In The Trillion-Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, they warn that the war’s “true budgetary cost,” excluding interest, “is likely to reach $2.7 trillion.” Aside from the price of munitions, contractors, transport, fuel and other fixed costs, their calculations are based on the government’s continuing obligation to provide medical care and disability payments for the thousands of wounded Iraq and Afghanistan veterans over the coming decades.
read more here:
http://www.observer.com/2008/crooked-talk-iraq-cost