Supporters of Senator Obama have every right to be upset at the guilt by association game being played by the hockey mom and that little guy she’s running with for president. Though there is no reason to get overly angry and certainly no reason to panic. Obama isn’t in a panic he’s taking McCain on the facts. Obama’s relationship to Bill Ayers is about the same as the one average Americans have with a fellow employee they know by name, but talk to for two minutes a year at the office holiday party. McCain-Palin want to play that game and declare that you are who you hang out with, then they are the ones that have some explaining to do. Despite attacks on media by McCain campaign, case studies show disparate coverage in McCain’s favor
….since The New York Times first reported on April 22 that McCain facilitated land deals that benefited major donors, these media outlets have mentioned those deals in only six additional reports, but news reports and editorial and opinion pieces by or in those media outlets have mentioned Obama’s ties to Rezko — who was convicted in June in a case in which Obama was never accused of any wrongdoing — 44 times during that same time period. Moreover, while these same media outlets have frequently mentioned Obama’s ties to Ayers — 69 mentions so far in 2008 — they have yet to mention McCain’s connections to Liddy, whom McCain has praised and repeatedly associated with in public and in campaign settings. In addition to serving more than four years in prison for his role in the Watergate break-in and the Daniel Ellsberg case, Liddy also admitted that he plotted to murder journalist Jack Anderson; plotted to murder fellow Republican operative E. Howard Hunt; and plotted to firebomb the Brookings Institution. Liddy also reportedly gave advice on how to shoot agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and reportedly admitted to naming shooting targets after the Clintons.
Liddy has been a McCain supporter for years and given money to the McCain campaign this year. Its almost laughable that Obama having repeatedly and publicaly condemned Bill Ayers, would let Ayers have any influence in his administration. Liddy on the other hand has a large media soapbox, enjoys influence as part of the Rightie noise machine and has made numerous inflammatory remarks about Obama while extolling the virtues of John McCain. Liddy and his followers have political influence, they are McCain and Palin’s base. Ayers is a marginal figure, even as the right-wing smear meisters try to blow him up larger then life. McCain has been associated with Phil Gramm for years and despite ‘officially” removing Gramm from his campaign is still rumored to be McCain top choice for Treasury Secretary. That would be the same Phil Gramm that is responsible for terrorizing America’s working class, McCain Defends ‘Enron Loophole’
Then, over the next year, Enron – with Gramm’s wife Wendy serving on its board of directors – worked to create false electricity shortages in California, bilking consumers out of an estimated $40 billion.
[ ]..Gramm received more than $34,000 in campaign contributions from Enron and served as one of the company’s key legislative allies in Washington, including his help in 2000 removing federal oversight from energy trades on electronic platforms.
also see Foreclosure Phil
Who’s to blame for the biggest financial catastrophe of our time? There are plenty of culprits, but one candidate for lead perp is former Sen. Phil Gramm. Eight years ago, as part of a decades-long anti-regulatory crusade, Gramm pulled a sly legislative maneuver that greased the way to the multibillion-dollar subprime meltdown.
[ ]..As Congress and the White House were hurriedly hammering out a $384-billion omnibus spending bill, Gramm slipped in a 262-page measure called the Commodity Futures Modernization Act. Written with the help of financial industry lobbyists and cosponsored by Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the chairman of the agriculture committee, the measure had been considered dead—even by Gramm. Few lawmakers had either the opportunity or inclination to read the version of the bill Gramm inserted. “Nobody in either chamber had any knowledge of what was going on or what was in it,” says a congressional aide familiar with the bill’s history.
[ ]…But the Enron loophole was small potatoes compared to the devastation that unregulated swaps would unleash. Credit default swaps are essentially insurance policies covering the losses on securities in the event of a default. Financial institutions buy them to protect themselves if an investment they hold goes south. It’s like bookies trading bets, with banks and hedge funds gambling on whether an investment (say, a pile of subprime mortgages bundled into a security) will succeed or fail. Because of the swap-related provisions of Gramm’s bill—which were supported by Fed chairman Alan Greenspan and Treasury secretary Larry Summers—a $62 trillion market (nearly four times the size of the entire US stock market) remained utterly unregulated, meaning no one made sure the banks and hedge funds had the assets to cover the losses they guaranteed.
Obama has a nonassociation with a guy that committed his crimes when Obama was eight. McCain has on going relationships with people that are have committed crimes and passed legislation that every day working Americans will be paying for the foreseeable future. In fact McCain has an ongoing relationship with a rogues gallery of America’s most corrupt lobbyists, No Reformer – McCain Puts 170+ Lobbyists First While Americans Struggle (PDF file)
McCain campaign chairman Charlie Black has lobbied for corrupt dictators, despots, and corporations accused of mass murder over the course of a lobbying career that has spanned more than 30 years and seen Black pass through K St.’s revolving door to Republican presidential campaigns seven times. Black lobbied for US aid on behalf of foreign regimes notorious for human rights abuses, including Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, Nigeria General Ibrahim Babangida, Somali President Mohamed Siad Barre, and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, whose government was cited in a congressional report as guilty of numerous “incidents of banishment, torture and detention without charge or trial.” Black earned more than $1.8 million lobbying for Occidental Petroleum, accused of complicity in mass murder in Colombia. Not only has Black assisted regimes and corporations that commit crimes against citizens of other nations, Black has lobbied for foreign companies linked to Iran, putting business interests ahead of America’s security.
Republican support of right-wing death squads in Latin America is OK. Senator Obama once ate a PB&J in the same cafeteria as Bill Ayers, OMG. Obama is running an ad with video that speaks to McCain’s involvement with the Keating Five. There’s no reason not to use Charlie Black as another McCain poster boy for McCain’s fake populism and a roaring symbol of the Palin-McCain hypocrisy machine. What if a terrorist was responsible for spilling 3 million gallons of oil into America’s lakes across six states and was one of Obama was their friend. We’d all be deaf from the shrill cries of outrage by the Right, but McCain hires a lobbyist that tried to protect the ‘terrorist’ not a word from the Ayers Conspiracy Crowd,
Senior Advisor Nancy Pfotenhauer has lobbied for the particularly despicable Koch Industries, remarkable for its disregard for the safety and wellbeing of Americans even among the many questionable clients who have benefited from the services of McCain’s lobbyists. Pfotenhauer lobbied for Koch on pipeline safety issues over a period during which Koch’s poor safety standards and regulations resulted in a spill of 3 million gallons of oil into lakes and streams across six states, leading to the largest civil fine ever levied under the Clean Water Act. McCain sponsored the pipeline safety bill on which Pfotenhauer lobbied, unsurprisingly recognized as the most lenient of the three pipeline safety bills proposed in 2000 – and noted as being favored by the gas industry.
In a saner America, at the very least Nancy would be mapping the floor on the nightshift at the county jail, but in ConWorld she’s rewarded with a job on McCain’s staff. Just one more from the report in homage to those populist conservative reformers Pail-McCain,
McCain’s Capitol Hill liaison John Green is a founding partner of Ogilvy Government Relations and may be able to claim the greatest breadth of lobbying ties, with long-standing relationships to oil and gas giants, the health insurance industry, private equity firms, and predatory lenders. Green’s firm has reaped more than $1 million from Chevron Texaco and Amerada Hess, and earned more than $600,000 lobbying to protect the interests of Americhoice, a managed care HMO, over Medicaid, Medicare, and SCHIP recipients. Green also lobbied on behalf of Blackstone, to attempt to help Blackstone and other private equity groups avoid higher taxes, and made more than $700,000 from predatory lender Ameriquest, which was forced to settle law suits from 49 states for $325 million following the exposure of predatory lending practices that affected 725,000 American homeowners.
Republicans have plenty of terrorist associations. Sometimes their terrorists support totalitarian-authoritrain governments, sometimes they support domestic terrrorism that poisons our water and sometimes its spreadsheet anti-regulation terrorism.
I received my license to make hyperbolic insults in perpetuity from John MCain and McCain supporters Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Michelle Malkin and Rush Limbaugh.
Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism and Godless: The Church of Liberalism , books or more like a few news clips Ann Coulter got and garbeled from Lexis-Nexus.
Unhinged: Exposing Liberals Gone Wild a very slim tome by Conservative Michelle Malkin, reviewed here.
Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism – an attempt by Sean Hannity to prove to the world his complete lack of knowledge about American history and traditional American values – possibly the inspiration for Jonah Goldberg’s work. He can also type he word evil more times then anybody, ever.
And Rush Limbaugh who once said “They oughtta change Black History Month to Black Progress Month and start measuring it.” and “The phony soldiers.” — his term for U.S. service members who support withdrawal from Iraq.
Republicans finance terrorists
Ex-Lawmaker Charged in Terror Conspiracy
A former congressman and delegate to the United Nations was indicted Wednesday as part of a terrorist fundraising ring that allegedly sent more than $130,000 to an al-Qaida and Taliban supporter who has threatened U.S. and international troops in Afghanistan.
The former Republican congressman from Michigan, Mark Deli Siljander, was charged with money laundering, conspiracy and obstructing justice for allegedly lying about lobbying senators on behalf of an Islamic charity that authorities said was secretly sending funds to terrorists.
The Long Goodbye 