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Big news just hit the fan for McCain. I knew this was a bogus Drudge story when it came out that she refused medical treatment for her wounds. I've been through enough these last few years and know the pain would have been incredible and anyone of us would have begged for a doctor immediately. Well, it looks like the McCain campaign has their fingers all over this phony volunteer attack story and that's big trouble for him.

John McCain's Pennsylvania communications director told reporters in the state an incendiary version of the hoax story about the attack on a McCain volunteer well before the facts of the case were known or established -- and even told reporters outright that the "B" carved into the victim's cheek stood for "Barack," according to multiple sources familiar with the discussions.

John Verrilli, the news director for KDKA in Pittsburgh, told TPM Election Central that McCain's Pennsylvania campaign communications director gave one of his reporters a detailed version of the attack that included a claim that the alleged attacker said, "You're with the McCain campaign? I'm going to teach you a lesson." Verrilli also told TPM that the McCain spokesperson had claimed that the "B" stood for Barack. According to Verrilli, the spokesperson also told KDKA that Sarah Palin had called the victim of the alleged attack, who has since admitted the story was a hoax...read on

This should hurt McCain severely. As FOX's Executive VP, John Moody said:

If the incident turns out to be a hoax, Senator McCain’s quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting.

For Pittsburgh, a city that has done so much to shape American history over the centuries, another moment of truth is at hand.

Bozell's operation ran with it and attacked the media. "Obama Supporter Maims McCain Volunteer, Will Media Care?"
Now I ask the question. Since McCain's camp was involved in trying to promote this race baiting attack story against Obama, will the media care? Let's hope so.

UPDATE: If this doesn't discredit Drudge also then what will? He was obviously fed this story by Republicans from either the RNC or McCain's campaign.

And who told Sarah Palin to call Ashley Todd?

(AP photo)
So says VIcky Iseman about McCain. This will refresh your memory.
I wonder why she came out with this now?

A female telecommunications lobbyist who became part of an explosive story early this year about John McCain has broken months of silence to deny the main subtext of the account — that she was suspected of being romantically involved with the Republican presidential candidate. "I did not have a sexual relationship with Senator McCain," Vicky Iseman told the National Journal magazine.

Marcy says:

Which is ultimately what the NYT said: that Iseman bragged about her ties to McCain, that that hurt his claim to be a maverick, that McCain did do unethical favors for her clients, and that campaign staffers intervened to try to get her away from McCain.

So the big news here, I guess, is that Vicki Iseman denies she ever asked McCain to share her blankie.

Back in 1999, John McCain acknowledged his role in the 1980's Keating Five savings and loan scandal that rightly stained his career. "The fact is," he said, "it was the wrong thing to do, and it will be on my tombstone and deservedly so." But again facing withering criticism as a second financial crisis grips the United States, his campaign today instead claimed McCain's intervention 20 years ago with federal regulators on behalf of future convicted felon Charles Keating was merely "a political smear job."

As AmericaBlog and Politico reported, the campaign deployed McCain's lawyer John Dowd to rewrite history on his client's behalf during a conference call Monday:

McCain lawyer John Dowd described McCain's "former relationship with Charles Keating as 'social friends,'" and called the situation a "classic political smear job on John."

Sadly for McCain, Dowd's yarn matches neither the facts nor McCain's self-proclaimed resurrection as a reformer in the wake of his near-death experience in the Keating Five imbroglio.

Earlier this year, the Boston Globe summarized McCain's close relationship with Keating and his decision to intervene with federal regulators on his behalf:

McCain met Keating in 1982, during McCain's successful run for Congress, and soon began accepting offers from Keating to fly McCain's family on a corporate plane to Keating's house in the Bahamas. McCain did not pay for most of the trips until years later, when the matter became public.

Keating, meanwhile, complained regularly to McCain that a proposed regulation would hurt his business. Known as the "direct investment" rule, it limited the amount that savings-and-loan institutions could invest from their assets. In 1985, after having "heard frequently from Charlie on the matter," McCain decided that Keating's complaints "were sound enough to warrant our assistance." He cosponsored a resolution sought by Keating, but it failed to postpone the regulation, McCain wrote in his autobiography.

By then, Keating was one of McCain's most important benefactors; McCain received $112,000 in campaign donations from Keating and his Lincoln associates, mostly between 1982 and 1986.

Continue reading »

Here's the 13 minute documentary on John McCain's involvement in the Keating 5. Obama is finally forcing this scandal out in the open where journalists have remained virtually mum on the topic. Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post says:

While the "Keating Five" has occasionally come up in McCain's political career, it has never been an issue that has caused him any significant agita. McCain, who was cited for poor judgment but nothing else by the Senate Ethics Committee, has pointed to his experience with the "Keating Five" as his spur to pushing for campaign finance reform and the limitation of money in campaign politics.

The "Keating Five" episode has the potential -- we repeat, potential -- to cast a pall over that McCain as maverick image. The more people see McCain as just another politician, the worse chance he has of making a comeback in the final month of the campaign.

As Billmon notes, McCain developed his phony Maverick image because of the scandal.

In a sense, the scandal marked the birth of the McCain "brand," because unlike the other four of the Five, he stood up in the Senate and more or less admitted he was guilty (not nearly as guilty as the others, he hastened to point out – but still, he felt bad about what he had done.) This went over really big with the media ("Senator admits guilt" outranking even man bites dog on the news-o-meter.

I find it appalling that the media has ignored McCain's involvement in this scandal and then helped brand him a Maverick in the process. You would think that after the economic meltdown we are experiencing the Villagers would make it public finally, right? Wrong. Cillizza is correct to say that this could hurt McCain in the final thirty days. It should, but he's wrong when he brings up the Hannity type attacks on Obama as a sort of even exchange. I wish the journalists would stick to solid facts and not idiot associations put ut by a desperate campaign. C&L and many others have been pushing this out there and finally it's getting the attention it deserves. In response to this documentary, the McCain campaign said that bringing up this scandal is a hit job:

Speaking to reporters on a conference call, John Dowd, a partner at the powerhouse lobbying/consulting firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, painted the Keating investigation as a "political smear job" led by Democrats who needed to make the issue a bipartisan embarrassment rather than own it themselves.

Ben Smith says:

I'd always thought McCain's great strength in defending the Keating affair was that he'd acknolwedged making a huge mistake, and spent his career repenting by recasting himself as a reformer.

So when his campaign puts his lawyer on the line with reporters to contest the details of a congressional inquiry that, largely, let McCain off the hook, doesn't that cloud the sin-confession-atonement dynamic a bit?

I'm sorry, the market is in the tank and we can't take the chance of turning over our economy to John McCain because we know what the result will be. With the Phill Gramm's of the world hanging on his coattails and calling us "a nation of whiners," another catastrophe is headed our way while this one sinks us to new lows.

This is the story that the media refuses to mention. With the economic meltdown that we are witnessing, shouldn't the media be reminding the American people that John McCain was involved in the Keating 5 scandal?

The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The five senators, Alan Cranston (D-CA), Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ), John Glenn (D-OH), John McCain (R-AZ), and Donald W. Riegle (D-MI), were accused of improperly aiding Charles H. Keating, Jr., chairman of the failed Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which was the target of an investigation by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB).

Well, Obama is doing just that and I think it's about time. Check out this new site called: Keating Economics. There will be a 13 minute documentary available at 9AM PST/NOON EST today.

Make sure you watch and learn. This is a real scandal with real news that had an huge impact on our whole financial system. Not some silly Sean Hannity/FOX News phony talking points nonsense.

I've posted on the new Keating 5 movie called "Third Term" here as well.

Here's more:

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on Monday will launch a multimedia campaign to draw attention to the involvement of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the “Keating Five” savings-and-loan scandal of 1989-91, which blemished McCain’s public image and set him on his course as a self-styled reformer.

The Obama campaign, including its surrogates appearing on radio and television, will argue that the deregulatory fervor that caused massive, cascading savings-and-loan collapses in the late ‘80s was pursued by McCain throughout his career, and helped cause the current credit crisis.

The GOP sure knows its base, you gotta hand it to them. A little digging by Govgap.com reveals that www.votefortheMILF.com links directly back to JohnMcCain.com, then on to Sarah Palin's page and a video message.

Govgap.com:

- URL Registered within ~36 hours of McCain's Decision to select Palin as running mate
- Redirect sends users specifically to a palin.htm file, but only on the FIRST redirect
- Whois Privacy Information Matches JohnMcCain.com Whois Privacy
- URL Held by same registrar
- Note that the .net and .org versions also redirect to the McCain Campaign Website.
Network Tools.com Trace Route:
- 64.203.107.149 (VoteForTheMILF.com)
- 64.203.107.149 (JohnMcCain.com) Read on...

Al Franken's new ad features his wife talking about her struggles with alcoholism and how he helped her get through it and kept their family going.  It's so refreshing to see a this kind of revealing and personal ad from a politician, especially in today's volatile climate. 

You can see all of Al's ads at his Franken For Senate YouTube Page and if you would like to show him some love and donate to his campaign and help him give Norm Coleman the boot, you can visit his official campaign website.

  Two of McCain/Palin's most effective (and vile) smears about Obama are are that he voted to raise taxes on those making $42,000 a year, and that he voted to "cut off funding for our troops in the field." Obama refuted McCain on the later in the first debate, but he let the second one slide. Obama can learn a lot from Biden about how to diasrm this line of attack.

First on taxes:

The charge is absolutely not true. Barack Obama did not vote to raise taxes. The vote she's referring to, John McCain voted the exact same way. It was a budget procedural vote. John McCain voted the same way. It did not raise taxes. Number two, using the standard that the governor uses, John McCain voted 477 times to raise taxes. It's a bogus standard.

Now, on funding for the troops:

With regard to Barack Obama not quote funding the troops, John McCain voted the exact same way. John McCain voted against funding the troops because of an amendment he voted against had a timeline in it to draw down American troops. And John said I'm not going to fund the troops if in fact there's a time line. [...]

John McCain voted to cut off funding for the troops. Let me say that again. John McCain voted against an amendment containing $1 billion, $600 million that I had gotten to get MRAPS, those things that are protecting the governor's son and pray god my son and a lot of other sons and daughters. He voted against it. He voted against funding because he said the amendment had a time line in it to end this war. He didn't like that.

These smears are so transparently false, it's almost surprising that they're still repeated ad nauseum. Almost because attacks and smears are all the GOP has left. The troop funding one really irks me. While it's technically true that Obama voted no on a funding bill that provided money for the troops, he didn't vote against it on that basis. Biden did a hell of a job pointing out that McCain "voted against funding for the troops" too when he voted against the bill that included a time line. But that's a fundamental difference between Democrats and Republicans. While you can twist and distort a vote to accuse your opponent of hating the military, the Democrats choose not to. I wish McCain's "honorable" campaign compelled him to adhere to the same standard.

The Obama campaign has already released an ad using footage from last night's VP debate and they've scored another direct hit.

The ad targets Sarah Palin from last night's debate as she proudly announced John McCain's disastrous health care plan that allows a $5000 tax credit for Americans to purchase health care -- and then strikes right back with Joe Biden's brilliant response, reminding people that in order to offset the credit McCain's plan would tax American's health insurance premiums for the first time in American history. The ULTIMATE bridge to nowhere.  Brilliant! (h/t Jamie)

And the resume padding hits just keep on coming:

Sarah Palin has committed yet another political blunder after claiming she had held talks with a British ambassador - talks that never actually took place.

In an answer to questions about her foreign policy experience ahead of tonight's make-or-break vice presidential TV debate, her aides listed numerous contacts with foreign officials - including Britain's ambassador to Washington, Sir Nigel Sheinwald.

However the meeting never occurred. Officials at the embassy swiftly contacted the McCain-Palin campaign to inform them of the discrepancy.

A British Embassy spokesman said the error arose after Sir Nigel's name was listed among those who had attended a US Governor's meeting in July.

So her aides used a list with the names of guests at a meeting Palin was at in an attempt to show her foreign policy experience, but that list had an error on it. Even if Sir Nigel Sheinwald showed up, what is to say that he and Palin actual met and exchanged ideas? It really sounds like her handlers are throwing out anything they can to pad her resume a little more, and that tactic has just come back to bite them.

There were no game changers in last night's Vice Presidential debate, but the American people were treated to more rambling, incoherent non-answers from Republican Sarah Palin.

Among the head scratching moments was this rant about nuclear weapons. Palin starts off on one of her "US Americans -- such as" answers about how America uses nukuler weapons safely, yadda, yadda, yadda. Here's the money line:

" Uh, nukuler weaponry, of course, would be the be-all, end-all of just too many people and too many parts of our planet so those dangerous regimes again cannot be allowed to acquire nukuler weapons, period."

Huh? Notice how once she realizes she's not making any sense and talks herself into a corner, she changes the subject. One need look no further than this clip to see that she is the most unqualified, unfit candidate to run for Vice President in modern U.S. history.  The thought of this person being anywhere near our nukes scares the living daylights out of me. How about you?

  In one of his strongest responses of the night, Joe Biden lists all the issues where McCain has proven himself to be the complete opposite of a "maverick."

Download | play   Download | play   (h/t Heather)

Transcript via CNN:

Look, the maverick -- let's talk about the maverick John McCain is.  And, again, I love him. He's been a maverick on some issues, but he has been no maverick on the things that matter to people's lives.

He voted four out of five times for George Bush's budget, which put us a half a trillion dollars in debt this year and over $3 trillion in debt since he's got there.

He has not been a maverick in providing health care for people. He has voted against -- he voted including another 3.6 million children in coverage of the existing health care plan, when he voted in the United States Senate.

He's not been a maverick when it comes to education. He has not supported tax cuts and significant changes for people being able to send their kids to college.

He's not been a maverick on the war. He's not been a maverick on virtually anything that genuinely affects the things that people really talk about around their kitchen table.

Can we send -- can we get Mom's MRI? Can we send Mary back to school next semester? We can't -- we can't make it. How are we going to heat the -- heat the house this winter?

He voted against even providing for what they call LIHEAP, for assistance to people, with oil prices going through the roof in the winter.

So maverick he is not on the important, critical issues that affect people at that kitchen table.

During the recent debate with Barack Obama, John McCain stated that "I know the veterans, I know them well, and I know that they know that I'll take care of them". Obama let it slide, but nothing could be further from the truth.

Our good friend Brandon Freidman of VetVoice has done some excellent work researching and compiling the Master List of how little McCain cares for troops and veterans. It's a must-read post that's too detailled to excerpt but it comprehensively lists all the times McCain: refused to support veterans by refusing to vote for veteran benefits, healthcare and support; refused to support the troops in combat by voting against extra armor for them; refused to  support the troops by first cheerleading for and then voting for enmiring America in Bush's war of choice in Iraq; refused to support the real front in Afghanistan by continually voting against any withdrawal from Iraq. It also lists a whole slew of McCain's foreign policy gaffes, pointing to systemic ignorance and bad judgement rather than a few accidental mis-speakings. Brandon has included sources for his list and YouTube videos to back many of the items.

Seriously, you'll want to read and cite this list often. His support for veterans and troops is a big part of McCain's pitch but in reality it's simply mythology created out of whole cloth.

And so is McCain's "judgement" on Iraq.

McCain: "We're going to win this victory. Tragically, we will lose American lives. But it will be brief.  We're going to find massive evidence of weapons of mass destruction . . . It's going to send the message throughout the Middle East that democracy can take hold in the Middle East." (Fox News, Hannity & Colmes, 2/21/03)

   WBOY:

Coal production at a mine in Monongalia County came to a halt today when every union miner stayed home, as part of a political protest.

It was an idle day Monday at the Blacksville #2 Mine.

More than 440 workers who are members of the United Mine Workers of America took what's called a Memorial Day instead of going to work.

Union officials say they took the day to protest after a film crew from the National Rifle Association showed up at the Consol mine last week to interview union workers.

They say the crew tried to get union coal miners to speak out against Barack Obama. Read on...

The NRA didn't just show up at the coal mine, this was apparently an unprecedented move by mine management, who allowed them in and supported the manipulation and exploitation of their employees. Consol just learned a big lesson - don't f*#k with your union workers.

"Consol doesn't let anybody on their property - never," said Safety Committee Member Mark Dorsey, "And for them to let the NRA come on the property and solicit our membership was totally uncalled for. We made our endorsement to our political process and we didn't bother them and they shouldn't be harassing our membership over this." 

  Bill Clinton gave a blistering endorsement of Barack Obama's leadership at a huge rally in Ft. Pierce, Florida today.

Download | play   Download | play

Clinton: We have to elect a President that will rebuild the American dream, repair a badly shattered financial system and restore America's standing in the world. Look at the mess that we have  in our financial  system. This is not accidental folks. It doesn't have to be this way. It matters who the President is, it matters what decisions he makes and it matters what the policies are. Obama's got better answers.  He knows what it will take to get this country back on track.

Obama's answers are better!

Bill Clinton explains the financial crisis and how Obama will be able to grow the economy and lead America back like no other.