Minority Leader Boehner is telling Rep. Rick Renzi, who’s just been indicted for wire fraud, extortion, money laundering and a few other things, should resign. Meanwhile, John McCain, who has Renzi as one of his Arizona campaign co-chairs, says he doesn’t “know enough of the details to make a judgment.”
We’re sort of surprised no one flagged this till now.
Turns out John McCain is such a scourge of lobbyists everywhere that his senior advisor, GOP lobbyist Charlie Black, is now conducting most of his lobbying work by phone from the Straight Talk Express.
I have to confess that this new detail has vanquished my ability to snark.
Maybe they’d prefer to go back to the affair story?
When John McCain went before the press on Wednesday to deny having an affair with lobbyist Vicki Iseman, he also made a series of categorical denials about the non-sex, influence peddling part of the story. Only many or most of those claims now appear to be demonstrably false.
McCain said and his office later released a statement claiming that McCain hadn’t met with anyone from either Paxson Communications (the broadcaster wanting the favors) or Alcalde & Fay (the lobby shop trying to get them the favors). Today, though, Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff dug up a 2002 deposition in which McCain said that he had discussed the issue directly with Lowell Paxson, the head of Paxson Communications. Now the Post has asked Paxson himself, now retired, and he says, Yep, I met with McCain and asked him to write the letters. And he thinks he remembers Iseman being in the meeting too.
It would appear that we have another case where the Bush Pentagon, particularly the Office of Public Affairs is forcefully inserting itself into the civilian election process. Earlier today I referenced Barack Obama’s anecdote from Thursday night’s Democratic debate about an Army Captain in Afghanistan who said his unit had had to get from captured Taliban ammunition they weren’t able to get quickly enough through standard Army supply channels. ABCNews’ Jake Tapper talked to the soldier in question, who confirmed the story he’d told Obama. Now NBC News also appears to have confirmed the story by talking to the Army Captain in question.
But Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman is telling reporters he doesn’t think it’s true and that of course they can’t confirm it unless the soldier — still on active duty — comes forward to discuss the issue with the Pentagon brass, a step that would surely do wonders for his future in the Army.
I don’t know how far this is going to go. Phillip Carter, the military affairs writer who’s in the reserves and did a tour in Iraq, says that from his own experience in Iraq and discussions with Afghanistan vets who report doing the same thing as the anonymous captain, he finds the story “eminently believable.” But this is becoming a pattern in which political appointees at the Bush Pentagon volubly insert themselves into domestic political debate or even election campaigns.
Expect this to be a major factor in this year’s election campaign.
Does Obama have a patriotism problem?
The AP’s Nedra Pickler asks disgraced Republican dirty-trickster Roger Stone for his opinion. Stone you’ll remember is the guy who got caught making threatening phone calls to New York Gov. Spitzer’s (D-NY) elderly father and last month set up an anti-Hillary group with the acronym C-U-N-T.
Surprisingly enough, Stone thinks the answer is yes.
SurveyUSA did an interesting experiment, running Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama against John McCain in Alabama and California. The answers? Shockingly obvious: McCain crushes both (Hillary by 20%, Barack by 24%) Democrats in Alabama, while both crush him in California. To add another layer of symmetry, Clinton does 4 points better in losing in Alabama. And Obama does 4 points better in winning California.
Overtime, and pretty quickly now, it’ll make sense to keep a list of stuff like this. On Friday night’s Bill Maher show, Rep. Jack Kingston (R-GA) claimed that Barack Obama refuses to say the pledge of allegiance to the American flag. This along with other bogus claims about Obama come from the hoax emails circulating on the internet.
If you see any local or national media outlets asking Kingston about this or if you get a word out of him, please let us know.
Of course, last night, the Associated Press signed on to the Obama hoax email train.