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Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
How tough is John McCain? well back in 99 NRA
How tough is John McCain?
The GOP contender stands up to Milosevic, but will he defy the NRA?
First, a confession: Sen. John McCain almost seduced me (professionally). I was thisclose to becoming one of those reporters who swoon whenever the Republican senator from Arizona flashes his winning smile and demonstrates his passion and boyish enthusiasm. Just another journalist infatuated with the prisoner of war turned politician.
And then he showed me that he was a mere mortal.
In Tuesday, in response to a question about what he would do if he were president in the aftermath of the Columbine High School shootings, McCain told me, "It's obvious that at a gun show people should be subject to background checks. I don't get it why in stores you get a background check, but you go three blocks down, there's no background checks."
There's a loophole in the existing gun control laws, I noted, because the gun lobby argued successfully to exempt gun shows.
"Well, it should be closed," McCain responded.
But a day later, on Wednesday, McCain voted to kill an amendment from Sen. Frank Lautenberg that would have closed that very loophole. The largely party-line vote was 51-47. Six Republicans voted for the measure. McCain was not among them. This after reports that the four guns used in the Columbine killings had been purchased at gun shows. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., complained, "It's like the NRA lives in here."
And then, a day after that, McCain changed his mind again, and signaled he'd support legislation to close the loophole; in fact, he might even draft it. Stay tuned, because the battle won't be over until the last vote is counted.
McCain's 48-hour flip-flop ain't no big thing for most politicians. But it must be said that McCain is supposed to be more than just a politician. John Sidney McCain III has been wooing congregants into the church of his courage and charisma from the moment he burst onto the American landscape as an unfathomably brave returning POW in 1973.
He first ran for Congress in 1982, and won a Senate seat just four years later, all the while garnering supporters and detractors with outspoken, often counterintuitive views on high-profile subjects. He's gone after government waste, fought to reform campaign finance laws, pursued big tobacco and lately, as his friend, Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., says, he's been "the only one who was acting presidential in the middle of Kosovo."
Add it all up, throw in a presidential candidacy and you have grown men falling at his feet as if he were Gwyneth Paltrow in a sundress.
"He wants to clean up campaign financing, and restore honor to the heart of politics," the normally acerbic Michael Lewis gushed for the New York Times Magazine. "A Maverick Takes on the Senate and Looks to 2000," headlined the regularly just-the-facts-ma'am National Journal. "John McCain Walks on Water," intoned Esquire. (Really.) This from the so-called liberal media, despite the fact that, on all but a handful of issues, McCain is politically about as conservative as they come -- pro-life, pro-impeachment, pro-gun, pro-GOP.
It's difficult to write about McCain without dealing with the gushing from the fourth estate. Media is as important to John McCain as is he to us. He loves the limelight, for one, but more importantly, it's an important element of his battle plan as he tries to emerge as a serious contender for the GOP nomination. As he explains it to me, his easy access to media will help him make up for the bigger bankroll of the front-runner, Texas Gov. George W. Bush. And then, once it becomes a two-man race, his credibility, experience and straight talk will do the rest. Especially if Bush stumbles, as many Republicans think he can't help but do.
But beyond his need for media, or journalists' need to see him as a hero -- or, conversely, a sham to demythologize -- McCain is a compelling figure. In the end, he's a flawed, complex man -- as he'll be the first one to tell you -- and that makes him almost irresistible, at least to reporters.
"I'm a very imperfect person," McCain says in an interview with Salon News. "I don't live up to my own expectations in my life in many ways," he adds. "There's an impatience that sometimes is harmful to me in my relationships. Sometimes I move from one issue to another too quickly. Sometimes I'm not as considerate of my staff and my family as I should be. I could catalog many failings that I have as a human being. But I do try to recognize them and I try to improve. But I will not always be as good a person as some of the people I've had the opportunity to have met."
This combination of humility and candor has served him well with a press corps fed on a steady diet of braggadocio and evasion. "There's something about John McCain that comes through that's hard to measure," says one of his campaign co-chairmen, former New Hampshire Sen. Warren Rudman. "There's a quality to him that's interesting. It's an earnestness. A directness. An intensity. I can't really explain what it is, but people like him. And I think that will carry him to victory if nothing else."
But McCain's a Rorshach test; you see in him what you want to see. To his Republican opponents in the House and Senate, he's a hot-headed, grandstanding opportunist, while his Democratic foes see him as an ultra right-wing wolf hiding beneath the pelt of a charismatic sheep. To his first wife, he was a philanderer; to veterans he is the exemplar of the American fighting man.
"The media has had a difficult time conveying the essence of the whole man," says Jeff Barker, Washington correspondent for the Arizona Republic. "The Arizona media focuses on how scrappy he is, and the national media focuses on how he seems to be above the fray. But I think it's a combination of genuine courage and good political instincts -- and it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins."
But it's the members of his staff -- some of whom have worked for him for almost a generation -- who have it about right. They roll their eyes at his quirks, nudging each other knowingly, complaining about him like you might do about a parent. All the while they put in 14-hour days because at the bottom of it all they love not issues or a cause or an image, not any false concept of St. John McCain the Divine, but the man, just the man.
"I don't think he thinks of himself as a saint," says Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wisc., his partner on campaign finance reform. "I don't think he likes that kind of label. He's just out there trying to do the right thing."
First of all, for a saint he's got a flaming temper and, occasionally, a foul mouth.
One senator, a friend, tells the story of an acrimonious meeting toward the end of 1992, when the 12 members of the Senate Special Committee on POW/MIA Affairs were finishing up their report. It featured a hot debate over how to deal with former U.S. Marine Bobby Garwood, a former POW who'd been an accused defector.
The question was whether Garwood should be included in the report along with all the other POWs and MIAs, or if he had diminished his status and therefore only merited inclusion in the report's attachments. Half the room thought he was a traitor, a deserter who knew about POWs held after the war but didn't do anything about it, and McCain fell into that camp. The other half -- which included Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa -- thought that Garwood had been unfairly blamed.
"Bobby Garwood is a traitor, and I and a whole bunch of other POWs got beat because of him," the hot-headed McCain argued, according to a senator present during the debate.
Then Grassley started screaming. "Chuck has a temper, too," the senator relates. "So McCain started shouting back."
Grassley got in McCain's face, and the two pit bulls started barking at each other while the other senators in the room sat back and watched. The pair got so close to one another that the senator who tells me the story -- aware that because of war injuries, McCain's arms don't fully extend -- was convinced McCain "was going to drive the top of his head into Grassley's nose. I was convinced that bone fragments were going to go into Chuck's brain, and I was sitting there and was about to witness a murder."
McCain suddenly stood up. But instead of a head-butting homicide, he delivered a crushing blow of words.
"You know, senator," McCain said, seething, "I thought your problem was that you don't listen. But that's not it at all. Your problem is that you're a fucking jerk."
"He is a combatant," allows Sen. Smith of Oregon, who has yet to endorse any GOP presidential hopeful. "But I think people appreciate that he's a man of principle; he fights for what he believes in. John is not lukewarm. He makes friends and enemies with his mode of operations. His style is both a strength and a weakness."
He has a temper, and he can hold a grudge. "No question," Rudman says, "John isn't too popular up in the Senate. But all that means come the New Hampshire primary is that he may lose two votes."
McCain is fully capable of freezing out someone who has disappointed him. After the Arizona Republic, for instance, published a harsh editorial cartoon making light of a scandal involving painkillers his wife stole from a charity she founded, McCain refused to talk to the newspaper for more than a year. He regularly yells at or ignores fellow senators when he thinks they've done him wrong. One Arizona reporter reports that numerous subjects he's contacted have refused to speak about McCain with him since they're terrified of the repercussions.
The storm usually subsides almost immediately. The day after the one fight he and Feingold ever had in their four years of partnership on various government reform issues, McCain apologized, Feingold says. "He said, 'I didn't sleep all night, thinking about our fight.'"
It's a common refrain. And, to hear his allies tell it, they wouldn't want it any other way. "He's unafraid of getting into the ring and getting into battle," says Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb. "That's a characteristic I admire in anybody. And no matter how much he gets bloodied, he'll stay till the very end. You may lose the battle, but you'll have fun doing it."
McCain loses his high-profile battles quite often. His bills on tobacco and campaign finance reform keeled over by the side of the road, coughing up blood. Critics say his support for these issues is political opportunism, but that makes little sense. "I think anyone who would say that campaign finance reform is a way for John McCain to ride to the White House has a unique perspective on the popularity of the issue in Washington and in the Republican Party," says Meredith McGehee, vice president and legislative director for Common Cause. "It's been a very tough issue for him."
Indeed, GOP strategists wrinkle their noses at the mere mention of McCain, arguing he's not a team player, he's an in-your-face screamer, he's got demons. He and Senate leader Trent Lott enjoy a tumultuous relationship, one symbolic of the love/hate he has with both the Senate and the GOP -- they're enemies, then they're best buds. The trends last not days or weeks, but hours.
The idea that McCain embraces issues that put him at odds with his leader for his own political ends flies in the face of logic. Campaign finance reform is not a big vote-getter. Though it may enable McCain to wear an attractive chapeau that says "maverick," the issue is too complex to truly resonate with voters, and it wins him far more enemies among his Senate colleagues and the big-money PAC culture then it garners him brownie points. Same with tobacco.
And same with Kosovo. By pressing President Clinton to do whatever is necessary to win the NATO mission -- an order that he says includes ground troops -- McCain is hardly embracing a stance popular with either the public or his colleagues. The Senate voted on May 4 to table his resolution authorizing the president whatever he needed to win the war. "We have allowed American pilots ... to risk their lives for a cause that we will not risk our careers for," McCain said on May 3 in a speech that hardly endeared him to his colleagues.
But he admits there's no McCain doctrine that will determine when future intervention is required. "We always search for this magic formula," he says. "I'd love to have a McCain doctrine. But this is such a complex world we live in, with such varying situations, with varying threats, that I'm not sure you could ever develop an overall doctrine into one size fits all."
For the U.S. to use force, he says, "Our interests and our values have to be threatened. But the corollary to that is that you have to be able to beneficially be able to affect the situation." That's why, he says, he opposed sending the Marines into Lebanon in 1983 as a freshman congressman, and why he wouldn't have sent troops to Rwanda or the Sudan.
According to his supporters, McCain's courage on Kosovo will resonate with a public starving for leadership. "It tells people, here's a guy who doesn't need consultants to tell him what he believes in," says Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., another McCain 2000 co-chairman. "Contrast that with who's been leading this country for the last seven years."
"He's surged in New Hampshire," brags Rudman. "He went from 3 percent to 15 percent in just a month."
As Smith puts it, "He's won the Kosovo primary."
McCain has been brash ever since he was a kid. From high school through the Naval Academy, McCain was in an extended rebel-without-a-clue phase, always more interested in the three B's -- booze, brawls and broads -- than the three R's. (He graduated fifth from the bottom of the Naval Academy class of '58.)
Born into Navy royalty -- both his father and grandfather achieved the rank of admiral -- McCain was just another risk-taking fly boy until he was captured by the North Vietnamese. Shot down over Hanoi on Oct. 26, 1967, as John Hubbell wrote in "P.O.W.," "No American reached [the prison camp] Hoa Lo in worse physical condition than McCain."
He suffered unimaginable torture, particularly once the North Vietnamese realized that he was the son of the commander of the Pacific Fleet. Recognizing the propaganda value of letting McCain free, so as to demoralize less-connected soldiers and POWs, his Vietnamese captors offered McCain an immediate ticket home.
"I wouldn't even consider any kind of release," McCain said, according to the moving account of his POW experience in Robert Timberg's "The Nightingale's Song." "They'll have to drag me out of here." Leaving would be dishonorable, he thought. It would be detrimental to morale, and would violate the "first in, first out" rule of prisoner release.
They beat him senseless, over and over, until he signed a piece of paper confessing his "war crimes" -- a perfectly understandable, even relatively innocuous, action that he still has yet to forgive himself for. "The cockiness was gone," Timberg wrote, "replaced by a suffocating despair." The despair, the beatings and the brutality lasted five and a half years.
He returned to a hero's welcome, as well as months of grueling physical therapy and a collapsing marriage. He remains humble about it all, which is one of the reasons why reporters fall in love with him so quickly, as well as why he may make a compelling candidate.
"What I would like to tell you is that it turned me into a perfect individual motivated only by the most noble of principles and ambitions," McCain says of his experience. "But ... the fact is, that's not true. I was privileged to serve in the company of heroes; I failed in prison as well ... But I continue to strive to do the right thing, although I fail very frequently."
One failure -- though it wasn't the big deal opponents made it seem -- was his role as one of the fabled Keating Five -- the five senators accused of muscling regulators on behalf of savings and loan shyster Charles Keating. McCain was eventually cleared of all but poor judgment, but he refuses to cut himself any slack. By all rights, McCain could be bitter: The Democrat-controlled Senate Ethics Committee, which normally strives to be nonpartisan, refused the advice of its counsel and insisted on lumping him and then-Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio, in with the far-more-sullied Keating Three, all Democrats, because they wanted at least one Republican to share the heat.
But McCain only criticized himself about the matter. "I can't tell you the hoops we have to go through in this office before a letter goes out with my name on it. The stuff we go through because ... appearance is reality and ... you can get into trouble."
Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., who's endorsed McCain's presidential run, says that stance shows McCain's political growth. "When he first came to Congress [in 1983], he was still trying to make up for his six lost years in the POW prison camp," Kolbe says. "He didn't tolerate delays, he didn't tolerate views that didn't seem to match his. He has changed." While Kolbe says that McCain's one major flaw remains his fickle short fuse, he allow that "he really has learned to reign that in."
And Kolbe has personal experience with McCain's willingness to take stands that won't endear him to the average GOP primary voter. "He was very supportive of me when I was 'outed' by the Advocate," Kolbe says. Kolbe went to McCain's office to tell him what was about to happen, but before the congressman could get a word out, McCain put up his hands in protest.
"You don't have to say anything more," McCain said. "It doesn't make a goddamn bit of difference to me if you're gay. You're a good congressman and a good friend." When Tempe, Ariz., Mayor Neil Giuliano went through a similar ordeal, McCain was just as supportive.
"One of the reasons I have this confidence about not changing is because I'm not afraid of losing," McCain says. "In 10 months, this nominating process will be over. And if I lose, I have to live in Arizona, have four wonderful kids, be in the Senate and be chairman of the Commerce Committee. I'm not afraid of losing."
In fact, he doesn't seem afraid of anything. Sometimes this is disastrous -- witness his awful joke about Chelsea Clinton. Other times he can make you want to give him a big sloppy kiss -- as CBS's Mike Wallace recently did when he said he would campaign for him if he got the nomination.
Which is why, when he looked at me matter-of-factly and told me that it was just common sense that the NRA-backed loophole exempting gun show firearms buyers from background checks was wrong, and should be closed, I believed him. It made sense. Though he's a longtime friend of the NRA, I knew he'd bucked big-time money lobbies of all shapes and sizes, and I believed he'd buck this one.
And then he caved. I felt disappointed, and exasperated, but having spent a month studying and reading up on the man, I didn't write him off. On Thursday morning, McCain awoke and, bolstered by a number of other GOP senators who were alarmed at what had happened the day before, or else by how it was playing in the media (or a potent combination of both), McCain brokered a compromise. McCain thought Lautenberg's bill had been too extreme -- mandating a three-day waiting period, even though some gun shows don't last that long. But the GOP alternative, calling for "voluntary" checks (read none), sat on the other extreme.
McCain was looking for something in the middle, instant -- but mandatory -- background checks. "I'm doing what it takes to close this loophole," McCain told his staff. The NRA is said to be "grudgingly" supporting the new moves, but ultimately the battle could get nasty. McCain doesn't seem to care: "This is not an overly burdensome requirement in the face of the tragic shootings at Columbine High School," he said in a statement issued Thursday evening. "Rather, it is a responsible means of lessening the likelihood of unlawful gun purchases."
So in the end, he's not the superhero his supporters depict, nor is he the opportunistic bully described by detractors. In the end, he's just a man, as he told me -- many times -- himself. And he's betting that if voters get to know him, they'll appreciate him in all his complexity.
"I don't think the Republicans are smart enough to nominate him," says Feingold.
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By Jake Tapper salon.com | May 14, 1999 see more at ...
www.mccainalert.com
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/05/14/mccain/index.html
The GOP contender stands up to Milosevic, but will he defy the NRA?
First, a confession: Sen. John McCain almost seduced me (professionally). I was thisclose to becoming one of those reporters who swoon whenever the Republican senator from Arizona flashes his winning smile and demonstrates his passion and boyish enthusiasm. Just another journalist infatuated with the prisoner of war turned politician.
And then he showed me that he was a mere mortal.
In Tuesday, in response to a question about what he would do if he were president in the aftermath of the Columbine High School shootings, McCain told me, "It's obvious that at a gun show people should be subject to background checks. I don't get it why in stores you get a background check, but you go three blocks down, there's no background checks."
There's a loophole in the existing gun control laws, I noted, because the gun lobby argued successfully to exempt gun shows.
"Well, it should be closed," McCain responded.
But a day later, on Wednesday, McCain voted to kill an amendment from Sen. Frank Lautenberg that would have closed that very loophole. The largely party-line vote was 51-47. Six Republicans voted for the measure. McCain was not among them. This after reports that the four guns used in the Columbine killings had been purchased at gun shows. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., complained, "It's like the NRA lives in here."
And then, a day after that, McCain changed his mind again, and signaled he'd support legislation to close the loophole; in fact, he might even draft it. Stay tuned, because the battle won't be over until the last vote is counted.
McCain's 48-hour flip-flop ain't no big thing for most politicians. But it must be said that McCain is supposed to be more than just a politician. John Sidney McCain III has been wooing congregants into the church of his courage and charisma from the moment he burst onto the American landscape as an unfathomably brave returning POW in 1973.
He first ran for Congress in 1982, and won a Senate seat just four years later, all the while garnering supporters and detractors with outspoken, often counterintuitive views on high-profile subjects. He's gone after government waste, fought to reform campaign finance laws, pursued big tobacco and lately, as his friend, Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., says, he's been "the only one who was acting presidential in the middle of Kosovo."
Add it all up, throw in a presidential candidacy and you have grown men falling at his feet as if he were Gwyneth Paltrow in a sundress.
"He wants to clean up campaign financing, and restore honor to the heart of politics," the normally acerbic Michael Lewis gushed for the New York Times Magazine. "A Maverick Takes on the Senate and Looks to 2000," headlined the regularly just-the-facts-ma'am National Journal. "John McCain Walks on Water," intoned Esquire. (Really.) This from the so-called liberal media, despite the fact that, on all but a handful of issues, McCain is politically about as conservative as they come -- pro-life, pro-impeachment, pro-gun, pro-GOP.
It's difficult to write about McCain without dealing with the gushing from the fourth estate. Media is as important to John McCain as is he to us. He loves the limelight, for one, but more importantly, it's an important element of his battle plan as he tries to emerge as a serious contender for the GOP nomination. As he explains it to me, his easy access to media will help him make up for the bigger bankroll of the front-runner, Texas Gov. George W. Bush. And then, once it becomes a two-man race, his credibility, experience and straight talk will do the rest. Especially if Bush stumbles, as many Republicans think he can't help but do.
But beyond his need for media, or journalists' need to see him as a hero -- or, conversely, a sham to demythologize -- McCain is a compelling figure. In the end, he's a flawed, complex man -- as he'll be the first one to tell you -- and that makes him almost irresistible, at least to reporters.
"I'm a very imperfect person," McCain says in an interview with Salon News. "I don't live up to my own expectations in my life in many ways," he adds. "There's an impatience that sometimes is harmful to me in my relationships. Sometimes I move from one issue to another too quickly. Sometimes I'm not as considerate of my staff and my family as I should be. I could catalog many failings that I have as a human being. But I do try to recognize them and I try to improve. But I will not always be as good a person as some of the people I've had the opportunity to have met."
This combination of humility and candor has served him well with a press corps fed on a steady diet of braggadocio and evasion. "There's something about John McCain that comes through that's hard to measure," says one of his campaign co-chairmen, former New Hampshire Sen. Warren Rudman. "There's a quality to him that's interesting. It's an earnestness. A directness. An intensity. I can't really explain what it is, but people like him. And I think that will carry him to victory if nothing else."
But McCain's a Rorshach test; you see in him what you want to see. To his Republican opponents in the House and Senate, he's a hot-headed, grandstanding opportunist, while his Democratic foes see him as an ultra right-wing wolf hiding beneath the pelt of a charismatic sheep. To his first wife, he was a philanderer; to veterans he is the exemplar of the American fighting man.
"The media has had a difficult time conveying the essence of the whole man," says Jeff Barker, Washington correspondent for the Arizona Republic. "The Arizona media focuses on how scrappy he is, and the national media focuses on how he seems to be above the fray. But I think it's a combination of genuine courage and good political instincts -- and it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins."
But it's the members of his staff -- some of whom have worked for him for almost a generation -- who have it about right. They roll their eyes at his quirks, nudging each other knowingly, complaining about him like you might do about a parent. All the while they put in 14-hour days because at the bottom of it all they love not issues or a cause or an image, not any false concept of St. John McCain the Divine, but the man, just the man.
"I don't think he thinks of himself as a saint," says Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wisc., his partner on campaign finance reform. "I don't think he likes that kind of label. He's just out there trying to do the right thing."
First of all, for a saint he's got a flaming temper and, occasionally, a foul mouth.
One senator, a friend, tells the story of an acrimonious meeting toward the end of 1992, when the 12 members of the Senate Special Committee on POW/MIA Affairs were finishing up their report. It featured a hot debate over how to deal with former U.S. Marine Bobby Garwood, a former POW who'd been an accused defector.
The question was whether Garwood should be included in the report along with all the other POWs and MIAs, or if he had diminished his status and therefore only merited inclusion in the report's attachments. Half the room thought he was a traitor, a deserter who knew about POWs held after the war but didn't do anything about it, and McCain fell into that camp. The other half -- which included Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa -- thought that Garwood had been unfairly blamed.
"Bobby Garwood is a traitor, and I and a whole bunch of other POWs got beat because of him," the hot-headed McCain argued, according to a senator present during the debate.
Then Grassley started screaming. "Chuck has a temper, too," the senator relates. "So McCain started shouting back."
Grassley got in McCain's face, and the two pit bulls started barking at each other while the other senators in the room sat back and watched. The pair got so close to one another that the senator who tells me the story -- aware that because of war injuries, McCain's arms don't fully extend -- was convinced McCain "was going to drive the top of his head into Grassley's nose. I was convinced that bone fragments were going to go into Chuck's brain, and I was sitting there and was about to witness a murder."
McCain suddenly stood up. But instead of a head-butting homicide, he delivered a crushing blow of words.
"You know, senator," McCain said, seething, "I thought your problem was that you don't listen. But that's not it at all. Your problem is that you're a fucking jerk."
"He is a combatant," allows Sen. Smith of Oregon, who has yet to endorse any GOP presidential hopeful. "But I think people appreciate that he's a man of principle; he fights for what he believes in. John is not lukewarm. He makes friends and enemies with his mode of operations. His style is both a strength and a weakness."
He has a temper, and he can hold a grudge. "No question," Rudman says, "John isn't too popular up in the Senate. But all that means come the New Hampshire primary is that he may lose two votes."
McCain is fully capable of freezing out someone who has disappointed him. After the Arizona Republic, for instance, published a harsh editorial cartoon making light of a scandal involving painkillers his wife stole from a charity she founded, McCain refused to talk to the newspaper for more than a year. He regularly yells at or ignores fellow senators when he thinks they've done him wrong. One Arizona reporter reports that numerous subjects he's contacted have refused to speak about McCain with him since they're terrified of the repercussions.
The storm usually subsides almost immediately. The day after the one fight he and Feingold ever had in their four years of partnership on various government reform issues, McCain apologized, Feingold says. "He said, 'I didn't sleep all night, thinking about our fight.'"
It's a common refrain. And, to hear his allies tell it, they wouldn't want it any other way. "He's unafraid of getting into the ring and getting into battle," says Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb. "That's a characteristic I admire in anybody. And no matter how much he gets bloodied, he'll stay till the very end. You may lose the battle, but you'll have fun doing it."
McCain loses his high-profile battles quite often. His bills on tobacco and campaign finance reform keeled over by the side of the road, coughing up blood. Critics say his support for these issues is political opportunism, but that makes little sense. "I think anyone who would say that campaign finance reform is a way for John McCain to ride to the White House has a unique perspective on the popularity of the issue in Washington and in the Republican Party," says Meredith McGehee, vice president and legislative director for Common Cause. "It's been a very tough issue for him."
Indeed, GOP strategists wrinkle their noses at the mere mention of McCain, arguing he's not a team player, he's an in-your-face screamer, he's got demons. He and Senate leader Trent Lott enjoy a tumultuous relationship, one symbolic of the love/hate he has with both the Senate and the GOP -- they're enemies, then they're best buds. The trends last not days or weeks, but hours.
The idea that McCain embraces issues that put him at odds with his leader for his own political ends flies in the face of logic. Campaign finance reform is not a big vote-getter. Though it may enable McCain to wear an attractive chapeau that says "maverick," the issue is too complex to truly resonate with voters, and it wins him far more enemies among his Senate colleagues and the big-money PAC culture then it garners him brownie points. Same with tobacco.
And same with Kosovo. By pressing President Clinton to do whatever is necessary to win the NATO mission -- an order that he says includes ground troops -- McCain is hardly embracing a stance popular with either the public or his colleagues. The Senate voted on May 4 to table his resolution authorizing the president whatever he needed to win the war. "We have allowed American pilots ... to risk their lives for a cause that we will not risk our careers for," McCain said on May 3 in a speech that hardly endeared him to his colleagues.
But he admits there's no McCain doctrine that will determine when future intervention is required. "We always search for this magic formula," he says. "I'd love to have a McCain doctrine. But this is such a complex world we live in, with such varying situations, with varying threats, that I'm not sure you could ever develop an overall doctrine into one size fits all."
For the U.S. to use force, he says, "Our interests and our values have to be threatened. But the corollary to that is that you have to be able to beneficially be able to affect the situation." That's why, he says, he opposed sending the Marines into Lebanon in 1983 as a freshman congressman, and why he wouldn't have sent troops to Rwanda or the Sudan.
According to his supporters, McCain's courage on Kosovo will resonate with a public starving for leadership. "It tells people, here's a guy who doesn't need consultants to tell him what he believes in," says Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., another McCain 2000 co-chairman. "Contrast that with who's been leading this country for the last seven years."
"He's surged in New Hampshire," brags Rudman. "He went from 3 percent to 15 percent in just a month."
As Smith puts it, "He's won the Kosovo primary."
McCain has been brash ever since he was a kid. From high school through the Naval Academy, McCain was in an extended rebel-without-a-clue phase, always more interested in the three B's -- booze, brawls and broads -- than the three R's. (He graduated fifth from the bottom of the Naval Academy class of '58.)
Born into Navy royalty -- both his father and grandfather achieved the rank of admiral -- McCain was just another risk-taking fly boy until he was captured by the North Vietnamese. Shot down over Hanoi on Oct. 26, 1967, as John Hubbell wrote in "P.O.W.," "No American reached [the prison camp] Hoa Lo in worse physical condition than McCain."
He suffered unimaginable torture, particularly once the North Vietnamese realized that he was the son of the commander of the Pacific Fleet. Recognizing the propaganda value of letting McCain free, so as to demoralize less-connected soldiers and POWs, his Vietnamese captors offered McCain an immediate ticket home.
"I wouldn't even consider any kind of release," McCain said, according to the moving account of his POW experience in Robert Timberg's "The Nightingale's Song." "They'll have to drag me out of here." Leaving would be dishonorable, he thought. It would be detrimental to morale, and would violate the "first in, first out" rule of prisoner release.
They beat him senseless, over and over, until he signed a piece of paper confessing his "war crimes" -- a perfectly understandable, even relatively innocuous, action that he still has yet to forgive himself for. "The cockiness was gone," Timberg wrote, "replaced by a suffocating despair." The despair, the beatings and the brutality lasted five and a half years.
He returned to a hero's welcome, as well as months of grueling physical therapy and a collapsing marriage. He remains humble about it all, which is one of the reasons why reporters fall in love with him so quickly, as well as why he may make a compelling candidate.
"What I would like to tell you is that it turned me into a perfect individual motivated only by the most noble of principles and ambitions," McCain says of his experience. "But ... the fact is, that's not true. I was privileged to serve in the company of heroes; I failed in prison as well ... But I continue to strive to do the right thing, although I fail very frequently."
One failure -- though it wasn't the big deal opponents made it seem -- was his role as one of the fabled Keating Five -- the five senators accused of muscling regulators on behalf of savings and loan shyster Charles Keating. McCain was eventually cleared of all but poor judgment, but he refuses to cut himself any slack. By all rights, McCain could be bitter: The Democrat-controlled Senate Ethics Committee, which normally strives to be nonpartisan, refused the advice of its counsel and insisted on lumping him and then-Sen. John Glenn, D-Ohio, in with the far-more-sullied Keating Three, all Democrats, because they wanted at least one Republican to share the heat.
But McCain only criticized himself about the matter. "I can't tell you the hoops we have to go through in this office before a letter goes out with my name on it. The stuff we go through because ... appearance is reality and ... you can get into trouble."
Rep. Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., who's endorsed McCain's presidential run, says that stance shows McCain's political growth. "When he first came to Congress [in 1983], he was still trying to make up for his six lost years in the POW prison camp," Kolbe says. "He didn't tolerate delays, he didn't tolerate views that didn't seem to match his. He has changed." While Kolbe says that McCain's one major flaw remains his fickle short fuse, he allow that "he really has learned to reign that in."
And Kolbe has personal experience with McCain's willingness to take stands that won't endear him to the average GOP primary voter. "He was very supportive of me when I was 'outed' by the Advocate," Kolbe says. Kolbe went to McCain's office to tell him what was about to happen, but before the congressman could get a word out, McCain put up his hands in protest.
"You don't have to say anything more," McCain said. "It doesn't make a goddamn bit of difference to me if you're gay. You're a good congressman and a good friend." When Tempe, Ariz., Mayor Neil Giuliano went through a similar ordeal, McCain was just as supportive.
"One of the reasons I have this confidence about not changing is because I'm not afraid of losing," McCain says. "In 10 months, this nominating process will be over. And if I lose, I have to live in Arizona, have four wonderful kids, be in the Senate and be chairman of the Commerce Committee. I'm not afraid of losing."
In fact, he doesn't seem afraid of anything. Sometimes this is disastrous -- witness his awful joke about Chelsea Clinton. Other times he can make you want to give him a big sloppy kiss -- as CBS's Mike Wallace recently did when he said he would campaign for him if he got the nomination.
Which is why, when he looked at me matter-of-factly and told me that it was just common sense that the NRA-backed loophole exempting gun show firearms buyers from background checks was wrong, and should be closed, I believed him. It made sense. Though he's a longtime friend of the NRA, I knew he'd bucked big-time money lobbies of all shapes and sizes, and I believed he'd buck this one.
And then he caved. I felt disappointed, and exasperated, but having spent a month studying and reading up on the man, I didn't write him off. On Thursday morning, McCain awoke and, bolstered by a number of other GOP senators who were alarmed at what had happened the day before, or else by how it was playing in the media (or a potent combination of both), McCain brokered a compromise. McCain thought Lautenberg's bill had been too extreme -- mandating a three-day waiting period, even though some gun shows don't last that long. But the GOP alternative, calling for "voluntary" checks (read none), sat on the other extreme.
McCain was looking for something in the middle, instant -- but mandatory -- background checks. "I'm doing what it takes to close this loophole," McCain told his staff. The NRA is said to be "grudgingly" supporting the new moves, but ultimately the battle could get nasty. McCain doesn't seem to care: "This is not an overly burdensome requirement in the face of the tragic shootings at Columbine High School," he said in a statement issued Thursday evening. "Rather, it is a responsible means of lessening the likelihood of unlawful gun purchases."
So in the end, he's not the superhero his supporters depict, nor is he the opportunistic bully described by detractors. In the end, he's just a man, as he told me -- many times -- himself. And he's betting that if voters get to know him, they'll appreciate him in all his complexity.
"I don't think the Republicans are smart enough to nominate him," says Feingold.
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By Jake Tapper salon.com | May 14, 1999 see more at ...
www.mccainalert.com
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/1999/05/14/mccain/index.html
Monday, January 28, 2008
BILL CLINTON'S TEMPER NEGATIVELY AFFECTS HILLARY'S
BILL CLINTON'S TEMPER NEGATIVELY AFFECTS HILLARY'S CAMPAIGN
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on FoxNews.com on January 25, 2008.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen it all before.
That picture of the seething, red-faced former president of the United States shaking his finger at members of the press who dare to question his wife’s slimy campaign tactics, is all too familiar to those who have worked closely with him in the past.
Like Janus, the two-faced Roman god, there are always been two distinct personalities in Bill Clinton. That charming, smiling gentleman seen in public is too often eclipsed in private by his negative twin evidenced in the eruption of a furious, unexpected, and uncontrollable rage, often accompanied by loud cursing and occasionally, even physical violence. It’s not a pretty picture.
I’ve been at the other end of that anger too many times and I was always amazed at the suddenness and intensity of his fury.
Early one Sunday morning, he woke me up at my Connecticut home screaming into the phone, “have you seen the Washington Post?” Blearily, I said no that I wasn’t in Washington (it was in the pre-Internet days). Apparently, the paper’s lead article had our poll and focus group questions about his character and image.
“Who did you tell?” “Who did you tell?” he shrieked. I assured him that I never spoke to the press.
“Well, who DID you speak to?” he screeched.
“I only spoke to George [Stephanopopous] and Rahm [Emmanuel],” (his two closest aides).
That set him off even more. He yelled even louder: “You ONLY told George and Rahm! You ONLY told George and Rahm! Why didn’t you just send out a f-ing press release. Don’t you understand that you can’t tell those two anything that you don’t want to see on the front page of the Washington Post? They leak everything!
He kept screaming about how he couldn’t keep anything confidential because everyone who worked for him leaked. Then he slammed the phone down.
I was shaken.
The phone conversation recalled an even more difficult encounter with his temper.
Many years earlier, in 1990, he seriously overstepped his boundaries with me during one of his blind rages and permanently changed our relationship.
It was during his last gubernatorial race and he was falling behind in the polls. When we met at the governor’s mansion, it was close to midnight. Hillary and Gloria Cabe, his campaign manager at the time, were at the meeting with Bill and me. I had left Connecticut after oral surgery that morning to arrive in time for a 6 p.m. meeting. My mouth was killing me, but I avoided taking any pain killers to be alert for the strategy session. The meeting was changed several times because Bill had decided to do the Nightline Show. He finally arrived back to the mansion in a foul mood. Even though he was a teetotaler, I wondered if he had been drinking.
When he learned of his decline in the polls, he immediately blamed me, accusing me of spending too much time with other clients. Yelling and screaming, he escalated his charges, refusing to listen to me tell him that his latest ad had not been on television yet when the poll was completed. He kept ranting.
Finally, I had enough. I stood up and said I was leaving, quitting the campaign. I grabbed my coat and headed out of the mansion. As I crossed the foyer, I suddenly fell to the ground, tackled by Bill Clinton. I saw his large fist coming at me. Hillary was trying to get between us, yelling “Bill, Bill, stop it. Think about what you are doing. Bill, stop it!”
Bill got up and I walked out the door. Hillary ran after me. She tried to calm me and asked me to walk around the grounds of the Mansion with her. “He only does this to people he loves,” she told me. (I’ll leave that one for the psychologists.)
When the story appeared in the media in 1992 , probably leaked by a fellow political consultant I had confided in that night, I called Hillary to warn her that the press was on to the fight. Her advice: Deny that it ever happened. I never did that, but I refused to comment.
Years later, when I was writing my book, Behind the Oval Office, I sent the galleys to Bill. He marked up a few areas where he had questions or comments. Then he called me and said “I never did actually hit you.” He asked me to change the text and tone down the story.
At the request of the president of the United States, I did.
After that Sunday morning phone conversation about the Washington Post story, I wrote the president a letter telling him how upsetting I found his tantrums and saying that I couldn’t work with him any longer if that’s the way it was going to be. He seemed shocked that his volcanic outbursts caused personal pain. But he knew that I was serious and wrote me a nice note apologizing and the outbursts ceased.
Until, during the 1996 Republican convention, I called him in Wyoming, where he was on vacation. That was never his happiest time, and apparently, he was upset because his favorite golf driver, given him by the King of Morocco, had broken. (He once told me it took seven strokes off his game). He started screaming at me that he was on vacation and did not want to talk about the convention. Again, he was so loud that Eileen heard him across the room.
I hung up on him and went to sleep. A half hour later, Eileen answered a midnight call. A voice told her that the president of the United States was calling for Dick Morris. She told the caller that I was sleeping. Two minutes later, the phone rang again. “Miss, this is a call from the president of the United States.” Again, she told the caller that I was asleep. “The president wants to speak to Mr. Morris right now, please.” “I’m sorry, tell the president that he’s not available right now.” When the phone rang again a few minutes later, it woke me up. It was the president, calling to apologize and to talk about the convention.
Most of Bill’s tantrums were behind closed doors. But during Hillary’s presidential campaign, we’ve seen the real Bill boiling with rage.
But don’t think that he can’t stage blowing his top when he thinks it will be strategically useful. If you have any doubts, just remember another red-faced finger-pointing performance when he said “I want to say something to the American people. I want you to listen. I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.”
Bill’s tantrums are causing the press to focus on him and not Hillary. That’s what he wants. No more questions about her experience, her ethics, her flip-flops. Now it's all about Bill.
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on FoxNews.com on January 25, 2008.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen it all before.
That picture of the seething, red-faced former president of the United States shaking his finger at members of the press who dare to question his wife’s slimy campaign tactics, is all too familiar to those who have worked closely with him in the past.
Like Janus, the two-faced Roman god, there are always been two distinct personalities in Bill Clinton. That charming, smiling gentleman seen in public is too often eclipsed in private by his negative twin evidenced in the eruption of a furious, unexpected, and uncontrollable rage, often accompanied by loud cursing and occasionally, even physical violence. It’s not a pretty picture.
I’ve been at the other end of that anger too many times and I was always amazed at the suddenness and intensity of his fury.
Early one Sunday morning, he woke me up at my Connecticut home screaming into the phone, “have you seen the Washington Post?” Blearily, I said no that I wasn’t in Washington (it was in the pre-Internet days). Apparently, the paper’s lead article had our poll and focus group questions about his character and image.
“Who did you tell?” “Who did you tell?” he shrieked. I assured him that I never spoke to the press.
“Well, who DID you speak to?” he screeched.
“I only spoke to George [Stephanopopous] and Rahm [Emmanuel],” (his two closest aides).
That set him off even more. He yelled even louder: “You ONLY told George and Rahm! You ONLY told George and Rahm! Why didn’t you just send out a f-ing press release. Don’t you understand that you can’t tell those two anything that you don’t want to see on the front page of the Washington Post? They leak everything!
He kept screaming about how he couldn’t keep anything confidential because everyone who worked for him leaked. Then he slammed the phone down.
I was shaken.
The phone conversation recalled an even more difficult encounter with his temper.
Many years earlier, in 1990, he seriously overstepped his boundaries with me during one of his blind rages and permanently changed our relationship.
It was during his last gubernatorial race and he was falling behind in the polls. When we met at the governor’s mansion, it was close to midnight. Hillary and Gloria Cabe, his campaign manager at the time, were at the meeting with Bill and me. I had left Connecticut after oral surgery that morning to arrive in time for a 6 p.m. meeting. My mouth was killing me, but I avoided taking any pain killers to be alert for the strategy session. The meeting was changed several times because Bill had decided to do the Nightline Show. He finally arrived back to the mansion in a foul mood. Even though he was a teetotaler, I wondered if he had been drinking.
When he learned of his decline in the polls, he immediately blamed me, accusing me of spending too much time with other clients. Yelling and screaming, he escalated his charges, refusing to listen to me tell him that his latest ad had not been on television yet when the poll was completed. He kept ranting.
Finally, I had enough. I stood up and said I was leaving, quitting the campaign. I grabbed my coat and headed out of the mansion. As I crossed the foyer, I suddenly fell to the ground, tackled by Bill Clinton. I saw his large fist coming at me. Hillary was trying to get between us, yelling “Bill, Bill, stop it. Think about what you are doing. Bill, stop it!”
Bill got up and I walked out the door. Hillary ran after me. She tried to calm me and asked me to walk around the grounds of the Mansion with her. “He only does this to people he loves,” she told me. (I’ll leave that one for the psychologists.)
When the story appeared in the media in 1992 , probably leaked by a fellow political consultant I had confided in that night, I called Hillary to warn her that the press was on to the fight. Her advice: Deny that it ever happened. I never did that, but I refused to comment.
Years later, when I was writing my book, Behind the Oval Office, I sent the galleys to Bill. He marked up a few areas where he had questions or comments. Then he called me and said “I never did actually hit you.” He asked me to change the text and tone down the story.
At the request of the president of the United States, I did.
After that Sunday morning phone conversation about the Washington Post story, I wrote the president a letter telling him how upsetting I found his tantrums and saying that I couldn’t work with him any longer if that’s the way it was going to be. He seemed shocked that his volcanic outbursts caused personal pain. But he knew that I was serious and wrote me a nice note apologizing and the outbursts ceased.
Until, during the 1996 Republican convention, I called him in Wyoming, where he was on vacation. That was never his happiest time, and apparently, he was upset because his favorite golf driver, given him by the King of Morocco, had broken. (He once told me it took seven strokes off his game). He started screaming at me that he was on vacation and did not want to talk about the convention. Again, he was so loud that Eileen heard him across the room.
I hung up on him and went to sleep. A half hour later, Eileen answered a midnight call. A voice told her that the president of the United States was calling for Dick Morris. She told the caller that I was sleeping. Two minutes later, the phone rang again. “Miss, this is a call from the president of the United States.” Again, she told the caller that I was asleep. “The president wants to speak to Mr. Morris right now, please.” “I’m sorry, tell the president that he’s not available right now.” When the phone rang again a few minutes later, it woke me up. It was the president, calling to apologize and to talk about the convention.
Most of Bill’s tantrums were behind closed doors. But during Hillary’s presidential campaign, we’ve seen the real Bill boiling with rage.
But don’t think that he can’t stage blowing his top when he thinks it will be strategically useful. If you have any doubts, just remember another red-faced finger-pointing performance when he said “I want to say something to the American people. I want you to listen. I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.”
Bill’s tantrums are causing the press to focus on him and not Hillary. That’s what he wants. No more questions about her experience, her ethics, her flip-flops. Now it's all about Bill.
OBAMA AND KENNEDY RAISE THE STAKES
OBAMA -- AND KENNEDY -- RAISE THE STAKES
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Barack Obama used his victory in South Carolina to change the dialogue with the Clintons in the presidential race. He has taken Hillary’s and Bill’s attempt to use the race issue and replied with a clever move. He has basically called their bluff.
And Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama has ratified the Illinois Senator’s strategy and candidacy.
So far, to summarize: Move One was when Obama arrived as a new candidate. Move two was Hillary’s comeback that she is more experienced. Move three was when Obama pivoted off her experience message and said he was the voice of change. Move four was the Clintons’ attempt to inject race into the election. They counted on a racial split in South Carolina to make Super Tuesday about a black/white division.
Now Obama has come back saying, in effect, “Yes, I know that you have made this election about race. But I am betting on the decency, fairness, tolerance, and objectivity of the American electorate. We all share the same hopes and dreams.”
In effect, he said I match you and raise you.
To date, Obama has avoided the race issue. But after his smashing win in South Carolina, he embraced the issue and turned it around to his advantage. He did not go down the path of Jesse Jackson and base his candidacy on a rainbow coalition. Rather, he decided to rise above the Clintons and appeal to America’s ecumenical diversity.
So now Super Tuesday is a contest between those who are mired in racial division and those who are willing to transcend it.
The massive outpouring of criticism of the Clintons for their tactics in South Carolina is withering fire which may take a serious toll among Hillary’s voters. Caroline Kennedy’s invocation of her father in endorsing Obama seems right on the money. Ted Kennedy’s support for him legitimizes white backing for the Illinois Senator and could have a big impact.
The Clintons were banking on a silent invocation of racial division stemming from a massive Obama win in South Carolina among black voters and a last place finish among whites. Their hopes were that whites would note the racial split in South Carolina and react by voting for Clinton.
But this racial divisiveness can only take place in the dark, out of sight. With the glare of Obama’s idealism shining on the dialogue, conscience comes into play and the American electorate may overcome the divisiveness of the Clintons.
Will Obama’s move trump the Clinton strategy? A lot hangs in the balance. Ultimately, the choice will say more about our soul as a nation than about the candidates in this election.
The boldness of Obama in accepting the Clintons’ injection of race as an issue and his insistence on an enlightened answer challenges us all. Even as one’s head warns that the strategy will fail, one’s heart hopes that it will succeed.
Either way, Obama has made the Super Tuesday vote more about who we are than who the candidates running for president are.
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Barack Obama used his victory in South Carolina to change the dialogue with the Clintons in the presidential race. He has taken Hillary’s and Bill’s attempt to use the race issue and replied with a clever move. He has basically called their bluff.
And Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama has ratified the Illinois Senator’s strategy and candidacy.
So far, to summarize: Move One was when Obama arrived as a new candidate. Move two was Hillary’s comeback that she is more experienced. Move three was when Obama pivoted off her experience message and said he was the voice of change. Move four was the Clintons’ attempt to inject race into the election. They counted on a racial split in South Carolina to make Super Tuesday about a black/white division.
Now Obama has come back saying, in effect, “Yes, I know that you have made this election about race. But I am betting on the decency, fairness, tolerance, and objectivity of the American electorate. We all share the same hopes and dreams.”
In effect, he said I match you and raise you.
To date, Obama has avoided the race issue. But after his smashing win in South Carolina, he embraced the issue and turned it around to his advantage. He did not go down the path of Jesse Jackson and base his candidacy on a rainbow coalition. Rather, he decided to rise above the Clintons and appeal to America’s ecumenical diversity.
So now Super Tuesday is a contest between those who are mired in racial division and those who are willing to transcend it.
The massive outpouring of criticism of the Clintons for their tactics in South Carolina is withering fire which may take a serious toll among Hillary’s voters. Caroline Kennedy’s invocation of her father in endorsing Obama seems right on the money. Ted Kennedy’s support for him legitimizes white backing for the Illinois Senator and could have a big impact.
The Clintons were banking on a silent invocation of racial division stemming from a massive Obama win in South Carolina among black voters and a last place finish among whites. Their hopes were that whites would note the racial split in South Carolina and react by voting for Clinton.
But this racial divisiveness can only take place in the dark, out of sight. With the glare of Obama’s idealism shining on the dialogue, conscience comes into play and the American electorate may overcome the divisiveness of the Clintons.
Will Obama’s move trump the Clinton strategy? A lot hangs in the balance. Ultimately, the choice will say more about our soul as a nation than about the candidates in this election.
The boldness of Obama in accepting the Clintons’ injection of race as an issue and his insistence on an enlightened answer challenges us all. Even as one’s head warns that the strategy will fail, one’s heart hopes that it will succeed.
Either way, Obama has made the Super Tuesday vote more about who we are than who the candidates running for president are.
win lose or die, can we get a new senator for Arizona?
when senator Mccain loses again or dies( he is 72yr plus), can we get a new senator for Arizona?
is Hillary a carpetbagger ? did Chris Matthews on Hardball
is Hillary a carpetbagger ?
Chris Matthews called Hillary a sort of carpetbagger on Hardball Monday afternoon tv show.
He did hihight her Illinois, Arkansas and now New York accents.
www.mccainalert.com
Chris Matthews called Hillary a sort of carpetbagger on Hardball Monday afternoon tv show.
He did hihight her Illinois, Arkansas and now New York accents.
www.mccainalert.com
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Florida Governor Charlie Crist Endorses Mccain ?
Florida Governor Charlie Crist Endorses
John McCain for President
Last night in St. Petersburg, Florida Governor Charlie Crist endorsed John McCain for President of the United States.
"Senator John McCain is a true American hero and patriot and I am honored to endorse him tonight in St. Petersburg," said Governor Crist. "He is a tremendous statesman, leader and uniter. I am confident that his years of experience will serve our country well when he becomes the next President of the United States."
John McCain thanked Governor Crist for his support, stating, "Charlie Crist has earned the admiration and respect of the people of Florida for his principled, conservative leadership and boundless optimism for the future of the Sunshine State. He's a leader of the new generation of Republican governors who are putting conservative principles to work for the people of America. I am honored to have his support as we work toward victory in Florida on Tuesday."
John McCain for President
Last night in St. Petersburg, Florida Governor Charlie Crist endorsed John McCain for President of the United States.
"Senator John McCain is a true American hero and patriot and I am honored to endorse him tonight in St. Petersburg," said Governor Crist. "He is a tremendous statesman, leader and uniter. I am confident that his years of experience will serve our country well when he becomes the next President of the United States."
John McCain thanked Governor Crist for his support, stating, "Charlie Crist has earned the admiration and respect of the people of Florida for his principled, conservative leadership and boundless optimism for the future of the Sunshine State. He's a leader of the new generation of Republican governors who are putting conservative principles to work for the people of America. I am honored to have his support as we work toward victory in Florida on Tuesday."
Ted Kennedy to endorse Mccain ?
Will Mccain get the support of Ted Kennedy for his work on the McCain-Kennedy Immigration Bill ?
www.mccainalert.com
www.mccainalert.com
Saturday, January 26, 2008
HOW CLINTON WILL WIN THE NOMINATION BY LOSING SOUTH CAROLINA
HOW CLINTON WILL WIN THE NOMINATION BY LOSING SOUTH CAROLINA
By DICK MORRIS
Published on TheHill.com on January 23, 2008.
Hillary Clinton will undoubtedly lose the South Carolina primary as African-Americans line up to vote for Barack Obama. And that defeat will power her drive to the nomination.
The Clintons are encouraging the national media to disregard the whites who vote in South Carolina’s Democratic primary and focus on the black turnout, which is expected to be quite large. They have transformed South Carolina into Washington, D.C. — an all-black primary that tells us how the African-American vote is going to go.
By saying he will go door to door in black neighborhoods in South Carolina matching his civil rights record against Obama’s, Bill Clinton emphasizes the pivotal role the black vote will play in the contest. And by openly matching his record on race with that of the black candidate, he invites more and more scrutiny focused on the race issue.
Of course, Clinton is going to lose that battle. Blacks in Nevada overwhelmingly backed Obama and will obviously do so again in South Carolina, no matter how loudly former President Clinton protests. So why is he making such a fuss over a contest he knows he’s going to lose?
Precisely because he is going to lose it. If Hillary loses South Carolina and the defeat serves to demonstrate Obama’s ability to attract a bloc vote among black Democrats, the message will go out loud and clear to white voters that this is a racial fight. It’s one thing for polls to show, as they now do, that Obama beats Hillary among African-Americans by better than 4-to-1 and Hillary carries whites by almost 2-to-1. But most people don’t read the fine print on the polls. But if blacks deliver South Carolina to Obama, everybody will know that they are bloc-voting. That will trigger a massive white backlash against Obama and will drive white voters to Hillary Clinton.
Obama has done everything he possibly could to keep race out of this election. And the Clintons attracted national scorn when they tried to bring it back in by attempting to minimize the role Martin Luther King Jr. played in the civil rights movement. But here they have a way of appearing to seek the black vote, losing it, and getting their white backlash, all without any fingerprints showing. The more President Clinton begs black voters to back his wife, and the more they spurn her, the more the election becomes about race — and Obama ultimately loses.
Because they have such plans for South Carolina, the Clintons were desperate to win in Nevada. They dared not lose two primaries in a row leading up to Florida. But now they can lose South Carolina with impunity, having won in Nevada.
But don’t look for them to walk away from South Carolina. Their love needs to appear to have been unrequited by the black community for their rejection to seem so unfair that it triggers a white backlash. In this kind of ricochet politics, you have to lose openly and publicly in order to win the next round. And since the next round consists of all the important and big states, polarizing the contest into whites versus blacks will work just fine for Hillary.
Of course, this begs the question of how she will be able to attract blacks after beating Obama. Here the South Carolina strategy also serves its purpose. If she loses blacks and wins whites by attacking Obama, it will look dirty and underhanded to blacks. She’ll develop a real problem in the minority community. But if she is seen as being rejected by minority voters in favor of Obama after going hat in hand to them and trying to out-civil rights Obama, blacks will even likely feel guilty about rejecting Hillary and will be more than willing to support her in the general election.
By DICK MORRIS
Published on TheHill.com on January 23, 2008.
Hillary Clinton will undoubtedly lose the South Carolina primary as African-Americans line up to vote for Barack Obama. And that defeat will power her drive to the nomination.
The Clintons are encouraging the national media to disregard the whites who vote in South Carolina’s Democratic primary and focus on the black turnout, which is expected to be quite large. They have transformed South Carolina into Washington, D.C. — an all-black primary that tells us how the African-American vote is going to go.
By saying he will go door to door in black neighborhoods in South Carolina matching his civil rights record against Obama’s, Bill Clinton emphasizes the pivotal role the black vote will play in the contest. And by openly matching his record on race with that of the black candidate, he invites more and more scrutiny focused on the race issue.
Of course, Clinton is going to lose that battle. Blacks in Nevada overwhelmingly backed Obama and will obviously do so again in South Carolina, no matter how loudly former President Clinton protests. So why is he making such a fuss over a contest he knows he’s going to lose?
Precisely because he is going to lose it. If Hillary loses South Carolina and the defeat serves to demonstrate Obama’s ability to attract a bloc vote among black Democrats, the message will go out loud and clear to white voters that this is a racial fight. It’s one thing for polls to show, as they now do, that Obama beats Hillary among African-Americans by better than 4-to-1 and Hillary carries whites by almost 2-to-1. But most people don’t read the fine print on the polls. But if blacks deliver South Carolina to Obama, everybody will know that they are bloc-voting. That will trigger a massive white backlash against Obama and will drive white voters to Hillary Clinton.
Obama has done everything he possibly could to keep race out of this election. And the Clintons attracted national scorn when they tried to bring it back in by attempting to minimize the role Martin Luther King Jr. played in the civil rights movement. But here they have a way of appearing to seek the black vote, losing it, and getting their white backlash, all without any fingerprints showing. The more President Clinton begs black voters to back his wife, and the more they spurn her, the more the election becomes about race — and Obama ultimately loses.
Because they have such plans for South Carolina, the Clintons were desperate to win in Nevada. They dared not lose two primaries in a row leading up to Florida. But now they can lose South Carolina with impunity, having won in Nevada.
But don’t look for them to walk away from South Carolina. Their love needs to appear to have been unrequited by the black community for their rejection to seem so unfair that it triggers a white backlash. In this kind of ricochet politics, you have to lose openly and publicly in order to win the next round. And since the next round consists of all the important and big states, polarizing the contest into whites versus blacks will work just fine for Hillary.
Of course, this begs the question of how she will be able to attract blacks after beating Obama. Here the South Carolina strategy also serves its purpose. If she loses blacks and wins whites by attacking Obama, it will look dirty and underhanded to blacks. She’ll develop a real problem in the minority community. But if she is seen as being rejected by minority voters in favor of Obama after going hat in hand to them and trying to out-civil rights Obama, blacks will even likely feel guilty about rejecting Hillary and will be more than willing to support her in the general election.
THERE'S A METHOD TO CRAFTY BILL'S MADNESS
THERE'S A METHOD TO CRAFTY BILL'S MADNESS
By DICK MORRIS
Published in the New York Post on January 22, 2008.
Why is Bill Clinton courting such intense publicity, in evitably much of it negative?
Is he crazy? Crazy like a fox.
He has two goals and is achieving them both spectacularly.
First, he wants to be the same kind of lightning rod for Hillary that she was for him during his run for the presidency.
As the 1992 Republican convention approached, Hillary ratcheted up her comments and profile precisely to attract GOP fire so that they would leave Bill alone. He and I discussed the plan.
Hillary's comment, for example, about "baking cookies and serving tea" put her squarely in the Republican Party's sights as the convention approached.
The Republicans fell for the lure big time and spent their entire convention going after Hillary. Bill was scarcely hit.
And the 1992 GOP convention is one of the few that afforded its party no bounce at all. Now Bill is returning the favor.
In the days before Iowa and leading up to New Hampshire, Hillary was the prime topic of political discussion.
She took shots for misusing Bill's record and trying to adopt it as her own, for minimizing King's contribution to civil rights, for crying, for attacking her opponents, and for changing her campaign style to become more likeable.
Now, she rarely gets hit anymore. They're hitting Bill instead.
Like a red cape, he is attracting the attention of the bull so his wife the matador escapes unharmed.
The other method behind his madness is that Bill wants to suck up all the oxygen in the room and dominate the coverage of the Democratic contest. By doing so, he cuts Obama out of the news, pushes him off the front page, and usurps the headlines.
Of course, he also crowds out Hillary, but that's OK, given her large leads in the national polls and in all the big states whose primaries are coming up.
If there were a newspaper and television blackout, Hillary would cruise to an easy win, so Bill, by injecting himself into the coverage and hogging it, is accomplishing the same goal.
His tactics now are reminiscent of those he used to black out John Kerry during the lead-up to the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
By scheduling book signings and speeches in Boston, he effectively took the coverage away from the prospective Democratic nominee, a man who would have eclipsed Hillary's presidential ambitions had he won the election.
Ultimately, the Clintons are playing a game of jujitsu with Obama, using his own strength against him.
By challenging Obama for the black vote - by promising to go door to door in South Carolina in minority neighborhoods, for example - Bill is highlighting the question: Will Obama carry the black vote? Of course, he will. He leads, 4 to 1, among African-Americans now.
But by making that the central question, Obama's South Carolina victory will be hailed as proof that he won the African-American vote. Such block voting will trigger the white backlash Sen. Clinton needs to win.
Once whites see blacks voting en masse for a black man, they will figure that it is a racial game and line up for Hillary. Already, she carries white voters by 2 to 1.
The Clintons can well afford to lose South Carolina as long as the election is not seen as a bellwether of how the South will vote but as an indication of how African-Americans will go. It's a small price to pay for the racial polarization they need to win.
So to seize the limelight, take Hillary out of the line of fire, and to call attention to his head-to-head battle with Obama for the loyalty of America's blacks, Bill Clinton is seeking all the coverage he can get, positive, negative or neutral.
By DICK MORRIS
Published in the New York Post on January 22, 2008.
Why is Bill Clinton courting such intense publicity, in evitably much of it negative?
Is he crazy? Crazy like a fox.
He has two goals and is achieving them both spectacularly.
First, he wants to be the same kind of lightning rod for Hillary that she was for him during his run for the presidency.
As the 1992 Republican convention approached, Hillary ratcheted up her comments and profile precisely to attract GOP fire so that they would leave Bill alone. He and I discussed the plan.
Hillary's comment, for example, about "baking cookies and serving tea" put her squarely in the Republican Party's sights as the convention approached.
The Republicans fell for the lure big time and spent their entire convention going after Hillary. Bill was scarcely hit.
And the 1992 GOP convention is one of the few that afforded its party no bounce at all. Now Bill is returning the favor.
In the days before Iowa and leading up to New Hampshire, Hillary was the prime topic of political discussion.
She took shots for misusing Bill's record and trying to adopt it as her own, for minimizing King's contribution to civil rights, for crying, for attacking her opponents, and for changing her campaign style to become more likeable.
Now, she rarely gets hit anymore. They're hitting Bill instead.
Like a red cape, he is attracting the attention of the bull so his wife the matador escapes unharmed.
The other method behind his madness is that Bill wants to suck up all the oxygen in the room and dominate the coverage of the Democratic contest. By doing so, he cuts Obama out of the news, pushes him off the front page, and usurps the headlines.
Of course, he also crowds out Hillary, but that's OK, given her large leads in the national polls and in all the big states whose primaries are coming up.
If there were a newspaper and television blackout, Hillary would cruise to an easy win, so Bill, by injecting himself into the coverage and hogging it, is accomplishing the same goal.
His tactics now are reminiscent of those he used to black out John Kerry during the lead-up to the 2004 Democratic National Convention.
By scheduling book signings and speeches in Boston, he effectively took the coverage away from the prospective Democratic nominee, a man who would have eclipsed Hillary's presidential ambitions had he won the election.
Ultimately, the Clintons are playing a game of jujitsu with Obama, using his own strength against him.
By challenging Obama for the black vote - by promising to go door to door in South Carolina in minority neighborhoods, for example - Bill is highlighting the question: Will Obama carry the black vote? Of course, he will. He leads, 4 to 1, among African-Americans now.
But by making that the central question, Obama's South Carolina victory will be hailed as proof that he won the African-American vote. Such block voting will trigger the white backlash Sen. Clinton needs to win.
Once whites see blacks voting en masse for a black man, they will figure that it is a racial game and line up for Hillary. Already, she carries white voters by 2 to 1.
The Clintons can well afford to lose South Carolina as long as the election is not seen as a bellwether of how the South will vote but as an indication of how African-Americans will go. It's a small price to pay for the racial polarization they need to win.
So to seize the limelight, take Hillary out of the line of fire, and to call attention to his head-to-head battle with Obama for the loyalty of America's blacks, Bill Clinton is seeking all the coverage he can get, positive, negative or neutral.
BILL CLINTON'S TEMPER
BILL CLINTON'S TEMPER NEGATIVELY AFFECTS HILLARY'S CAMPAIGN
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on FoxNews.com on January 25, 2008.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen it all before.
That picture of the seething, red-faced former president of the United States shaking his finger at members of the press who dare to question his wife’s slimy campaign tactics, is all too familiar to those who have worked closely with him in the past.
Like Janus, the two-faced Roman god, there are always been two distinct personalities in Bill Clinton. That charming, smiling gentleman seen in public is too often eclipsed in private by his negative twin evidenced in the eruption of a furious, unexpected, and uncontrollable rage, often accompanied by loud cursing and occasionally, even physical violence. It’s not a pretty picture.
I’ve been at the other end of that anger too many times and I was always amazed at the suddenness and intensity of his fury.
Early one Sunday morning, he woke me up at my Connecticut home screaming into the phone, “have you seen the Washington Post?” Blearily, I said no that I wasn’t in Washington (it was in the pre-Internet days). Apparently, the paper’s lead article had our poll and focus group questions about his character and image.
“Who did you tell?” “Who did you tell?” he shrieked. I assured him that I never spoke to the press.
“Well, who DID you speak to?” he screeched.
“I only spoke to George [Stephanopopous] and Rahm [Emmanuel],” (his two closest aides).
That set him off even more. He yelled even louder: “You ONLY told George and Rahm! You ONLY told George and Rahm! Why didn’t you just send out a f-ing press release. Don’t you understand that you can’t tell those two anything that you don’t want to see on the front page of the Washington Post? They leak everything!
He kept screaming about how he couldn’t keep anything confidential because everyone who worked for him leaked. Then he slammed the phone down.
I was shaken.
The phone conversation recalled an even more difficult encounter with his temper.
Many years earlier, in 1990, he seriously overstepped his boundaries with me during one of his blind rages and permanently changed our relationship.
It was during his last gubernatorial race and he was falling behind in the polls. When we met at the governor’s mansion, it was close to midnight. Hillary and Gloria Cabe, his campaign manager at the time, were at the meeting with Bill and me. I had left Connecticut after oral surgery that morning to arrive in time for a 6 p.m. meeting. My mouth was killing me, but I avoided taking any pain killers to be alert for the strategy session. The meeting was changed several times because Bill had decided to do the Nightline Show. He finally arrived back to the mansion in a foul mood. Even though he was a teetotaler, I wondered if he had been drinking.
When he learned of his decline in the polls, he immediately blamed me, accusing me of spending too much time with other clients. Yelling and screaming, he escalated his charges, refusing to listen to me tell him that his latest ad had not been on television yet when the poll was completed. He kept ranting.
Finally, I had enough. I stood up and said I was leaving, quitting the campaign. I grabbed my coat and headed out of the mansion. As I crossed the foyer, I suddenly fell to the ground, tackled by Bill Clinton. I saw his large fist coming at me. Hillary was trying to get between us, yelling “Bill, Bill, stop it. Think about what you are doing. Bill, stop it!”
Bill got up and I walked out the door. Hillary ran after me. She tried to calm me and asked me to walk around the grounds of the Mansion with her. “He only does this to people he loves,” she told me. (I’ll leave that one for the psychologists.)
When the story appeared in the media in 1992 , probably leaked by a fellow political consultant I had confided in that night, I called Hillary to warn her that the press was on to the fight. Her advice: Deny that it ever happened. I never did that, but I refused to comment.
Years later, when I was writing my book, Behind the Oval Office, I sent the galleys to Bill. He marked up a few areas where he had questions or comments. Then he called me and said “I never did actually hit you.” He asked me to change the text and tone down the story.
At the request of the president of the United States, I did.
After that Sunday morning phone conversation about the Washington Post story, I wrote the president a letter telling him how upsetting I found his tantrums and saying that I couldn’t work with him any longer if that’s the way it was going to be. He seemed shocked that his volcanic outbursts caused personal pain. But he knew that I was serious and wrote me a nice note apologizing and the outbursts ceased.
Until, during the 1996 Republican convention, I called him in Wyoming, where he was on vacation. That was never his happiest time, and apparently, he was upset because his favorite golf driver, given him by the King of Morocco, had broken. (He once told me it took seven strokes off his game). He started screaming at me that he was on vacation and did not want to talk about the convention. Again, he was so loud that Eileen heard him across the room.
I hung up on him and went to sleep. A half hour later, Eileen answered a midnight call. A voice told her that the president of the United States was calling for Dick Morris. She told the caller that I was sleeping. Two minutes later, the phone rang again. “Miss, this is a call from the president of the United States.” Again, she told the caller that I was asleep. “The president wants to speak to Mr. Morris right now, please.” “I’m sorry, tell the president that he’s not available right now.” When the phone rang again a few minutes later, it woke me up. It was the president, calling to apologize and to talk about the convention.
Most of Bill’s tantrums were behind closed doors. But during Hillary’s presidential campaign, we’ve seen the real Bill boiling with rage.
But don’t think that he can’t stage blowing his top when he thinks it will be strategically useful. If you have any doubts, just remember another red-faced finger-pointing performance when he said “I want to say something to the American people. I want you to listen. I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.”
Bill’s tantrums are causing the press to focus on him and not Hillary. That’s what he wants. No more questions about her experience, her ethics, her flip-flops. Now it's all about Bill.
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on FoxNews.com on January 25, 2008.
Unfortunately, I’ve seen it all before.
That picture of the seething, red-faced former president of the United States shaking his finger at members of the press who dare to question his wife’s slimy campaign tactics, is all too familiar to those who have worked closely with him in the past.
Like Janus, the two-faced Roman god, there are always been two distinct personalities in Bill Clinton. That charming, smiling gentleman seen in public is too often eclipsed in private by his negative twin evidenced in the eruption of a furious, unexpected, and uncontrollable rage, often accompanied by loud cursing and occasionally, even physical violence. It’s not a pretty picture.
I’ve been at the other end of that anger too many times and I was always amazed at the suddenness and intensity of his fury.
Early one Sunday morning, he woke me up at my Connecticut home screaming into the phone, “have you seen the Washington Post?” Blearily, I said no that I wasn’t in Washington (it was in the pre-Internet days). Apparently, the paper’s lead article had our poll and focus group questions about his character and image.
“Who did you tell?” “Who did you tell?” he shrieked. I assured him that I never spoke to the press.
“Well, who DID you speak to?” he screeched.
“I only spoke to George [Stephanopopous] and Rahm [Emmanuel],” (his two closest aides).
That set him off even more. He yelled even louder: “You ONLY told George and Rahm! You ONLY told George and Rahm! Why didn’t you just send out a f-ing press release. Don’t you understand that you can’t tell those two anything that you don’t want to see on the front page of the Washington Post? They leak everything!
He kept screaming about how he couldn’t keep anything confidential because everyone who worked for him leaked. Then he slammed the phone down.
I was shaken.
The phone conversation recalled an even more difficult encounter with his temper.
Many years earlier, in 1990, he seriously overstepped his boundaries with me during one of his blind rages and permanently changed our relationship.
It was during his last gubernatorial race and he was falling behind in the polls. When we met at the governor’s mansion, it was close to midnight. Hillary and Gloria Cabe, his campaign manager at the time, were at the meeting with Bill and me. I had left Connecticut after oral surgery that morning to arrive in time for a 6 p.m. meeting. My mouth was killing me, but I avoided taking any pain killers to be alert for the strategy session. The meeting was changed several times because Bill had decided to do the Nightline Show. He finally arrived back to the mansion in a foul mood. Even though he was a teetotaler, I wondered if he had been drinking.
When he learned of his decline in the polls, he immediately blamed me, accusing me of spending too much time with other clients. Yelling and screaming, he escalated his charges, refusing to listen to me tell him that his latest ad had not been on television yet when the poll was completed. He kept ranting.
Finally, I had enough. I stood up and said I was leaving, quitting the campaign. I grabbed my coat and headed out of the mansion. As I crossed the foyer, I suddenly fell to the ground, tackled by Bill Clinton. I saw his large fist coming at me. Hillary was trying to get between us, yelling “Bill, Bill, stop it. Think about what you are doing. Bill, stop it!”
Bill got up and I walked out the door. Hillary ran after me. She tried to calm me and asked me to walk around the grounds of the Mansion with her. “He only does this to people he loves,” she told me. (I’ll leave that one for the psychologists.)
When the story appeared in the media in 1992 , probably leaked by a fellow political consultant I had confided in that night, I called Hillary to warn her that the press was on to the fight. Her advice: Deny that it ever happened. I never did that, but I refused to comment.
Years later, when I was writing my book, Behind the Oval Office, I sent the galleys to Bill. He marked up a few areas where he had questions or comments. Then he called me and said “I never did actually hit you.” He asked me to change the text and tone down the story.
At the request of the president of the United States, I did.
After that Sunday morning phone conversation about the Washington Post story, I wrote the president a letter telling him how upsetting I found his tantrums and saying that I couldn’t work with him any longer if that’s the way it was going to be. He seemed shocked that his volcanic outbursts caused personal pain. But he knew that I was serious and wrote me a nice note apologizing and the outbursts ceased.
Until, during the 1996 Republican convention, I called him in Wyoming, where he was on vacation. That was never his happiest time, and apparently, he was upset because his favorite golf driver, given him by the King of Morocco, had broken. (He once told me it took seven strokes off his game). He started screaming at me that he was on vacation and did not want to talk about the convention. Again, he was so loud that Eileen heard him across the room.
I hung up on him and went to sleep. A half hour later, Eileen answered a midnight call. A voice told her that the president of the United States was calling for Dick Morris. She told the caller that I was sleeping. Two minutes later, the phone rang again. “Miss, this is a call from the president of the United States.” Again, she told the caller that I was asleep. “The president wants to speak to Mr. Morris right now, please.” “I’m sorry, tell the president that he’s not available right now.” When the phone rang again a few minutes later, it woke me up. It was the president, calling to apologize and to talk about the convention.
Most of Bill’s tantrums were behind closed doors. But during Hillary’s presidential campaign, we’ve seen the real Bill boiling with rage.
But don’t think that he can’t stage blowing his top when he thinks it will be strategically useful. If you have any doubts, just remember another red-faced finger-pointing performance when he said “I want to say something to the American people. I want you to listen. I did not have sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.”
Bill’s tantrums are causing the press to focus on him and not Hillary. That’s what he wants. No more questions about her experience, her ethics, her flip-flops. Now it's all about Bill.
Obama wins South Carolina
Obama wins South Carolina
Illinois Sen. Barack Obama scored an overwhelming victory in the South Carolina primary Saturday,
mccain alert com
Illinois Sen. Barack Obama scored an overwhelming victory in the South Carolina primary Saturday,
mccain alert com
Friday, January 25, 2008
Paul Pelosi Jr, son of Nancy Pelosi involved in the mortgage mess ?
Nancy Pelois, Democrat,Ca son is a registered lobbyist for Countrywide Mortgage in the middle of this mortgage mess at Countrywide Loans in California
Paul Pelosi Jr., was hired by InfoUSA for $180,000 a year
also provides credit background info thru InfoUSA
to government agencies
Paul Pelosi Jr, son of Nancy Pelosi involved in the mortgage mess
Paul Pelosi Jr., was hired by InfoUSA for $180,000 a year
also provides credit background info thru InfoUSA
to government agencies
Paul Pelosi Jr, son of Nancy Pelosi involved in the mortgage mess
Monday, January 21, 2008
Mccain worked against curbing illegals in Arizona even in 2004
Mccain worked against curbing illegals in Arizona even in 2004
On one of his rare visits to his home state Senator Mccain
worked to defeat state "Protect Arizona Now/Propostion 200"
which was overwhleming passed by the voters in Arizona in 2004.
This was a state initiated prop to curb the drain on public bennies
to illegals and voter fraud.
I guess Senator Mccain didn't get the message way back in 2004?
enough said for a state rights issue.
some news items back in 2004..........
U.S. Sen. John McCain will meet with opponents of a controversial
immigration ballot question in the coming days to see how
he can help defeat the measure.
McCain will sit down with those opposed to the
Protect Arizona Now/Propostion 200, which will be on the November ballot.
PAN looks to curtail illegal immigration into the state requiring those seeking public welfare benefits to prove they are eligible for such services and those seeking to votes to prove they are U.S. citizens.
The measure also requires state agencies to report illegal aliens to federal authorities and those state workers who do not do that face criminal sanctions.
McCain said Wednesday he will soon meet with PAN opponents to see
what role he can play in the effort against Prop. 200.
McCain stressed Wednesday that he understands frustrations within the state regarding border security and continues to press the federal government
and Congress to focus more on the matter.
see more at...
http://phoenix.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/2004/09/13/daily37.html
On one of his rare visits to his home state Senator Mccain
worked to defeat state "Protect Arizona Now/Propostion 200"
which was overwhleming passed by the voters in Arizona in 2004.
This was a state initiated prop to curb the drain on public bennies
to illegals and voter fraud.
I guess Senator Mccain didn't get the message way back in 2004?
enough said for a state rights issue.
some news items back in 2004..........
U.S. Sen. John McCain will meet with opponents of a controversial
immigration ballot question in the coming days to see how
he can help defeat the measure.
McCain will sit down with those opposed to the
Protect Arizona Now/Propostion 200, which will be on the November ballot.
PAN looks to curtail illegal immigration into the state requiring those seeking public welfare benefits to prove they are eligible for such services and those seeking to votes to prove they are U.S. citizens.
The measure also requires state agencies to report illegal aliens to federal authorities and those state workers who do not do that face criminal sanctions.
McCain said Wednesday he will soon meet with PAN opponents to see
what role he can play in the effort against Prop. 200.
McCain stressed Wednesday that he understands frustrations within the state regarding border security and continues to press the federal government
and Congress to focus more on the matter.
see more at...
http://phoenix.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/2004/09/13/daily37.html
Norris says McCain too old for president
Norris says McCain too old for president
By APRIL CASTRO, Associated Press Writer
Campaigning for Mike Huckabee, actor Chuck Norris said Sunday that Sen. John McCain is too old to handle the pressures of being president.
"I didn't pick John to support because I'm just afraid that the vice president would wind up taking over his job in that four-year presidency," said Norris, who was hosting a fundraiser for Huckabee at his Lone Wolf Ranch.
"So we need to find someone that can handle it for four years or eight years ... that has the youth and vision and communication skills to make that work." Norris, 67, is four years younger than McCain, who will be 72 in August.
Huckabee will be 52 in August.
The former Arkansas governor, coming off a disappointing second-place finish in the South Carolina GOP primary to McCain, distanced himself from Norris' comments.
"Only John McCain and his hairdresser know for sure," he quipped, at a ranch house on the sprawling East Texas estate. "It is a very stressful position. ... I'm not going to say he's too old. I think he's got a lot of inner strength, good genetic factors by his mom."
McCain's campaign did not immediately have a comment.
As the first Southern primary, South Carolina was supposed to be friendly territory for Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister.
"We obviously wanted to win and we really thought we would win," he said. "The fact of Fred Thompson's being in the race took some votes that we would have most likely had."
Huckabee also blamed late snowfall in parts of upstate South Carolina.
"The snow not only froze the streets of the Greenville-Spartanburg area, the votes kinda stopped once it started snowing," he said. "That was an area we were looking forward to having a significant vote margin."
Huckabee hoped the fundraiser would be the start of a momentum shift in his favor.
"Starting today, we reset the clock," Huckabee said. "I woke up this morning and I thought 'the momentum is back.'"
Huckabee next turns to Florida, which holds its GOP primary Jan. 29. He seemed to be preparing for a long haul.
"Even a contest of delegates isn't going to be over after Florida and probably even after February 5," he said. "So everybody's sort of retooled and said, 'No, this could go on all the way to the convention.'"
Norris estimated that more than 200 people had paid at least $1,000 for a plate of barbecue and a chance to watch Huckabee play bass guitar with his band, Capitol Offense. Some paid $2,300, but fundraising totals were not yet available.
After repeating his stump speech to the rural Texas crowd, the band joined Huckabee on stage for some classic rock tunes, kicking off with "Only in America."
By APRIL CASTRO, Associated Press Writer
By APRIL CASTRO, Associated Press Writer
Campaigning for Mike Huckabee, actor Chuck Norris said Sunday that Sen. John McCain is too old to handle the pressures of being president.
"I didn't pick John to support because I'm just afraid that the vice president would wind up taking over his job in that four-year presidency," said Norris, who was hosting a fundraiser for Huckabee at his Lone Wolf Ranch.
"So we need to find someone that can handle it for four years or eight years ... that has the youth and vision and communication skills to make that work." Norris, 67, is four years younger than McCain, who will be 72 in August.
Huckabee will be 52 in August.
The former Arkansas governor, coming off a disappointing second-place finish in the South Carolina GOP primary to McCain, distanced himself from Norris' comments.
"Only John McCain and his hairdresser know for sure," he quipped, at a ranch house on the sprawling East Texas estate. "It is a very stressful position. ... I'm not going to say he's too old. I think he's got a lot of inner strength, good genetic factors by his mom."
McCain's campaign did not immediately have a comment.
As the first Southern primary, South Carolina was supposed to be friendly territory for Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor and Baptist minister.
"We obviously wanted to win and we really thought we would win," he said. "The fact of Fred Thompson's being in the race took some votes that we would have most likely had."
Huckabee also blamed late snowfall in parts of upstate South Carolina.
"The snow not only froze the streets of the Greenville-Spartanburg area, the votes kinda stopped once it started snowing," he said. "That was an area we were looking forward to having a significant vote margin."
Huckabee hoped the fundraiser would be the start of a momentum shift in his favor.
"Starting today, we reset the clock," Huckabee said. "I woke up this morning and I thought 'the momentum is back.'"
Huckabee next turns to Florida, which holds its GOP primary Jan. 29. He seemed to be preparing for a long haul.
"Even a contest of delegates isn't going to be over after Florida and probably even after February 5," he said. "So everybody's sort of retooled and said, 'No, this could go on all the way to the convention.'"
Norris estimated that more than 200 people had paid at least $1,000 for a plate of barbecue and a chance to watch Huckabee play bass guitar with his band, Capitol Offense. Some paid $2,300, but fundraising totals were not yet available.
After repeating his stump speech to the rural Texas crowd, the band joined Huckabee on stage for some classic rock tunes, kicking off with "Only in America."
By APRIL CASTRO, Associated Press Writer
Sunday, January 20, 2008
border guard killed in Yuma Arizona
US Yuma Arizona border guard killed by car speeding to Mexico
A US border guard was struck and killed Saturday while trying
to flag down two cars that were speeding toward the Mexican border
near Yuma, Arizona, said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.
"The agent was struck and killed while attempting to stop two vehicles
believed to have illegally entered the country and were absconding
back into Mexico," he told reporters.
"I have spoken to the Mexican ambassador (Arturo Sarukhan) who gives
me both his condolences and deep assurance that their government will
be resolute in tracking down the perpetrators, and bringing them
to swift justice," Chertoff added.
He said he would use "the full force of the law" in pursuing the
perpetrators of this "heinous act of violence."
see more at............
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080120/ts_alt_afp/usmexicocrime_080120183522;_ylt=AoxfeenXVk408K4NrtoqZkDZa7gF
www.mccainalert.com
A US border guard was struck and killed Saturday while trying
to flag down two cars that were speeding toward the Mexican border
near Yuma, Arizona, said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.
"The agent was struck and killed while attempting to stop two vehicles
believed to have illegally entered the country and were absconding
back into Mexico," he told reporters.
"I have spoken to the Mexican ambassador (Arturo Sarukhan) who gives
me both his condolences and deep assurance that their government will
be resolute in tracking down the perpetrators, and bringing them
to swift justice," Chertoff added.
He said he would use "the full force of the law" in pursuing the
perpetrators of this "heinous act of violence."
see more at............
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080120/ts_alt_afp/usmexicocrime_080120183522;_ylt=AoxfeenXVk408K4NrtoqZkDZa7gF
www.mccainalert.com
when Mccain loses again, can we get a new senator for Arizona?
when Mccain loses again, can we get a new senator for Arizona?
that 72 year old shithead should just fade away....
www.mccainalert.com
that 72 year old shithead should just fade away....
www.mccainalert.com
Saturday, January 19, 2008
MICHIGAN'S MEANING: GOP CHAOS
MICHIGAN'S MEANING: GOP CHAOS
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published in the New York Post on January 16, 2008.
The GOP race has now descended into total chaos. Mike Huckabee, John McCain and now Mitt Romney have each won an important primary or caucus and lost two others. Onetime front-runner Rudy Giuliani finished dead last in Michigan last night, falling below the somnambulant Fred Thompson and the flakey Ron Paul.
The scatter-shot outcome reflects deeper divisions among the GOP's three wings: Economic conservatives are moving to Romney; social righties rallying 'round Huckabee - and the national-security types who started for Rudy have migrated to McCain in the voting so far.
The various factions are growing ever more alienated from each other, demanding a level of purity from their candidates that makes consensus and unity less and less possible. Those concerned over immigration don't forgive McCain his support for the McCain-Kennedy bill; pro-lifers criticize Romney's inconsistency over their issue. Moralists worry about Rudy's marriages; tax-cut purists won't forgive Huckabee's mixed record on taxes in Arkansas.
This is no way to select a nominee who can win.
The Republican Party is simply not used to selecting a nominee without having it imposed from above. In near-monarchic fashion, the party has always had an anointed front-runner in every election since 1944 - Tom Dewey begat Ike who begat Dick Nixon who begat Gerald Ford; Ronald Reagan challenged Ford, and then it was his turn. He begat the first George Bush - who literally begat the current president.
The designated candidate won the nomination in each one of those years but 1964 - and that year, the party met disaster.
But President Bush has been unique in refusing to help his party choose a successor. The result is the fissure now is tearing the party apart.
The winnowing-down process that's worked so well in the Democratic Party has failed totally in the GOP contest. With each candidate finding adequate momentum in the results so far, the party faces the prospect of a deadlock with each of the four main candidates (McCain, Romney, Huckabee and Giuliani) winning a share of the vote but nobody winning a majority on Super Tuesday.
Can South Carolina or Nevada winnow down the field? Unlikely. Neither is significant enough, and each is so totally atypical of the rest of the nation that its results won't have great national credibility.
Florida is probably the last time that the GOP can avoid a destructive fracturing. Its pivotal vote, the week before Super Tuesday, may offer the best chance to focus the field and allow somebody to win a majority. But the state is now a four-way tie, with vote shares ranging from 17 percent to 21 percent.
Unless Republicans are willing to show some flexibility in their insistence on purity from each of their candidates, the splitting that is increasingly evident will tear the party apart even as it faces the most serious challenge from the Democrats in years.
The Democratic debate last night was a demonstration of Barack Obama's limited ability to project issues. He managed to sit through a debate over bankruptcy without citing Hillary Clinton's massive campaign contributions from banks and lenders.
In a series of exchanges on subprime mortgages, he didn't mention her contributions from precisely the companies that pushed these flawed lending instruments. He even failed to mention the $10 million the Clinton library got from the Saudi monarchy even when asked about American banks going to that family for capital infusions.
We need less rancor among Republicans and sharper issue distinctions among the Democrats.
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published in the New York Post on January 16, 2008.
The GOP race has now descended into total chaos. Mike Huckabee, John McCain and now Mitt Romney have each won an important primary or caucus and lost two others. Onetime front-runner Rudy Giuliani finished dead last in Michigan last night, falling below the somnambulant Fred Thompson and the flakey Ron Paul.
The scatter-shot outcome reflects deeper divisions among the GOP's three wings: Economic conservatives are moving to Romney; social righties rallying 'round Huckabee - and the national-security types who started for Rudy have migrated to McCain in the voting so far.
The various factions are growing ever more alienated from each other, demanding a level of purity from their candidates that makes consensus and unity less and less possible. Those concerned over immigration don't forgive McCain his support for the McCain-Kennedy bill; pro-lifers criticize Romney's inconsistency over their issue. Moralists worry about Rudy's marriages; tax-cut purists won't forgive Huckabee's mixed record on taxes in Arkansas.
This is no way to select a nominee who can win.
The Republican Party is simply not used to selecting a nominee without having it imposed from above. In near-monarchic fashion, the party has always had an anointed front-runner in every election since 1944 - Tom Dewey begat Ike who begat Dick Nixon who begat Gerald Ford; Ronald Reagan challenged Ford, and then it was his turn. He begat the first George Bush - who literally begat the current president.
The designated candidate won the nomination in each one of those years but 1964 - and that year, the party met disaster.
But President Bush has been unique in refusing to help his party choose a successor. The result is the fissure now is tearing the party apart.
The winnowing-down process that's worked so well in the Democratic Party has failed totally in the GOP contest. With each candidate finding adequate momentum in the results so far, the party faces the prospect of a deadlock with each of the four main candidates (McCain, Romney, Huckabee and Giuliani) winning a share of the vote but nobody winning a majority on Super Tuesday.
Can South Carolina or Nevada winnow down the field? Unlikely. Neither is significant enough, and each is so totally atypical of the rest of the nation that its results won't have great national credibility.
Florida is probably the last time that the GOP can avoid a destructive fracturing. Its pivotal vote, the week before Super Tuesday, may offer the best chance to focus the field and allow somebody to win a majority. But the state is now a four-way tie, with vote shares ranging from 17 percent to 21 percent.
Unless Republicans are willing to show some flexibility in their insistence on purity from each of their candidates, the splitting that is increasingly evident will tear the party apart even as it faces the most serious challenge from the Democrats in years.
The Democratic debate last night was a demonstration of Barack Obama's limited ability to project issues. He managed to sit through a debate over bankruptcy without citing Hillary Clinton's massive campaign contributions from banks and lenders.
In a series of exchanges on subprime mortgages, he didn't mention her contributions from precisely the companies that pushed these flawed lending instruments. He even failed to mention the $10 million the Clinton library got from the Saudi monarchy even when asked about American banks going to that family for capital infusions.
We need less rancor among Republicans and sharper issue distinctions among the Democrats.
TIME FOR EDWARDS' EXIT: HILLARY, BARACK FATE IN HIS HANDS
TIME FOR EDWARDS' EXIT: HILLARY, BARACK FATE IN HIS HANDS
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published in the New York Post on January 15, 2008.
The Democratic nomination for president will likely be decided by the subtle pulls of ego against duty that tug at the conscience of John Edwards. He manifestly can no longer win - but he helps Hillary Clinton if he stays in the race and boosts Barack Obama if he pulls out.
After a vigorous campaign, Edwards has fallen irreparably behind - the real race is now a grueling test of strength with Clinton. The contrast between the party's insensitive establishment and the determined voices of change couldn't be clearer.
Edwards divides the anti-Clinton vote - and so undermines the prospects for the changes that he so passionately demands in our government. By staying in, he's helping deliver the nomination to the person whom he has described as the defender of the status quo.
The votes already cast and the polls of coming primaries all tell the same story: Edwards can't win. After a dis- tant second-place finish in Iowa, he still had some basis for hope. But when he finished far back in New Hampshire, his chances for victory vanished.
Just how hopeless is his candidacy? Realclearpolitics.com's average of national polls has him in third place - with Clinton at 41 percent, Obama at 35 percent and Edwards at just 15 percent. Even in South Carolina (right next door to his home state), he's polling at only 15 percent to Obama's 42 percent and Clinton's 30 percent.
To date, Edwards has been a passionate and effective advocate of the need for change. His opposition to special-interest funding of our politics and his good example in refusing to take funds from political action committees both merit our praise and admiration.
But at this point, the practical impact of any support for Edwards is to help Clinton defeat Obama. Polling shows that the second choice of Edwards' followers is overwhelmingly Obama.
By staying in the race after he has lost any realistic chance of winning, Edwards is making it possible for Hillary to win and to bring with her precisely the policies he most opposes: dependence on special interests, a determination to maintain a presence in Iraq and a reversion to dynastic politics.
Edwards deserves a special place in our politics for his efforts to bring poverty to national attention and to revise national priorities to take account of the needs of the poor. But now it's time to read the writing on the wall and obey the verdict of history. It's time for Edwards to pull out.
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published in the New York Post on January 15, 2008.
The Democratic nomination for president will likely be decided by the subtle pulls of ego against duty that tug at the conscience of John Edwards. He manifestly can no longer win - but he helps Hillary Clinton if he stays in the race and boosts Barack Obama if he pulls out.
After a vigorous campaign, Edwards has fallen irreparably behind - the real race is now a grueling test of strength with Clinton. The contrast between the party's insensitive establishment and the determined voices of change couldn't be clearer.
Edwards divides the anti-Clinton vote - and so undermines the prospects for the changes that he so passionately demands in our government. By staying in, he's helping deliver the nomination to the person whom he has described as the defender of the status quo.
The votes already cast and the polls of coming primaries all tell the same story: Edwards can't win. After a dis- tant second-place finish in Iowa, he still had some basis for hope. But when he finished far back in New Hampshire, his chances for victory vanished.
Just how hopeless is his candidacy? Realclearpolitics.com's average of national polls has him in third place - with Clinton at 41 percent, Obama at 35 percent and Edwards at just 15 percent. Even in South Carolina (right next door to his home state), he's polling at only 15 percent to Obama's 42 percent and Clinton's 30 percent.
To date, Edwards has been a passionate and effective advocate of the need for change. His opposition to special-interest funding of our politics and his good example in refusing to take funds from political action committees both merit our praise and admiration.
But at this point, the practical impact of any support for Edwards is to help Clinton defeat Obama. Polling shows that the second choice of Edwards' followers is overwhelmingly Obama.
By staying in the race after he has lost any realistic chance of winning, Edwards is making it possible for Hillary to win and to bring with her precisely the policies he most opposes: dependence on special interests, a determination to maintain a presence in Iraq and a reversion to dynastic politics.
Edwards deserves a special place in our politics for his efforts to bring poverty to national attention and to revise national priorities to take account of the needs of the poor. But now it's time to read the writing on the wall and obey the verdict of history. It's time for Edwards to pull out.
IN CONTRAST TO OBAMA, HILLARY PLAYS THE RACE CARD
IN CONTRAST TO OBAMA, HILLARY PLAYS THE RACE CARD
By DICK MORRIS
Published on TheHill.com on January 16, 2008.
On the evening of Jan. 3, it became clear that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) was going to be a serious candidate for president with a viable chance of winning. The Clintons decided that he was going, inevitably, to win a virtually unanimous vote from the black community. Their own reputation for support for civil rights would make no difference.
With a black candidate within striking distance of the White House, a coalescing of black voters behind his candidacy became inevitable.
Frustratingly for the Clintons, Obama had achieved this likely solidarity among black voters without, himself, summoning racial emotions. He had gone out of his way to avoid mentioning race — quite a contrast with Hillary, whose every speech talks about her becoming the first female president. But precisely to distinguish himself from the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons of American politics, Obama resisted any racial appeal or even reference. His rhetoric, argumentation, and presentation was indistinguishable from a skilled white candidate’s.
So the Clintons faced a problem: With Obama winning the black vote, how were they to win a sufficient proportion of the white electorate to offset his advantage?
Not racists themselves, they decided, nonetheless, to play the race card in order to achieve the polarization of the white vote that they needed to offset that among blacks.
They embarked on a strategy of talking about race — mentioning Martin Luther King Jr., for example — and asking their surrogates to do so as well. They have succeeded in making an election that was about gender and age into one that is increasingly about race.
According to the Rasmussen poll of Monday, Jan. 14, Obama leads among blacks by 66-16 while Hillary is ahead among whites by 41-27. The overall head to head is 37-30 in favor of Hillary.
It does not matter which specific reference to race can be traced to whom. Obama’s campaign has resisted any temptation to campaign on race and, for an entire year, kept the issue off the front pages. Now, at the very moment that the crucial voting looms, the election is suddenly about race. Obviously, it is the Clintons’ doing. Remember the adage: Who benefits?
As Super Tuesday nears, the Clintons will likely take their campaign to a new level, charging that Obama can’t win.
They will never cite his skin color in this formulation, but it will be obvious to all voters what they mean: that a black cannot get elected.
The Clintons are far from above using race to win an election. Running for president in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles race riots, Clinton seized on a comment made by rapper Sister Souljah in an interview with her published on May 13, 1992 in The Washington Post. She said, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?”
Clinton pounced, eager to show moderates that he was not a radical and was willing to defy the political correctness imposed on the Democratic Party by the civil rights leadership. In a speech to the Rainbow Coalition he said, “If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black’ and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech,” an allusion to the former Klansman then running for public office in Louisiana.
The Clintons will be very careful about how they go about injecting race into the campaign. Part of their strategy will be to provoke discussion of whether race is becoming a factor in the election. Anything that portrays Obama as black and asks about the role of race in the contest will serve their political interest. And you can bet that there is nothing they won’t do ... if they can get away with it.
By DICK MORRIS
Published on TheHill.com on January 16, 2008.
On the evening of Jan. 3, it became clear that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) was going to be a serious candidate for president with a viable chance of winning. The Clintons decided that he was going, inevitably, to win a virtually unanimous vote from the black community. Their own reputation for support for civil rights would make no difference.
With a black candidate within striking distance of the White House, a coalescing of black voters behind his candidacy became inevitable.
Frustratingly for the Clintons, Obama had achieved this likely solidarity among black voters without, himself, summoning racial emotions. He had gone out of his way to avoid mentioning race — quite a contrast with Hillary, whose every speech talks about her becoming the first female president. But precisely to distinguish himself from the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons of American politics, Obama resisted any racial appeal or even reference. His rhetoric, argumentation, and presentation was indistinguishable from a skilled white candidate’s.
So the Clintons faced a problem: With Obama winning the black vote, how were they to win a sufficient proportion of the white electorate to offset his advantage?
Not racists themselves, they decided, nonetheless, to play the race card in order to achieve the polarization of the white vote that they needed to offset that among blacks.
They embarked on a strategy of talking about race — mentioning Martin Luther King Jr., for example — and asking their surrogates to do so as well. They have succeeded in making an election that was about gender and age into one that is increasingly about race.
According to the Rasmussen poll of Monday, Jan. 14, Obama leads among blacks by 66-16 while Hillary is ahead among whites by 41-27. The overall head to head is 37-30 in favor of Hillary.
It does not matter which specific reference to race can be traced to whom. Obama’s campaign has resisted any temptation to campaign on race and, for an entire year, kept the issue off the front pages. Now, at the very moment that the crucial voting looms, the election is suddenly about race. Obviously, it is the Clintons’ doing. Remember the adage: Who benefits?
As Super Tuesday nears, the Clintons will likely take their campaign to a new level, charging that Obama can’t win.
They will never cite his skin color in this formulation, but it will be obvious to all voters what they mean: that a black cannot get elected.
The Clintons are far from above using race to win an election. Running for president in the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles race riots, Clinton seized on a comment made by rapper Sister Souljah in an interview with her published on May 13, 1992 in The Washington Post. She said, “If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?”
Clinton pounced, eager to show moderates that he was not a radical and was willing to defy the political correctness imposed on the Democratic Party by the civil rights leadership. In a speech to the Rainbow Coalition he said, “If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black’ and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech,” an allusion to the former Klansman then running for public office in Louisiana.
The Clintons will be very careful about how they go about injecting race into the campaign. Part of their strategy will be to provoke discussion of whether race is becoming a factor in the election. Anything that portrays Obama as black and asks about the role of race in the contest will serve their political interest. And you can bet that there is nothing they won’t do ... if they can get away with it.
The McCain Update
The McCain Update - January 18, 2008
Tomorrow is the South Carolina primary and our events across the state have been filled with great crowds, energy and excitement. John McCain remains the best candidate in this race, a candidate who is ready to give voters straight talk and real solutions. He is ready to stand up for truth and honesty. Since 1980, the candidate who has won South Carolina has gone on to win the Republican nomination and we intend for John McCain to continue that trend.
Even if you are not in South Carolina, you can still have an impact on this critical primary:
Make Phone Calls. This election is going to be won vote-by-vote! By signing up for our online phone bank, you can play an important role in our victory by calling voters in South Carolina.
Contribute to the South Carolina Victory Fund. Your online donation can be put to work immediately to get us ready to win.
Reach out to your friends. Forward them this email and tell them why you're supporting John McCain. Invite them to join you as a proud member of the McCain team.
Tomorrow is the South Carolina primary and our events across the state have been filled with great crowds, energy and excitement. John McCain remains the best candidate in this race, a candidate who is ready to give voters straight talk and real solutions. He is ready to stand up for truth and honesty. Since 1980, the candidate who has won South Carolina has gone on to win the Republican nomination and we intend for John McCain to continue that trend.
Even if you are not in South Carolina, you can still have an impact on this critical primary:
Make Phone Calls. This election is going to be won vote-by-vote! By signing up for our online phone bank, you can play an important role in our victory by calling voters in South Carolina.
Contribute to the South Carolina Victory Fund. Your online donation can be put to work immediately to get us ready to win.
Reach out to your friends. Forward them this email and tell them why you're supporting John McCain. Invite them to join you as a proud member of the McCain team.
HILLARY CLINTON'S MASSIVE CONFLICT OF INTEREST
HILLARY CLINTON'S MASSIVE CONFLICT OF INTEREST
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on FoxNews.com on January 18, 2008.
As American banks go hat in hand to foreign financial institutions and governments, begging for capital to help them get out of the mess into which their subprime loans have landed them, the question arises as to whether the United States should permit nations like China, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the banks they control to acquire part ownership of our leading banks.
The presidential candidates discussed this issue in their Nevada debate and Hillary was asked about it in an interview with Neil Cavuto on the FOX Business Network yesterday. She replied that she would not “stand in the way” of such investments, but said that they needed to be vetted and called for more disclosure and “transparency.”
The fact is that Hillary Clinton is totally unable to be objective on this key question of our national financial sovereignty because she and her husband have been so compromised by their financial dealings with the very countries at issue in the decision.
Should the Saudi monarchy be permitted to purchase an important equity position in some of America’s leading banks? How can Hillary be objective when the very same monarchy donated $10 million to the Clinton Library and Foundation?
Should the UAE be allowed in? How can Hillary decide fairly when Bill — and therefore herself — have been getting a reported $10 million per year from a fund that administers the investments of the Emir of Dubai, the largest component state in the UAE?
The Dubai Ports deal compromised our national security by putting key points of entry in that nation’s control. But the infusion of capital and the acquisition of equity in our key banks has the potential to make that encroachment on our sovereignty seem piddling by comparison.
Neither Dubai nor Saudi Arabia would be permitted to contribute to Hillary’s campaign. Foreigners are not allowed to do so, precisely to avoid having potential office holders compromised by gratitude for their financial support. But these nations have used the porous ethics of the Clinton family to acquire positions of massive influence by making contributions, not to her campaign, but to her personal bank account — either through Bill or through the Library and Foundation, which the Clintons directly control. The extent of the influence their millions must buy with a family only recently, according to Hillary, in the “middle class” must be huge.
And it is for exactly this kind of situation that the Clintons should be required to divulge the extent of their involvement with foreign interests and exactly how much money their personal bank accounts and their Library/Foundation have received. (The Saudi donation to the Library and Foundation was only discovered by the New York Times when the information was inadvertently posted on the Library’s Web site. Soon after the story appeared, it was taken down. The Clintons refuse to reveal the donors to the Library or the related Foundation.) Hillary and Bill have also refused to release their income tax returns, despite the fact that Bill willingly released his when he was running for president.
Why hasn’t Barack Obama or John Edwards even mentioned this issue? Their attacks on Hillary’s links to lobbyists and other special interests are usually painted with a broad brush. But the journey of America’s banks abroad in search of a bailout makes this specific conflict a key question of policy and highly relevant to their campaigns. What better illustration could one have of Hillary’s conflicts of interest than this one?
By DICK MORRIS & EILEEN MCGANN
Published on FoxNews.com on January 18, 2008.
As American banks go hat in hand to foreign financial institutions and governments, begging for capital to help them get out of the mess into which their subprime loans have landed them, the question arises as to whether the United States should permit nations like China, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and the banks they control to acquire part ownership of our leading banks.
The presidential candidates discussed this issue in their Nevada debate and Hillary was asked about it in an interview with Neil Cavuto on the FOX Business Network yesterday. She replied that she would not “stand in the way” of such investments, but said that they needed to be vetted and called for more disclosure and “transparency.”
The fact is that Hillary Clinton is totally unable to be objective on this key question of our national financial sovereignty because she and her husband have been so compromised by their financial dealings with the very countries at issue in the decision.
Should the Saudi monarchy be permitted to purchase an important equity position in some of America’s leading banks? How can Hillary be objective when the very same monarchy donated $10 million to the Clinton Library and Foundation?
Should the UAE be allowed in? How can Hillary decide fairly when Bill — and therefore herself — have been getting a reported $10 million per year from a fund that administers the investments of the Emir of Dubai, the largest component state in the UAE?
The Dubai Ports deal compromised our national security by putting key points of entry in that nation’s control. But the infusion of capital and the acquisition of equity in our key banks has the potential to make that encroachment on our sovereignty seem piddling by comparison.
Neither Dubai nor Saudi Arabia would be permitted to contribute to Hillary’s campaign. Foreigners are not allowed to do so, precisely to avoid having potential office holders compromised by gratitude for their financial support. But these nations have used the porous ethics of the Clinton family to acquire positions of massive influence by making contributions, not to her campaign, but to her personal bank account — either through Bill or through the Library and Foundation, which the Clintons directly control. The extent of the influence their millions must buy with a family only recently, according to Hillary, in the “middle class” must be huge.
And it is for exactly this kind of situation that the Clintons should be required to divulge the extent of their involvement with foreign interests and exactly how much money their personal bank accounts and their Library/Foundation have received. (The Saudi donation to the Library and Foundation was only discovered by the New York Times when the information was inadvertently posted on the Library’s Web site. Soon after the story appeared, it was taken down. The Clintons refuse to reveal the donors to the Library or the related Foundation.) Hillary and Bill have also refused to release their income tax returns, despite the fact that Bill willingly released his when he was running for president.
Why hasn’t Barack Obama or John Edwards even mentioned this issue? Their attacks on Hillary’s links to lobbyists and other special interests are usually painted with a broad brush. But the journey of America’s banks abroad in search of a bailout makes this specific conflict a key question of policy and highly relevant to their campaigns. What better illustration could one have of Hillary’s conflicts of interest than this one?
Friday, January 18, 2008
MCCAIN'S WIFE LIKELY WON'T BE PROSECUTED
MCCAIN'S WIFE LIKELY WON'T BE PROSECUTED
STOLE DRUGS FROM CHARITY
Published on Tuesday, August 23, 1994
© 1994 The Arizona Republic
By Martin Van Der Werf and Susan Leonard, The Arizona Republic
Cindy McCain apparently won't be prosecuted for stealing painkillers from her charity, but the wife of the U.S. senator from Arizona still faces a civil lawsuit filed by a former employee whose tip led to an investigation of her by the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The fired employee, Thomas Gosinski, in turn, is being investigated for suspected extortion by the Maricopa County Attorney's Office at the request of McCain's lawyer.
''This is a shakedown,'' McCain's attorney, John Dowd wrote in asking the county attorney to pursue the extortion allegation.
McCain admitted in a series of media interviews Monday that she became addicted to the painkillers Percocet and Vicodin. She said she used the drugs from 1989 to 1992 and acknowledged that she had stolen some pills from the American Voluntary Medical Team, a charitable organization of which she is president.
Gosinski's lawsuit alleges that McCain, wife of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., ordered him to conceal ''improper'' acts and ''misrepresent facts in a judicial proceeding.''
Gosinski, 35, worked as the fund-raising director for the American Voluntary Medical Team from September 1991 to January 1993.
Investigative documents released Monday by County Attorney Rick Romley after a public-records request from The Arizona Republic contain a letter from Gosinski's former attorney, Stanley Lubin, offering to settle the lawsuit for a quarter of a million dollars.
Although the language in the lawsuit is vague, with no mention of drugs, the settlement proposal addressed to Cindy McCain states, ''It is clear that you made it appear that Mr. Gosinski was ordering the drugs, many of which were controlled narcotics, in an effort to hide your personal use of them.''
The letter also states that Gosinski ''has done what he could to keep the sensitive matters from exposure.''
Dowd called the offer extortion, and he asked Romley to investigate. The case is pending.
Lubin said Monday night that his letter was nothing more than a standard settlement offer and that he finds Dowd's actions offensive.
''If Dowd claims my letter constitutes extortion, then he is a flat out liar,'' Lubin said. ''We were trying to settle a potential piece of litigation that would have been very embarrassing and that had substantial merit. I always make that kind of effort to settle out of court.''
Lubin said that he never expected to actually collect $250,000 from Cindy McCain and added that it's common for lawyers to ask for more than they actually expect.
''I made it very clear to Dowd that we were prepared to settle for a lot less,'' he said.
McCain's spokesman, Jay Smith, said that when she refused to settle, Gosinski tipped off the Drug Enforcement Administration, which began its investigation in January.
Smith said the McCains will fight the lawsuit, and there will be no efforts to settle it.
Gosinski refused to comment Monday night.
Refuses interview
Cindy McCain refused to be interviewed by The Republic, but issued a statement saying she began taking painkillers in 1989 after back surgery.
''I occasionally supplemented my supply by taking extra prescription drugs which were obtained by the American Voluntary Medical Team,'' her statement said.
McCain's medical team, founded in 1988, flies doctors to areas around the world where medical help is needed, distributing drugs and performing emergency medical procedures.
McCain told her husband about her addiction in January.
She granted selective interviews about her drug addiction after receiving an ''agreement'' Wednesday that she would not be prosecuted, Smith said.
That agreement was signed by the U.S. Attorney's Office for Arizona, which had been investigating the allegations in tandem with the DEA.
Virginia Mathis, chief assistant U.S. attorney for Arizona, said she could not confirm that there was an investigation. However, she specifically denied that McCain had completed a diversion program designed to avoid prosecution. McCain told the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson that she had completed such a program.
The program, called ''deferred prosecution,'' usually lasts 18 months and involves non-violent offenders with no record who are willing to pay full restitution.
Romley's report indicates McCain's drug problem was known by some workers for the charity. Gosinski made jokes about her moods depending on whether he thought she had taken drugs that day, the report says.
According to Romley's records, the team obtained drugs through a doctor who wrote prescriptions using employees' names, including Gosinski's.
Dr. John Johnson, medical director for McCain's charity, told a county attorney's investigator that although he knew it was improper, he had written prescriptions in the names of Gosinski and two other employees of the charity without their knowledge.
He also wrote personal prescriptions for Percocet for McCain, and she had her nanny pick up the presciptions at his home, the investigator reported.
Johnson also told the investigator that McCain kept all of the narcotic drugs in her personal luggage during overseas flights.
McCain said the drugs ''took control of me sometime during the summer of 1992.'' That period was especially difficult, Smith said, because John McCain's Senate re-election campaign ''was heating up, and she had to relive the Keating hearings.''
Keating ordeal
John McCain was one of five senators who were the subject of hearings by the Senate Ethics Committee in late 1990 and early 1991 about their relations with Charles H Keating Jr., former owner of Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, the largest S&L to go bankrupt in the wave of bankruptcies that struck the industry in the late 1980s.
McCain was rebuked by the Ethics Committee for advocating in Keating's behalf after accepting large contributions from him and his co-workers.
Cindy McCain became involved in the investigation because she could not find receipts showing that she and her husband had reimbursed the Keatings for the cost of flying on a corporate jet to a Keating vacation home in the Bahamas. That became a focus of the hearings.
McCain said she quit taking the drugs ''cold turkey'' in the fall of 1992 after being approached by her parents, multimillionaire liquor distributor Jim Hensley and his wife, Smitty, who asked her about her ''erratic behavior.''
McCain said she briefly relied on painkillers again while in the hospital in January 1993 after a hysterectomy. Since then, she has been drug-free, she said in her statement.
Gosinski alleges in his lawsuit that he was fired in January 1993, after being asked ''on numerous occasions'' to ''engage in acts that were improper.''
The acts are not detailed in the lawsuit, but it says that Gosinski ''was responsible for the maintenance of certain sensitive records and the overall operation and integrity of the organization.''
Slander, libel alleged
Gosinski alleges that McCain wrongly terminated him and engaged in libel and slander to keep him from getting another job.
''She has engaged in this conduct in order to gain retribution for his (Gosinski's) refusal to misrepresent facts in a judicial proceeding and to prevent him from providing full and truthful information in a federal proceeding concerning personal matters in which she is involved,'' the lawsuit says.
It is unclear what judicial proceeding Gosinski is referring to in his lawsuit where he alleges he was told to lie. All references to it are redacted from the records released by the county attorney's office.
Kathy Walker, director of operations for the charity, said she heard Gosinski say after a meeting that ''he would blackmail Cindy McCain if he was ever fired,'' according to the county attorney's investigation.
Dowd met with Gosinski on May 4. He and other McCain lawyers repeatedly asked Gosinski to document his allegations, and Gosinski refused.
Gosinski's lawsuit seeks unspecified damages. It has been assigned to a judge but is listed as ''not active'' in county court files.
McCain 'wanted to talk'
McCain has wanted to talk publicly about her addiction for weeks, Smith said, but had been precluded from doing so by the U.S. Attorney's Office, who thought their investigation ''might be impeded if she went public.''
Smith denied that McCain's public admissions had anything to do with Gosinski's lawsuit or the possibility that news organizations might break the news of her addiction and drug thefts. However, he said, the news was bound to leak out. McCain entered a treatment program earlier this year at The Meadows in Wickenburg and attends Narcotics Anonymous meetings twice a week.
Percocet and Vicodin contain acetominophen, a non-aspirin pain reliever available over the counter, and artificial codeine, a stronger, addictive, pain reliever.
John McCain issued a statement Monday saying he is ''extremely proud of Cindy's courageous battle to recover from her health problem.''
''In addition to Cindy's serious back pain, I have no doubt that the inevitable ups and downs of my political career have been rough on her,'' he said.
see more on cindy at..............
http://www.concentric.net/~ronsm/cindy_mccain.html
STOLE DRUGS FROM CHARITY
Published on Tuesday, August 23, 1994
© 1994 The Arizona Republic
By Martin Van Der Werf and Susan Leonard, The Arizona Republic
Cindy McCain apparently won't be prosecuted for stealing painkillers from her charity, but the wife of the U.S. senator from Arizona still faces a civil lawsuit filed by a former employee whose tip led to an investigation of her by the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The fired employee, Thomas Gosinski, in turn, is being investigated for suspected extortion by the Maricopa County Attorney's Office at the request of McCain's lawyer.
''This is a shakedown,'' McCain's attorney, John Dowd wrote in asking the county attorney to pursue the extortion allegation.
McCain admitted in a series of media interviews Monday that she became addicted to the painkillers Percocet and Vicodin. She said she used the drugs from 1989 to 1992 and acknowledged that she had stolen some pills from the American Voluntary Medical Team, a charitable organization of which she is president.
Gosinski's lawsuit alleges that McCain, wife of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., ordered him to conceal ''improper'' acts and ''misrepresent facts in a judicial proceeding.''
Gosinski, 35, worked as the fund-raising director for the American Voluntary Medical Team from September 1991 to January 1993.
Investigative documents released Monday by County Attorney Rick Romley after a public-records request from The Arizona Republic contain a letter from Gosinski's former attorney, Stanley Lubin, offering to settle the lawsuit for a quarter of a million dollars.
Although the language in the lawsuit is vague, with no mention of drugs, the settlement proposal addressed to Cindy McCain states, ''It is clear that you made it appear that Mr. Gosinski was ordering the drugs, many of which were controlled narcotics, in an effort to hide your personal use of them.''
The letter also states that Gosinski ''has done what he could to keep the sensitive matters from exposure.''
Dowd called the offer extortion, and he asked Romley to investigate. The case is pending.
Lubin said Monday night that his letter was nothing more than a standard settlement offer and that he finds Dowd's actions offensive.
''If Dowd claims my letter constitutes extortion, then he is a flat out liar,'' Lubin said. ''We were trying to settle a potential piece of litigation that would have been very embarrassing and that had substantial merit. I always make that kind of effort to settle out of court.''
Lubin said that he never expected to actually collect $250,000 from Cindy McCain and added that it's common for lawyers to ask for more than they actually expect.
''I made it very clear to Dowd that we were prepared to settle for a lot less,'' he said.
McCain's spokesman, Jay Smith, said that when she refused to settle, Gosinski tipped off the Drug Enforcement Administration, which began its investigation in January.
Smith said the McCains will fight the lawsuit, and there will be no efforts to settle it.
Gosinski refused to comment Monday night.
Refuses interview
Cindy McCain refused to be interviewed by The Republic, but issued a statement saying she began taking painkillers in 1989 after back surgery.
''I occasionally supplemented my supply by taking extra prescription drugs which were obtained by the American Voluntary Medical Team,'' her statement said.
McCain's medical team, founded in 1988, flies doctors to areas around the world where medical help is needed, distributing drugs and performing emergency medical procedures.
McCain told her husband about her addiction in January.
She granted selective interviews about her drug addiction after receiving an ''agreement'' Wednesday that she would not be prosecuted, Smith said.
That agreement was signed by the U.S. Attorney's Office for Arizona, which had been investigating the allegations in tandem with the DEA.
Virginia Mathis, chief assistant U.S. attorney for Arizona, said she could not confirm that there was an investigation. However, she specifically denied that McCain had completed a diversion program designed to avoid prosecution. McCain told the Arizona Daily Star in Tucson that she had completed such a program.
The program, called ''deferred prosecution,'' usually lasts 18 months and involves non-violent offenders with no record who are willing to pay full restitution.
Romley's report indicates McCain's drug problem was known by some workers for the charity. Gosinski made jokes about her moods depending on whether he thought she had taken drugs that day, the report says.
According to Romley's records, the team obtained drugs through a doctor who wrote prescriptions using employees' names, including Gosinski's.
Dr. John Johnson, medical director for McCain's charity, told a county attorney's investigator that although he knew it was improper, he had written prescriptions in the names of Gosinski and two other employees of the charity without their knowledge.
He also wrote personal prescriptions for Percocet for McCain, and she had her nanny pick up the presciptions at his home, the investigator reported.
Johnson also told the investigator that McCain kept all of the narcotic drugs in her personal luggage during overseas flights.
McCain said the drugs ''took control of me sometime during the summer of 1992.'' That period was especially difficult, Smith said, because John McCain's Senate re-election campaign ''was heating up, and she had to relive the Keating hearings.''
Keating ordeal
John McCain was one of five senators who were the subject of hearings by the Senate Ethics Committee in late 1990 and early 1991 about their relations with Charles H Keating Jr., former owner of Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, the largest S&L to go bankrupt in the wave of bankruptcies that struck the industry in the late 1980s.
McCain was rebuked by the Ethics Committee for advocating in Keating's behalf after accepting large contributions from him and his co-workers.
Cindy McCain became involved in the investigation because she could not find receipts showing that she and her husband had reimbursed the Keatings for the cost of flying on a corporate jet to a Keating vacation home in the Bahamas. That became a focus of the hearings.
McCain said she quit taking the drugs ''cold turkey'' in the fall of 1992 after being approached by her parents, multimillionaire liquor distributor Jim Hensley and his wife, Smitty, who asked her about her ''erratic behavior.''
McCain said she briefly relied on painkillers again while in the hospital in January 1993 after a hysterectomy. Since then, she has been drug-free, she said in her statement.
Gosinski alleges in his lawsuit that he was fired in January 1993, after being asked ''on numerous occasions'' to ''engage in acts that were improper.''
The acts are not detailed in the lawsuit, but it says that Gosinski ''was responsible for the maintenance of certain sensitive records and the overall operation and integrity of the organization.''
Slander, libel alleged
Gosinski alleges that McCain wrongly terminated him and engaged in libel and slander to keep him from getting another job.
''She has engaged in this conduct in order to gain retribution for his (Gosinski's) refusal to misrepresent facts in a judicial proceeding and to prevent him from providing full and truthful information in a federal proceeding concerning personal matters in which she is involved,'' the lawsuit says.
It is unclear what judicial proceeding Gosinski is referring to in his lawsuit where he alleges he was told to lie. All references to it are redacted from the records released by the county attorney's office.
Kathy Walker, director of operations for the charity, said she heard Gosinski say after a meeting that ''he would blackmail Cindy McCain if he was ever fired,'' according to the county attorney's investigation.
Dowd met with Gosinski on May 4. He and other McCain lawyers repeatedly asked Gosinski to document his allegations, and Gosinski refused.
Gosinski's lawsuit seeks unspecified damages. It has been assigned to a judge but is listed as ''not active'' in county court files.
McCain 'wanted to talk'
McCain has wanted to talk publicly about her addiction for weeks, Smith said, but had been precluded from doing so by the U.S. Attorney's Office, who thought their investigation ''might be impeded if she went public.''
Smith denied that McCain's public admissions had anything to do with Gosinski's lawsuit or the possibility that news organizations might break the news of her addiction and drug thefts. However, he said, the news was bound to leak out. McCain entered a treatment program earlier this year at The Meadows in Wickenburg and attends Narcotics Anonymous meetings twice a week.
Percocet and Vicodin contain acetominophen, a non-aspirin pain reliever available over the counter, and artificial codeine, a stronger, addictive, pain reliever.
John McCain issued a statement Monday saying he is ''extremely proud of Cindy's courageous battle to recover from her health problem.''
''In addition to Cindy's serious back pain, I have no doubt that the inevitable ups and downs of my political career have been rough on her,'' he said.
see more on cindy at..............
http://www.concentric.net/~ronsm/cindy_mccain.html
Thursday, January 17, 2008
picture Mccain on a windsurfing board, flipping yes/no on tax cuts,
picture Mccain on a windsurfing board, flipping yes/no on tax cuts,
He voted against the Bush tax cuts now he wants them.........
He voted against the Bush tax cuts now he wants them.........
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
ICE's Julie Myers at work. 200k deporting inmates a year.............?
ICE's Julie Myers at work, deporting 200k inmates a year.............?
The object is to deport illegals directly from the hundreds
of state and federal jail facilities after they serve their prison sentence
DOBBS: Among the top issues for voters in Michigan as throughout the nation,
illegal immigration. Immigrations and custom enforcement today, taking steps
to empty our jails of some 200,000 illegal alien convicts and to send
them home. But as Kitty Pilgrim now reports, this may be only a
fraction of the illegal aliens in this country's prisons.
KITTY PILGRIM, CNN CORRESPONDENT: A typical prison population. Which ones are illegal aliens? The answer is, federal officials don't know how many illegal aliens are in U.S. prisons. But now I.C.E. is boosting efforts to try to find out and is in process of identifying and start deportation proceedings on 200,000 inmates, both illegal aliens and immigrants who lost their legal status because they committed a crime.
JULIE MYERS, IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT: Well, we're expanding our program. We're prioritizing the high-risk institutions and Congress gave us $200 million to make sure that we're identifying aliens in all facilities.
PILGRIM: The object is to deport illegals directly from the hundreds
of state and federal facilities after they serve their prison sentence
rather than the old way of releasing them onto the streets and then starting deportation hearings. The so-called criminal alien program is gaining ground.
In fiscal 2006, I.C.E. filed charges against 57,000 illegals to start the deportation process. That climbed to 164,000 in 2007 and an estimated 200,000 in fiscal 2008.
Some say more resources are needed to undertake this properly.
MICHAEL CUTLER, CENTER FOR IMMIGRATION STUDIES: We don't have the tools
to properly identify many of these criminal aliens, I suspect.
Not all of them are going to jump up and be honest with you and
tell you that they're here illegal or deportable aliens.
PILGRIM: Once the removable process is started, many won't be deported for years, but at least prison authorities will know not to release them back into society.
see actual Lou Dobbs at www.loudobbs.com of CNN fame
www.mccainalert.com
The object is to deport illegals directly from the hundreds
of state and federal jail facilities after they serve their prison sentence
DOBBS: Among the top issues for voters in Michigan as throughout the nation,
illegal immigration. Immigrations and custom enforcement today, taking steps
to empty our jails of some 200,000 illegal alien convicts and to send
them home. But as Kitty Pilgrim now reports, this may be only a
fraction of the illegal aliens in this country's prisons.
KITTY PILGRIM, CNN CORRESPONDENT: A typical prison population. Which ones are illegal aliens? The answer is, federal officials don't know how many illegal aliens are in U.S. prisons. But now I.C.E. is boosting efforts to try to find out and is in process of identifying and start deportation proceedings on 200,000 inmates, both illegal aliens and immigrants who lost their legal status because they committed a crime.
JULIE MYERS, IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT: Well, we're expanding our program. We're prioritizing the high-risk institutions and Congress gave us $200 million to make sure that we're identifying aliens in all facilities.
PILGRIM: The object is to deport illegals directly from the hundreds
of state and federal facilities after they serve their prison sentence
rather than the old way of releasing them onto the streets and then starting deportation hearings. The so-called criminal alien program is gaining ground.
In fiscal 2006, I.C.E. filed charges against 57,000 illegals to start the deportation process. That climbed to 164,000 in 2007 and an estimated 200,000 in fiscal 2008.
Some say more resources are needed to undertake this properly.
MICHAEL CUTLER, CENTER FOR IMMIGRATION STUDIES: We don't have the tools
to properly identify many of these criminal aliens, I suspect.
Not all of them are going to jump up and be honest with you and
tell you that they're here illegal or deportable aliens.
PILGRIM: Once the removable process is started, many won't be deported for years, but at least prison authorities will know not to release them back into society.
see actual Lou Dobbs at www.loudobbs.com of CNN fame
www.mccainalert.com
Former POW John Mccain Fights Public Access to his POW/MIA Files
Former POW John Mccain Fights Public Access to POW/MIA Files
The War Secrets Senator John McCain Hides
Former POW Fights Public Access to POW/MIA Files
By Sydney Schanberg
NEW YORK (APBnews.com) The voters who were drawn to John S. McCain in his run for the Republican presidential nomination this year often cited, as the core of his appeal, his openness and blunt candor and willingness to admit past lapses and release documents that other senators often hold back. These qualities also seemed to endear McCain to the campaign press corps, many of whom wrote about how refreshing it was to travel on the McCain campaign bus, The Straight Talk Express, and observe a maverick speaking his mind rather than a traditional candidate given to obfuscation and spin.
But there was one subject that was off-limits, a subject the Arizona senator almost never brings up and has never been open about his long-time opposition to releasing documents and information about American prisoners of war in Vietnam and the missing in action who have still not been accounted for. Since McCain himself, a downed Navy pilot, was a prisoner in Hanoi for 5 1/2 years, his staunch resistance to laying open the POW/MIA records has baffled colleagues and others who have followed his career. Critics say his anti-disclosure campaign, in close cooperation with the Pentagon and the intelligence community, has been successful. Literally thousands of documents that would otherwise have been declassified long ago have been legislated into secrecy.
For example, all the Pentagon debriefings of the prisoners who returned from Vietnam are now classified and closed to the public under a statute enacted in the 1990s with McCain’s backing. He says this is to protect the privacy of former POWs and gives it as his reason for not making public his own debriefing.
But the law allows a returned prisoner to view his own file or to designate another person to view it. APBnews.com has repeatedly asked the senator for an interview for this article and for permission to view his debriefing documents. He has not responded. His office did recently send APBnews.com an e-mail, referring to a favorable article about the senator in the Jan. 1 issue of Newsweek. In the article, the reporter, Michael Isikoff, says that he was allowed to review McCain’s debriefing report and that it contained nothing incriminating although in a phone interview Isikoff acknowledged that there were redactions in the document. Isikoff declined to say who showed him the document, but APBnews.com has learned it was McCain.
Many Vietnam veterans and former POWs have fumed at McCain for keeping these and other wartime files sealed up. His explanation, offered freely in Senate hearings and floor speeches, is that no one has been proven still alive and that releasing the files would revive painful memories and cause needless emotional stress to former prisoners, their families and the families of MIAs still unaccounted for. But what if some of these returned prisoners, as has always been the case at the conclusion of wars, reveal information to their debriefing officers about other prisoners believed still held in captivity? What justification is there for filtering such information through the Pentagon rather than allowing access to source materials? For instance, debriefings from returning Korean war POWs, available in full to the American public, have provided both citizens and government investigators with important information about other Americans who went missing in that conflict.
Would not most families of missing men, no matter how emotionally drained, want to know? And would they not also want to know what the government was doing to rescue their husbands and sons? Hundreds of MIA families have for years been questioning if concern for their feelings is the real reason for the secrecy.
Prisoners left behind
A smaller number of former POWs, MIA families and veterans have suggested there is something especially damning about McCain that the senator wants to keep hidden. Without release of the files, such accusations must be viewed as unsubstantiated speculation. The main reason, however, for seeking these files is to find out if there is any information in the debriefings, or in other MIA documents that McCain and the Pentagon have kept sealed, about how many prisoners were held back by North Vietnam after the Paris peace treaty was signed in January 1973. The defense and intelligence establishment has long resisted the declassification of critical records on this subject. McCain has been the main congressional force behind this effort.
The prisoner return in 1973 saw 591 Americans repatriated by North Vietnam. The problem was that the U.S. intelligence list of men believed to be alive at that time in captivity in Vietnam, Laos and possibly across the border in southern China and in the Soviet Union was much larger.
Possibly hundreds of men larger. The State Department stated publicly in 1973 that intelligence data showed the prisoner list to be starkly incomplete. For example, only nine of the 591 returnees came out of Laos, though experts in U.S. military intelligence listed 311 men as missing in that Hanoi-run country alone, and their field reports indicated that many of those men were probably still alive. Hanoi said it was returning all the prisoners it had. President Nixon, on March 29, 1973, seconded that claim, telling the nation on television: All of our American POWs are on their way home. This discrepancy has never been acknowledged or explained by official Washington. Over the years in Washington, McCain, at times almost single-handedly, has pushed through Pentagon-desired legislation to make it impossible or much harder for the public to acquire POW/MIA information and much easier for the defense bureaucracy to keep it hidden.
The Truth Bill
In 1989, 11 members of the House of Representatives introduced a measure they called The Truth Bill. A brief and simple document, it said: [The] head of each department or agency which holds or receives any records and information, including live-sighting reports, which have been correlated or possibly correlated to United States personnel listed as prisoner of war or missing in action from World War II, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam conflict shall make available to the public all such records and information held or received by that department or agency. In addition, the Department of Defense shall make available to the public with its records and information a complete listing of United States personnel classified as prisoner of war, missing in action, or killed in action (body not returned) from World War II, the Korean conflict, and the Vietnam conflict.
Opposed by Pentagon
Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon, The Truth Bill got nowhere. It was reintroduced in the next Congress in 1991 and again disappeared. Then, suddenly, out of the Senate, birthed by the Arizona senator, a new piece of legislation emerged. It was called The McCain Bill. This measure turned The Truth Bill on its head. It created a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the available documents could emerge. And it became law. So restrictive were its provisions that one clause actually said the Pentagon didn’t even have to inform the public when it received intelligence that Americans were alive in captivity.
First, it decreed that only three categories of information could be released, i.e., information … that may pertain to the location, treatment, or condition of unaccounted-for personnel from the Vietnam War. (This was later amended in 1995 and 1996 to include the Cold War and the Korean conflict.) If information is received about anything other than location, treatment or condition, under this statute, which was enacted in December 199l, it does not get disclosed.
Second, before such information can be released to the public, permission must be granted by the primary next of kin, or PNOK. In the case of Vietnam, letters were sent by the Department of Defense to the 2,266 PNOK. More than 600 declined consent (including 243 who failed to respond, considered under the law to be a no ).
Hurdles and limitations
Finally, in addition to these hurdles and limitations, the McCain act does not specifically order the declassification of the information. Further, it provides the Defense Department with other justifications for withholding documents. One such clause says that if the information may compromise the safety of any United States personnel … who remain not accounted for but who may still be alive in captivity, then the Secretary [of Defense] may withhold that record or other information from the disclosure otherwise required by this section.
Boiled down, the preceding paragraph means that the Defense Department is not obligated to tell the public about prisoners believed alive in captivity and what efforts are being made to rescue them. It only has to notify the White House and the intelligence committees in the Senate and House. The committees are forbidden under law from releasing such information.
At the same time, the McCain act is now being used to deny access to other sorts of records. For instance, part of a recent APBnews.com Freedom of Information Act request for the records of a mutiny on merchant marine vessel in the 1970s was rejected by a Defense Department official who cited the McCain act. Similarly, requests for information about Americans missing in the Korean War and declared dead for the last 45 years have been denied by officials who reference the McCain statute. (Read a denial letter.)
Another bill gutted in 1996
And then there is the Missing Service Personnel Act, which McCain succeeded in gutting in 1996. A year before, the act had been strengthened, with bipartisan support, to compel the Pentagon to deploy more resources with greater speed to locate and rescue missing men. The measure imposed strict reporting requirements.
McCain amended the heart out of the statute. For example, the 1995 version required a unit commander to report to his theater commander within two days that a person was missing and describe what rescue and recovery efforts were underway. The McCain amendments allowed 10 days to pass before a report had to be made.
In the 1995 act, the theater commander, after receiving the MIA report, would have 14 days to report to his Cabinet secretary in Washington. His report had to certify that all necessary actions were being taken and all appropriate assets were being used to resolve the status of the missing person. This section was stricken from the act, replaced with language that made the Cabinet secretary, not the theater commander, the recipient of the report from the field. All the certification requirements also were stricken. ‘Turn commanders into clerks’ This, said a McCain memo, transfers the bureaucracy involved out of the field to Washington. He argued that the original legislation, if left intact, would accomplish nothing but create new jobs for lawyers and turn military commanders into clerks.
In response, the backers of the original statute cited the Pentagon’s stained record on MIA’s and argued that military history had shown that speed of action is critical to the chances of recovering a missing man. Moving the bureaucracy to Washington, they said, was merely a way to sweep the issue under a rug.
Chilling effect cited
One final evisceration in the law was McCain’s removal of all its enforcement teeth. The original act provided for criminal penalties for anyone, such as military bureaucrats in Washington, who destroy or cover up or withhold from families any information about a missing man. McCain erased this part of the law. He said the penalties would have a chilling effect on the Pentagon’s ability to recruit personnel for its POW/MIA office.
McCain does not deal lightly with those who disagree with him on any of these issues or who suggest that the evidence indeed shows that a significant number of prisoners were alive and cached away as future bargaining chips when he came home in the group of 591 released in 1973.
Over the years, he has regularly vilified any group or person who keeps trying to pry out more evidence about MIAs. He calls them hoaxers and charlatans and conspiracy theorists. He decries the bizarre rantings of the MIA hobbyists and describes them as individuals primarily who make their living off of keeping the issue alive. Before he died last year of leukemia, retired Col. Ted Guy, a highly admired POW and one of the most dogged resisters in the camps, wrote an angry open letter to the senator in an MIA newsletter. In it, he said of McCain’s stream of insults: John, does this include Senator Bob Smith and other concerned elected officials? Does this include the families of the missing where there is overwhelming evidence that their loved ones were ‘last known alive? ’ Does this include some of your fellow POWs?
Sightings dismissed
McCain has said again and again that he has seen no credible evidence that more than a tiny handful of men might have been alive in captivity after the official prison return in 1973. He dismisses all of the subsequent radio intercepts, live sightings, satellite photos, CIA reports, defector information, recovered enemy documents and reports of ransom demands thousands and thousands of pieces of information indicating live captives as meaningless. He has even described these intelligence reports as the rough equivalent of UFO and alien sightings.
In Congress, colleagues and staffers who have seen him erupt in the open and, more often, in closed meetings profess themselves confounded by his behavior. Insisting upon anonymity so as not to invite one of his verbal assaults, they say they have no easy way to explain why a former POW would work so hard and so persistently to keep POW/MIA information from coming out. Typical is the comment of one congressional veteran who has watched McCain over many years: This is a man not at peace with himself. McCain’s sense of disgrace.
Some McCain watchers searching for answers point to his recently published best-selling autobiography, Faith of My Fathers, half of which is devoted to his years as a prisoner. In the book, he says he felt badly throughout his captivity because he knew he was being treated more leniently than his fellow POWs owing to his propaganda value as the son of Adm. John S. McCain II, who was then the CINCPAC commander in chief of all U.S. forces in the Pacific region, including Vietnam. (His captors considered him a prize catch and nicknamed him the Crown Prince. )
Also in the book, the Arizona Senator repeatedly expresses guilt and disgrace at having broken under torture and given the North Vietnamese a taped confession, broadcast over the camp loudspeakers, saying he was a war criminal who had, among other acts, bombed a school. I felt faithless and couldn’t control my despair, he writes. He writes, revealing that he made two half-hearted attempts at suicide. Most tellingly, he said he lived in dread that his father would find out. I still wince, he says, when I recall wondering if my father had heard of my disgrace.
After McCain returned home, he says he told his father about the confession, but never discussed it at length. The admiral, McCain says, didn’t indicate he had heard anything about it before.
McCain’s father died in 1981. McCain writes: I only recently learned that the tape … had been broadcast outside the prison and had come to the attention of my father.
McCain wasn’t alone it’s well-known that a sizeable percentage of prisoners of war will break down under torture. In fact, many of his supporters view McCain’s prison travails as evidence of his overall heroism. Fears unpublished details?
But how would McCain’s forced confession alone explain his endless campaign against releasing MIA/POW information?
Some veterans and other McCain watchers have speculated that McCain’s mortification, given his family’s proud military tradition (his grandfather was also an admiral), was so severe that it continues to haunt him and make him fear any opening up of information that could revive previously unpublished details of the era, including his own nagging history.
Another question that defies easy explanation is why there has never been any significant public outcry over the POWs who didn’t come home or about the machinations of public officials like McCain who carefully wove a blanket of secrecy around this issue. It can only be understood in the context of what the Vietnam War did to the American mind.
Forgetting the Vietnam War
It was the longest war in our history and the only one in which we accepted defeat and brought our troops home. It had roiled the country more than any conflict but the Civil War to the point where almost everyone, regardless of their politics, wanted to get away from anything that reminded them of this bloody failure. Only a small band of Americans, led by Vietnam veterans and MIA families, kept asking for more information about the missing men and demanding that the government keep its promise to do everything possible to bring them home. Everyone else seemed to be running away from all things Vietnam.
Knowledgeable observers note that it’s quite possible that Nixon, leading the country’s withdrawal, accepted the peace treaty of Jan. 27, 1973, while telling himself that somehow he would negotiate the release of the remaining POWs later. But when Congress refused to provide the $3 billion to $4 billion in proposed national development reparations that National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger had dangled as a carrot to Hanoi, the prospects for the abandoned men began to unravel.
Observers also point out that over the years that followed, Washington continued to reject paying what it branded as ransom money and so, across six presidencies, including the present one, the issue of POWs who may have been left behind remained unacknowledged by the White House and the Pentagon. Hanoi refused to correct the impression that all the prisoners had been returned, and Washington, for its part, refused to admit that it had known about abandoned POWs from the beginning.
Mainstream press indifferent
Of course, the government and many mainstream scholars reject this theory. And whether any such prisoners remain alive to this day is impossible for the outsider to know. Intelligence sources privately express the belief that most of the men had either died or been executed by the early 1990s. Presumably, these sources say, the POW’s lost their bargaining value to Hanoi as time passed and ransom dollars never materialized. Eventually Hanoi began seeking another path to the money the renewal of relations with Washington. Diplomatic ties were restored by President Clinton in 1994, and American economic investment quickly followed.
One factor in the nation’s indifference to the POWs was the stance of the national press. From the very start to the present, the mainstream media showed little interest. With just a smattering of exceptions, the journalistic community, like the rest of the country, ran away from the story. During the war, thousands of American journalists poured into Vietnam in shifts; now only a handful cover the country, most of them filing business stories about Nike and other conglomerates opening up factories to avail themselves of the cheap labor.
Even reporters who had covered the war came to view the MIA story, in the years afterward, as a concoction of the far right. Without doing much, if any, first-hand reporting, such as digging into the available documents in the National Archives, nearly all these journalists dismissed the MIA story as unfounded.
Generated a hero aura
In McCain’s recently suspended campaign for the presidency, it was almost as if, in the press’s eyes, he was to be treated differently and quite gingerly because of the hero aura generated by his POW experience. None of his political opponents ever dared criticize him for his legislative history on withholding POW information, and the press never brought itself to be direct enough to even question him on the issue.
It’s not that he didn’t give reporters plenty of openings to ask the right Vietnam questions. For one thing, he used his history as a Vietnam prisoner as a constant campaign theme in his speeches. Rarely did he appear without a larger-than- life photo backdrop showing him in battle gear as a Navy pilot before he was shot down over Hanoi in 1967.
Here is a passage typical of the soft, even erroneous reporting on McCain this from a March 4 story in The New York Times: His most striking achievement came when he joined with another Vietnam veteran, Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, to puncture the myth that Vietnam continued holding American prisoners. The piece went on to speak with admiration about his concern over the prisoners-of-war issue but, tellingly, it offered no details.
Tepid veterans’ vote
The press corps, covering the state-by-state primary vote, made an assumption, based apparently on sentiment, that McCain, as the war hero, would capture the significant veterans’ vote by stunning margins. Actually, he didn’t capture it at all. He carried veterans only in the states that he won, like Michigan and New Hampshire, but was rejected by them in the larger number of states that he lost, like New York, Ohio and California. Added together, when the states were tallied up, the veterans’ vote went to George W. Bush.
The Washington press corps had gone openly soft once before on the prisoner issue, again benefiting McCain. That was in 1991-93, during the proceedings of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. McCain starred on that committee, working hand in hand with his new ally, Sen. John Kerry, the panel’s co-chairman, to play down voluminous evidence that sizeable numbers of men were still held alive after the prisoner return in 1973. One example: At the time of the committee’s hearings, the Pentagon had received more than 1,600 firsthand sightings of live American prisoners and nearly 14,000 secondhand reports. The intelligence officers who gathered these reports from refugees and other informants in the field described a large number of them as credible and so marked the reports. Some of the informants had been given lie-detector tests and passed.
But the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, after reviewing all the reports, concluded that they do not constitute evidence that men were still alive at the time.
McCain and Kerry endorsed the Pentagon’s findings. They also treated both the Pentagon and the CIA more as the committee’s partners than as objects of its inquiry. As one committee staff investigator said, in a memo preserved from the period: Speaking for the other investigators, I can say we are sick and tired of this investigation being controlled by those we are supposedly investigating.
McCain stood out because he always showed up for the committee hearings where witnesses were going to talk about specific pieces of evidence. He would belittle and berate these witnesses, questioning their patriotism and otherwise scoffing at their credibility. All of this is on record in the National Archives.
Confrontation with witness
One such witness was Dolores Apodaca Alfond, chairwoman of the National Alliance of Families, an all-volunteer MIA organization. Her pilot brother, Capt. Victor J. Apodaca, out of the Air Force Academy, was shot down over Dong Hoi, North Vietnam, in the early evening of June 8, 1967. At least one person in the two-man plane survived. Beeper signals from a pilot’s distress radio were picked up by overhead helicopters, but the cloud cover was too heavy to go in. Hanoi has recently turned over some bone fragments that are supposed to be Apodaca’s. The Pentagon first declared the fragments to be animal bones. But now it is telling the family verbally that they came from the pilot. But the Pentagon, for unexplained reasons, will not put this in writing, which means Apodaca is still unaccounted for. Also the Pentagon refuses to give Alfond a sample of the fragments so she can have testing done by an independent laboratory.
Alfond’s testimony, at a hearing of the POW/MIA committee Nov. 11, 1992, was revealing. She pleaded with the committee not to shut down in two months, as scheduled, because so much of its work was unfinished. Also, she was critical of the committee, and in particular Kerry and McCain, for having discredited the overhead satellite symbol pictures, arguing there is no way to be sure that the [distress] symbols were made by U.S. POWs. She also criticized them for similarly discounting data from special sensors, shaped like a large spike with an electronic pod and an antenna, that were airdropped to stick in the ground along the Ho Chi Minh trail.
These devices served as motion detectors, picking up passing convoys and other military movements, but they also had rescue capabilities. Specifically, someone on the ground a downed airman or a prisoner on a labor detail could manually enter data into the sensor pods. Alfond said the data from the sensor spikes, which was regularly gathered by Air Force jets flying overhead, had showed that a person or persons on the ground had manually entered into the sensors as U.S. pilots had been trained to do no less than 20 authenticator numbers that corresponded exactly to the classified authenticator numbers of 20 U.S. POWs who were lost in Laos.
Other than the panel’s second co-chairman, Sen. Bob Smith, R-N.H., not a single committee member attended this public hearing. But McCain, having been advised of Alfond’s testimony, suddenly rushed into the room to confront her. His face angry and his voice very loud, he accused her of making allegations that are patently and totally false and deceptive. Making a fist, he shook his index finger at her and said she had insulted an emissary to Vietnam sent by President Bush. He said she had insulted other MIA families with her remarks. And then he said, through clenched teeth: And I am sick and tired of you insulting mine and other people’s [patriotism] who happen to have different views than yours.
Brought to tears
By this time, tears were running down Alfond’s cheeks. She reached into her handbag for a handkerchief. She tried to speak: The family members have been waiting for years years! And now you’re shutting down. He kept interrupting her. She tried to say, through tears, that she had issued no insults. He kept talking over her words. He said she was accusing him and others of some conspiracy without proof, and some cover-up. She said she was merely seeking some answers. That is what I am asking. He ripped into her for using the word fiasco. She replied: The fiasco was the people that stepped out and said we have written the end, the final chapter to Vietnam. No one said that, he shouted. No one said what you are saying they said, Ms. Alfond. And then, his face flaming pink, he stalked out of the room, to shouts of disfavor from members of the audience.
As with most of McCain’s remarks to Alfond, the facts in his closing blast at her were incorrect. Less than three weeks earlier, on Oct. 23, 1992, in a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden, President Bush with John McCain standing beside him said: Today, finally, I am convinced that we can begin writing the last chapter in the Vietnam War.
The committee did indeed, as Alfond said they planned to do, shut down two months after the hearing.
Cannot discuss it
As for her description of the motion sensor evidence about prisoners in Laos, McCain’s response at the hearing was that this data was in a 1974 report that the committee had read but was still classified, so I cannot discuss it here. … We hope to get it declassified.
The question to the senator now is: What happened to that report and what happened to the pilots who belonged to those authenticator numbers? Intelligence sources in Washington say the report was never declassified. It became clear over the months of hearings and sparrings that the primary goal of the Kerry-McCain alliance was to clear the way for normalization of relations with Vietnam. They did it in two ways first, by regularly praising Hanoi for its cooperation in the search for information about the unaccounted-for prisoners and then by minimizing and suppressing the volume of evidence to the contrary that had been unearthed by the committee’s staff investigators.
Recasting the issue
Kerry and McCain also tried, at every opportunity, to recast the issue as a debate about how many men could still be alive today, instead of the real issue at stake: How many men were alive in 1973 after the 591 were returned? Although much evidence was kept out of the committee’s final report in January 1993, enough of it, albeit watered down by the committee’s majority, was inserted by the determined staff to demonstrate conclusively that all the prisoners had not come home. Still, if the reader didn’t plow through the entire 1,223-page report but scanned just the brief conclusions in the 43-page executive summary at the beginning, he or she would have found only a weak and pallid statement saying that there was evidence … that indicates the possibility of survival, at least for a small number after the repatriation of 1973. On page 468 of the report, McCain provided his own personal statement, saying that we found no compelling evidence to prove that Americans are alive in captivity today. There is some evidence though no proof to suggest only the possibility that a few Americans may have been kept behind after the end of American’s military involvement in Vietnam.
Two defense secretaries
And even these meager concessions were not voluntary. They had been forced by the sworn public testimony before the Senate committee of two former defense secretaries from the Nixon Administration, Melvin Laird and James Schlesinger. Both these men testified that they believed in 1973, from strong intelligence data, that a number of prisoners in Vietnam and Laos had not been returned. Their testimony has never been challenged. Schlesinger, before becoming defense secretary, had been the CIA director. During his committee appearance, Schlesinger was asked why Nixon would have accepted the prisoners being held back in 1973. He replied: One must assume that we had concluded that the bargaining position of the United States … was quite weak. We were anxious to get our troops out and we were not going to roil the waters … Then he was asked a very simple question. In your view, did we leave men behind? ‘Some were left behind’ I think that as of now, replied the former Pentagon secretary, that I can come to no other conclusion [that] … some were left behind. The press went along once again with the debunkers. The Schlesinger-Laird testimony, which seemed a bombshell, became but a one-day story in the nation’s major media. The press never followed it up to explore its implications. On Jan. 26, 1994, when a resolution ardently backed by McCain and Kerry came up in the Senate calling for the lifting of the two-decade-old economic embargo against Vietnam, some members in an effort to stall the measure tried to present new evidence about men left behind. McCain rose to his feet and, offering no rebuttal evidence of his own, proceeded to chide the professional malcontents, conspiracy mongers, con artists and dime-store Rambos who attend this issue. The resolution passed, 62-38. ‘Isolated Personnel’ These days, the Pentagon seems to be moving toward closing its POW/MIA books completely. In recent statements and reports, it has begun describing prisoners not as POWs but as IPs Isolated Personnel.
And in a 1999 booklet, the Pentagon said: By the end of the year 2004, we will have moved from the way the US government conducts the business of recovery and accounting [now] to an active program of loss prevention, immediate rescues, and rapid post-hostility accounting. More important, there seems to be no allocation of funds in 2004 for the task force that now conducts POW/MIA investigations, searches for remains and does archival research. As for McCain, he continues to stonewall on his own POW records. Through numerous phone calls, faxes and letters to his office, APBnews.com has been trying since late January to interview the Senator and get his permission to view his POW debriefing. The response has been that the senator has been occupied by his campaign schedule.
Call for openness and disclosure
During the campaign, McCain, who is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, had to address a controversy over queries he had made to the Commerce Department on behalf of a major campaign contributor. To deal with the press interest, he announced he was releasing all of his correspondence with the Commerce Department, not just the letters involving the one case. In addition, to show his full commitment to openness and disclosure, he called on every other government agency to release his communications with them. On Jan. 9 on the CBS program Face the Nation, he announced: Today, we are asking the federal government to release all correspondence that I’ve had with every government agency.
McCain’s staff has acknowledged that this request includes the Pentagon. But the Pentagon says it needs an official document from McCain designating a surrogate before it can show his debriefing report to anyone else. APBnews.com has repeatedly asked the senator for this waiver. He does not respond.
Sydney H. Schanberg is the editor of APBnews.com’s investigative unit. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his 1975 coverage of political and social chaos in Cambodia. His news reports and a best-selling book about his experiences in Southeast Asia became the basis for the Academy Award-winning film The Killing Fields.
http://www.vvof.org/mccain_hides.htm
The War Secrets Senator John McCain Hides
Former POW Fights Public Access to POW/MIA Files
By Sydney Schanberg
NEW YORK (APBnews.com) The voters who were drawn to John S. McCain in his run for the Republican presidential nomination this year often cited, as the core of his appeal, his openness and blunt candor and willingness to admit past lapses and release documents that other senators often hold back. These qualities also seemed to endear McCain to the campaign press corps, many of whom wrote about how refreshing it was to travel on the McCain campaign bus, The Straight Talk Express, and observe a maverick speaking his mind rather than a traditional candidate given to obfuscation and spin.
But there was one subject that was off-limits, a subject the Arizona senator almost never brings up and has never been open about his long-time opposition to releasing documents and information about American prisoners of war in Vietnam and the missing in action who have still not been accounted for. Since McCain himself, a downed Navy pilot, was a prisoner in Hanoi for 5 1/2 years, his staunch resistance to laying open the POW/MIA records has baffled colleagues and others who have followed his career. Critics say his anti-disclosure campaign, in close cooperation with the Pentagon and the intelligence community, has been successful. Literally thousands of documents that would otherwise have been declassified long ago have been legislated into secrecy.
For example, all the Pentagon debriefings of the prisoners who returned from Vietnam are now classified and closed to the public under a statute enacted in the 1990s with McCain’s backing. He says this is to protect the privacy of former POWs and gives it as his reason for not making public his own debriefing.
But the law allows a returned prisoner to view his own file or to designate another person to view it. APBnews.com has repeatedly asked the senator for an interview for this article and for permission to view his debriefing documents. He has not responded. His office did recently send APBnews.com an e-mail, referring to a favorable article about the senator in the Jan. 1 issue of Newsweek. In the article, the reporter, Michael Isikoff, says that he was allowed to review McCain’s debriefing report and that it contained nothing incriminating although in a phone interview Isikoff acknowledged that there were redactions in the document. Isikoff declined to say who showed him the document, but APBnews.com has learned it was McCain.
Many Vietnam veterans and former POWs have fumed at McCain for keeping these and other wartime files sealed up. His explanation, offered freely in Senate hearings and floor speeches, is that no one has been proven still alive and that releasing the files would revive painful memories and cause needless emotional stress to former prisoners, their families and the families of MIAs still unaccounted for. But what if some of these returned prisoners, as has always been the case at the conclusion of wars, reveal information to their debriefing officers about other prisoners believed still held in captivity? What justification is there for filtering such information through the Pentagon rather than allowing access to source materials? For instance, debriefings from returning Korean war POWs, available in full to the American public, have provided both citizens and government investigators with important information about other Americans who went missing in that conflict.
Would not most families of missing men, no matter how emotionally drained, want to know? And would they not also want to know what the government was doing to rescue their husbands and sons? Hundreds of MIA families have for years been questioning if concern for their feelings is the real reason for the secrecy.
Prisoners left behind
A smaller number of former POWs, MIA families and veterans have suggested there is something especially damning about McCain that the senator wants to keep hidden. Without release of the files, such accusations must be viewed as unsubstantiated speculation. The main reason, however, for seeking these files is to find out if there is any information in the debriefings, or in other MIA documents that McCain and the Pentagon have kept sealed, about how many prisoners were held back by North Vietnam after the Paris peace treaty was signed in January 1973. The defense and intelligence establishment has long resisted the declassification of critical records on this subject. McCain has been the main congressional force behind this effort.
The prisoner return in 1973 saw 591 Americans repatriated by North Vietnam. The problem was that the U.S. intelligence list of men believed to be alive at that time in captivity in Vietnam, Laos and possibly across the border in southern China and in the Soviet Union was much larger.
Possibly hundreds of men larger. The State Department stated publicly in 1973 that intelligence data showed the prisoner list to be starkly incomplete. For example, only nine of the 591 returnees came out of Laos, though experts in U.S. military intelligence listed 311 men as missing in that Hanoi-run country alone, and their field reports indicated that many of those men were probably still alive. Hanoi said it was returning all the prisoners it had. President Nixon, on March 29, 1973, seconded that claim, telling the nation on television: All of our American POWs are on their way home. This discrepancy has never been acknowledged or explained by official Washington. Over the years in Washington, McCain, at times almost single-handedly, has pushed through Pentagon-desired legislation to make it impossible or much harder for the public to acquire POW/MIA information and much easier for the defense bureaucracy to keep it hidden.
The Truth Bill
In 1989, 11 members of the House of Representatives introduced a measure they called The Truth Bill. A brief and simple document, it said: [The] head of each department or agency which holds or receives any records and information, including live-sighting reports, which have been correlated or possibly correlated to United States personnel listed as prisoner of war or missing in action from World War II, the Korean conflict and the Vietnam conflict shall make available to the public all such records and information held or received by that department or agency. In addition, the Department of Defense shall make available to the public with its records and information a complete listing of United States personnel classified as prisoner of war, missing in action, or killed in action (body not returned) from World War II, the Korean conflict, and the Vietnam conflict.
Opposed by Pentagon
Bitterly opposed by the Pentagon, The Truth Bill got nowhere. It was reintroduced in the next Congress in 1991 and again disappeared. Then, suddenly, out of the Senate, birthed by the Arizona senator, a new piece of legislation emerged. It was called The McCain Bill. This measure turned The Truth Bill on its head. It created a bureaucratic maze from which only a fraction of the available documents could emerge. And it became law. So restrictive were its provisions that one clause actually said the Pentagon didn’t even have to inform the public when it received intelligence that Americans were alive in captivity.
First, it decreed that only three categories of information could be released, i.e., information … that may pertain to the location, treatment, or condition of unaccounted-for personnel from the Vietnam War. (This was later amended in 1995 and 1996 to include the Cold War and the Korean conflict.) If information is received about anything other than location, treatment or condition, under this statute, which was enacted in December 199l, it does not get disclosed.
Second, before such information can be released to the public, permission must be granted by the primary next of kin, or PNOK. In the case of Vietnam, letters were sent by the Department of Defense to the 2,266 PNOK. More than 600 declined consent (including 243 who failed to respond, considered under the law to be a no ).
Hurdles and limitations
Finally, in addition to these hurdles and limitations, the McCain act does not specifically order the declassification of the information. Further, it provides the Defense Department with other justifications for withholding documents. One such clause says that if the information may compromise the safety of any United States personnel … who remain not accounted for but who may still be alive in captivity, then the Secretary [of Defense] may withhold that record or other information from the disclosure otherwise required by this section.
Boiled down, the preceding paragraph means that the Defense Department is not obligated to tell the public about prisoners believed alive in captivity and what efforts are being made to rescue them. It only has to notify the White House and the intelligence committees in the Senate and House. The committees are forbidden under law from releasing such information.
At the same time, the McCain act is now being used to deny access to other sorts of records. For instance, part of a recent APBnews.com Freedom of Information Act request for the records of a mutiny on merchant marine vessel in the 1970s was rejected by a Defense Department official who cited the McCain act. Similarly, requests for information about Americans missing in the Korean War and declared dead for the last 45 years have been denied by officials who reference the McCain statute. (Read a denial letter.)
Another bill gutted in 1996
And then there is the Missing Service Personnel Act, which McCain succeeded in gutting in 1996. A year before, the act had been strengthened, with bipartisan support, to compel the Pentagon to deploy more resources with greater speed to locate and rescue missing men. The measure imposed strict reporting requirements.
McCain amended the heart out of the statute. For example, the 1995 version required a unit commander to report to his theater commander within two days that a person was missing and describe what rescue and recovery efforts were underway. The McCain amendments allowed 10 days to pass before a report had to be made.
In the 1995 act, the theater commander, after receiving the MIA report, would have 14 days to report to his Cabinet secretary in Washington. His report had to certify that all necessary actions were being taken and all appropriate assets were being used to resolve the status of the missing person. This section was stricken from the act, replaced with language that made the Cabinet secretary, not the theater commander, the recipient of the report from the field. All the certification requirements also were stricken. ‘Turn commanders into clerks’ This, said a McCain memo, transfers the bureaucracy involved out of the field to Washington. He argued that the original legislation, if left intact, would accomplish nothing but create new jobs for lawyers and turn military commanders into clerks.
In response, the backers of the original statute cited the Pentagon’s stained record on MIA’s and argued that military history had shown that speed of action is critical to the chances of recovering a missing man. Moving the bureaucracy to Washington, they said, was merely a way to sweep the issue under a rug.
Chilling effect cited
One final evisceration in the law was McCain’s removal of all its enforcement teeth. The original act provided for criminal penalties for anyone, such as military bureaucrats in Washington, who destroy or cover up or withhold from families any information about a missing man. McCain erased this part of the law. He said the penalties would have a chilling effect on the Pentagon’s ability to recruit personnel for its POW/MIA office.
McCain does not deal lightly with those who disagree with him on any of these issues or who suggest that the evidence indeed shows that a significant number of prisoners were alive and cached away as future bargaining chips when he came home in the group of 591 released in 1973.
Over the years, he has regularly vilified any group or person who keeps trying to pry out more evidence about MIAs. He calls them hoaxers and charlatans and conspiracy theorists. He decries the bizarre rantings of the MIA hobbyists and describes them as individuals primarily who make their living off of keeping the issue alive. Before he died last year of leukemia, retired Col. Ted Guy, a highly admired POW and one of the most dogged resisters in the camps, wrote an angry open letter to the senator in an MIA newsletter. In it, he said of McCain’s stream of insults: John, does this include Senator Bob Smith and other concerned elected officials? Does this include the families of the missing where there is overwhelming evidence that their loved ones were ‘last known alive? ’ Does this include some of your fellow POWs?
Sightings dismissed
McCain has said again and again that he has seen no credible evidence that more than a tiny handful of men might have been alive in captivity after the official prison return in 1973. He dismisses all of the subsequent radio intercepts, live sightings, satellite photos, CIA reports, defector information, recovered enemy documents and reports of ransom demands thousands and thousands of pieces of information indicating live captives as meaningless. He has even described these intelligence reports as the rough equivalent of UFO and alien sightings.
In Congress, colleagues and staffers who have seen him erupt in the open and, more often, in closed meetings profess themselves confounded by his behavior. Insisting upon anonymity so as not to invite one of his verbal assaults, they say they have no easy way to explain why a former POW would work so hard and so persistently to keep POW/MIA information from coming out. Typical is the comment of one congressional veteran who has watched McCain over many years: This is a man not at peace with himself. McCain’s sense of disgrace.
Some McCain watchers searching for answers point to his recently published best-selling autobiography, Faith of My Fathers, half of which is devoted to his years as a prisoner. In the book, he says he felt badly throughout his captivity because he knew he was being treated more leniently than his fellow POWs owing to his propaganda value as the son of Adm. John S. McCain II, who was then the CINCPAC commander in chief of all U.S. forces in the Pacific region, including Vietnam. (His captors considered him a prize catch and nicknamed him the Crown Prince. )
Also in the book, the Arizona Senator repeatedly expresses guilt and disgrace at having broken under torture and given the North Vietnamese a taped confession, broadcast over the camp loudspeakers, saying he was a war criminal who had, among other acts, bombed a school. I felt faithless and couldn’t control my despair, he writes. He writes, revealing that he made two half-hearted attempts at suicide. Most tellingly, he said he lived in dread that his father would find out. I still wince, he says, when I recall wondering if my father had heard of my disgrace.
After McCain returned home, he says he told his father about the confession, but never discussed it at length. The admiral, McCain says, didn’t indicate he had heard anything about it before.
McCain’s father died in 1981. McCain writes: I only recently learned that the tape … had been broadcast outside the prison and had come to the attention of my father.
McCain wasn’t alone it’s well-known that a sizeable percentage of prisoners of war will break down under torture. In fact, many of his supporters view McCain’s prison travails as evidence of his overall heroism. Fears unpublished details?
But how would McCain’s forced confession alone explain his endless campaign against releasing MIA/POW information?
Some veterans and other McCain watchers have speculated that McCain’s mortification, given his family’s proud military tradition (his grandfather was also an admiral), was so severe that it continues to haunt him and make him fear any opening up of information that could revive previously unpublished details of the era, including his own nagging history.
Another question that defies easy explanation is why there has never been any significant public outcry over the POWs who didn’t come home or about the machinations of public officials like McCain who carefully wove a blanket of secrecy around this issue. It can only be understood in the context of what the Vietnam War did to the American mind.
Forgetting the Vietnam War
It was the longest war in our history and the only one in which we accepted defeat and brought our troops home. It had roiled the country more than any conflict but the Civil War to the point where almost everyone, regardless of their politics, wanted to get away from anything that reminded them of this bloody failure. Only a small band of Americans, led by Vietnam veterans and MIA families, kept asking for more information about the missing men and demanding that the government keep its promise to do everything possible to bring them home. Everyone else seemed to be running away from all things Vietnam.
Knowledgeable observers note that it’s quite possible that Nixon, leading the country’s withdrawal, accepted the peace treaty of Jan. 27, 1973, while telling himself that somehow he would negotiate the release of the remaining POWs later. But when Congress refused to provide the $3 billion to $4 billion in proposed national development reparations that National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger had dangled as a carrot to Hanoi, the prospects for the abandoned men began to unravel.
Observers also point out that over the years that followed, Washington continued to reject paying what it branded as ransom money and so, across six presidencies, including the present one, the issue of POWs who may have been left behind remained unacknowledged by the White House and the Pentagon. Hanoi refused to correct the impression that all the prisoners had been returned, and Washington, for its part, refused to admit that it had known about abandoned POWs from the beginning.
Mainstream press indifferent
Of course, the government and many mainstream scholars reject this theory. And whether any such prisoners remain alive to this day is impossible for the outsider to know. Intelligence sources privately express the belief that most of the men had either died or been executed by the early 1990s. Presumably, these sources say, the POW’s lost their bargaining value to Hanoi as time passed and ransom dollars never materialized. Eventually Hanoi began seeking another path to the money the renewal of relations with Washington. Diplomatic ties were restored by President Clinton in 1994, and American economic investment quickly followed.
One factor in the nation’s indifference to the POWs was the stance of the national press. From the very start to the present, the mainstream media showed little interest. With just a smattering of exceptions, the journalistic community, like the rest of the country, ran away from the story. During the war, thousands of American journalists poured into Vietnam in shifts; now only a handful cover the country, most of them filing business stories about Nike and other conglomerates opening up factories to avail themselves of the cheap labor.
Even reporters who had covered the war came to view the MIA story, in the years afterward, as a concoction of the far right. Without doing much, if any, first-hand reporting, such as digging into the available documents in the National Archives, nearly all these journalists dismissed the MIA story as unfounded.
Generated a hero aura
In McCain’s recently suspended campaign for the presidency, it was almost as if, in the press’s eyes, he was to be treated differently and quite gingerly because of the hero aura generated by his POW experience. None of his political opponents ever dared criticize him for his legislative history on withholding POW information, and the press never brought itself to be direct enough to even question him on the issue.
It’s not that he didn’t give reporters plenty of openings to ask the right Vietnam questions. For one thing, he used his history as a Vietnam prisoner as a constant campaign theme in his speeches. Rarely did he appear without a larger-than- life photo backdrop showing him in battle gear as a Navy pilot before he was shot down over Hanoi in 1967.
Here is a passage typical of the soft, even erroneous reporting on McCain this from a March 4 story in The New York Times: His most striking achievement came when he joined with another Vietnam veteran, Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, to puncture the myth that Vietnam continued holding American prisoners. The piece went on to speak with admiration about his concern over the prisoners-of-war issue but, tellingly, it offered no details.
Tepid veterans’ vote
The press corps, covering the state-by-state primary vote, made an assumption, based apparently on sentiment, that McCain, as the war hero, would capture the significant veterans’ vote by stunning margins. Actually, he didn’t capture it at all. He carried veterans only in the states that he won, like Michigan and New Hampshire, but was rejected by them in the larger number of states that he lost, like New York, Ohio and California. Added together, when the states were tallied up, the veterans’ vote went to George W. Bush.
The Washington press corps had gone openly soft once before on the prisoner issue, again benefiting McCain. That was in 1991-93, during the proceedings of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. McCain starred on that committee, working hand in hand with his new ally, Sen. John Kerry, the panel’s co-chairman, to play down voluminous evidence that sizeable numbers of men were still held alive after the prisoner return in 1973. One example: At the time of the committee’s hearings, the Pentagon had received more than 1,600 firsthand sightings of live American prisoners and nearly 14,000 secondhand reports. The intelligence officers who gathered these reports from refugees and other informants in the field described a large number of them as credible and so marked the reports. Some of the informants had been given lie-detector tests and passed.
But the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency, after reviewing all the reports, concluded that they do not constitute evidence that men were still alive at the time.
McCain and Kerry endorsed the Pentagon’s findings. They also treated both the Pentagon and the CIA more as the committee’s partners than as objects of its inquiry. As one committee staff investigator said, in a memo preserved from the period: Speaking for the other investigators, I can say we are sick and tired of this investigation being controlled by those we are supposedly investigating.
McCain stood out because he always showed up for the committee hearings where witnesses were going to talk about specific pieces of evidence. He would belittle and berate these witnesses, questioning their patriotism and otherwise scoffing at their credibility. All of this is on record in the National Archives.
Confrontation with witness
One such witness was Dolores Apodaca Alfond, chairwoman of the National Alliance of Families, an all-volunteer MIA organization. Her pilot brother, Capt. Victor J. Apodaca, out of the Air Force Academy, was shot down over Dong Hoi, North Vietnam, in the early evening of June 8, 1967. At least one person in the two-man plane survived. Beeper signals from a pilot’s distress radio were picked up by overhead helicopters, but the cloud cover was too heavy to go in. Hanoi has recently turned over some bone fragments that are supposed to be Apodaca’s. The Pentagon first declared the fragments to be animal bones. But now it is telling the family verbally that they came from the pilot. But the Pentagon, for unexplained reasons, will not put this in writing, which means Apodaca is still unaccounted for. Also the Pentagon refuses to give Alfond a sample of the fragments so she can have testing done by an independent laboratory.
Alfond’s testimony, at a hearing of the POW/MIA committee Nov. 11, 1992, was revealing. She pleaded with the committee not to shut down in two months, as scheduled, because so much of its work was unfinished. Also, she was critical of the committee, and in particular Kerry and McCain, for having discredited the overhead satellite symbol pictures, arguing there is no way to be sure that the [distress] symbols were made by U.S. POWs. She also criticized them for similarly discounting data from special sensors, shaped like a large spike with an electronic pod and an antenna, that were airdropped to stick in the ground along the Ho Chi Minh trail.
These devices served as motion detectors, picking up passing convoys and other military movements, but they also had rescue capabilities. Specifically, someone on the ground a downed airman or a prisoner on a labor detail could manually enter data into the sensor pods. Alfond said the data from the sensor spikes, which was regularly gathered by Air Force jets flying overhead, had showed that a person or persons on the ground had manually entered into the sensors as U.S. pilots had been trained to do no less than 20 authenticator numbers that corresponded exactly to the classified authenticator numbers of 20 U.S. POWs who were lost in Laos.
Other than the panel’s second co-chairman, Sen. Bob Smith, R-N.H., not a single committee member attended this public hearing. But McCain, having been advised of Alfond’s testimony, suddenly rushed into the room to confront her. His face angry and his voice very loud, he accused her of making allegations that are patently and totally false and deceptive. Making a fist, he shook his index finger at her and said she had insulted an emissary to Vietnam sent by President Bush. He said she had insulted other MIA families with her remarks. And then he said, through clenched teeth: And I am sick and tired of you insulting mine and other people’s [patriotism] who happen to have different views than yours.
Brought to tears
By this time, tears were running down Alfond’s cheeks. She reached into her handbag for a handkerchief. She tried to speak: The family members have been waiting for years years! And now you’re shutting down. He kept interrupting her. She tried to say, through tears, that she had issued no insults. He kept talking over her words. He said she was accusing him and others of some conspiracy without proof, and some cover-up. She said she was merely seeking some answers. That is what I am asking. He ripped into her for using the word fiasco. She replied: The fiasco was the people that stepped out and said we have written the end, the final chapter to Vietnam. No one said that, he shouted. No one said what you are saying they said, Ms. Alfond. And then, his face flaming pink, he stalked out of the room, to shouts of disfavor from members of the audience.
As with most of McCain’s remarks to Alfond, the facts in his closing blast at her were incorrect. Less than three weeks earlier, on Oct. 23, 1992, in a ceremony in the White House Rose Garden, President Bush with John McCain standing beside him said: Today, finally, I am convinced that we can begin writing the last chapter in the Vietnam War.
The committee did indeed, as Alfond said they planned to do, shut down two months after the hearing.
Cannot discuss it
As for her description of the motion sensor evidence about prisoners in Laos, McCain’s response at the hearing was that this data was in a 1974 report that the committee had read but was still classified, so I cannot discuss it here. … We hope to get it declassified.
The question to the senator now is: What happened to that report and what happened to the pilots who belonged to those authenticator numbers? Intelligence sources in Washington say the report was never declassified. It became clear over the months of hearings and sparrings that the primary goal of the Kerry-McCain alliance was to clear the way for normalization of relations with Vietnam. They did it in two ways first, by regularly praising Hanoi for its cooperation in the search for information about the unaccounted-for prisoners and then by minimizing and suppressing the volume of evidence to the contrary that had been unearthed by the committee’s staff investigators.
Recasting the issue
Kerry and McCain also tried, at every opportunity, to recast the issue as a debate about how many men could still be alive today, instead of the real issue at stake: How many men were alive in 1973 after the 591 were returned? Although much evidence was kept out of the committee’s final report in January 1993, enough of it, albeit watered down by the committee’s majority, was inserted by the determined staff to demonstrate conclusively that all the prisoners had not come home. Still, if the reader didn’t plow through the entire 1,223-page report but scanned just the brief conclusions in the 43-page executive summary at the beginning, he or she would have found only a weak and pallid statement saying that there was evidence … that indicates the possibility of survival, at least for a small number after the repatriation of 1973. On page 468 of the report, McCain provided his own personal statement, saying that we found no compelling evidence to prove that Americans are alive in captivity today. There is some evidence though no proof to suggest only the possibility that a few Americans may have been kept behind after the end of American’s military involvement in Vietnam.
Two defense secretaries
And even these meager concessions were not voluntary. They had been forced by the sworn public testimony before the Senate committee of two former defense secretaries from the Nixon Administration, Melvin Laird and James Schlesinger. Both these men testified that they believed in 1973, from strong intelligence data, that a number of prisoners in Vietnam and Laos had not been returned. Their testimony has never been challenged. Schlesinger, before becoming defense secretary, had been the CIA director. During his committee appearance, Schlesinger was asked why Nixon would have accepted the prisoners being held back in 1973. He replied: One must assume that we had concluded that the bargaining position of the United States … was quite weak. We were anxious to get our troops out and we were not going to roil the waters … Then he was asked a very simple question. In your view, did we leave men behind? ‘Some were left behind’ I think that as of now, replied the former Pentagon secretary, that I can come to no other conclusion [that] … some were left behind. The press went along once again with the debunkers. The Schlesinger-Laird testimony, which seemed a bombshell, became but a one-day story in the nation’s major media. The press never followed it up to explore its implications. On Jan. 26, 1994, when a resolution ardently backed by McCain and Kerry came up in the Senate calling for the lifting of the two-decade-old economic embargo against Vietnam, some members in an effort to stall the measure tried to present new evidence about men left behind. McCain rose to his feet and, offering no rebuttal evidence of his own, proceeded to chide the professional malcontents, conspiracy mongers, con artists and dime-store Rambos who attend this issue. The resolution passed, 62-38. ‘Isolated Personnel’ These days, the Pentagon seems to be moving toward closing its POW/MIA books completely. In recent statements and reports, it has begun describing prisoners not as POWs but as IPs Isolated Personnel.
And in a 1999 booklet, the Pentagon said: By the end of the year 2004, we will have moved from the way the US government conducts the business of recovery and accounting [now] to an active program of loss prevention, immediate rescues, and rapid post-hostility accounting. More important, there seems to be no allocation of funds in 2004 for the task force that now conducts POW/MIA investigations, searches for remains and does archival research. As for McCain, he continues to stonewall on his own POW records. Through numerous phone calls, faxes and letters to his office, APBnews.com has been trying since late January to interview the Senator and get his permission to view his POW debriefing. The response has been that the senator has been occupied by his campaign schedule.
Call for openness and disclosure
During the campaign, McCain, who is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, had to address a controversy over queries he had made to the Commerce Department on behalf of a major campaign contributor. To deal with the press interest, he announced he was releasing all of his correspondence with the Commerce Department, not just the letters involving the one case. In addition, to show his full commitment to openness and disclosure, he called on every other government agency to release his communications with them. On Jan. 9 on the CBS program Face the Nation, he announced: Today, we are asking the federal government to release all correspondence that I’ve had with every government agency.
McCain’s staff has acknowledged that this request includes the Pentagon. But the Pentagon says it needs an official document from McCain designating a surrogate before it can show his debriefing report to anyone else. APBnews.com has repeatedly asked the senator for this waiver. He does not respond.
Sydney H. Schanberg is the editor of APBnews.com’s investigative unit. He was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his 1975 coverage of political and social chaos in Cambodia. His news reports and a best-selling book about his experiences in Southeast Asia became the basis for the Academy Award-winning film The Killing Fields.
http://www.vvof.org/mccain_hides.htm
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