Day: July 11, 2008

McCain Campaign Quickly Scrubs Website of References to Its Allegedly Outed Alabama Campaign Chair

Jon Ponder

Click graphic to see full screen capture

Another One Under the Bus

The John McCain campaign scrubbed its website today to remove all references to its Alabama campaign chairman, Attorney General Troy King.
King, who has frequently made homophobic statements, including calling gays the “downfall of society,” is the subject of rumors that his wife recently discovered him having sex with another man.
King, who is known for extremist views on religion and who has frequently made homophobic statements, including calling gays the “downfall of society,” is the subject of rumors that his wife recently discovered him having sex with another man.

The story about King had been published at Wonkette and on numerous gay news websites, but none of them had reported King’s connection with the McCain campaign before we published the story, “McCain’s Alabama Chairman Reportedly Outed – Attorney General Troy King Has a Record of Homophobic Rhetoric,” earlier today.

We happened upon the scrubbing of the campaign website as we did fact-checking this afternoon. At about 2:30 p.m PDT, when we checked the McCain campaign website, we found a news release from January on this now-blank page announcing the Alabama politicians who had joined McCain’s “leadership team.” The list included King, who was indeed named state campaign chairman.

A few minutes after we published the article, a reader left a comment alerting us that the link to the McCain website led to the blank page that is there now.

A search on the campaign site for “Troy King” returned no results, however a Google search for “Troy King” and “John McCain” still produced a link to the now-blank McCain campaign webpage near the top of the results as of 4 p.m. today.

We happened to have the webpage open and so made the screen capture of it and grabbed the text:

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McCain’s Alabama Chairman Reportedly Outed – Attorney General Troy King Has a Record of Homophobic Rhetoric

Jon Ponder

Troy King, Alabama’s Attorney General as well as the chairman of John McCain’s Alabama Leadership Team* was reportedly caught by his wife in their bed with — naturally — another man:

King, a conservative Republican Christian who has called homosexuality the “downfall of society,” has been caught with his pants down — literally — in a gay sex scandal. King was reportedly nabbed having sex with a male assistant by his wife, Paige King, in the couple’s own bed.

There are unconfirmed stories that King has been banished from his home and that he is on the brink of resigning.

King’s record on gay issues is standard fare for high-profile self-hating gays of his ilk:

King, considered a potential frontrunner for Alabama Governor in 2010, has been vocal in his condemnation of homosexuality and abortion. He has worked to outlaw sex toys and is a staunch supporter of the death penalty…

As a law student at the University of Alabama, King wrote frequent editorials for The Crimson White in condemnation of gays, affirmative action and abortion. In his editorials for the student newspaper, King called homosexuality the “downfall of society” and said AIDS could be cleansed from America if “this nation’s current purveyors of perversion would refrain from committing sodomy.”

King also slammed the idea that gays and lesbians could provide loving, normal families for children, saying: “I often hear the argument that homosexuals who live together create a loving, caring family environment, perhaps an environment which is even superior to that which can be provided by a heterosexual couple. In this day of rampant decadence, many homosexuals would misled society into believe that three men, an armadillo and a house plant create a functional family.”

Favorite rumor so far: King’s boyfriend is a former homecoming king at Troy University. If It’s true, expect to see the headline, “Troy King and the Troy Homecoming King” somewhere soon.

*Update: The McCain campaign quickly scrubbed King from its website today. We have a screen capture and the full text posted here.

Why We Whine: Florida Taxpayers Sending Gov. and Fiancee on European Tour

Trish

Life is just different if you’re a powerful Republican. Or his fiancee.

If it were any other governor traveling with his fiancee, I’d just nod and wink about the possibility of her staying in her own room

At a cost to taxpayers of $255,000, Gov. Charlie Crist embarks with staff and dozens of corporate executives Saturday on an 11-day European trade mission in the hope of striking business deals to spark Florida’s flagging economy.

The group will travel to London, Paris, Madrid and Russia’s St. Petersburg…Crist is also meeting with Britain’s Prince Charles and his brother, Prince Andrew.

The governor’s fiancée, Carole Rome, is going as one of the business “delegates,” who pay for their own hotel and airfare. The Fisher Island resident is a consultant to her family’s Halloween costume business.

Yeah, I’m sure Halloween costumes are big bucks all over Europe. But even if they were, it’s unlikely a single Floridian would get any work from it. The wholesaler, whose slogan is, “Where Fashion Meets Halloween,” is based in New York but I doubt its products are made there either. I’m thinking China.

So why are Charlie and Carole spending part of the summer in Europe?

Asked what he hopes to accomplish, Crist said: “Economic opportunities for Florida. You look at what’s happening in London. To the extent the British visit Florida, love and invest in Florida — as do Russians — that has been a help to our real-estate market obviously.”

So…the dollar is weak and foreigners are snapping up discount Florida real estate, and the governor wants to help them do it?

At least we taxpayers won’t be paying for Rome’s hotel rooms. If it were any other governor traveling with his fiancee, I’d just nod and wink about the possibility of her staying in her own room. But there is long-standing speculation Crist is gay and in the closet, and is rumored to be marrying Rome to further his chances of being selected as John McCain’s running mate. Yeah, Carole will probably be sleeping alone.

A Fine Whine: Telling Phil Gramm How It Really Is

Trish

Fabulous post at Texas blog BurntOrange, to help Phil Gramm understand what real life is like for us whiners.

Melody Townsel begins with the quote from Gramm.

“We have sort of become a nation of whiners. You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline,” said the former Texas senator. “You’ve heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession.”

Gramm also said the media was responsible for fostering unnecessary anxiety over the state of the economy. “Misery sells newspapers,” he said. “Thank God the economy is not as bad as you read in the newspaper every day.”

Or then again, maybe it is. Townsel elucidates it on down for Gramm.

See, Phil, while you were on the stump, not-so-quietly losing your mind, I was on about my fifth hour of work. I sat my alarm for 4 a.m. so I could get five hours of freelance writing and editing in before my eight-year-old crawled out of bed…

Townsel: “Errand time now, Phil. I fill up the car. That runs $58 this week, when it used to come in right at $30. Not that I’m whining, big guy.”

…I hand the kid a sandwich (by the way, Phil — the price of a loaf of bread is now up about 50%, did you know that?). Then I bust out a cheap craft kit to keep her close and busy and begin my next chore of the day: making call after call begging the Texas Insurance Risk Pool to accept the pages of pages of documentation I’ve already submitted as proof that I really can’t get a standard commercial insurance policy and I, therefore, really, really need them to sell me a $7,500-deductible, $469/month policy.

See, Phil, I’m uninsured now…[W]hen my old insurer…informed me that my premium was going up to the point where it was rivaling my mortgage, it was time for me to pack up my whiny ass and look for greener pastures.

Greener pastures that, when it comes to health insurance, apparently no longer exist in America…

Errand time now, Phil. I fill up the car. That runs $58 this week, when it used to come in right at $30. Not that I’m whining, big guy. Then we head to the grocery store to pick up a few staples at the grocery store (milk, $5.79/gallon; grapes, $7.24 for 1 1/2 pounds; $4.99 for a pint of blueberries; $2.39 for a dozen eggs)…

We head home so I can get started on another four-hour project for a client…

Why the need for an additional 20 hours of work per week? The small stuff, Phil. The stuff you and Wendy don’t sweat. Gas prices. Food prices. Utility bills. The vast crops of legalese sounding, alphabet-soup fees and surcharges that are suddenly appearing on every single bill I get so every vendor in the marketplace can pass on increasing gas and commodity prices to us “whiners” in a way that’s harder for us to figure out. But not, sadly, any easier to pay.

There’s lots more, and you should read it all, but suffice it to say that it doesn’t appear the Gramms, architects of the Enron Loophole, live on the same planet as the rest of us whiners.

Disturbing News About McCain’s Grasp on Reality

Trish

John McCain’s been coming up with some wacky-assed stuff lately. One would wonder if his advanced age is causing his fuzzy-headedness, but then one would be reminded that his advanced age is off limits, and cannot be noted, alluded to, or used as an explanation for confusion or seeming dementia. Sorry, I meant, misstatements.

First, McCain mistook his own voting history.

In a statement criticizing Obama’s positions (sic) on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard…McCain wrote, “This is the same organization that I voted to condemn as a terrorist organization when an amendment was on the floor of the United States Senate. Senator Obama refused to vote.”

The problem with the critique? McCain also missed that vote on the Kyl-Lieberman amendment on September 26, 2007. Records show that Obama was in New Hampshire and McCain was in New York instead of being in the Senate chamber for the vote in question.

O.K., I guess you could just shoot off your mouth about what you did without being sure of it, but it’s not recommended when you’re running for president and people actually check your facts. Then again, mixing up your voting record is small potatoes compared McCain’s other recent memory slip, which occurred this week while campaigning in Pennsylvania.

How do you mix up something that was purportedly such a big deal it became the stuff of legend, landing prominent placement in your own auto- biography and subsequent Hollywood dramatization?

And then McCain told a rather moving story about his time as a P.O.W. “When I was first interrogated and really had to give some information because of the pressures, physical pressures on me, I named the starting lineup, defensive line of the Pittsburgh Steelers as my squadron mates.”

“Did you really?” asked the reporter.

“Yes,” McCain said.

“In your POW camp?” asked the reporter.

“Yes,” McCain said.

“Could you do it today?” asked the reporter.

“No, unfortunately,” McCain said.

Here’s one reason he likely couldn’t do it today — the Steelers aren’t the team whose defensive line McCain named for his Vietnamese tormentors. The Green Bay Packers are. At least according to every previous time McCain has told this story. And the McCain campaign just told ABC News that the senator made a mistake — it was, indeed, the Packers.

In McCain’s best-selling 1999 memoir “Faith of My Fathers,” McCain writes:

“Once my condition had stabilized, my interrogators resumed their work. Demands for military information were accompanied by threats to terminate my medical treatment if I did not cooperate. Eventually, I gave them my ship’s name and squadron number, and confirmed that my target had been the power plant. Pressed for more useful information, I gave the names of the Green Bay Packers offensive line, and said they were members of my squadron. When asked to identify future targets, I simply recited the names of a number of North Vietnamese cities that had already been bombed.”

In 2005, A&E ran a movie version of “Faith of My Fathers.”

And McCain discussed that precise clip on CNN.

The actor playing McCain, asked to name the men in his squadron, says: “Starr; Greg; McGee; Davis; Adderly; Brown; Ringo; Wood.”

Cut back to real life. The CNN anchor asks McCain: “For those who don’t know the story, were those NFL football players?”

“That was the starting lineup of the Green Bay Packers, the first Super Bowl champions, yes,” McCain responded. But it’s — it was the best I could think of at the time.”

Too bad McCain can’t think that fast anymore. How do you mix up something that was purportedly such a big deal it became the stuff of legend, landing prominent placement in your own autobiography and subsequent Hollywood dramatization? I’m not feeling so good about McCain’s mental acuity.

McCain’s Extramarital Affair with Cindy Ended His Friendship with Reagans in the 1970s

Jon Ponder
Strained: Reagan with McCain before she endorsed him earlier this year
Strained: Reagan with McCain before she endorsed him earlier this year

The Los Angeles Times published a story today, front page above the fold, detailing the adulterous personal history of a presidential candidate, a story that would be upending the dynamics of the 2008 presidential campaign — possibly even throwing the election to the other party — had the story been about a Democratic candidate.
The media will ignore this story, even when McCain campaigns in California for a constitutional amendment that protects marriage — not from adultery, the real threat to marriage — but from gay people seeking equal rights.
Instead, the story is about John McCain, the Republican, and is therefore bound to be ignored by the rest of the mainstream press.

The only possible interest the story might generate in the corporate media — and in conservative circles, where McCain is already not particularly well-liked — stems from the fact that McCain’s extramarital affair with his current wife, Cindy, permanently ended his friendship with Ronald Reagan and, especially, his wife, Nancy, around the same time Reagan was running for president 30 years ago.

The Times article opens with the strained moments around Nancy Reagan’s tepid endorsement of McCain earlier this year:

Outside her Bel-Air home, Nancy Reagan stood arm in arm with John McCain and offered a significant — but less than exuberant — endorsement.

“Ronnie and I always waited until everything was decided, and then we endorsed,” the Republican matriarch said in March. “Well, obviously this is the nominee of the party.” They were the only words she would speak during the five-minute photo op.

In a written statement, she described McCain as “a good friend for over 30 years.” But that friendship was strained in the late 1970s by McCain’s decision to divorce his first wife, Carol, who was particularly close to the Reagans, and within weeks marry Cindy Hensley, the young heiress to a lucrative Arizona beer distributorship.

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With Approval of Congress at 9%, Impeachment Inches Its Way onto the Table

Jon Ponder

When the Democrats regained control of the House in 2006, the new Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, famously took the impeachment of George Bush “off the table.” This puzzled and disappointed millions of people who rightly wondered why a president could be impeached over a sex lie in 1999 but not over a lie just four years later that sent hundreds of thousands of innocent people to their deaths in Iraq while draining the U.S. Treasury of billions upon billions of dollars.
True, the fact that Bush’s lies cost the lives of 4,116 lives of US service men and women, injuries to over 30,000 of our troops, the deaths of over 1 million innocent Iraqi civilians, the destruction of Iraq, and a long term cost over $3 trillion may not rise to the level of a sex lie about a blowjob, but they still deserve at least a hearing.
In parliamentary proceedings, however, any item that can be taken off the table can be put back on it, if conditions change and the leadership wills it so. Yesterday, Speaker Pelosi signaled that an Article of Impeachment charging Bush with lying to Congress about his pretexts for invading Iraq might at least get a hearing in the House Judiciary Committee.

There’s no way to know what changes in conditions, if any, may have prompted her to rethink impeachment, but it may have something to do with a new Rasmussen poll released on Tuesday that found approval of Congress at 9 percent, which is essentially a statistical zero.

Pundits have long speculated that Pelosi, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and the other leaders have been averse to impeaching Bush because the impeachment of Pres. Bill Clinton put the Republican-controlled Congress in such bad odor with the public.

Let’s assume that Pelosi and company are not so blind that they can’t see the difference in severity of Clinton’s misdemeanor and Bush’s high crimes — or that they’re such bad politicians that they can’t judge the difference in the voters’ view of Clinton, whose approval rating remained in the mid-60s throughout the ordeal, and its disregard for Bush, whose approval is in the low 30s. Nor can they be unaware of the corollary fact that disapproval of Bush’s misadventure in Iraq is in the upper 60s.

But the bottom line for Pelosi is, with approval of Congress at statistical zero, what has she got to lose? A good politician in that kind of trouble should not be averse to throwing some red meat out to the base.

Who can say if that’s what is happening but yesterday, the right-leaning Politico.com reported that Pelosi herself said that there might be hearings on impeachment:

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