Earlier this week, after a critical New York Times article about McCain campaign manager Rick Davis’s lobbying ties to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Davis told reporters on a conference call that he “had a severed leave of absence from my firm for 18 months.” This claim came into question last night, however, when Newsweek reported that Davis had “remained the treasurer and a corporate director of his lobbying firm” through at least April 1, 2008:

Filings made by “Davis Manafort Partners” with the Virginia Corporation Commission as recently as April 1, 2008, show that Davis was still listed as one of only two corporate officers and directors of the firm, according to records on the commission’s Web site reviewed by NEWSWEEK. That filing records Davis as the “treas/clerk” of the firm; his business partner, Paul Manafort is listed as the president and chief executive officer.

Another filing by “Davis Manafort, Inc.” (with the same Alexandria, Va. address, and recorded on Oct. 17, 2007) also lists Davis as an officer and director of the firm, reporting his position as “T/Clerk,” a reference to his formal title as corporate treasurer and clerk.

The new revelations about Davis’ ongoing relationship with his old lobbying firm appear to create some cognitive dissonance with the campaign’s policy on lobbying.

In May, after two McCain aides were forced to resign over their controversial lobbying ties, Davis issued a memo laying out a new conflict of interest policy for the campaign. Here’s what the policy said about lobbying:

1.) No person working for the Campaign may be a registered lobbyist or foreign agent, or receive compensation for any such activity.

The McCain campaign maintains that Davis “has not taken a salary or received compensation since 2006.” But, as the Washington Post pointed out yesterday, “as an equity partner in the firm, he continues to have an financial stake in its success.” Additionally, Newsweek notes, Davis “stopped short of the steps another senior McCain campaign official, Charlie Black, took to severe his ties to his own well-connected Washington lobbying firm.”

When Davis issued the conflict of interests policy, he made clear that “employees who lie about their affiliations will be fired.” Do Davis’s now debunked denials of a relationship to his old firm amount to a firing offense under his own policy?

When talking about the economy, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) regularly resorts to talking about one of his favorite subjects: pork barrel spending projects known as earmarks. “The first big-spending pork-barrel earmark bill that comes across my desk, I will veto it. I will make them famous, and you will know their names,” McCain constantly says.

During an interview with CBS’s Katie Couric yesterday, McCain said that the current financial crisis “is of the utmost seriousness and a crisis of enormous proportions.” But sticking to his mantra, McCain strangely cited earmarks as “one of the major reasons why we’re having difficulties”:

McCAIN: [W]e’ve got to take tough decisions and one of them is government spending by the way. One of the major reasons why we’re having difficulties is we let spending get completely out of control — earmark and pork-barrel projects. Senator Obama asked for over $900 million in earmarks pork-barrel projects, that’s not part of the answer thats part of the problem.

Watch it (starting at 8:55):

But of course, earmarks have very little to do with the current financial crisis — one that is actually rooted in bad mortgages and crashing credit markets. But that doesn’t seem to stop McCain from thinking it does. In fact, this isn’t the first time McCain has blamed earmarks for seemingly unrelated calamities:

– Hurricane Katrina: “[McCain] places ‘some of those responsibilities on the Congress of the United States, which funded pork barrel projects that were not only not needed and certainly not as important as some of the projects that were needed [in New Orleans]”

– Minnesota Bridge Collapse: “The bridge in Minneapolis didn’t collapse because there wasn’t enough money,” McCain told reporters while campaigning in Pennsylvania. “The bridge in Minneapolis collapsed because so much money was spent on wasteful, unnecessary pork-barrel projects.”

McCain was forced to walk back his comments on the Minnesota bridge after the state’s Republican Gov. Tim Pawlenty said “citizens should not jump to conclusions about the bridge collapse.”

McCain also likes to say that eliminating earmarks will balance the budget but, in fact, that would do little to balance the budget — let alone save the entire economy. But as McCain himself has said, “economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should.”

Digg It!

Earlier today, Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress announced that they had reached a “fundamental agreement” on a government bailout of the nation’s financial system. But following a meeting at the White House this afternoon, which included Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Barack Obama (D-IL), there are “fears the Wall Street bailout deal is falling apart.”

In an interview with CNN this evening, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-CT) said the meeting became “contentious” when “all of a sudden there was some new core agreement floating around, which no one had heard of before, until we sort of got to the White House.” Asked who introduced it, Dodd said it was McCain and the House Republicans:

BLITZER: Who introduced that?

DODD: Well, it, we’re told it came out of the Republican House. We were even told at one point that this was, maybe, John McCain was floating the idea. That Hank Paulson was considering it. And of course Barney Frank and I, along with Republicans from the House and the Senate, of course, had spent three hours this morning working on a different core. We were told for the last seven days this was the core issue that would give the secretary the authority to move, to deal with the crisis.

Aggravated from having “spent seven straight days at this,” Dodd said that the surprise proposal at the meeting “looked like…a rescue plan for John McCain for two hours.” “It took us away from the work we were trying to do today,” said Dodd. Watch it:

Noting that “it was McCain who urged President Bush to call the White House meeting,” Politico’s David Rogers writes that “the whole sequence of events confirmed Treasury’s fears about inserting presidential politics into what were already difficult negotiations.” One of the chief negotiators in the House, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA), described it more bluntly:

House Financial Services Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., told Democratic colleagues that McCain’s involvement has destroyed chance of an agreement, sources told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

Frank compared McCain’s involvement to: “Richard Nixon blowing up the Vietnam peace talks in 1968.”

Marc Ambinder reports that McCain and his staff are sounding out “moderate Democrats and conservative Republicans to see whether they support the conservative Republican Study Committee’s alternative bailout bill.” McCain spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker denies McCain is “pushing any specific proposal.”

ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos reports that when Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson told a room full of Democrats, “Please don’t blow this up,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, “We’re not the ones trying to blow this up; it’s the House Republicans.” “I know, I know,” Paulson replied.

Over on the Wonk Room, Matt Duss recalls this line from Osama bin Laden’s surprise late-October 2004 videotaped address:

And even more dangerous and bitter for America is that the Mujahedin recently forced Bush to resort to emergency funds to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq which is evidence of the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan with Allah’s permission… And it all shows that the real loser is… you. It’s the American people and their economy.

The CIA judged that Bin Laden’s videotaped message was an effort by al Qaeda to deliver four more years for President Bush, thus helping them recruit a new generation of terrorists.

Louisiana State Rep. John LaBruzzo (R) recently stirred controversy by advocating a form of eugenics to decrease the number of poor. “I realized that all these people were in Louisiana’s care and what a massive financial responsibility that is to the state,” he said. “I said, ‘I wonder if it might be a good idea to pay some of these people to get sterilized.’” His plan would also give tax incentives to the rich to encourage procreation.

Appearing on CNN today, LaBruzzo defended his proposal by arguing that “the taxpayers of America are kind of getting fed up” with supporting welfare programs. He cited the “totally reliant” residents who relied on government evacuations during Hurricane Katrina. When CNN’s Kyra Phillips asked why he couldn’t invest in education and poverty-reduction programs, LaBruzzo faulted the media for focusing too much attention on his eugenics program:

Every one of the ideas you brought up were talked about in the brainstorming session. Obviously the media thought this was the one they could get some ratings out of. We talked about getting involved in the community. … We talked about a lot of those issues. This is one that the media grabbed hold of because it gets ratings.

He also blamed the “tremendous influx of illegal aliens” for “bringing down the economy even more.” Watch it:

But this week, LaBruzzo explicitly ruled out more common sense solutions. “LaBruzzo said other, mainstream strategies for attacking poverty, such as education reforms and programs informing people about family planning issues, have repeatedly failed to solve the problem,” the Times-Picayune reported.

LaBruzzo seems to be dead serious about implementing the plan. He “gathering statistics” now and is planning to introduce legislation “if he finds that the number of people on welfare has increased” over the past decades.