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McCain transition chief aided Saddam in lobbying effort to ease sanctions and extract oil profits

By Joe Romm on Oct 14, 2008 at 5:22 pm

William Timmons, the Washington lobbyist John McCain named to head his presidential transition team, “aided an influence effort on behalf of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to ease international sanctions against his regime.” A blockbuster HuffingtonPost exclusive quotes a U.N. investigator into the corrupt oil-for-food program who said,

I guess William Timmons is just a natural born oilman. He is either deceiving himself to rationalize what he has done or taking the rest of us for fools.

We can perhaps now say the same thing about John McCain.

I had noted last week that Timmons, whose lobbying firm gets about $100,000 a quarter from the American Petroleum Institute (API), was part of McCain’s intimate relationship with the oil industry (see “Why did McCain sell out to Big Oil? Ask Charles Keating“). But until now, we had no idea just how far McCain’s buddies were willing to go for Big Oil:

The two lobbyists who Timmons worked closely with over a five year period on the lobbying campaign later either pleaded guilty to or were convicted of federal criminal charges that they had acted as unregistered agents of Saddam Hussein’s government.

During the same period beginning in 1992, Timmons worked closely with the two lobbyists, Samir Vincent and Tongsun Park, on a previously unreported prospective deal with the Iraqis in which they hoped to be awarded a contract to purchase and resell Iraqi oil. Timmons, Vincent, and Park stood to share at least $45 million if the business deal went through.

Note to John “Drill, Baby, Drill” McCain: When you lay down with Big Oil dogs, you wake up with greasy fleas. Here’s more from this breaking story:

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Politics

Did PBS bury controversial torture documentary under pressure from Bush administration?

By Ryan Powers on Oct 14, 2008 at 5:11 pm

Scott Horton reports today that PBS may have refused to nationally air a controversial documentary on the use of torture by the U.S. government in order to protect its funding. Previously, the Bush administration threatened to cut PBS’s funding after it aired Bush’s War, a Frontline special critical of the war in Iraq:

On Thursday evening WNET in New York will air an important new documentary by Emmy and Dupont Award winning producer Sherry Jones entitled “Torturing Democracy.” It appears on WNET and several other affiliates independently because PBS would not run the show. [...]

According to producer Sherry Jones, PBS told her that “no time slot could be found for the documentary before January 21, 2009″ — the day after George W. Bush and Dick Cheney leave office.

Watch a clip from Torturing Democracy here.

Yglesias

New MacBook

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 14, 2008 at 5:11 pm

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The new MacBook looks cool, though I kind of suspect that paying a premium for pretty design is the kind of thing people become disinclined to do in a recessionary environment. In a larger sense, I’m a bit surprised they’re moving to the aluminum shell. In my experience of using both MacBooks (plastic) and MacBook Pros (aluminum) the plastic shell is actually substantially more durabe. The aluminum ones pick up all kinds of random dents and so forth.

The new MacBook seems to be modeled on the “look” of the iPhone and the iMac more than on the MacBook Pro and it’s possible that that design is hardier than the aluminum I’m used to (certainly the iPhone is pretty durable), but if not this could be a step in the wrong direction.

Health

How The Lewin Analysis Falls Short

By Igor Volsky on Oct 14, 2008 at 4:39 pm

On Sunday, former Rep. Rob Portman (R-OH) cited The Lewin Group’s new analysis of Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) health care plan to argue that McCain’s proposal “will cover about the same number of uninsured” as Sen. Barack Obama’s (D-IL):

With all due respect, they are very different plans. But the independent evaluations that I’ve seen, including one last week, shows that the McCain plan will cover about the same number of uninsured–in fact, this particular analysis said a few million more people–but it will reduce costs. That’s the key.

Watch it:

According to last week’s Lewin analysis, McCain’s health care plan would reduce the number of uninsured by 21.1 million and cost $2.05 trillion dollars. But the Lewin assessment is the black-sheep of the candidates’ health care comparisons– in fact, the three other prominent analyses of the candidates’ health care plans estimate that McCain would reduce the number of uninsured by just 1-5 million:

Organization Reduction in Uninsured Employer Coverage Non-Group Coverage
Tax Policy Center 1 million in 2009, 5 million in 2013 -20 million by 2018 21 million by 2018
Health Affairs 1 million -20 million 21 million
Commonwealth Fund 2 million -20 million by 2018 21 million by 2018
The Lewin Group 21.1 million -9.4 million 38.1 million

The Lewin Group inflates McCain’s numbers in several ways. Put simply, the report ignores the consequences of opening the health insurance market to unfettered market competition, overstates the purchasing power of McCain’s health credit and the quality of individual health insurance plans.

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Politics

Bipartisan House report finds that Bush made ‘inappropriate’ use of executive privilege.

By Satyam Khanna on Oct 14, 2008 at 4:31 pm

A bipartisan report released today by the House Oversight Committee finds that President Bush made a ‘legally unprecedented and an inappropriate use of executive privilege” when the administration withheld Patrick Fitzgerald’s interview with Vice President Cheney on the CIA leak scandal. A separate report also criticizes Bush’s assertion of executive privilege regarding his recent climate change and Clean Air Act decisions:

On CIA leak scandal: “The assertion of executive privilege prevents the Committee from having access to a complete set of records and thus results in the Committee’s inability to assess fully the actions of the Vice President.”

On the environment: “The assertion of executive privilege under these circumstances has stymied the Committee’s investigation of the [California] waiver and ozone decisions. For these reasons, the Committee finds that the President’s assertion of executive privilege is wrong and an abuse of the privilege.“

Related Posts

Yglesias

The Coverup

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 14, 2008 at 4:11 pm

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Stanley Kurtz unleashes a self-described “October surprise”:

It took me a while to put the pieces together, but I think I’ve figured out what’s had the Obama camp so worried about the Chicago Annenberg Challenge records. It goes way beyond Bill Ayers. In fact, it connects the dots between Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, and Obama’s own early radicalism. I lay out the details today in my new piece, “Wright 101.” The gist of what I found is that, from his position as board chair at the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, Barack Obama was funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars to education programs built around the same extremist anti-American ideology preached by Jeremiah Wright. As I argue in today’s piece, this puts the Wright issue back in play in this campaign.”

Specifically, the Chicago Annenberg Challenge on whose board Obama served gave a grant to an outfit called the Coalition for Improved Education in [Chicago’s] South Shore (CIESS). CIESS was “linked to a network of schools within the Chicago public system” called the “South Shore African Village Collaborative.” According to Kurtz, this network which was linked to an organization which got a grant from a group on whose board Obama served, “was very much a part of the Afrocentric ‘rites of passage movement’” and also at time did events featuring guys named Jacob Carruthers and Asa Hilliard. These two, in turn, seem to have held fringy opinions somewhat similar to some of Jeremiah Wright’s fringy opinions. Ergo, according to Kurtz, Wright is back on the table.

I’d say McCain’s in luck with this one! Obama’s doomed!

Seriously, though, is there anyone who could withstand this kind of guilt-by-association. Obama was on the board of an outfit that gave a grant to an outfit that was linked to another outfit that organized an event where some dude spoke, and thus Obama is responsible for the dude? Really? I spoke at the Heritage Foundation once. Does that make Heritage’s board members responsible for stuff on my blog? It doesn’t make any sense.

UPDATE: I should make clear that I don’t know anything about Jacob Carruthers or Asa Hilliard other than that, according to Kurtz (who’s not a reliable source), they had fringey ideas. I’m told by a colleague that Hilliard, at least, was no fringe figure at all.

Culture

Redskins to DC

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 14, 2008 at 4:03 pm

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Spending a huge sum of money in order to build a stadium that tempts the Redskins back into DC would indeed be a terrible use of funds. Nationals Park hosts over 80 events per year. The Verizon Center is home to an NBA team, an NHL team, a WNBA team, and a smattering of other events. Those kind of usage levels are viable to help anchor a retail/entertainment district. And despite that stuff, cities still often wind up overpaying for sports stadiums. A football stadium, by contrast, features just eight home games in the regular season. That’s part of what makes the NFL so exciting. The games are rare enough that not only is every Redskins game important, every game played by the other NFC East teams is pretty crucial as well. But it’s just not enough games to be any kind of useful economic development tool.

That’s why decades ago we saw the vogue for combo stadiums. If you could build a single field and use it for baseball and football and MLS that’d be a pretty useful economic anchor. But people don’t like those combo stadiums and teams have been moving to dedicated single-sport fields. Which is find. But it means that football fields need to be exiled way out into the boonies where land is cheap and it makes sense to set such a large space aside for a facility that’s used so rarely.

Politics

Parker: White House Officials Agree That Palin Should Be Off GOP Ticket

By Ben Armbruster on Oct 14, 2008 at 3:50 pm

Last month, conservative columnist Kathleen Parker wrote a scathing column saying that Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) is “way out of her league” as the GOP’s vice presidential candidate and called on the Alaska governor to “bow out” of the race in order to “save McCain, her party, and the country she loves.”

Parker has subsequently noted angry responses from conservatives around the country. “To the GOP base, predictably, I’m a traitor,” Parker wrote.

Last night on the Colbert Report, Parker reiterated her belief that Palin is not qualified for the GOP ticket, but she also revealed that some White House officials have told her that they secretly agree:

COLBERT: Now but you said you got emails from people in the White House who secretively –

PARKER: Did I say that?

COLBERT: Yes you did. You said you secretly got emails from people in the White House but you wouldn’t name who they were, who said that they agreed with you.

PARKER: That’s correct. I got a lot of off-the-record emails and a lot of phone calls from people who said, you’re saying what we’ve been saying.

Watch it (starting at 2:06)

Indeed, Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) choice of Palin as his running mate has stirred the conservative establishment. New York Times columnist David Brooks has said that Palin is “a fatal cancer” on the GOP and said he prefers someone “who’s read a few more books.”

After calling the race “over” in response to Palin’s selection, Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan has offered only tepid praise of Palin, saying she mainly shows a “great and natural competence about the show business of politics.”

Responding to Palin’s critics on the right, McCain said, “Now if there’s a Georgetown cocktail party person who quote calls himself a conservative and doesn’t like her, good luck, good luck, fine.”

Digg It!

Yglesias

McCain Transition Chief Lobbied for Saddam

By Matthew Yglesias on Oct 14, 2008 at 3:33 pm

mccainface1.jpg

Murray Waas reports:

William Timmons, the Washington lobbyist who John McCain has named to head his presidential transition team, aided an influence effort on behalf of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to ease international sanctions against his regime.

The two lobbyists who Timmons worked closely with over a five year period on the lobbying campaign later either pleaded guilty to or were convicted of federal criminal charges that they had acted as unregistered agents of Saddam Hussein’s government.

It was probably thanks to Timmons’ insider information that McCain came to have all that detailed information about Saddam’s secret nuclear weapons programs and ties to al-Qaeda.

Politics

Another McCain-Palin supporter yells ‘kill him!’ about Obama.

By Satyam Khanna on Oct 14, 2008 at 3:23 pm

The Scranton Times-Tribune notes that yet another McCain supporter at a rally today with Gov. Sarah Palin yelled “kill him!” in reference to Sen. Barack Obama:

Chris Hackett addressed the increasingly feisty crowd as they await the arrival of Gov. Palin. Each time the Republican candidate for the seat in the 10th Congressional District mentioned Barack Obama the crowd booed loudly. One man screamed “kill him!”

Last Monday, a supporter also yelled “kill him” at a rally. In the past weeks, McCain supporters have called Obama “an Arab,” “Little Hussein,” and a “terrorist.” (HT: TPM)

UPDATE: At a rally in Virginia Beach, a supporter yelled “Obama bin Laden!“:

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