Among the crush of political donations to the Obama campaign, you find some odd donors. Some are die hard Democrats, but others are independents and even the odd Republican here and there. Many are long time political activists, but there are quite a few first time donors as well. But it’s a few of the donor’s names that are popping up in this New York Times report.
But even a contributor who used the name “Jgtj Jfggjjfgj,” and listed an address of “thjtrj” in “gjtjtjtjtjtjr, AP,” was able to contribute $370 in a series of $10 donations in August.
A pair of donors named “Derty West” and “Derty Poiiuy,” who listed “rewq, ME” as their addresses and “Qwertyyy” or “Qwerttyyu” as either their employer or occupation, contributed a combined $1,110 in July.
I’m going to cover a few of the possibilities being suggested and leave it up to you to pry reality from the headlines. Some of these people may, as the article suggests, simply not want to release their real names out of privacy concerns. (And, apparently, share a shocking lack of knowledge about campaign finance laws.) Others may be knowingly looking for ways to thwart the law and give more than the maximum allowable limit.
For those fans of the X-Files out there, some may speculate that Team Obama is purposefully using these ploys to funnel more money into his hugely expensive campaign. From the other end of the tin foil hat spectrum, some have even speculated that these are hijinks perpetrated by McCain supporters who knew that they would find a willing mouthpiece at Newsbusters to put the story in front of the public in October.
I personally find the last two theories without merit. It’s a silly charge for any Republicans to try to raise, given how easily it is brushed away by a campaign staff with millions of small donations to wade through. And if Obama’s team was trying to pump cash in this way, they would come up with better names than Jgtj fxtxtfuffle, and the amounts in question are barely a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of millions the candidate has raked in.
Personally I suspect it’s overly enthusiastic supporters breaking the law to dump every last cent they can into The One’s efforts to claim the White House. But, as I said, I’ll leave it to you to decide.
October 10th, 2008 By JOE WINDISH, Technology Editor
The video above is Jon Stewart’s round-up of Fox News election coverage since the debate. “If you want to see real panic, don’t go to Wall Street, head down to Fox News.”
When did untouched become “unfair,” as a Republican media consultant claims during the segment? And when did it become a requirement to retouch photos in news magazines rather than fashion ones?
… It’s also ridiculous that the three women on the segment prefaced their statements by some form of “Sarah Palin is a beautiful woman.” We get it.
If I were Palin, I would upset. Not at the magazine, but at these women who can only talk about her as a “beautiful woman.”
And this isn’t sexist treatment?
The Alaska Legislature is investigating the firing of Alaska state trooper Michael Wooten and to establish whether the governor abused the powers of her office to pursue a personal vendetta.
[A]n examination of the case, based on interviews with Mr. Monegan and several top aides, indicates that, to a far greater degree than was previously known, the governor, her husband and her administration pressed the commissioner and his staff to get Trooper Wooten off the force, though without directly ordering it.
In all, the commissioner and his aides were contacted about Trooper Wooten three dozen times over 19 months by the governor, her husband and seven administration officials, interviews and documents show.
Salon looks into Palin’s relationship with AIP (the Alaska Independence Party). And Raw Story says the Secret Service has investigated an alleged death threat against Barack Obama shouted Monday at a Palin rally.
Let me preface this post by saying that I still believe 100% in Get Out The Vote (GOTV) efforts. The more informed voters we have out there considering the issues and casting their votes, the better off we are. We, as a country, may make mistakes now and again, but hopefully we learn from them and move on more the wiser. But there is one group - specifically the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN - who just seems to keep showing up in the headlines for all the wrong reasons.
So we have 644,197 people eligible to be registered in Marion County/Indianapolis, and 677,401 people registered. Congratulations go to Indianapolis for having 105% of its residents registered!
Or how about registering a 7 year old girl to vote in Connecticut? Or one man in Cleveland who was registered to vote three times in a single day using two different home addresses? Perhaps you prefer the story of a convicted felon in Milwaukee registering not only himself to vote, but registering others as well? (No matter your take on felon voting restrictions, it’s currently illegal in Wisconsin and ACORN should know that.)
There are only so many of these tales that we can read before concluding that - at least in some of their chapters - there is more going on here than simply a helpful group of citizens trying to encourage maximum participation in the electoral process. There is also the fact that in each of these instances, the benefactor of the alleged abuses seems to be the Democratic Party. Here’s a news flash for you, ACORN… your candidates are already doing fine in the polls. If you try to rig the game any further in your favor, you diminish the credibility of the ticket and call the validity of any victory you may achieve into question. Not to mention that such activities, if true, are illegal and, frankly, disgusting.
In the past I’ve been reluctant to point fingers at this group, since I’ve long found the dismal turnout rate during our elections to be depressing. Getting more people to the polls is an admirable goal. But election tampering and voter fraud are far more depressing. ACORN has earned themselves a much closer look by authorities, in my opinion, and the sooner the better.
I pointed out yesterday why I felt that the new McCain tactic of attempting to shift the discussion to Bill Ayers wasn’t going to work. Not only has the media responded pretty much as predicted (with the notable exception of Fox and Friends which I caught yesterday) but the Obama Campaign has fired back with no delay, airing the following ad in a number of swing states. Take a look.
With the latest polls showing that not only is the economy the top issue on people’s minds, but that 60% of Americans think a depression (not recession) is “likely” at this point, we have to give Team Obama credit. This is exactly the sort of advertisement that’s going to hit home with voters wondering if they’re going to have a job next year. While the Right wing base may be clamoring for McCain to talk about Ayers, Rezko and Wright, those don’t seem like the sort of discussions that are going to move the needle in the groups McCain needs to turn this thing around.
A 390-page report by the Inspector General is only a small step for mankind in bringing Karl Rove to justice for what he did to the Justice Department in the firing of the nine US attorneys, but it’s a start.
The internal investigation finds political pressure drove the 2006 dismissals but that refusal of major players at the White House and the department to cooperate in the year-long inquiry has left significant “gaps” in understanding what happened.
Investigators’ doubts have led Attorney General Michael Mukasey to appoint Acting United States Attorney in Connecticut Nora Dannehy, who led the conviction of a former governor for corruption, to continue the probe and decide if anyone should be prosecuted.
The “anyone” list starts with Bush’s White House toadies, Karl Rove and Harriet Miers, and goes on to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales…
Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) — U.S. Senator Ted Stevens’s bid for a seventh term may be decided by 12 people he has never met in a courthouse thousands of miles away from his home state of Alaska.
Jury selection in the Stevens trial gets under way tomorrow in Washington after the prospective jurors complete questionnaires. The trial could last a month or more, concluding just days before U.S. election on Nov. 4.
The longest-serving Republican senator in U.S. history, Stevens was indicted in July for failing to report gifts from an Alaska oil-services company. He demanded speedy justice in an effort to clear his name.
Less shocking than the trial itself are the poll numbers reported in the article. In the midst of the Alaska Pork King’s (shown above posing with the 49th state’s Pork Queen) trial, he has not only managed to secure his party’s nomination for Senate yet again, but has erased a previous 13% deficit and has drawn even in the polls with Democratic challenger, Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich. In yet another demonstration of how all politics is local (or at least State level), we find political actors retaining their popularity at home even as they are branded as scoundrels in the national press. (Think “Dollar” Bill Jefferson from the left side of the aisle for a comparison, though recent polls indicate that his own constituents may be tiring of him.)
Should this jury return a guilty verdict in late October, will that be enough to turn Alaskan voters off from one of the hungriest gobblers at the Federal Feed Bag, or will they send him back to extend his record as the longest-serving GOP Senator? Yet another question is whether or not this will have any fallout for the presidential race. Sarah Palin’s ties to Stevens’ pork parade run right up until Feb. of this year, when she submitted a 70 page request to Stevens’ office for hundreds of millions in earmarks. Palin faces her own investigation, with results scheduled to come out prior to Election Day, so the two actions will doubtless garner a lot of attention just as voters prepare to go to the polls.
For the 9/11-like Commission he wants to study the Wall Street collapse, John McCain could well be the star witness about failure of government regulation to prevent chaos in the financial industry.
His actions as a member of the Keating Five in the 1980s, which the Senate Ethics Committee later labeled “poor judgment,” were the start of two decades of McCain opposition to controlling the excesses he is now denouncing on the campaign trail.
Like the Washington insiders he is now promising to rein in, McCain took heavy campaign contributions from Savings and Loan operator Charles H. Keating, accepted free trips to Keating’s Bahamas vacation retreat and saw his family turn a profit from an investment his wife and father-in-law made with Keating.
In return, McCain worked hard to delay and divert government action against Keating, who later went to jail for fraud and whose S&L bailout cost taxpayers more than $124 billion.
September 15th, 2008 By JAZZ SHAW, Assistant Editor
I need to thank alert reader Lee Indiana for pointing me to what is now, unfortunately, being called “Dairygate” in some circles and setting me off on a morning’s expedition with The Google. Even if you are already aware of the strange goings on between the Alaska state government and the long, winding tale of the Matanuska Maid dairy in Anchorage, (later referred to as “Mat Maid”) here is what I’ve found, laid out in a timeline with background information on all of the players.
In December of 2006, the historic Matanuska Maid dairy closes its doors after years of financial troubles. Operating since the 1930’s, it was taken over by the state to keep it solvent during the 80’s but remained a money sink for most of its operating life.
Spring of 2007. The government has moved again to use state funds to keep the struggling dairy afloat. More financial woes ensue, and in June of 2007 Sarah Palin swoops in to the rescue, declaring that the dairy situation is “a mess” and the she is “going to clean it up.”
August, 2007. The previously discussed Franci Havemeister is appointed to the position of Director of Agriculture at a salary of roughly $100K, considerably more than she made in her real estate business. (Remember the real estate connection for later.) Her appointment comes despite her previously noted “thin” credentials for the position. She is the daughter-in-law of local dairy farmer Bob Havemeister. (We’ll be getting back to Bob in a bit… keep reading.)
Nov. 19, 2007. Franci Havemeister issues a gag order, saying that nobody other than fellow political appointee Ray Nix, of the Dept. of Agriculture, is allowed to speak to the press about the situation with Mat Maid.
Dec. 20, 2007. Troubles continue at the dairy, and four local dairy farmers, including Bob Havemeister, are worried that they will have to begin dumping their milk on the ground, spurring concerns from environmentalists. An offer comes in from Kyle Beus (remember that name for later also. we’ll be getting back to him) to purchase some of the milk for a dairy coop he’s starting up to produce cheese and other creamery goods.
Dec. 24, 2007. Good news comes just in time for Christmas for the four previously mentioned dairy farmers. A $600,000 grant has been made available by the state government to cover costs related to Mat Maid and the farmers will be able to tap into that for cash payments of $40,000 each to “cover their losses.” State Senate President Lyda Green (R-Wasilla) initially objects to the cash payouts, saying the money was appropriated to cover the state’s debt, but later relents, saying, it was an appropriate use of the funds.
March 21, 2008. Reports surface that Kyle Beus (remember him?) has landed himself a sweetheart of a deal, gutting and leasing dairy equipment from the now effectively defunct Mat Maid facility for his new creamery coop. Both Beus and Ray Nix (see above) brush off the reports, saying that the discount prices are “nothing unusual” in these types of situations.
May 15, 2008. State auditors say that the government went against the law in handing out the $40K payments to the farmers, including Franci Havemeister’s father-in-law. State senate president Lyda Green (R-Wasilla) reiterates her feelings that the payments were made “with good intentions” and that she “didn’t view it quite as harshly” as the auditors.
May 31, 2008. Kyle Beus has a ribbon cutting ceremony, opening his new creamery. Reporters find him looking “deceptively at ease for a guy who is currently propping up the state’s dairy business.” And he probably should look that way. In addition to the discount equipment rentals, he’s recently received a $643,000 grant from the Alaska Dept. of Agriculture under the direction of… Franci Havemeister.
Kyle Beus turns out to be an exceptionally fortunate fellow in the dairy game. His background bio indicates that he moved to Alaska in 2000, and since then received $116,967 in dairy related government subsidy payments from the Dept. of Agriculture between 2002 and 2005. This is a very fortunate situation for somebody who has been under investigation by the state’s labor board for years over charges that he failed to provide workman’s compensation insurance to his employees, among other “oversights.”
Aug. 23, 2008. The former Mat Maid plant is unloaded off the state books. The state’s only other dairy interest looks into purchasing it, but somehow can’t get a bid qualified. The only qualified bid received comes from Franci Havemeister’s real estate colleague, Matt Bobbich, and the facility is sold for the minimum bid acceptable by the state, $1.5M. It’s termed a “break even” deal for Alaska.
What does all of this add up to? We’ll have to leave it to sharper legal beagles than yours truly to sort it all out, but there certainly does seem to be a lot of money changing hands between a small group of related individuals. I’m not sure if we’ve struck fire yet, but there’s certainly plenty of smoke. Stay tuned for more of my baseless smears against Sarah Palin and her family as the campaign rolls on.
Amid all this year’s psychodramas about gender, race and age, consider the conflict in the heart and soul of the 42nd President of the United States as he looks back at his past and ahead to his place in history.
This week Bill Clinton gave Barack Obama lunch in his Harlem office, a promise to do “whatever I’m asked” in the campaign and a prediction that Obama “will win and win handily” in November.
But nothing is simple in Clintonland. The day before, the former President had another visitor, billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, head of the “vast right wing conspiracy” that had financed his impeachment. They talked cozily about doing good in the world, just as Hillary had met with the editorial board of Scaife’s Pittsburgh newspaper and won their endorsement in this year’s primary.
Since there are no permanent friends or enemies in the Clintons’ lives (ask Bill Richardson), their support of Obama requires close parsing.
Without his own marital melodrama, there would be little reason to doubt Clinton’s sincerity about seeing Obama as a logical heir to his and JFK’s Democratic legacies. But the bruising primary season and Hillary Clinton’s future hopes can’t be left out of the equation.
September 8th, 2008 By SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
Don’t expect the Bush administration’s embrace of Nazi-like torture techniques to be a talking point as the presidential campaign heads into the home stretch. As despicable as the practice has been — and made worse by the cover-ups, obfuscations and junk-law opinions justifying its use — torture simply isn’t on the radar screen of most voters.
That so noted, and overlooking any mental torture that previous presidents may have suffered at the hands of their First Ladies, John McCain becomes the first potential president to have been physically tortured by an enemy while serving his country. As he has written in his memoirs, his North Vietnamese jailers withheld medical treatment, forced him to stand for long periods of time, put him in stress positions, beat him and deprived him of sleep during five and a half years of captivity.
All are clearly torture techniques, right?
Not according to Dick Cheney, the architect of the torture regime. Not according to his feckless boss, who long denied that he approved of torture and then publicly embraced it. Not according to the former concierge of the eponymously named Rumsfeld Gulag, a global system that includes Guantánamo Bay and secret prisons in foreign countries and aboard U.S. Navy ships. Not according to David Addington, who has proudly served as Cheney’s dungeon master.
It is the view of all of these cowards, smugly reinforced in John Yoo’s ethically- and morally-impaired Justice Department memos, that McCain was not tortured because the techniques employed against him were merely used to extract accurate information.
“The false confessions that McCain was forced to make were, according to the logic of the Bush administration, as accurate as the ‘intelligence’ we have procured from ‘interrogating” terror suspects.
“Feel safer?”
McCain’s service during the Vietnam War must be honored on its face. That is in no way diminished by the fact he was, by many accounts, the spoiled brat son and grandson of admirals and an underachiever at the Naval Academy and in the cockpit. He destroyed no fewer than three fighter jets (or four or five, depending upon the account) in the months before he was shot down, quite possibly because of the trademark impetuosity we saw in his selection of Sarah Palin.
But that is where I draw the line as a fellow veteran, albeit one who was never war hero material.
McCain has flipped and flopped on torture since the Bush administration’s mischief first saw the light of day and hasn’t spoken out forcefully against it — let alone commented on it — since he launched his campaign. Meanwhile, he has shamelessly played the POW Card when he doesn’t want to answer a question.
Does this diminish McCain’s stature as a war hero? No. Does it diminish his stature as a presidential wannabe? Absolutely.
Because in the end, accruing power and prestige has been more important to McCain than standing up for veterans, let alone standing on principle, which makes his newly minted claim that he is an agent of change so patently false.
Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House and here for an index with links to other torture-related posts.
What lessons - if any -can one glean about the direction of the Republican Party from its embrace of an ultra-conservative working mother with a daughter pregnant out of wedlock? According to Jordan Mejias of Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, it may indicate a change in course best highlighted by harkening back to the infamous Dan Quayle-Murphy Brown episode of 1992.
A few months ago, the Republican candidate told backers that choosing a running mate was easy. “You know, basically it’s a Google. What you can find out now on the Internet–it’s remarkable.”
Now it appears that vetting his last-minute choice of Sarah Palin was no search engine slam dunk as a traffic jam of revelations clogs the path to her nomination and raises once again the question of whether McCain’s shoot-from-the-hip temperament is suitable for a 21st century presidency.
The list keeps growing–the ethics investigation of her firing the state’s public safety commissioner for not firing her former brother-in-law; her membership in a party that advocated Alaskan secession from the Union; her support for the Bridge to Nowhere before opposing it, along with such family items as her teenage daughter’s pregnancy and husband’s drunk driving arrest.
What’s more troubling than any of these disclosures is the fact that the decision was so impulsive, the fact-finding behind it so slipshod and, worst of all, that McCain’s staff is so clearly lying about the process to cover up its shortcomings.
After seven years of an Administration that manipulated intelligence for life-or-death decisions, the last thing the nation needs is a new President who can’t even keep the information-gathering on his running mate from going off the rails.
September 2nd, 2008 By SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
There are those, I know, who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American dream. — ARCHIBALD MacLEISH
In exactly nine weeks, America will go to the polls in the most important election of my lifetime and, I daresay, for anyone who wasn’t old enough to vote for Franklin Roosevelt or Herbert Hoover in 1932.
Why is it the most important? Because even before factoring in the excesses, amorality and criminality of the last eight years, America already was in the kind of deep doo-doo that not even 1932 can compare to:
Well before the coming of George Walker Bush, the disparity between the rich and poor was accelerating. Middle class families were having a harder time balancing their checkbooks. Millions of people had no access to affordable health care, let alone the insurance to help pay for it. There was an over-reliance on fossil fuels and indifference to alternative energy resources. The infrastructure was crumbling. And there was great confusion about the role the remaining superpower should play on the world stage.
These crises, well underway as the new millennium dawned, cannot be blamed on the Clinton administration alone or for that matter any other administration of recent vintage. Some of the problems were beyond the control of whomever occupied the Oval Office. Indeed, some cried out for solutions that no party or politician could provide.
Sarah Palin today announced that her 17-year old daughter Bristol is pregnant. She will marry the father.
Word comes from McCain sources that the family announced this in response to rumors that Palin’s son Trig, who has Down’s Syndrome, was actually Bristol’s baby. Those rumors have been effectively quashed by this photo taken in April, just before Trig’s birth.
There are still many questions swirling about Sarah Palin’s decision to board an 8-hour flight from Texas to Alaska AFTER her water broke. She was one month premature with a special-needs child and risked infection and a dangerous airborne delivery by going back to Alaska and not having the baby in Dallas. Anecdotal conversations I’ve had with women show horror at the prospect of getting on an airplane after leaking amniotic fluid late in pregnancy. Who would do that? Isn’t that reckless?
All of this comes on the heels of an ongoing investigation into Sarah Palin’s potential abuse of power for firing the Public Safety Commissioner Walt Monegan for not removing Palin’s ex-brother-in-law from the police force. Mike Wooten, the trooper in question, had been abusing Sarah’s sister and was embroiled in a nasty custody dispute.
Each of these stories in isolation would be noteworthy and a bit odd. But taken together they portray a family in a great deal of crisis - a special-needs infant, a sister and brother-in-law embroiled in a conflict that could result in legal charges filed against Governor Palin for abuse of power, and now a teenage pregnancy, made public apparently to deflect attention paid to the bizarre circumstances of Trig’s birth.
I have no idea what the political ramifications of all this are. I suppose many people will just feel more sympathy for a family that is all too “real.” I know that I feel sympathy for them. But the thought that John McCain knew all of this and decided to promote her from Alaska Governor to a heartbeat away from the Presidency is quite stunning. What does it say about McCain’s judgment? Die he really vet her? Or did he figure that our tabloid-obsessed nation would somehow not care about these things? Or maybe he calculated that these stories would just make her more authentic and sympathetic. Who knows?
All I can say is that this campaign has gotten truly bizarre. Is there any modern precedent for this? GOP officials are supposedly a bit stunned at the Bristol pregnancy. Does this factor in to a “family values” campaign in some way? As a decidedly non-family-values voter I have no idea how to calculate it.
We’re not even eight hours into the era of the McCain - Palin ticket, but I am quickly becoming more and more convinced that John McCain had previously decided upon T-Paw or Romney but hit the panic button and selected Sarah Palin after Obama’s Mile High Stadium speech without full vetting. Two items have already jumped to the front page. The first, of course, is what is quickly being dubbed with the overdrawn nickname of “troopergate.” During our radio show today, I was told by a good friend that “if this is the best they can find…” but it seems the best may indeed have some legs. We live in the Internet Age, and it’s amazing that McCain’s team didn’t realize that the news reports from Channel 11 in Anchorage would be available on this story. Apparently, in a period of only a few weeks, Governor Palin completely reversed herself on her story about the firing of her brother-in-law.
This might not fit well in the whole “straight talk express” line. But what is more interesting may be Palin’s stance on abortion. While still a divisive issue in the country, poll after poll has shown that voters are only willing to go just so far in support of pro-life movements. Palin has apparently shown herself to be just about as far out on the far right fringe as one could be on this issue, going so far as to say that abortion should be banned even in the cases of rape or incest.
Keenan is upset because Palin also opposes abortions in very rare cases of rape or incest and she complained that “Palin is also a member of the anti-choice group Feminists for Life.”
No matter how conservative you are, you don’t win elections these days on that kind of platform. No word yet on whether or not Palin supports letting a mother die in an effort to save a four-month gestation fetus, but then we’ve only had six hours to dig. The point is, it just doesn’t sell in large portions of the country, particularly with women who can empathize with their sisters who may have been placed in such a horrific condition. I don’t know if we’ll ever know the truth on this one, but I am becoming more and more convinced that this was a panic move on McCain’s part and Governor Palin was simply not fully-vetted before being thrust on the ticket.
I’m still no fan of Barack Obama, but he may be the luckiest man on the face of the planet today.
Idaho Senator Larry Craig, after years of demonizing and legislating against gays and lesbians, finally came out of the closet—or, as the British would say, the “water closet”—at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport a little over a year ago.
Similarly, Conservative Bill Kristol, who for years has been demonizing Hillary Clinton (and her husband), has come out of the closet and revealed his secret love and admiration for Hillary.
In his New York Times column this morning, “A Joe of His Own?”, Kristol admits how “empathetic” he feels about “the anguished cries of Hillary supporters.” Supporters of his dear friend, who “got about 18 million votes this year running against [Obama],” but who was betrayed by Obama when he picked “Joe Biden, who gained the support of a few thousand caucusgoers in Iowa before dropping out of the race.”
He decries how “Obama’s glass ceiling” has kept his beloved Hillary from reaching the Democratic presidential nomination she was entitled to.
In a sincere, heartfelt, and selfless appeal (I can see the tears in his eyes), Kristol begs Hillary supporters to avenge the Obama snub by voting for John McCain and Joe Lieberman in November.
These have to be the words and sentiments of a man truly in love. Why else would a dyed-in-the-wool Conservative wish to help a flaming Liberal in her hour of need?
But, there are still some doubters. For example co-blogger to the Moderate Voice, Robert Stein, writes this morning in “Shedding Tears for Hillary”:
From the sidelines, hopeful Republicans are shedding crocodile tears for Hillary Clinton with TV commercials about being “passed over,” and ardent feminists like William Kristol are bemoaning “The Democrats’ Glass Ceiling.” Such sympathy is touching, coming from those whose political sensitivities have brought on a devastating war and economic chaos…”
“Crocodile tears?” No, not my Bill Kristol!
Unless…Unless—and I hate myself for even thinking of this—Republicans have some ulterior motive for their professed love and concern for Hillary. Could it be that they are trying to split, and steal, the Democratic vote, and divide the Democratic Party? Could it be that they are cruelly using Hillary as a piñata, and her supporters as the candy they are trying to beat out of the piñata?
It couldn’t be!
But just in case, Hillary supporters need to ask themselves the following question, in the privacy of their own conscience and intellect: “Is the sudden love, concern,and respect being expressed by Republicans for Hillary ‘true love,’ or could it perhaps, just perhaps, be hate for Obama in particular and antipathy for Democrats in general?
But back to Bill. Didn’t I hear someone say, “If you really think this is love, I have a bridge to nowhere in Alaska I would like to sell you”?
The post-post-mortems are rolling in on Fornigate as we learn more than we ever cared to know about Rielle Hunter, including how to correctly pronounce the trollop’s name and the revelation that her lawyer advised her to let John Edwards take a paternity test because he would marry her after his wife Elizabeth succumbed to cancer. Yes, it all makes you want to take a really long shower.
Most pundits are picking at crumbs at this point, I myself have drained the well of usable photographs of the lovebirds and pray that next week and the Democratic National Convention arrive on schedule so we can put this whole sordid affair out on the compost pile.
As it is, there has been unsurprisingly little written about Hunter and John Edwards that is smart, let alone insightful, and that includes the bulk of my own nattering. (Exception here, I think.)
I blame my own semi-fixation on the Dog Days of Summer and morbid fascination with celebrity gone bad after covering the O.J. Simpson double-murder saga from the discovery of the bodies through the criminal trial to the civil denouement, well over 500 bylines in all, including an interview with the plastic surgeon who augmented Nicole’s bazooms to meet The Juice’s specifications.
Anyhow, in general the mainstream media has gotten the story wrong pretty much from the jump:
* It ignored it far too long, exhibiting a false modesty and lack of curiosity that it also afforded presidential wannabe adulterers like Rudy Giuliani and John McCain.
* When it finally did tip-toe through the dung heap and gingerly climbed on board, it took John Boy’s confession at face value, as opposed to the tissue of half truths and outright lies that it was.
* Most importantly, it ran the same broad brush over Edward’s legacy as it did his adultery.
I promised myself that I would not blog on the Jennifer Aniston-John Mayer smash-up, and it’s been like only 72 hours since I last wrote anything about the John & Rielle Show, which actually had more to do with electrocuting horses than short-circuiting political careers.
But a newly-published account concerning Edwards shamelessly using his wife’s cancer to try to guilt-trip a newspaper editor into the presidential wannabe’s own Cone of Silence cannot go un-noted.
Explains John Drescher, the executive editor of the Raleigh News & Observer:
“Edwards told me that the allegations were not true.
“He said The N&O was the paper that arrived on his doorstep every day, the one read by friends of him and his wife, Elizabeth.
“He said he’d never called before to complain or state his case. Given Elizabeth’s health — she has cancer — he said it was especially important to him that the story not run in The N&O.”
Drescher says that as it turned out, The N&O did not run the story on the National Enquirer’s scoop because it was based on only a single source, and there is an element of sour-grapes in his account because when John Boy finally realized that it was curtains he blabbed to ABC News and not his hometown paper.
Still, is this guy a shameless sonofabitch or what?
This Guest Voice is by “Raging Moderate” Will Durst — a take on the John Edwards affair.
“Too” Americas
by Will Durst
Not content to be viewed as your ordinary run-of-the-mill hypocritical oaf, former vice-presidential candidate John Edwards compounded his monumental weaseldom by trying to sneak an overdue admission of serial monogamy infractions under the cloak of the Beijing Olympics.
Nice one, John-Boy. Surprised you neglected to blame the whole sordid affair on the little girl who lip-synced opening night because the real singer wasn’t deemed cute enough by the Chinese government. Question: How much cuter can one 7-year-old girl be than another?
What is this guy’s major malfunction? Has he not been paying attention? Does the term “impeachment proceedings” ring no bells here? The hell has he been doing since 1998? Eating fudge in a cave, wearing earmuffs and galoshes? You’d think the public dredging of Bill Clinton through 24 months of partisan mud might intimidate a man with a penchant for $400 barber visits, wouldn’t you? As clueless as a junior-varsity cheerleader’s fifth Long Island Iced Tea.
Rielle Hunter, the one-time apple of John Edwards’ eye, is emerging as quite a piece of work — and whose turbulent past intersects with a gruesome series of crimes.
Hunter’s bona fides as a party girl are well established. She had a voracious appetite for sex and cocaine that so impressed onetime paramour and Generation X novelist Jay McInerney that he did a roman à clef on her in a piece titled “Story of My Life.”
Why couldn’t Edwards have hit on a waitress at an IHOP? Things probably would have been much less messy. The answer, of course, is that Hunter hit on him, opened her legs and the next thing you know it was volare, oh oh, which has lately been replaced by cantare, oh no. And now even The New York Timesis on the case, prying the lid off of an elaborate cover-up scheme hatched with the help of a bevy of attorneys in the days before the Iowa caucuses when rumors of Edwards’ dalliance ran rampant.
This is the part of the movie . . . er, soap opera, where the scolds try to pile on by saying that Edwards’ political career is caput and his wife will be sooner or later, so why should any of this matter? I try to answer that here en route to a particularly sordid chapter in the life of Lisa Druck, which was the birth name of Rielle Hunter.
Back before she was tripping the light fantastic in New York City clubs, Druck rode and showed championship-caliber horses at Eagle Nest, an Ocala, Florida, farm owned by James Druck, her millionaire lawyer father. These horses included Henry the Hawk, a brilliant show jumper whom daddy bought for daughter for $150,000.
James Druck made his nut on representing insurance companies, but he went over to the other side in masterminding a series of claims following the orchestrated deaths of a bevy of show horses, most of them by electrocution, at the hands of accomplice Tommy “The Sandman” Burns.
Papa was having money problems in 1982 and sought to sell Henry but could only get $125,000. Sports Illustrated subsequently reported that Druck showed Burns how to slice an extension cord down the middle, attach a pair of alligator clips to the bare end of each wire, and attach the clips to the horse — one to an ear, the other to its rectum. Burns then plugged the cord into a standard wall socket and stepped back.
“You better get out of the way,” Burns told SI co-authors William Munson and William Nack. “They go down immediately. One horse dropped so fast in the stall, he must have broken his neck when he hit the floor. It’s a sick thing, I know, but it was quick and it was painless. They didn’t suffer.”
That is debatable, but death by such a means left no visible trace, and insurance companies attributed most of the fatalities to colic, a not uncommon malady in horses.
Munson now writes at ESPN.com that 17-year-old Lisa Druck and her then boyfriend, Louis Whelen, were doing the wild thing in the back of a pickup truck when Burns slipped into the barn at Eagle Nest Farm to light up her steed.
Did Lisa Druck know what Tommy Burns was up to?
Apparently only after the fact. Lisa and her boyfriend say they saw Burns stealing away and unsuccessfully gave chase. When they returned to the barn they found Henry lying dead in his stall. Munson says that Lisa confronted her father about the killing and he never denied orchestrating the murder for the money. (The murder of a horse and a father’s non-denial are part of the McInerney story.)
James Druck died of lung cancer in 1990. Two years later, 36 people — some of them big names in the Grand Prix horse show circuit — were indicted by a grand jury investigating the electrocutions. All but one were convicted of crimes based on the testimony of Burns, who did six months in a Florida county jail.
There is a special place reserved in hell for people like James Druck who murder animals, let alone do so for financial gain. He and Lisa’s mother divorced the year that Henry was dispatched, and the future Rielle’s tumultuous adolescence may explain her reinventions over the years as actress, screenwriter, filmmaker, early YouTube progenitor and New Age entrepreneur.
No matter.
As Munson notes, where some people go, trouble seems to follow, and in accepting Rielle Hunter’s open-legged invitation, John Edwards has found more than his share.
Largely without notice during the banking dust up, 
I need to thank alert reader 
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Most pundits are picking at crumbs at this point, I myself have drained the well of usable photographs of the lovebirds and pray that next week and the Democratic National Convention arrive on schedule so we can put this whole sordid affair out on the compost pile.
