1 March, 2008

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McCain Repeatedly Lobbied FCC on Behalf of Campaign Donors

By Amanda Terkel, Think Progress Posted on March 1, 2008, Alternet.

In 2000, Bush sharply criticized McCain for his unethical behavior. Now, Bush is blaming newspapers for highlighting McCain’s lapses to the public.

So, for you Republicans out there….needing a little impetus on your voting strategies…this one is FOR YOU!  Alternet comes thru for me again!  And, if you’re still thinking this is a democracy…well, readon on sweetheart!

Since The New York Times’s explosive story on Feb. 21, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has been under intense scrutiny for his willingness to use his former position as chair of the Senate Commerce Committee to benefit campaign contributors.

In 1999,McCain wrote two controversial letters to the FCC on behalf of broadcaster and campaign contributor Lowell “Bud” Paxson. He urged the commissioners to make a “rapid decision on Paxson’s quest to acquire a Pittsburgh television station.” McCain had flown on Paxson’s corporate jet on four occasions, and received $28,000 in contributions from Paxson and his law firm.

McCain has insisted that his letter-writing had nothing to do with Paxson. In fact, he claimed that he wasn’t even on Paxson’s side; he simply wanted the FCC to make a decision.

Yet the Paxson case wasn’t an isolated incident. In 2000, reporters reviewed 2,000 pages of correspondences from McCain and his staff. They found that “in the vast majority of those particularly regulatory matters were Mr. McCain himself sent a letter, the interested parties had contributed to his presidential or Senate campaigns” [New York Times, 1/6/00]. Some examples:

- In 1998, McCain wrote the FCC a letter asking it to give “serious consideration” to allowing BellSouth to enter the long-distance market. Just four months earlier, on May 6, 1998, BellSouth officials had donated $16,750 to McCain. [Boston Globe, 1/9/00]
- In June 1998, McCain wrote to the FCC “on behalf of AT&T, Spring, and MCI Worldcom,” even though he had “long favored the so-called Baby Bells.” Two weeks later,Spring donated $2,000. In October 1998, AT&T officials gave him $25,800. [Boston Globe, 1/9/00]
- In May 1999, McCain wrote to the FCC and accused it of “bias against Ameritech and SBC Communications,” two companies seeking to merge. Just before his May letter, “officials and lobbyists for the two companies helped him raise almost $120,000.” Ameritech was led by Richard Notebaert, a “friend and leading fund-raiser” for McCain. [Boston Globe, 1/7/00; New York Times, 1/6/00]
- In 1998, McCain wrote two letters on behalf of satellite television companies Echostar and DirecTV, “in an effort help them win permission to carry local broadcast signals. Echostar’s chairman raised about $25,000 for McCain” in the period between the two letters. [Boston Globe, 1/9/00]
- On Dec. 1, 1998, McCain wrote a letter to the FCC advocating against tighter restrictions, which were “clearly not in the spirit” of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. In the months before the letter, Paxson and Sinclair officials donated about $17,000 to McCain’s campaign. [Boston Globe, 1/9/00]
In 2000, George W. Bush sharply criticized McCain for his unethical behavior. “I think it’s really important for people who advocate reforms to live to the spirit of the reforms they advocate,” said Bush. Now, however, Bush is blaming newspapers for highlighting McCain’s lapses to the public.

Amanda Terkel is Deputy Research Director at the Center for American Progress and serves as Deputy Editor for The Progress Report and ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress.

© 2008 Think Progress All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/bloggers/http://www.thinkprogress.org//78338/

Its the first day of March 2008. Its Saturday, and I’ve been up since 6:41. What I need to be writing I cannot write! I have an article deadline and for the life of me, I’m unable to write.

So much is happening in my head and heart.

I don’t want to wish away this Winter, but dammit…

I’ll be back in full-swing shortly…I’m just needing some time to sort through everything. I do want to comment on the upcoming presidential primaries, especially the Texas primary. Perhaps that is where I will begin or re-begin my March writing–politics! Its time to get back in my head, lock it, and throw away the fucking key!

By the way…I don’t think the Winter of 2008 will ever end…

¿Me oye usted, g?

Alright…so, salon.com is a great place to get a sense of leftist and critical news.  A colleague-friend of mine sent this to me.  Thought I’d share it w/ my readers…

Hillary Clinton, the first Latina in chief?

Clinton’s popularity with Latino voters reminds us that people of color do not walk in lock step. There’s a lesson here for Obama.

By Richard Rodriguez

Feb. 09, 2008 | Hillary Clinton’s Super Tuesday success with Hispanic voters — particularly female Hispanic voters — suggests that the time has come to rethink the ways we have categorized people in “multicultural” America.

For a generation, the cultural and political left has, to its credit, forced institutional America to acknowledge complexity — the nation’s many colors and sexualities and ethnicities. The trouble with the left’s sense of complexity was that it was dumped into a nondescript drum labeled “diversity,” a word that meant less and less the more that it was used.
The immediate conclusion drawn by political analysts from Super Tuesday’s big headline, “Hillary Clinton Wins Latino Votes,” was that Hispanics refused to support an African-American candidate, and that all is not well among “people of color” (another cheap term from the multicultural dictionary).

In fact, people of color do not walk in lock step, are not necessarily united in their goals by their tincture or free from competition with each other. In fact, Hispanics, particularly immigrants — legally or illegally here — often find themselves, as newcomers, in fierce competition with working-class blacks and whites at the meat plant hiring office.

The cynic will say that Hillary Clinton has detected tension in the brown-black relationship and exploited it, at a time when her rival is an African-American with vast support from black America. More accurately, I think Clinton has punctured the easy generality of a term like people of color.

Bill Clinton was famously anointed our “first African-American president” by Toni Morrison. But after his recent demeaning comments about the African-American vote for Barack Obama, I think it more likely that Hillary could end up as our first Latina president.

Our first Latina in chief, for more reasons than one: Hillary Clinton is reaping the benefits of a widespread Hispanic defection from a xenophobic Republican Party, the result of the GOP’s inability to distinguish the kid crossing the border to pick apples from a terrorist.

But remember also that Clinton won two-thirds of the Hispanic women’s, or Latinas’, vote. So the question her opponent should ponder is whether Latinas were voting as women, rather than as Hispanics ambivalent toward blacks?

Or, to put the matter more bluntly: Can a person in one demographic box also belong within another? Yes, Latina women, for example, may also vote for Hillary out of feminist allegiance. And Latino men may support her, too, although perhaps for slightly different reasons.

In the end, Hillary Clinton did only slightly less well among Latinos than Latinas. The stereotype of Latino men is that, like bright, feathered birds, they are apt to shy away from strong women. But my own stereotypical view is that Latino culture is matriarchal and machismo is less a confident strut than a reflection of male insecurity. Which Latino voter had not met her type before — the strong mother, the persevering wife, particularly the wife who withstands the humiliations of a sexually immature husband?

What, then, to say about Barack Obama — the son of a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya?

His biography is a case study in the ways that diversity can exist within diversity. To his credit, Obama has taken from his childhood in Indonesia and Hawaii, has learned from his experience of his father’s Muslim faith and his mother’s Christianity, has the wisdom of being able to unite disparate populations and cultures in a single life.

But whites (as early as Obama’s adolescence in Hawaii) tended to see him as black. Whereas blacks, whether at Harvard or in Chicago, tended to see him as not “black enough.”

Obama has been anxious to prove to African-Americans that he is one of them. And white liberals are content to see him as nothing more or less than that — “America’s first serious black candidate for president.”

Most Hispanics in the United States are mestizos — a racial mix of European, African and New World Indian. Most Hispanics would understand Barack Obama if he came to us, not as an African-American but, like us, as a person of confused bloodlines.

For the moment, Hillary Clinton’s advantage is that she promises mothers and wives universal healthcare and improved educational opportunities. What she shrewdly sees is that Hispanics are more than an ethnicity, they are also a gender.
– By Richard Rodriguez

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