John Wayne Gacy, a lifelong Democrat, got his start in Iowa too

Update: Michele Bachman mixed up John Wayne with John Wayne Gacy during her campaign stump speech in Iowa today. The famous American movie star, John Wayne was born in Iowa. John Wayne Gacy (the Democrat) got his first taste of fame when he was arrested for chasing a teenage Democrat office worker around after hours with his pants down.

I met John Wayne Gacy in 1975. I was teen working part-time at a luxury townhouse development near our home called Barrington Lakes. Gacy was a night watchman/contractor at the development site. We were told he was a “great guy,” very funny, a prominant Democrat and “Pogo the Clown” at special events. Another teenage co-worker and I talked to him once or twice. It just took a split second to form an opinion of Gacy. He was a perv, big time.

The fat slob sat in a construction trailer night after night reading dirty magazines and paperbacks. The stack was four feet high. I remember his fat, scrufty face and glazed-over, puss-filled eyes of a drug addict and drunk. And he had an old Hubert Humphrey bumper sticker on his “office” wall, along with some photos of Chicago politicians including Mayor Richard Daley. He had dreams of running for office some day. He was good friends with a new resident who rented his suite including the furniture. I forget his name, but remember the black man dressed well and paid his rent only in cash. He was a very good friend of Gacy.

It was startling to learn that the guy disappeared months later. We had to clean out his apartment. The new, designer couch had a big, greasy, filthy hole carved into the middle of the cushion. It smelled rancid. The place was wrecked.

Ten years earlier:

John Wayne Gacy seemed to have it all, two kids, a young wife and a career as a fast food manager thanks to his father-in-law in Waterloo, Iowa.

But there were strange stories circulating. It seemed that young boys were always in John Wayne Gacy’s presence. Everyone heard the stories that Gacy was homosexual and made passes at the young boys who worked for him at the fast food franchises his new father-in-law owned. Yet, people close to him refused to believe in the gossip, until May of 1968 when rumors became truths brought out in court.

In the spring of 1968, Gacy was indicted by a grand jury in Black Hawk County, Iowa for committing the act of sodomy with a teenage boy named Mark Miller. Miller testified that Gacy had tricked him into being tied up while visiting Gacy’s home a year earlier, and had violently raped him. Gacy denied all the charges against him and told a conflicting story, stating that Miller willingly had sexual relations with him in order to earn extra money. Gacy further insisted that Jaycee members opposed to him becoming president of the local chapter organization were setting him up. He was convicted to 10 years in prison becuase he had also hired a teenager to beat up Miller. He served just 18 months; his wife divorced him and he moved back to Chicago. He reportedly said that he considered his wife and kids dead.

He soon met and married his second wife, Carole. But Carole and John had drifted apart by 1975. He would be in a good mood one moment and the next moment he would be flying into an uncontrollable rage and throwing furniture. He was an insomniac and took speed. Gacy was rarely home in the evenings and when he was, he was either fixing something with the outside of the house or working in the garage. However, there was one thing that Carole was extremely worried about.

She began to find gay magazines with naked men and boys in her house. She knew that Gacy was reading them and he acted nonchalantly about his new choice of reading material. Gacy told his wife that he preferred boys to women.

Carole filed for divorce. The divorce became final on March 2, 1976.

Although Gacy had a criminal record, was working several night watchman and janitorial jobs, he refused to let it hold him back from realizing his dream of success. Being a man who thrived on recognition and attention, Gacy turned his sights to the world of politics. It was in politics that Gacy hoped to make his mark in the world. He had high aspirations and hoped to one day run for public office as a Democrat.

In 1975, Gacy became the Democrat precinct secretary treasurer. It seemed as if Gacy’s dreams of success were beginning to come true; however his career in politics would be short-lived. Troubles started to bubble up when rumors began to circulate about Gacy having homosexual interest in teenage boys.

One of the rumors stemmed from an actual incident that took place during the time Gacy was involved with cleaning the Democratic Party headquarters. One of the teenagers who worked with Gacy on that particular project was sixteen-year-old Tony Antonucci. According to Antonucci, Gacy made sexual advances towards him, and chased him in the Democrat headquarters with his pants down. According to court records, Gacy backed off when Antonucci threatened to hit him with a chair. Gacy joked about the situation and left him alone for a month.

The following month Gacy tried to trick the teen into handcuffs and believing he was securely cuffed he began to undress the boy. However, Antonucci had made sure that one of his hands was loosely cuffed and he was able to free himself and wrestle Gacy to the ground. Once he had Gacy on the ground he handcuffed him, but eventually let him go after Gacy promised he would never again try touching him. Gacy never made sexual advances towards Antonucci again and the boy remained working for Gacy for almost a year, following the incident.

When Gacy was exposed in December 1978 as a sadistic homosexual serial killer, it came as a huge shock to his neighbors, friends, local politicians and business associates.

It was also deeply embarrassing for the Democratic Party of President Jimmy Carter as Gacy was an enthusiastic supporter who had been photographed with the First Lady, Rosalyn Carter. He presented a check for $5,000 to Jimmy Carter’s campaign. The media didn’t cover the politics of the killer clown. The media filters the news that is harmful to their overall liberal Democrat creed.

Obama, Chavez and Hillary upset with Hondurans because they won’t let their leftist president remain in office for life like Castro and Chavez

By Mick Gregory

Did CNN or MSNBC report the details? 

Hugo Chávez’s socialist-building efforts suffered a minor setback yesterday when the Honduran military were ordered by the Honduras Supreme Court to expell its leftist president  Mel Zelaya for abusing the nation’s constitution.

Zeaya, with the help of Chavez wanted to hold an illegal special election last Sunday that would change the Honduran Constitution and allow him to remain “El Presidente” for life. That is a model set by Fidel Castro and followed by Hugo Chavez. 

 This report is from the Wall Street Journal:

El President l Zelaya miscalculated when he tried to emulate the success of his good friend Hugo Chavez in reshaping the Honduran Constitution to his liking.

But Honduras is not out of the Venezuelan woods yet. Yesterday the Central American country was being pressured to restore the authoritarian Mr. Zelaya by the likes of Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Hillary Clinton and, of course, Hugo himself. The Organization of American States, having ignored Mr. Zelaya’s abuses, also wants him back in power. It will be a miracle if Honduran patriots can hold their ground.

That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.

But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.

The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.

Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court’s order.

The attorney general had already made clear that the referendum was illegal, and he further announced that he would prosecute anyone involved in carrying it out. Yesterday, Mr. Zelaya was arrested by the military and is now in exile in Costa Rica.

It remains to be seen what Mr. Zelaya’s next move will be. It’s not surprising that chavistas throughout the region are claiming that he was victim of a military coup. They want to hide the fact that the military was acting on a court order to defend the rule of law and the constitution, and that the Congress asserted itself for that purpose, too.

Mrs. Clinton has piled on as well. Yesterday she accused Honduras of violating “the precepts of the Interamerican Democratic Charter” and said it “should be condemned by all.” Fidel Castro did just that. Mr. Chávez pledged to overthrow the new government.

Honduras is fighting back by strictly following the constitution. The Honduran Congress met in emergency session yesterday and designated its president as the interim executive as stipulated in Honduran law. It also said that presidential elections set for November will go forward. The Supreme Court later said that the military acted on its orders. It also said that when Mr. Zelaya realized that he was going to be prosecuted for his illegal behavior, he agreed to an offer to resign in exchange for safe passage out of the country. Mr. Zelaya denies it.

Many Hondurans are going to be celebrating Mr. Zelaya’s foreign excursion. Street protests against his heavy-handed tactics had already begun last week. On Friday a large number of military reservists took their turn. “We won’t go backwards,” one sign said. “We want to live in peace, freedom and development.”

Besides opposition from the Congress, the Supreme Court, the electoral tribunal and the attorney general, the president had also become persona non grata with the Catholic Church and numerous evangelical church leaders. On Thursday evening his own party in Congress sponsored a resolution to investigate whether he is mentally unfit to remain in office.

For Hondurans who still remember military dictatorship, Mr. Zelaya also has another strike against him: He keeps rotten company. Earlier this month he hosted an OAS general assembly and led the effort, along side OAS Secretary General José Miguel Insulza, to bring Cuba back into the supposedly democratic organization.

The OAS response is no surprise. Former Argentine Ambassador to the U.N. Emilio Cárdenas told me on Saturday that he was concerned that “the OAS under Insulza has not taken seriously the so-called ‘democratic charter.’ It seems to believe that only military ‘coups’ can challenge democracy. The truth is that democracy can be challenged from within, as the experiences of Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and now Honduras, prove.” A less-kind interpretation of Mr. Insulza’s judgment is that he doesn’t mind the Chávez-style coup.

The struggle against chavismo has never been about left-right politics. It is about defending the independence of institutions that keep presidents from becoming dictators. This crisis clearly delineates the problem. In failing to come to the aid of checks and balances, Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Insulza expose their true colors.

Miss California has same views against gay marriage as President Obama, Biden and and Hillary

President Barack Obama didn’t think the media lap dogs would do this to him just 100 days into his term. But thanks to The Donald, Obama ended up in the middle of the gay/lesbian/transgender smear campaign against Miss California.  — the debate over Carrie Prejeans Christian beliefs — in opposition to gay marriage.

At a press conference addressing Carrie Prejean’s disputed title in the Miss USA competition, pageant owner Donald Trump compared Prejean’s stated views on gay marriage to Obama’s. Bloggers on Twitter have pointed this out weeks ago. 

“It’s the same answer that the president of the United States gave,” Trump said. “She gave an honorable answer. She gave an answer from her heart.”

In her own remarks moments later, Prejean echoed Trump’s statement, telling reporters: “The president of the United States, the secretary of state, and many Americans agree with me in this belief.” Let’s be clear on this media/gay smear, Miss Prejean would be Miss USA today, if not for the biased, hate-filled attacks by the gay/lesbian/transgender political arm of the Democratic party of the U.S. Perez Hilton is the one who should be in a controversy today by the major media.

Q: “Do you support gay marriage?” VP BIDEN: “No, Barack Obama nor I support redefining, from a civil side, what constitutes marriage. We do not support that. That is basically a decision to be able to be left to the faiths and people who practice their faiths to determine what you call it.”

Sleepless in Seattle — The Post-Intelligencer shuts down — lives online

Last week: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has told employees they “might” lose their jobs as soon as next week after a deadline for Hearst Corp to sell the newspaper passed last Monday. 

The news is out, the  146-year-old Seattle Post-Intelligencer prints its last edition tomorrow.

The P-I will continue to “live” on the Internet with a much smaller staff.

I like it. It’s a mix of current and archival. Mikey likes it!

http://www.seattlepi.com 

Owner, the Hearst Corp. reports it has failed to find a buyer for the newspaper, which it put up for sale in January after nine years of financial losses. There are no more suckers left with enough trust fund money to waste.

The end of the print edition leaves The Seattle Times as the only major daily newspaper in the city. 

The TV stations will be there tonight and tomorrow capturing the historic day.

Seattle has been counting TV, and now the internet as their favorite news sources. Do you think people will wait for the Seattle Times to find out?

 

 

Last week:

Read between the lines: Boxes for removing personal items and shredding bins are scheduled to be delivered to the PI floors this week.

Clues suggest Hearst plans to close the P-I shortly

Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports on its own demise

Just after Hearst spokesman Paul Luthringer claimed that “we are still evaluating our options,” Post-Intelligencer staffers learned that boxes and bins are scheduled to be delivered to the newsroom later this week — some for materials to be taken home, others for notes that require shredding. “It would be nice to have some clarity,” says business reporter Joseph Tartakoff. “It’s really hard to plan your work when you’re not sure if you’ll be around the next day.”

The New York Times sold off the majority of its new sky scraper in New York and has a long-term rent agreement. The company no longer owns the roof over its head.

Next, McClatchy announced massive layoffs, and Hearst’s Seattle PI is about to turn into a shadow, online only edition. Meanwhile, back at Hearst’s figurative flagship, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Media Guild has accepted big cuts just to keep most jobs. The Denver Rocky Mountain News shut down a week or so ago. 

McClatchy Co. is shearing another 1,600 jobs in a cost-cutting spree that has clipped nearly one-third of the newspaper publisher’s work force in less than a year.

The latest reduction in payroll announced Monday follows through on the Sacramento-based company’s previously disclosed plans to lower its expenses by as much as $110 million over the next year as its revenue evaporates amid a devastating recession.

The layoffs will start before April. No fooling.

 Several of McClatchy’s 30 daily newspapers, including The Sacramento Bee and The Kansas City Star, already have decided how many workers will be shown the door. Close to 2,000. 

 

Only 33% would miss their local paper if it folded

Pew Research report
Just 43 percent  of Americans say that losing their local newspaper would hurt civic life in their community “a lot,” according to a Pew Research poll. And even fewer, only 33 percent say they will miss their local newspaper if it folds.

Back to the West Coast

Negotiators for the Guild and the San Francisco Chronicle reached a tentative agreement Monday night changes to the collective bargaining agreement in line with cost cuts planned by Hearst. 

The agreement will require approval by Chronicle Unit Guild members. (They will approve or lose their jobs wholesale). 

A ratification meeting will be scheduled as early as Thursday of this week. Time and place will be announced on Tuesday as soon as a large enough facility can be secured.

In view of the latest terms agreed today, the Guild Negotiating Committee recommends membership approval.

The terms reached late Monday include expanded management ability to lay off employees without regard to seniority. All employees who are discharged in a layoff or who accept voluntary buyouts are guaranteed two weeks’ pay per year of service up to a maximum of one year, plus company-paid health care for the severance term, even in the event of a shutdown – which today’s agreement is designed to avoid.

Guild membership will remain a condition of continued employment for all employees. However, new hires in certain advertising sales positions will be given the option of membership, even though they will retain Guild protection under the contract.

On-callers will be limited to no more than 10 percent in any classification or department.

Pension changes are not part of this agreement, but are being discussed by pension authorities and must be implemented under terms of the Pension Protection Act, due to the recent declines in investment markets. Because those changes may affect the decisions of many members concerning buyouts, we are attempting to reach some key understandings now as to the nature of the changes and when they will take effect.

A lunch-hour meeting on Wednesday March 11, with our pension plan’s lawyer will be held at the Guild Office, 433 Natoma, Third Floor Conference Room.

A bulletin summarizing all the proposed contract changes will be issued Tuesday. A set of the complete proposed amendments will be available on the Guild’s Web site (mediaworkers.org) as soon as possible.

Management is seeking to change the union contract as part of an attempt to cut costs and keep the paper operating under the ownership of the Hearst Corp.

The company said Feb. 24 it would sell or close the paper unless the Guild agreed to changes in the labor agreement in effect through June 2010.

The leaders in the former cash cow industry thought they could just transform to their pages of expensive advertising to Web pages. Sorry. The Web is very competitive and readers will not put up with page after page of ads to follow the news. 

McClatchy is down for the count. The stock is hovering below $1 and will soon be kicked out of the New York Stock Exchange. 

The The Sun of Myrtle Beach and the  Macon Telegraph — McClatchy papers, announced last week that they were outsourcing printing, they joined what one experts are calling the last stage of the dying industry.

Chuck Moozakis, editor-in-chief of Newspapers & Technology, found in a December survey piece that the flight from printing includes mid-sized papers like the two last week, small papers, but also very big ones like the San Francisco Chronicle. Dow Jones has already closed plants in Denver and Chicago and could shutter 10 of the 17 around the country that have printed The Wall Street Journal.

 

“There is a lot of iron sitting out there now,” Moozkis reported.  

“What’s more sobering is the amount of press capacity now available within operations with relatively new presses” like Detroit and Denver. Losing the Rocky Mountain News press run — when it closes (not if) — won’t help, and some of the same impact will come as the two Detroit papers have reduced distribution of a smaller print product most weekdays.

 

 The carbon footprint of newspapers is enormous. At least the unemployed “progressives” can be happy that they are no longer contributing to the worst global warming industry on the planet. 

Ice age commeth — Deepest snow cover in North America in 40 years.

Al Gore, where are you?

Feb. 20 (Bloomberg) — A glitch in satellite sensors caused scientists to underestimate the extent of Arctic sea ice by 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles), a California- size area, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center said.

The error, due to a problem called “sensor drift,” began in early January and caused a slowly growing underestimation of sea ice extent until mid-February. That’s when “puzzled readers” alerted the NSIDC about data showing ice-covered areas as stretches of open ocean, the Boulder, Colorado-based group said on its Web site.

“Sensor drift, although infrequent, does occasionally occur and it is one of the things that we account for during quality- control measures prior to archiving the data,” the center said. “Although we believe that data prior to early January are reliable, we will conduct a full quality check.’’

By Mick Gregory

Update: Feb. 16, 2009

Former astronaut Harrison Schmitt, who walked on the moon and was elected to the U.S. Senate, doesn’t believe that humans are causing global warming.

“I don’t think the human effect is significant compared to the natural effect,” said Schmitt, who is among 70 skeptics scheduled to speak next month at the International Conference on Climate Change in New York.

Schmitt contends that scientists “are being intimidated” if they disagree with the idea that burning fossil fuels has increased carbon dioxide levels, temperatures and sea levels.

“They’ve seen too many of their colleagues lose grant funding when they haven’t gone along with the so-called political consensus that we’re in a human-caused global warming,” Schmitt said.

Dan Williams, publisher with the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, which is hosting the climate change conference, said he invited Schmitt after reading about his resignation from The Planetary Society, a nonprofit dedicated to space exploration.

Schmitt resigned after the group blamed global warming on human activity. In his resignation letter, the 74-year-old geologist argued that the “global warming scare is being used as a political tool to increase government control over American lives, incomes and decision making.”

Update: Feb. 4, 2009

The Weather Channel reports that 90 percent of the U.S. will reach freezing temeratures tonight. 

 

Update: Feb. 2, 2009

 

 

The groundhog says six more weeks of winter.

England has biggest snow cover in more than 20 years.

The heaviest snowfall in 20 years has closed thousands of schools and caused transport chaos up the eastern side of Britain, with London and the surrounding areas the hardest hit.

Six million bus passengers were left in the lurch as all London’s bus services were halted because of dangerous driving conditions, and every Tube line except the Victoria line was at least partially suspended.

 

Update: Dec. 13-17, 2008, Snow coverage in Malibu, Seattle, Las Vegas, Houston Texas! 
Feb. 25, 2008: Snow cover over North America and much of Russia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities recorded record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January “was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average.”

China is experiencing its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

NPR fans along with Al Gore and Hillary must be wondering why they called the “crisis” climate change, rather than global warming. Words matter.
No Mr. Gore, the debate is not over.

Kirsten Gillibrand is tapped for the New York U.S. Senate seat left by Hillary — a big seat to fill!

Update: After two months of a royal dance, and  the first public look at Caroline Kennedy, New York Gov. David Paterson (the legally blind replacement of the former man whore) named upstate NY Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand to replace Hillary Clinton in the U.S. Senate. And what a big seat to fill! 

Gillibrand is a NRA-backed moderate Democrat. But don’t worry liberals, she will fall in lock step with your party.
“This senator has great shoes to fill,” Paterson said at a press conference on Friday. (Note to MSM, this was a public news conference, any reports from this are in the public domain, bloggers are not getting their news from your press release rewrites). 

Gillibrand  is 42 and the mother of two. Did Paterson hear the uproar over the heir apparent Caroline Kennedy, then Andrew Cuomo’s obvious line to the throne? 

 

The privileged in New York’s Democrat royal families thought they could continue the tradition of tapping only the blue bloods. First Caroline Kennedy, then “you know” her do-nothing resume came to light. Next it was Andrew Cuomo. Wow, so his dad with Mafia connections and an ex-governor paved the way to keep high office all in the family.

Would Hillary have ever been a New York Senator in the first place if she had not been married to Bill, and bought their house in New York just months before she ran for office?

There are reports that that was the first time the Clinton’s had to buy a house and pay a mortage, all those other years their homes have been paid for by tax payers. What a royal life! 

What a surprise that Kirsten got the pick. I don’t think that she will do will when Hillary’s term is up. New York Democrats wanted one of the blue blood socialists. 

Now we know that Caroline got nasty. Gov. Paterson rappedCaroline Kennedy at a private event the night before he tapped Kirsten Gillibrand for the Senate, telling guests Kennedy had been “nasty” to him and shown “disrespect” with how she bowed out… 

 

Mick Gregory

The New York Times Tries to Save Face After Supporting and Covering Up for the Hillary Clinton Machine. Vicki Iseman Is Named John McCain’s Lover by the Scandal Sheet

UPDATE: The New York Times may not exist as we know it this year or next. The crash is happening faster than any of the experts had predicted.

This article has been mentioned on Silicon Alley Insider.

End Times
Virtually all the predictions about the death of old media have assumed a comfortingly long time frame for the end of print—the moment when, amid a panoply of flashing lights, press conferences, and elegiac reminiscences, the newspaper presses stop rolling and news goes entirely digital. Most of these scenarios assume a gradual crossing-over, almost like the migration of dunes, as behaviors change, paradigms shift, and the digital future heaves fully into view. The thinking goes that the existing brands—The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal—will be the ones making that transition, challenged but still dominant as sources of original reporting.

But what if the old media dies much more quickly? What if a hurricane comes along and obliterates the dunes entirely? Specifically, what if TheNew York Times goes out of business—like, this May?

It’s certainly plausible. Earnings reports released by the New York Times Company in October indicate that drastic measures will have to be taken over the next five months or the paper will default on some $400million in debt. With more than $1billion in debt already on the books, only $46million in cash reserves as of October, and no clear way to tap into the capital markets (the company’s debt was recently reduced to junk status), the paper’s future doesn’t look good.

“As part of our analysis of our uses of cash, we are evaluating future financing arrangements,” the Times Company announced blandly in October, referring to the crunch it will face in May. “Based on the conversations we have had with lenders, we expect that we will be able to manage our debt and credit obligations as they mature.” This prompted Henry Blodget, whose Web site, Silicon Alley Insider, has offered the smartest ongoing analysis of the company’s travails, to write: “‘We expect that we will be able to manage’? Translation: There’s a possibility that we won’t be able to manage.”

The paper’s credit crisis comes against a backdrop of ongoing and accelerating drops in circulation, massive cutbacks in advertising revenue, and the worst economic climate in almost 80 years. As of December, its stock had fallen so far that the entire company could theoretically be had for about $1 billion. The former Times executive editor Abe Rosenthal often said he couldn’t imagine a world without The Times. Perhaps we should start.

Granted, the odds that The Times will cease to exist entirely come May are relatively slim. Many steps could be taken to prolong its existence. The Times Company has already slashed its dividend, a major source of income for the paper’s owners, the Sulzberger family, but one that starved the company at precisely the moment it needed significant investments in new media. The company could sell its share of the brilliant Renzo Piano–designed headquarters—which cost the company about $600million to build and was completed in 2007, years after the digital threat to The Times’ core business had become clear. (It’s already borrowing money against the building’s value.) It could sell The Boston Globe—or shutter it entirely, given what the company itself has acknowledged is a challenging time for the sale of media properties. It could sell its share in the Boston Red Sox, close or sell various smaller properties, or off-load About.com, the resolutely unglamorous Web purchase that has been virtually the only source of earnings growth in the Times Company’s portfolio. With these steps, or after them, would come mass staffing cuts, no matter that the executive editor, Bill Keller, promised otherwise.

It’s possible that a David Geffen, Michael Bloomberg, or Carlos Slim would purchase The Times as a trophy property and spare the company some of this pain. Even Rupert Murdoch, after overpaying wildly for The Wall Street Journal, seems to be tempted by the prospect of adding The Times to his portfolio. But the experiences of Sam Zell, who must be ruing the day he waded into the waking nightmare that is the now-bankrupt Tribune Company, would surely temper the enthusiasm of all but the most arrogant of plutocrats. (And as global economies tumble around them, the plutocrats aren’t as plutocratic as they used to be.) Alternatively, Google or Microsoft or even CBS could purchase The Times on the cheap, strip it for parts, and turn it into a content mill to goose its own page views.

Regardless of what happens over the next few months, The Times is destined for significant and traumatic change. At some point soon—sooner than most of us think—the print edition, and with it The Times as we know it, will no longer exist. And it will likely have plenty of company. In December, the Fitch Ratings service, which monitors the health of media companies, predicted a widespread newspaper die-off: “Fitch believes more newspapers and news­paper groups will default, be shut down and be liquidated in 2009 and several cities could go without a daily print newspaper by 2010.” — Michael Hirschorn.

 

 

In a effort to retain their crown as the liberal beacon of Western Civilization, the old gray lady, The New York Times, found that not only its circulation, advertising and stock price are falling, now their editorial authority is irrelevant. Obama is crushing the Hillary Clinton machine and the massive coverup of voter fraud in New York and New Hampshire can’t be kept behind closed doors.   Not only are some leaders in the Democrat party pointing out the voter fraud, the liberal mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg called it exactly that. What does The Times do?

Instead they print  a smear job on the front page, attacking the Republican candidate, Sen. John McCain.

White House Spokesman Scott Stanzel told reporters that he and others working in the Bush administration felt the influential newspaper had a history of going after Republican presidential candidates.

“I think a lot of people here in this building with experience in a couple campaigns have grown accustomed to the fact that during the course of a campaign, about — seemingly on maybe a monthly basis leading up to the convention, maybe a weekly basis after that, The New York Times does try to drop a bombshell on the Republican nominee,” Stanzel told reporters.

Stanzel also said the newspaper sometimes makes “incredible leaps to try to drop those bombshells on the Republican nominees.”

It’s too late. The bombshell didn’t work this time. The truth is spreading via blogs. And it is too late for The Times to jump on the Obama band wagon, just yet. The editors are thinking ahead. They know that they will have to switch their support to the Democrat front runner in the next few weeks, graciously dropping Hillary. They have a first look at the poll results for Clinton and she is losing in Texas and Mississippi, big time it appears.  

So, in a last ditch effort, the NYT’s editors drop a bomb on McCain. They even endorsed the moderate war hero a few weeks ago. Take a look at the affair they are reporting that McCain had with Vicki Iseman. Who are the sources? What does Ms. Iseman have to say?

Why didn’t they do that kind of reporting on Bill Clinton? First, before he was elected, but more importantly, when he was being serviced by a young intern in the oval office? The Internet has toppled the elite liberal media in 2008. I predict the NYT stock price to fall below $15 in the coming weeks.

The Rod Blagojevich tapes started on Oct. 22, more than a year after the investigations started. Yet, no mention from the media until weeks after the election

Breaking news. 

Governor Rod Blagojevich gave a press confernence Dec. 19, at 2 p.m. announcing his side of the story for the first time.

“I’m hear to tell you right off the bat that I am not guilty of any criminal wrongdoing and that I intend to stay on the job and that I will fight this thing every step of the way,” said Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D-Ill.) proclaimed his innocence in the opening volley of a statement delivered at the John R. Thompson Center in downtown Chicago this afternoon.

“I will fight, I will fight, I will fight, until I take my last breath,” he continued.  “I have done nothing wrong.”

I believe him. I don’t think he did anything wrong. What about Obama’s chief of staff? 

President-elect Barack Obama’s incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuel had a deeper involvement in pressing for a U.S. Senate seat appointment than previously reported, the Sun-Times has learned. Emanuel had direct discussions about the seat with Gov. Blagojevich, who is is accused of trying to auction it to the highest bidder. — Reported by the Chicago Sun-Times (not the Tribune).  

We know now that hundreds of hours of conversations involving Rod Blagojevich and the top levels of the Democrat Party, were secretly recorded by the FBI since Oct. 22, and Tribune jounalists didn’t mention it — not until after the election of course. Wouldn’t the citizens of America have been better served if they knew about the investigation before the election? 

But it gets more interesting. 

It appears there was a marathon conference call on Nov. 10, with Blago getting all kinds action from the Obama and Chicago Democrat machine. This must have been big. Really big. Because someone tipped off the Tribune to announce to the world about the wire tap and the Obama lock down began. But this was before Blagojevich and Obama’s team exchanged favors, so no crime was committed. The Tribune got a call, from who? Could it be Tony Rezco (the former Tribune editor) to expose the wire tap before Obama’s team made the payoff? Who gave the Tribune the call to spill the beans? 

A WSJ report on Dec. 14 states that the Tribune knew about the wire in October and was working with Pat Fitzgerald’s office on withholding the story.

All is well in Crook County, Ill. 

Thousands of Avis customers are being billed for “unpaid” Ill tollroad fees that were supposed to be charged to the EZ toll devices. Millions of dollars are going to the corrupt Democrat Chicago machine. That’s chump change. This is Chicago! 

Tell us your Chicago stories. 

The Shagged Sheep — One party PC journalism is here. Watch the attack on Mark Steyn

THE SHAGGED SHEEP

This is a long piece but it does have underage sex and bestiality in it. So enjoy! — Mark Steyn The other day I had an e-mail from M J Murphy, who blogs as Big City Lib, saying only this: I think you owe Dr. Miller an apology. There followed a link to a post called Steyn Gets Punked By 28-Year Old Literary Hoax: Remember the kerfuffle between Mark Steyn and journalism professor Dr. John Miller from a few weeks back? Dr. Miller accused Steyn of taking material for “America Alone” from illegitimate sources like the infamous Little Green Book: Sayings of the Ayatollah Khomeini.* [*UPDATE: M J Murphy has quietly revised this paragraph, and so the airbrushing begins]  Actually, I don’t think Dr Miller has accused me of any such thing, though I admit, given his shifting accusations, that I’m no longer quite sure what he’s accusing me of. Just to recap, said “kerfuffle” arises from this passage in a review I wrote for Maclean’s of Oriana Fallaci’s final book The Force Of Reason: Signora Fallaci then moves on to the livelier examples of contemporary Islam — for example, Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Blue Book” and its helpful advice on romantic matters: “If a man marries a minor who has reached the age of nine and if during the defloration he immediately breaks the hymen, he cannot enjoy her any longer.” I’ll say. I know it always ruins my evening. Also: “A man who has had sexual relations with an animal, such as a sheep, may not eat its meat. He would commit sin.” Indeed. A quiet cigarette afterwards as you listen to your favourite Johnny Mathis LP and then a promise to call her next week and swing by the pasture is by far the best way. It may also be a sin to roast your nine-year-old wife, but the Ayatollah’s not clear on that. A cheap joke en passant. Indeed, insofar as I dwelt on the ovine fornication, it was to suggest to La Fallaci that, even for us flagrant Islamophobes, it was not perhaps the most useful avenue of attack: I enjoy the don’t-eat-your-sexual-partner stuff as much as the next infidel, but the challenge presented by Islam is not that the cities of the Western world will be filling up with sheep-shaggers. If I had to choose, I’d rather Mohammed Atta was downriver in Egypt hitting on the livestock than flying through the windows of Manhattan skyscrapers. But he’s not. And that’s it. That’s all I said. And no one would remember had not El Mo’s sock puppets included the sheep-shagging line in the dossier they submitted to the Canadian “Human Rights” Commission. Whereupon Dr Miller …actually, I’m not sure he is a doctor: He calls himself “The Journalism Doctor”, but the  title seems to be entirely self-conferred. Anyway, at this point, Doc Miller, Prof Miller, Herr Baron von Miller or whatever he is got interested in the case and asked the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal if he could intervene. Silly ol’ me assumed that he wished to intervene to argue the cause of free speech. But no: he wanted to intervene to argue that I was not a “responsible journalist”, and so it was entirely appropriate for the state to censor me. As Rory Leishman notes, since this thought-police racket got going, “Most journalists have either condoned censorship or cowered in silence.” Canadians who still value liberty should know that, if they rely on anemic PC flunkeys like Professor Miller, they’ll lose their country. At any rate, the BCHRT gave him the bum’s rush, so Prof Miller surfaced a few weeks ago and kept returning to the subject of the sheep-shaggers line. His complaint is in an apparently endless process of evolution. But let’s go through the story so far: 1) First, insofar as I understand his initial argument, he advanced the curious line that the ruling from the Ayatollah was not widely cited, and therefore it was improper of me to use it. After it was pointed out that in fact Khomeini’s views on the post-bestiality buffet, child sex and other arcane points of Islamic law are known to many (especially those  on the receiving end), a couple of weeks later he revised his line of attack: 2) Now his argument was that I’d concocted it out of whole cloth. The J-Doc declared boldly that Steyn “gave no citation for the quote, and I suspect it was made up.” In fact, as anyone who reads the passage above can see, I attributed it to Oriana Fallaci’s book. The disinterested observer might conclude that Professor Ethics-Bore had never so much as glanced at the offending article but had simply taken the Sock Puppets’ word for it. So the E-Bore was obliged to revise his argument yet again – and decided to accuse me of what he appeared to have done himself: 3) Now my sin was that I “clearly accepted someone else’s word for it”. Evidently, it wasn’t all that “clear” when he was accusing me of making it up, but a drowning ethics prof can be forgiven for clutching at straw men. At any rate, that makes three different complaints. As I wrote: That’s the great thing about the self-appointed “Journalism Doctor”: When he diagnoses you, he provides his own second opinion. Now, on Prof Miller’s behalf, M J Murphy has revised my crime yet again: Dr. Miller accused Steyn of taking material for “America Alone” from illegitimate sources like the infamous Little Green Book: Sayings of the Ayatollah Khomeini. As I said, the sheep-shagging passage is from a review of La Fallaci’s book in Maclean’s. It’s nothing to do with America Alone. There is no mention of sheep shagging in America Alone. There is no mention of any Little Green Book in America Alone. There is, indeed, no mention of Ayatollah Khomeini in America Alone. Prof Miller and Mr Murphy and their enthusiastic chorus boys at Law Is Cool are welcome to check for themselves. But, leaving that aside and forgiving M J Murphy for confusing America Alone with a book review in Maclean’s, if you return to the passage up above, you’ll see that neither Oriana nor I refer to any Little Green Book. We cite a “Blue Book” – or “Libro Azzurro”, in La Fallaci’s original Italian. That’s the color we’re nailing to our mast. We’re singing the blues, and it’s you fellers who are smelling the green. Indeed, the guy who brought up the Little Green Book is Prof Miller in his response to me. I never mentioned any green book. Like I said, I’d rather be blue. So, if M J Murphy and the excitable schoolgirls at Law R Cool have proved The Little Green Book is a “hoax”, the person who’s been “punked” is Professor Miller. Incidentally, I wouldn’t describe The Little Green Book as a “hoax”. It would be truer to say that it is a somewhat lurid and condensed version of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s work. Nevertheless, if you read M J Murphy’s post, you’ll find that Marvin Zonis of the University of Chicago declined to provide an introduction for it. Professor Zonis is evidently regarded by M J Murphy as a greater authority in these matters than I am, so please keep his name in mind. However, as it happens, I didn’t take “someone else’s word” for anything, whether it was the word of Oriana Fallaci or the compiler of The Little Green Book. When it comes to the Ayatollah Khomeini’s views on sheep shagging, my gu ide for many years has been a book called Resaleh Towzih al-Masael. The author is a chap called …Ayatollah Khomeini. Let’s go back to the original offending quotation from my Maclean’s book review: Signora Fallaci then moves on to the livelier examples of contemporary Islam — for example, Ayatollah Khomeini’s “Blue Book” and its helpful advice on romantic matters. Well, here’s a clue: Hmm. Here’s another clue: But how can that be? We all know: “There is no Blue Book.” The Lord High Checker of Facts has pronounced. As it happens, Resaleh Towzih al-Masael has been published in Iran in several editions. But the most popular was the paperback edition published by Nashr I Sharia’t of Tehran. It sold for 120 rials. It had some 350 pages, approx 5×7 inches, with a blue cover, featuring a picture of its ever more famous author. A souvenir hardback edition marketed as the perfect New Year gift was subsequently published by Rashidi with a plain blue cover… almost every year this book is published in a different color. But many versions of the “Blue Book” are still out there:     In the relevant passage in her book, Oriana recalls first seeing excerpts from the “Blue Book” in 1979. That’s what it was back then: A blue book. The blue book in revolutionary Iran. It certainly wasn’t a “little green book” as that wasn’t published till 1980. So when she and I refer to the Ayatollah’s “Blue Book” we’re referring to that Nashr I Sharia’t edition of the Resaleh. It was translated into English, unabridged, by J Borujerdi and published in 1984 by Westview in London and Boulder, Colorado under the title A Clarification Of Questions. I was given it a couple of decades ago by the Iranian gal I was then dating. She had a copy of the pocket paperback with the Ayatollah on the cover, and once, when she read out a bit to me, I expressed skepticism that it could really be that wacky.  So a few weeks later she presented me with the English edition. As she explained, these were not just some personal musings from the Ayatollah but a kind of moral compass for the Islamic state. So I didn’t need to “accept someone else’s word for it” on having sex with nine-year-old girls, because, like anyone else who’s taken even a cursory interest in the subject, I’ve known for a long time that, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, girls could be legally married at the age of nine. Article 1041 of the Civil Code states: Marriage before puberty by the permission of the Guardian and on condition of taking into interest the ward’s interest is proper. “Puberty” is defined as “nine full lunar years” – although, in practice, girls as young as seven can be married on the say-so of a doctor. The justification for all this is in the highly elaborate rules of Islamic life. They may sound unlikely to M J Murphy or Prof Miller but the Ayatollah’s “clarification of questions” doesn’t strike most devout Iranian Shi’ites that way. Mr Borujerdi, the English translator, was an Iranian émigré living in Cleveland, and he gave an interview about the book to David Remnick (now the editor of The New Yorker) in The Washington Post in 1985. It’s not available online but M J Murphy and Prof Miller and the Law R Cool nellies are welcome to go to their local reference library and check it out. It’s the Aug 21 issue, page B1: “I did the translation because it gives a very close understanding of the Shiite view of the world,” he said. “The Bantam Press published a very slight version five years ago called The Little Green Book’-just 6 percent of the original-but that was really a joke book, to poke fun at Khomeini and debunk Islam at the beginning of the hostage crisis. In Iran, this book is mandatory for every literate person, a kind of guide to living.” So this is the real deal, not the sensationalist précis but a serious, scholarly  “unabridged translation” designed to provide “a unique picture of the belief structure of Shi’ism“. Mr Borujerdi had no difficulty finding eminent academics to provide an introduction – namely, Professors Mehdi Abedi and Michael Fischer of Rice University in Houston. But he also consulted on the translation and interpretation with many other scholars, among them Professor Wilfred Madelung of the Oriental Institute at Oxford University, Professor Wheeler Thackston of Harvard’s Near Eastern Languages department, Professor William Darrow of Williams College, Professor Vincent McHale of Case Western, Professor Merlin Swartz of Boston University …oh, and Professor Marvin Zonis of the University of Chicago. That would be the same Prof Zonis who was unhappy with The Little Green Book, and thus made M J Murphy unhappy, too. But Prof Zonis is cool with A Clarification Of Questions, so presumably M J Murphy will also be satisfied? Resaleh Towzih al-Masael/A Clarification Of Questions consists of almost 3,000 “problems” for which Ayatollah Khomeini provides answers, plus a few follow-ups he dealt with in subsequent editions. So, just to bring the deplorably unicultural Prof Miller up to speed, the easiest way to get a flavor of the Ayatollah’s book is simply to  sample the contents pages: THE UNCLEANS 1&2. Urine and stool 3. Semen 4. Corpse 5. Blood 6&7. Dog and pig 8. Infidel 9. Wine 10. Beer 11. Sweat of an unlawful ejaculation 12. The sweat of a camel that eats uncleans Hey, Multiculti Man, that would be you at big hit sound number 8: “Infidel” – right behind “Dog and pig” but, if it’s any consolation, ahead of “Sweat of an unlawful ejaculation”. But hang on: ejaculate-wise, the Ayatollah’s just getting cranked up: PRECEPTS OF EJACULATION Things that are unlawful for an ejaculator Things that are loathesome for an ejaculator The bath of ejaculation… So just to reprise: Did I cite Oriana Fallaci accurately? Yes. Did she cite Ayatollah Khomeini accurately? Yes. Is there a volume by the Ayatollah commonly known as the “Blue Book”? Yes  Does it include rulings on sex with nine-year olds and what to do with a shagged sheep? Yes. Did either of us mention a Little Green Book? No. In fact, the translation Oriana cites pre-dates The Little Green Book by a year. I think Professor Waggy-Finger is doing what they call “projecting”. He’s accusing me of everything he’s been doing himself. I took “somebody else’s word for it”. Er, no. That would be you, taking the Sock Puppets’ word for it on my book review. I didn’t check the “primary source”. Er, no. That would be you, cavalierly announcing there’s no such thing as a “Blue Book”. To be more charitable to you than you deserve, you assume that Oriana Fallaci and I so want to think the worst of Islam that we’ll fall for any old hooey. Actually not. On the other hand, you so want to think the worst of us blowhard provocateurs that you assume we’re as ignorant of Islam as you evidently are.  Please follow this on SteynOnline.com

Joe the plumber is in deep sh*t now for speaking up against Obama

By Mick Gregory

You knew it would happen. Joe the Plumber’s 15 minutes of fame in last night’s debate have turned into a round of public humiliation for the wannabe business owner. The Toledo Blade is reporting that Joe has no plumber’s license.

To make matters worse, the Blade also found that the Ohio Department of Taxation placed a lien against Joe because $1,183 in personal property taxes had not been paid. The piling on has begun. The media is searching for more dirt on Joe. Why aren’t journalists looking at William Ayers and Obama’s ACORN support and the Fannie and Freddie financial disastor with as much vigor?

You know why, don’t you. Welcome to the new United Socialist/Democrat States! Where the media is in lockstep with Big Brother and Senator Government. Make way for a wave of taxes and government control not seen in this country since Jimmy Carter, or LBJ’s Great Society, maybe even FDR’s New Deal. It’s BO’s time.

It took a hard working, average citizen to expose the media propaganda and lack of reporting on Democrat candidate for president, Barack Obama. Rather than report on Obma’s ACORN and William Ayers long-term alliance with Obama’s political support, they turn to ripping into Joe from Ohio.

 

 

We know that more than 90 percent of the major media consider themselves liberal. Even more so, the “minor media” like loser reporters in Scranton and those working for the Stribe.

We know that the small town Scranton fat, homely liberal reporter who made up hearing people at McCain-Palin saying “terrorist,” etc.

Recent Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives on Obama’s payroll — Senator Chris Dodd oversees Freddie and Fannie and has received hundreds of thousands in contributions from them. Barney Frank’s lover was a director on Fannie

UPDATE: Oct. 2, 2008

Unqualified home buyers were not the only ones who benefited from Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank’s efforts to deregulate Fannie Mae throughout the 1990s.

So did Frank’s partner, a Fannie Mae executive at the forefront of the agency’s push to relax lending restrictions.

Enron executives are in prison over much less. In fact far more money was lost to investors after Mr. Frank, trumpeted the great management of Freddie Mack and Fannie May.

We thank Bill O’Reilly for bringing up Barney Frank’s role. Fortunately, we still have a free press in this country. Wait until ’09, if Obama wins he and Nancy Pelosi promise to invoke the “Fairness Doctrine.”

Now that Fannie Mae is at the epicenter of a financial meltdown that threatens the U.S. economy, some are raising new questions about Frank’s relationship with Herb Moses, who was Fannie’s assistant director for product initiatives. Moses worked at the government-sponsored enterprise from 1991 to 1998, while Frank was on the House Banking Committee, which had jurisdiction over Fannie.

Both Frank and Moses assured the Wall Street Journal in 1992 that they took pains to avoid any conflicts of interest. Critics, however, remain skeptical.

“It’s absolutely a conflict,” said Dan Gainor, vice president of the Business & Media Institute. “He was voting on Fannie Mae at a time when he was involved with a Fannie Mae executive. How is that not germane?

“If this had been his ex-wife and he was Republican, I would bet every penny I have – or at least what’s not in the stock market – that this would be considered germane,” added Gainor, a T. Boone Pickens Fellow. “But everybody wants to avoid it because he’s gay. It’s the quintessential double standard.”

Did you read about this in the New York Times, Washington Post or San Francisco Chronicle?

UPDATE: 9/25/08

Countrywide Financial, the biggest U.S. mortgage lender, made large, previously undisclosed home loans to two additional executives of Fannie Mae, the government-chartered firm at the center of the U.S. credit crisis.

This is what Lindsey Graham said on Greta’s show: “And this deal that’s on the table now is not a very good deal. Twenty percent of the money that should go to retire debt that will be created to solve this problem winds up in a housing organization called ACORN that is an absolute ill-run enterprise, and I can’t believe we would take money away from debt retirement to put it in a housing program that doesn’t work.”

Imagine what $140,000,000 can do to for ACORN and the Democrat party?

The FBI is investigating Freddie, Fannie, and AGI.
One of Countrywide’s previously undisclosed customers at Fannie was Jamie Gorelick, an influential Democratic Party figure whose $960,000 mortgage refinancing in 2003 was handled through a program reserved for influential figures and friends of Countrywide’s chief executive at the time, Angelo Mozilo. Ms. Gorelick was Fannie Mae’s vice chairman at the time. [Former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, listening to testimony on Capitol Hill in April, got a Countrywide refinancing while at Fannie Mae.] Associated Press

Former Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, listening to testimony on Capitol Hill in April, got a Countrywide refinancing while at Fannie Mae.

Another Countrywide client was recently ousted Fannie Mae Chief Executive Daniel Mudd, though it isn’t clear whether he received special treatment on two $3 million mortgage refinancings he made when he was the company’s chief operating officer.

In an interview, Ms. Gorelick said she had no knowledge of receiving special treatment. A financial adviser to Mr. Mudd said he received interest rates in line with the prevailing market.

The Fannie loans — including a series of already reported preferential loans to former Fannie chief executives James Johnson and Franklin Raines — underscore the close connections between Countrywide and Fannie Mae and raise potential conflict-of-interest issues.

UPDATE: 9/24/08

Statement by John McCain, May 25, 2006:

Mr. President, this week Fannie Mae’s regulator reported that the company’s quarterly reports of profit growth over the past few years were “illusions deliberately and systematically created” by the company’s senior management, which resulted in a $10.6 billion accounting scandal.

The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight’s report goes on to say that Fannie Mae employees deliberately and intentionally manipulated financial reports to hit earnings targets in order to trigger bonuses for senior executives. In the case of Franklin Raines, Fannie Mae’s former chief executive officer, OFHEO’s report shows that over half of Mr. Raines’ compensation for the 6 years through 2003 was directly tied to meeting earnings targets. The report of financial misconduct at Fannie Mae echoes the deeply troubling $5 billion profit restatement at Freddie Mac.

The OFHEO report also states that Fannie Mae used its political power to lobby Congress in an effort to interfere with the regulator’s examination of the company’s accounting problems. This report comes some weeks after Freddie Mac paid a record $3.8 million fine in a settlement with the Federal Election Commission and restated lobbying disclosure reports from 2004 to 2005. These are entities that have demonstrated over and over again that they are deeply in need of reform.

For years I have been concerned about the regulatory structure that governs Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac–known as Government-sponsored entities or GSEs–and the sheer magnitude of these companies and the role they play in the housing market. OFHEO’s report this week does nothing to ease these concerns. In fact, the report does quite the contrary. OFHEO’s report solidifies my view that the GSEs need to be reformed without delay.

I join as a cosponsor of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, S. 190, to underscore my support for quick passage of GSE regulatory reform legislation. If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.

I urge my colleagues to support swift action on this GSE reform legislation.

Mac and Mae meltdown. Which Democrats benefited from the quasi-government agencies?

UPDATE: 9/24/2008

Opensecrets.com has looked into the public records of direct contributions from the organizations of Freddie and Fannie, not including the donations from top executives. The FBI is opening major investigations into the actions of the organizations.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Invest in Democrats

Published by Lindsay Renick Mayer on July 16, 2008 5:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (15)

(For an updated chart that includes contributions from Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae’s PACs and employees to ALL lawmakers back to 1989, including to their leadership PACs, go here.) and data The federal government recently announced that it will come to the rescue of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, two embattled mortgage buyers that for years have pursued a lobbying strategy to get lawmakers on their side. Both companies have poured money into lobbying and campaign contributions to federal candidates, parties and committees as a general tactic, but they’ve also directed those contributions strategically. In the 2006 election cycle, Fannie Mae was giving 53 percent of its total $1.3 million in contributions to Republicans, who controlled Congress at that time. This cycle, with Democrats in control, they’ve reversed course, giving the party 56 percent of their total $1.1 million in contributions. Similarly, Freddie Mac has given 53 percent of its $555,700 in contributions to Democrats this cycle, compared to the 44 percent it gave during 2006.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have also strategically given more contributions to lawmakers currently sitting on committees that primarily regulate their industry. Fifteen of the 25 lawmakers who have received the most from the two companies combined since the 1990 election sit on either the House Financial Services Committee; the Senate Banking, Housing & Urban Affairs Committee; or the Senate Finance Committee. The others have seats on the powerful Appropriations or Ways & Means committees, are members of the congressional leadership or have run for president. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), chairman of the Senate banking committee, has received the most from Fannie and Freddie’s PACs and employees ($133,900 since 1989). Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.) has received $65,500. Kanjorski chairs the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance and Government-Sponsored Enterprises, and Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs.
Campaign Contributions, 1989-2008

Top Recipients of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

Name	Office	Party/State	Total
1. Dodd, Christopher	S	D-CT	$133,900
2. Kerry, John	S	D-MA	$111,000
3. Obama, Barack	S	D-IL	$105,849
4. Clinton, Hillary	S	D-NY	$75,550
5. Kanjorski, Paul E	H	D-PA	$65,500

This is a story that you won’t read about in the mainstream media. The Clinton administration marching orders to open up home loans to people unqualified, (socialization of home ownership). Today, the Democrats have taken over the U.S. Congress and have a 50/50 chance to take over the White House.

Look into the Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and Barack Obama connection — they have recieved millions of dollars from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Chris Dodd also received a sweet deal from Countrywide. These same people in “public service” are not investigating the corruption. For the past two years, the Democrats have held the majority controlling status of the House and Senate. So they will not turn in their own.

“Freddie and Fannie used huge lobbying budgets and political contributions to keep regulators off their backs.

A group called the Center for Responsive Politics keeps track of which politicians get Fannie and Freddie political contributions. The top three U.S. senators getting big Fannie and Freddie political bucks were Democrats and No. 2 on the list is Sen. Barack Obama.

Fannie and Freddie have been creations of the congressional Democrats and the Clinton White House, designed to make mortgages available to more people and, as it turns out, many people who couldn’t afford them… Now remember: Obama’s ads and stump speeches attack McCain and Republican policies for the current financial turmoil. It is demonstrably not Republican policy and worse, it appears the man attacking McCain — Sen. Obama — was at the head of the line when the piggies lined up at the Fannie and Freddie trough for campaign bucks.

Sen. Barack Obama: No. 2 on the Fannie/Freddie list of favored politicians after just two years in the Senate.

Next time you see that ad, you might notice he fails to mention that part of the Fannie and Freddie problem.”

Now let’s look at Franklin Raines, Barack Obama’s campaign manager — previously a Fannie Mae top executive.

This story is serious but it won’t receive any attention from the mainstream media who benefit from a socialist America and Barack Obama as President.

“Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have also strategically given more contributions to lawmakers currently sitting on committees that primarily regulate their industry. Fifteen of the 25 lawmakers who have received the most from the two companies combined since the 1990 election sit on either the House Financial Services Committee; the Senate Banking, Housing & Urban Affairs Committee; or the Senate Finance Committee. The others have seats on the powerful Appropriations or Ways & Means committees, are members of the congressional leadership or have run for president. Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), chairman of the Senate banking committee, has received the most from Fannie and Freddie’s PACs and employees ($133,900 since 1989). Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.) has received $65,500. Kanjorski chairs the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Capital Markets, Insurance and Government-Sponsored Enterprises, and Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are government-sponsored enterprises, or GSEs.”

The names of the top four recipients of Campaign contributions from Fannie and Freddie over the last 10 years is also interesting – Christopher Dodd, John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (all top Democrats for those keeping a scorecard).

About Franklin Raines and James Johnson

James A. Johnson (born December 24, 1943) is a United States Democratic Party political figure. He was the campaign manager for Walter Mondale’s failed 1984 presidential bid and chaired the vice presidential selection committee for the presidential campaign of John Kerry. He was involved in the vice-presidential selection process for the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama.
Johnson began his career as a faculty member at Princeton University, later moving on to the United States Senate as a staff member and to the Dayton-Hudson Corporation (now Target Corp.) as director of public affairs. He was executive assistant to Vice President Walter Mondale during the entire Carter Administration (1977-1981). Later, he founded and headed Public Strategies, a private consulting firm, from 1981 to 1985 before leaving for Lehman Brothers.

From 1991 to 1998, he served as chairman and chief executive officer of the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), the quasi-public organization that guarantees mortgages for millions of American homeowners. Previously, he was vice chairman of Fannie Mae (1990-1991). An Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight report from September 2004 found that, during Johnson’s tenure as CEO, Fannie Mae had improperly deferred $200 million in expenses. This enabled top executives, including Johnson and his successor, Franklin Raines, to receive substantial bonuses that they would have otherwise not earned.

As of 2006, he is a vice chairman of the private banking firm Perseus LLC, a position he has held since 2001. He is also a board member at Goldman Sachs, Gannett Company, Inc., a media holding group, KB Home, a home construction firm, Target Corporation, Temple-Inland, and UnitedHealth Group.

Johnson has also served as chairman of both the Kennedy Center for the Arts (1996-2004) and the Brookings Institution (1994-2003). He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Friends of Bilderberg, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Trilateral Commission.

On May 22, Democratic Party officials confidentially divulged that Obama had asked Johnson “to lead the process” for selecting Obama’s running mate.On June 4, 2008, Obama announced the formation of a three person committee to vet vice presidential candidates, including Johnson. However, Johnson soon became a source of controversy when it was reported that he had received loans directly from Angelo Mozilo, the CEO of Countrywide Financial, a company implicated in the U.S. subprime mortgage lending crisis. Although he was not accused of any wrongdoing and was initially defended by Obama on the grounds that he was simply an unpaid volunteer, Johnson announced he would step down from the vice-presidential vetting position on June 11, 2008 in order to avoid being a distraction to Obama’s campaign.

On September 19, the McCain/Palin campaign released an ad showing Obama linked him to Johnson.

What does Don Imus have to say about his old pals? They threw him under the train.

Give us your thoughts, my friends.

Despised San Francisco attorneys in dog-mauling death of their neighbor Diane Whipple are liberal Democrats

UPDATE: Sept. 22, 2008

A judge has sentenced a dog owner to 15 years to life in prison, seven years after her canines fatally mauled her neighbor in an upscale San Francisco neighborhood.A judge had reduced a jury’s conviction of second-degree murder to involuntary manslaughter and Marjorie Knoller was sentenced in 2002 to four years in prison.

But the California Supreme Court last year ordered the second-degree murder conviction reinstated. She was sentenced on that conviction Monday. Knoller’s lawyers plan to appeal.

The conviction stemmed from the 2001 death of Dianne Whipple. She was attacked by Knoller’s two Presa Canarios in a hallway of their apartment building. Each dog weighed more than 100 pounds and inflicted at least 77 wounds.

Here are some details that you may have missed becuase of the media coverups:

The case of the San Francisco dog owners who kept a killer bull mastiff in an apartment are Democrat activists. You might remember this grusome case: Marjorie Knoller was convicted of second-degree murder in the dog-mauling death of her neighbor Diane Whipple. Her husband, Robert Noel was convicted of a lesser charge because he wasn’t at the scene when the killing took place. Both lawyers were and remain active Democrats and also were ‘friends’ of a felon in prison, a member of the Aryan Brotherhood. The case came up again because a liberal judge cleared the Democrat fundraisers of the serious charges. Here is the rest of the story:

By Mick Gregory

The case of Knoller and her husband Robert Noel attracted worldwide media attention, but many of the unique details of the case were filtered out by the press. Did you know they were Democrat activists? They even had witnesses testify to that in their defense, they hate Republicans. (That makes it OK to have killer dogs the size and temperment of lions in a city apartment that end up tearing the throat out of a young woman). They hate Bush and Cheney!

When liberal and openly gay San Francisco Superior Court Judge James Warren threw out Marjorie Knoller’s second-degree murder conviction for the dog-mauling death of her neighbor Diane Whipple, the judge justified his controversial decision by explaining that Knoller did not know her conduct had a “high probability of death to another human being.”

More history on Warren: he is the son of the famous JFK assassination coverup, Earl Warren of the Warren Commission. Two death-bed confessions early this year have brought to light that that VP Lyndon Johnson was behind the assassination. But that is a story for another time.

Knoller and Noel were keeping the two massive dogs for Paul Schneider, a life inmate and member of the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang who bred and sold the Presa Canarios using people outside the prison. The couple later adopted Schneider, then 39 years old. And Mrs. Knoller was having sex with him on prison visits.

Days after the attack, Knoller appeared on “Good Morning America” and showed no remorse. Noel also publicly insulted San Francisco’s then-DA Terence Hallinan and partly blamed Whipple for the attack.

There were sex pictures of the cute couple and their adopted son and news reports of thier anti-Bush activisim. The “journalists” scrubbed that out of their reports.

PBS Democratic Party propaganda exposed by viewers — one sided poll is a laugher

Taxpayer supported PBS should at least try and show some restraint during the runup to a national election. But the programing executives do all they can to get Obama/Biden in the White House and complete the project of one party rule in the United States.

The media executives at PBS published a survey asking if Sarah Palin was qualified to be Vice President.

But there were no such surveys about Obama, Biden or Hillary were there?

Here are some examples of citizen journalists remarks buried on the PBS ombudsman Web page.

WIll you see this in your daily newspaper? Nah. And the Democratic Party promises to bring back the Fairness Doctrine after they take over the White House. Why do they have to go that far?

I am once again aghast and stunned that the PBS would be so involved in politics that they actually circulated the “is Sarah Palin qualified to be Vice President” poll. How dare you use federally subsidized taxpayer platform for your own political ambitions: have you know shame?

You code of ethics mentions a “neutral platform” and that means you do not have the right to back a candidate. The poll regarding the qualifications of Sarah Palin would only be put out by a biased, liberal attack apparatus: Everybody else knows that she is well enough qualified to be President, far far more than Obama. It is a moot point and undebateable fact that Obama is not qualified by experience, background or character to be President; yet you have the audacity to question whether the sitting governor of the State of Alaska is qualified.

The mere asking of the question is an unethical violation of your own “neutrality” status. As for me; Every night I pray to God that Obama does not reside at the White House.

James Steven Slater, Fort Worth, TX

You can put lipstick on a pig, but you still have a pig! Obama’s Macaca Moment

The quote heard ’round the world today came from the lips of Obama. The Democrat presidential candidate with ties to Acorn said this about Sarah Palin today, “You can put lipstick on a pig, but you still have a pig!

Will the Washington Post, New York Times and San Francisco Chronicle run 50 straight days about Obama’s Macaca moment?

I wonder what Don Imus has to say about that? How about Oprah?

Democrat Party  presidential hopeful Barack Obama brushed aside a series of polls that show him losing support among white women voters to John McCain since the Republican hero named Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.

A Washington Post/ABC News survey published on Tuesday found most of McCain’s surge in the polls since the Republican National Convention was due to a big shift in support among white women voters. Meanwhile, his supporter, Oprah refuses to have Sarah Palin as a guest on her daytime talk show that appeals to women. But apparently white women — not so much.

Who is more porcine, Oprah or Palin?

Question: Who said “It’s nice to be here in New Pennsylvania?”

A. Dan Quale

B. George Bush

C. Obama

Answere: C. Obama

Oprah

Question: Who said “Bashing my Muslim faith…”

A. Osama bin-Laden

B. Barack Obama

C. Ahmadinejad

Answer: B. Barack Obama

To the big-spending, do-nothing congress: Change is coming

Sen. John McCain’s blockbuster line: “Let me offer an advance warning to the old, big-spending, do-nothing, me-first-country-second Washington crowd: Change is coming.”

It’s not “global warming” climate change John McCain is talking about, it’s a red-state tide coming in to take back America from European socialists. Democrats, be afraid. Be very afraid.

Change is coming.

Newspapers send thousands to ‘cover’ the Democrat National Convention

This is called journalism? Thousands of newspaper reporters are in Denver to “cover” the party and coronation of the Obama/Biden ticket.

In fact, 15,000 “journalists” are flocking around the DNC convention. For the Republican convention? Not so much.

Did you know that several of the Democrat delegates are reporters and publishers?

Here is one. I’m not kidding. His name is Thomas Martinet.

It’s all rehearsed, fluffed up press conferences, electronic press releases and speeches read off teleprompters on unity and “toned down” socialism with a mix of religion and race thrown in. And the press laps it up. Of course, more than 90 percent vote exclusively for Democrats. This is amazing considering they have no problem picking up stories from wire services for most of their other news.

Meanwhile, back at the dilapidated newspapers, they continue to cut jobs to try and slow the red ink. How could they afford to send reporters to Denver? I wonder how many of the schmucks are on their own dime. It’s like their visit to Mecca every four years. The reporters are among old friends who still believe they have power.

Is there ever a report of the fall off in the number of reporters at the Republican convention? How about questions on how many houses John Kerry owned? Or a question on Obama’s life in Chicago and Hawaii while his brother lives on a dollar a month in shack in Africa?

This report is one of the best I’ve seen on the state of newspapers. It comes from digitaldeliverance.com.

Ignorance isn’t bliss to the dying. Witness the pathos of American daily newspaper companies. Most have finally begun to realize that the deterioration of their businesses isn’t cyclical but grave. Yet few, if any, understand why. Almost all grasp for the reasons.

Some attribute their grave condition to advertisers suddenly switching huge portions of spending from print to online – an excuse that ignores more than 30 years of declines in those newspapers’ printed editions’ circulations and readerships. Some others attribute their deterioration to not having transplanted their content into online quickly enough -an excuse that ignores not only the dozen years they’ve spent transplanting it but how their online editions are now read even less frequently and less thoroughly than their printed editions.

Most of the print newspaper experts who diagnose these companies’ condition still prescribe stale nostrums such as more consumer focus groups, subscription price incentives, more stylish typography, or shorter stories. Meanwhile, most of the experts who diagnose these companies’ Web sites prescribe balms and accessories such as giving blogs to reporters, adding video, or having the readers themselves report the stories. American daily newspaper companies have long been too financially impatient to submit themselves to anything but ostensibly quick cures and they’ve even longer been too conceptually myopic to perceive the real reasons for their declines.

I’ll declare the real reasons. There are but two and neither has anything to do with multimedia, ‘convergence’, blogs, ‘Web 2.0’, ‘citizen journalism,’ or any ancillary topics you may have heard presented at New Media conferences this millennium.

Nor is either of the real reasons advertisers’ abandonment of printed newspapers. Their abandonment is a symptom, not the reason for the decline. To understand the real reasons why the American daily newspaper industry is dying, first understand why more and more Americans are no longer reading daily papers and how their abandonment of newspapers has been wrought by changes in their own media economics. Also comprehend why the epicenter of the newspaper industry’s problems in post-Industrial countries is America and exactly how grave the situation is there.

The Fate of American Daily Newspapers

More than half of the 1,439 daily newspapers in the United States won’t exist in print, e-paper, or Web site formats by the end of next decade. They will go out of business. The few national dailies — namely USA Today, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal — will have diminished but continuing existences via the Web and e-paper, but not in print. The first dailies to expire will be the regional dailies, which have already begun to implode. Those plus a very many smaller dailies, most of whose circulations are steadily evaporating, will decline to levels at which they will no longer be economically viable to publish daily. Further layoffs of staffs by those newspapers’ companies cannot avoid this fate – not so long as daily circulations and readerships continually and increasingly decline. (Layoffs are becoming little more than the remedy of bleeding that was used in attempts to cure ill patients during the 18th Century and cannot restore the industry’s health.)

‘Hyperlocal’ news startup companies, whose services will be delivered not on newsprint but online, might replace many small dailies, but not most, and certainly not before the printed products’ demise. The deaths of large numbers of daily newspapers in the U.S. won’t cause a new Dark Age but will certainly cause a ‘Gray Age’ for American journalism during the next decade. Much local and regional news won’t see the light of publication. (America alone won’t suffer this calamity. Many other post-Industrial countries’ newspaper industries will suffer or, at best, skirt a version of this disaster.)

Is the Situation Really That Bad? Yes. Look at the numbers.

Last year, the most authoritative newsletter covering the American newspaper industry intentionally went out of business. The Morton-Groves Newspaper Newsletter, in a front page editorial entitled ‘Passing the Inflection Point,’ co-publisher Miles Grove, the former chief economist of the Newspaper Association of America, politely stated:

“The market momentum guiding the future of newspapers is especially brutal in the larger markets. Many have already passed the point of opportunity as it is too late for newspapers that have not successfully adopted marketing practices needed to support the core product and integrate with alternative distribution channels …For those who have not made the transition, technology and market factors may be too strong to enable success.”

Last month, Goldman Sachs equity analyst Peter Appert put it more bluntly in a Reuters in a story about the dwindling number of equity analysts who still covering the deterioration of this $40 billion industry:

“If I covered only the newspaper industry, first of all I would have been fired a long time ago; secondly, I would have had to kill myself.”

Among the largest American newspaper companies, the losses of equity have been titanic. On the August day in when I write this, stock in the Journal Register Companyis trading for less than four pennies per share, down from $3.25 a year ago, a loss of 99 percent. Any of the buildings housing any of its 22 daily newspapers is worth more than the company’s current stock market capitalization (currently $1.4 million). Journal Register reports that it has $77 million in assets, $719 million in liabilities, and lost $102 million last year. Standard & Poor’s, which downgraded its rating of Journal Register’s stock to junk, has now withdrawn any rating of it. Meanwhile, stock in Gatehouse Media, which publishes 97 dailies, is trading at 57 pennies per share, down from $22.00 two years ago, a 97 percent loss. That company faces delisting by the New York Stock Exchange and the equity research firm Morningstar this week declared its stock to be essentially worthless, valuing the fair price as zero.

Meanwhile, stock in the McClatchy Company, which publishers 30 dailies, has dropped from $74.30 three years ago to $3.78, a 95 percent loss. Stock in Lee Enterprises, which publishes 51 dailies, has dropped from $48.57 to $3.83, a 92 percent loss during the past four years. Media General, which publishes 25 dailies, has seen its stock price drop 83 percent in the past four years. Stock of The New York Times Company, which publishes 17 dailies, has dropped 75 percent during the past six years, from $51.50 to $12.98. Stock in Gannett Company, which publishes 85 dailies, has dropped 65 percent, from $90.14 to $17.40, during the past four years. Despite these results, Morningstar still calls newspapers, “the market’s most overvalued stocks,” according to the newspaper industry trade journal, Editor & Publisher.

The American newspaper industry’s losses of advertising revenues have been so well reported elsewhere that I see no need to outline those here. Likewise the industry’s losses of weekday and Sunday circulations, except that the industry maintains the façade that its overall circulation losses during the past three decades have been relatively minor. Weekday overall circulation was 62 million in 1970, dropped to 55.8 million at the turn of the century, and is approximately 53 million today. An overall loss of 9 million or 14.5% isn’t paltry but doesn’t seem that bad in the span of 38 years.

However, those absolute numbers fail to account for population growth during that time. The American population was 203 million in 1970 and 304 million today. Had the American daily newspaper industry at least kept pace with population growth, its weekday circulation should be 93 million today, not 53 million. The industry’s weekday penetration proportionate to population dropped from 30.5 percent 1970s to 17.4 percent to today, a relative decline of 43 percent.

To combat news of these declines, the industry has stretching its yardstick of readership plus begun conflating daily print circulation and monthlyonline usage. Its readership estimates vary from 2.3 people to 2.5 people per printed copy, numbers which, if true, would also mean that the majority of people who read a daily newspaper don’t themselves purchase it. More likely, the industry is stretching readership to mean the number of people who might live in a household where at least one person happened to buy or subscribe to a newspaper. But the other 1.3 to 1.5 people haven’t necessarily read it.

An independent survey released this month by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press reported that 46 percent of Americans a newspaper ‘regularly‘, down from 52 percent two years ago and as high as of 71 percent in 1992. Moreover, only 34 percent say they read a newspaper ‘yesterday‘, down from 40 percent two years ago.

Meanwhile, the industry has begun combining its Web sites’ total number of monthly users and its printed editions’ daily circulation totals – even though the average monthly unique user of the average American daily newspaper Web site use the site on only four to seven days per month. The resulting muddle of daily and monthly vastly overstates the number of people who use a newspaper daily, whether in print or online.

Despite those financial, advertising, circulation, and readership declines, an article of faith among newspaper companies has become that the cure lay online. The most widely prescribed remedies are multimedia (also called ‘convergence’) and interactivity (mainly in forms of ‘Web 2.0’ and ‘citizen journalism’). The companies hope that adding those attributes to what their newspapers have always done will reverse their industry’s fate.

Yet adding multimedia, convergence, interactivity, Web 2.0, and ‘citizen journalism’ to what their newspapers have always done aren’t cures but merely balms and accessories. No matter how well intentioned those New Media prescriptions are, no matter how much more animated or responsive multimedia and interactivity can make daily newspapers, adding those will prove to be little more than analgesics.

The absences of multimedia or interactivity aren’t why the circulations and readerships of American daily newspapers have been declining in relation to both population and households for more than three decades. Half of American newspapers’ declines in weekday circulation and readership relative to population occurred before the Internet opened to the public in late 1991, prior to popular awareness of interactivity or multimedia. Although Americans nowadays expect all media to have multimedia and interactive attributes, the absence of those attributes clearly aren’t the major causes of the deterioration of the newspaper industry nor will adding those reverse those declines.

So, what are the two reasons why the American daily newspaper industry’s is dying?

The major one is simply that American newspaper companies have violated a specific part of the Principle of Supply & Demand when consumers’ supply of news and information radically changed in the past 15 to 30 years. The other and more reasons why American newspapers are dying is because of how far too many of them have deviated from their local roots).

The major reason alone is a mortal wound for the industry, but the minor reason exacerbated it due to a corollary effect of newspapers’ violation of a Principle of Supply & Demand.

The editor-managed newspapers are a prime example of sad bastards.

Bump from Biden. Not so much.

Pew, NYT, Gallup, Rasmussen, CNN, CNBC and Huffington Post are all scrambling to get a poll out showing a spike in support for their Obama/Biden dream ticket. But so far, silence. That means no bump. Hillary still has a chance in Denver next week.

In fact, Gallup shows McCain up! Can Hillary do anything about it?

It’s official: Barack Obama has received no bounce in voter support out of his selection of Sen. Joe Biden to be his vice presidential running mate.

Gallup Poll Daily tracking from Aug. 23-25, the first three-day period falling entirely after Obama’s Saturday morning vice presidential announcement, shows 46% of national registered voters backing John McCain and 44% supporting Obama, not appreciably different from the previous week’s standing for both candidates. This is the first time since Obama clinched the nomination in early June, though, that McCain has held any kind of advantage over Obama in Gallup Poll Daily tracking.

Hillary Clinton super delegate assassinated, gunman later killed by police. But that’s not all. Now super delegate Stephanie Tubbs Jones is found brain dead.

A gunman walked into the office of the Arkansas Democratic Party yesterday asked for Bill Gwatney, a close friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton and a Clinton super delegate at the upcoming convention in Denver and fatally shot Gwatney.

Timothy Dale Johnson, the gunman, sped off in a pickup and later was shot dead by police following a 30-mile chase.

UPDATE: Democratic Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Cleveland, a super delegate and one of Hillary Clinton’s most prominent black supporters, was found in her car unconscious  Tuesday night, Aug. 19.  Today, she is considered brain dead and may be taken off life support this afternoon.

UPDATE 8/21/08: There are conflicting reports out of Cleveland regarding Jones speeding, driving erratically and found dead in her car by police. Other reports state she was not speeding; yet another said she drifted into an open field. Reports differed greatly on her time of death. The cause of death was unanimous, a brain hemorrhage. Jones never regained consciousness to give her account.

 Jones said in a phone interview earlier this year that Hillary Clinton still can do well in the black community in Ohio. “While a large number of black Ohioans might be for Obama, many also think that Clinton is the best Democratic candidate,” Jones said.

Now she will not be able to vote for Hillary.

What are the odds?

Jones was also outspoken on the new electronic Diebold voting machines and possible voter fraud in areas that use  the devices.

Back to Johnson; Little Rock police said they could find no criminal record for Johnson, but the Target, 30 miles north of the city, fired him that morning because he’d scrawled graffiti on a store wall.

Some say it was simply a political statement.

Others have reported that he was angry with the HR department, complaining that Target was run by sorority girls who teamed up against men and him in particular.

Johnson had more than one run-in with the HR department. He complained about a narrow hallway and later wrote on the wall, “This hallway is too *** **** narrow! Other messages believed to be his said “HR is run by sorority ******.

But the Target manager would not confirm.

The victim, Gwatney, a former state senator, was set to travel to the Democratic National Convention in Denver later in a few days as a superdelegate for Sen. Clinton.

One source told The Post he had been “very good” to her during her presidential campaign.

In a statement, the Clintons called Gwatney “not only a strong chairman of Arkansas’ Democratic Party, but he is also a cherished friend and confidant.”

The office where the murder took place was the same one Bill Clinton rented when he made a comeback run for Arkansas governor in 1982.

Johnson walked in and asked to volunteer and wanted to talk to Gwatney.

Don’t drink the Kool Aid. Police reported Wednesday that they found about a pound of cyanide in a Denver hotel room, where the body of a man was discovered. Denver is the location of the Democratic Presidential Convention.

An expert told the Denver Post that the amount of cyanide is enough to kill hundreds of people.

The medical examiner’s office said it is awaiting test results to determine whether cyanide killed 29-year-old Saleman Abdirahman Dirie, a Samali national who recently moved to Canada.

Foul play is not suspected and his death appears to be an isolated incident, according to Denver police.

Foul play? An Islamic Samali national in Denver? So? All is well. Step away. Nothing to see here.

Meanwhile, the chief of staff for Democrat Senator Jim Webb was found shot to death.

Fred Hutchins, Jr., an aide to Sen. Jim Webb — and described as a “rising star” in Virginia Democratic politics — was found shot dead on Tuesday beside a Botetourt County road. A gun was found beneath his body but the medical examiner has not ruled it suicide or murder yet. He was 26 and a longtime political activist.

Sheriff Ronnie Sprinkle said Hutchins’ body was found outside his SUV-type vehicle, on an embankment along U.S. 220 north of the town of Fincastle. He had a single gunshot wound in the head.

GregMitch’s diary

The Edwards coverup helped Obama win nomination, knock out Hillary

It doesn’t take a political insider to figure out that the year-long cover up by the major media of Democrat presidential candidate John Edwards’ duel life cost Hillary Clinton the presidency. The mainstream media ignored the National Enquirer. Blogs caught on and the news of the ego-maniac Edwards couldn’t be shut down.

Can Hillary’s supporters expose who knew about Edwards and Hunter and when? What did Sen. Jim Webb know and when?

 

ABC reports:

Now what will happen  in Denver?

Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic presidential nominee if John Edwards had been caught in his lie about an extramarital affair and forced out of the race last year, insists a top Clinton campaign aide, making a charge that could exacerbate previously existing tensions between the camps of Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama.

(AP Photo)

“I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee,” former Clinton Communications Director Howard Wolfson told ABCNews.com.

Clinton finished third in the Iowa caucuses barely behind Edwards in second place and Obama in first. The momentum of the insurgent Obama camaign beating two better-known candidates — not to mention an African-American winning in such an overwhelmingly white state — changed the dynamics of the race forever.

This will be the first of many terrible years for newspapers

There are no longer any suckers left with deep pockets and the desire to buy newspapers even at fire sale prices.

Last week, Hearst CEO Victor Ganzi abruptly resigned, citing “irreconcilable policy differences” over the future direction of the company.

 

What does he mean by that? Usually executives say “I’m taking time off to spend with my family…”

The New York Times and Business Week reported that the reason for Ganzi to leave a multi-million dollar-a -year, ivory tower position was recent investments and dismal returns in newspapers. He made some bad decisions.

Fortune and Portfolio said no, that was just an obvious-suspect guess and that the conflict was really over something else. Yeah, right.  Becuase Hillary was out of the race, perhaps?

 

Hearst made its last big newspaper acquisition in November 2007, buying the Tribune’s (former Times-Mirror) dailies in the well-heeled Connecticut suburbs of Greenwich and Stamford. Hearst has also signed on to numerous joint ventures with Dean Singleton’s MediaNews (bottom feeders), bought an interest in the company and thus has been poised to take over, should Singleton falter under its heavy debt load. That would be like owning the rights to own Enron in 2006.

This has been the longest, most grueling month for newspapers. Advertising reveue continues to fall like a brick thrown out of the new Hearst building. The editors need to fire the “business side” and get things turned around. That’s the ticket.

How about editors delivering the paper before they come to work in the morning?

The editors may be finding out that their ivory tower positions of filtering only the news that fits their liberal agenda is not viable any more. Each exectutive editor may want to pull their head out of their ass and look around at the massive layoffs.