WASHINGTON: Source - The Boston Globe - As William K. Black, author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank Is to Own One: How Corporate Executives and Politicians Looted the S&L Industry, watches John McCain move toward the Republican presidential nomination, he thinks of a day 21 years ago that he considers one of the most troubling of his life.

Black, a senior federal savings and loan regulator at the time, attended a meeting at which he felt McCain and four other senators pressured federal regulators to back off from investigating the troubled Lincoln Savings and Loan.

“I remain very upset that what they did caused such damage,” said Black, now a professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, recalling how Lincoln’s bankruptcy cost the government $3 billion. Moreover, he said he believes McCain intervened partly because his wife had invested money with Lincoln chairman Charles Keating, a campaign contributor who let the McCains use his home in the Bahamas.

Black, however, maintains that the Keating case was a textbook example of politicians, McCain among them, serving a major donor. And Dennis DeConcini, a former Democratic senator from Arizona and another of the Keating Five who hosted the key meeting in his office, said in an interview that McCain has gotten a relatively “free ride” even though DeConcini insists that McCain was the “most culpable” of the senators because he had the closest relationship with Keating.

McCain met Keating in 1982, during McCain’s successful run for Congress, and soon began accepting offers from Keating to fly McCain’s family on a corporate plane to Keating’s house in the Bahamas. McCain did not pay for most of the trips until years later, when the matter became public.

Keating, meanwhile, complained regularly to McCain that a proposed regulation would hurt his business. Known as the “direct investment” rule, it limited the amount that savings-and-loan institutions could invest from their assets. In 1985, after having “heard frequently from Charlie on the matter,” McCain decided that Keating’s complaints “were sound enough to warrant our assistance.” He cosponsored a resolution sought by Keating, but it failed to postpone the regulation, McCain wrote in his autobiography.

By then, Keating was one of McCain’s most important benefactors; McCain received $112,000 in campaign donations from Keating and his Lincoln associates, mostly between 1982 and 1986.

In the summer of 1986, while McCain was running for the Senate, the banking executive wrote him letters castigating the regulators. “The [bank board] is a mad dog turned loose in a police state,” Keating wrote in one of them. Weeks later, McCain accepted another trip aboard Keating’s jet to the Bahamas.

“I genuinely liked him and enjoyed being around him, especially on those occasions when Cindy and I and our oldest child, Meghan, were invited to his family’s vacation home in the Bahamas,” McCain wrote in his book. “I was never concerned that the time I spent enjoying Charlie’s company would raise public doubts about my judgment.”

With McCain having failed to postpone the regulation limiting investments by a savings and loan, Keating wanted him and other senators to get the Federal Home Loan Bank Board to grant Lincoln an exemption from the rule. McCain subsequently attended two meetings with regulators.

McCain said he felt he had a responsibility to a constituent whose company had 2,000 employees. Yet McCain had reason to be wary. His closeness to Keating had been an issue in his 1986 campaign, and aides urged him not to go to the meetings.

Four senators, including McCain, met with Edwin Gray, the chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board in Washington that April in 1987. When Gray returned from the meeting, he told Black he was “very upset” that the senators were trying to pressure him, according to Black’s Senate testimony. Gray told Black to attend a follow-up meeting and take notes. Gray could not be reached for comment.

In the end, McCain received only a mild rebuke from the Ethics Committee for exercising “poor judgment” for intervening with the federal regulators on behalf of Keating. Still, he felt tarred by the affair.

“The appearance of it was wrong,” McCain said. “It’s a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do.”

McCain noted that Bennett, the independent counsel, recommended that McCain and Glenn be dropped from the investigation.

“For the first time in history, the Ethics Committee overruled the recommendation of the independent counsel,” McCain said. For his part, DeConcini is critical of McCain’s role in the affair. The two senators never were particularly cozy, and the stress of the public scrutiny worsened their relations.

In his memoir Senator Dennis DeConcini: From the Center of the Aisle, he praises the decision to keep McCain on the hook.

“It became clear to me, and it was later confirmed by Ethics Committee members, that Bennett was attempting to dismiss the charges against McCain, and in order to appear nonpartisan, he included Glenn in this effort,” DeConcini wrote with co-author Jack August. “Thanks to the three Democrats on the committee and perhaps with the help of Senator (Jesse) Helms (R-N.C.), however, the charges remained in place for all the senators under investigation. So all of us had to attend the 23-day public hearing, which was indeed a trial, before the six-member Senate Ethics Committee.”

In the book, DeConcini reiterates his allegation that McCain leaked to the media “sensitive information” about certain closed proceedings in order to hurt DeConcini, Riegle and Cranston. It’s a fairly serious charge. The Boston Globe revisited the Keating Five leaks in 2000. The story paraphrased a congressional investigator, Clark B. Hall, as personally concluding that “McCain was one of the principal leakers.” The newspaper also reported that McCain, under oath, had denied involvement with the leaks.

McCain owns up to his mistake this way:

“I was judged eventually, after three years, of using, quote, poor judgment, and I agree with that assessment.”

An unknown Wikipedia editor was hard at work late Thursday night overhauling Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia entry. NPR first reported the mysterious update. By Yuki Noguchi Listen Now [3 min 28 sec] 

The good news is that Keating5.net was able to obtain the cached Wikipedia entries prior to the overhaul. Definitely some interesting changes. See for yourself.

Sarah Palin’s latest Wikipedia Entry, updated Thursday, August 28th.

Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia Entry, updated December, 2007
Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia Entry, updated November, 2007
Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia Entry, updated October, 2007
Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia Entry, updated September, 2007
Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia Entry, updated June, 2007
Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia Entry, updated September, 2006

NPR reported,

On Friday, 15 minutes before the rumor that John McCain had picked Palin as his running mate, a Wikipedia editor discovered 30 mostly favorable changes had been made to the Alaska governor’s profile.

She was called “a politician of eye-popping integrity” and sections on her participation in a beauty pageant and her alleged use of influence to get her former brother-in-law fired were diminished.

Wikipedia is now restricting who can alter Palin’s page.”

That user is one “Young Trigg.” He or she was thanked and lauded by other Wikipedia editors for thoroughness, before questions of a possible conflict of interest emerged.Brian Krebs at the Washington Post writes:

 Perhaps more tellingly, some of the same users editing her page were almost simultaneously updating McCain’s Wiki entry, adding information dealing with accuracy, sources and footnotes to each.

Palin’s Wikipedia Revision History

The Internet is a database.  For McCain, it’s a database of comments he’s made. Bloggers are just the folks posting those remarks.

Watch & See for Yourself:

Johnny McNasty
“Aim at the K5“

The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don’t Trust Him and Why Independents Shouldn’t by Cliff Schecter, reports an angry exchange between McCain and his wife that happened in full view of aides and reporters during a 1992 campaign stop. An advance copy of the book was obtained by RAW STORY.”

Three reporters from Arizona, on the condition of anonymity, also let me in on another incident involving McCain’s intemperateness. In his 1992 Senate bid, McCain was joined on the campaign trail by his wife, Cindy, as well as campaign aide Doug Cole and consultant Wes Gullett. At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain’s hair and said, ‘You’re getting a little thin up there.’ McCain’s face reddened, and he responded, ‘At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.’ McCain’s excuse was that it had been a long day. If elected president of the United States, McCain would have many long days.
“The man who was known as ‘McNasty’ in high school has erupted in foul-languaged tirades at political foes and congressional colleagues more-or-less throughout his career, and his quickness to anger has been an issue on the presidential campaign trail as evidence of his fury has surfaced.

“In the book [Schecter] outlines several other examples of McCain loosing his cool and raises the question of how that would affect a McCain presidency.”

What should voters make of this pattern? In February 2008 Tim Russert succinctly described McCain on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. A devilish grin spread from ear to ear as Russert, no McCain hater, leaned forward and spoke in a whisper, ‘He likes to fight.’ Russert got it right. But the big question isn’t whether McCain likes to fight: it’s who, when, and how.

Read the whole thing

Does anyone see a pattern of lies & deceit developing here? John McCain and his wife, Cindy do not have to answer to the American people…and the arrogance and anger shows. If you question McCain, he better not be in striking distance of that big, red button.

 

In spinning his side of the Keating story, McCain adopted the blanket defense that Keating was a constituent and that he had every right to ask his senators for help. In attending the meetings, McCain said, he simply wanted to make sure that Keating was treated like any other constituent.

Keating was far more than a constituent to McCain, however.

On Oct. 8, 1989, The Republic revealed that McCain’s wife and her father had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators.

…When the story broke, McCain did nothing to help himself. When reporters first called him, he was furious. Caught out in the open, the former fighter pilot let go with a barrage of cover fire. Sen. Hothead came out in all his glory.

”You’re a liar,”’ McCain snapped Sept. 29 when a Republic reporter asked him about business ties between his wife and Keating.

”That’s the spouse’s involvement, you idiot,” McCain said later in the same conversation. ”You do understand English, don’t you?”

He also belittled the reporters when they asked about his wife’s ties to Keating.

”It’s up to you to find that out, kids.”

And then he played the POW card.

”Even the Vietnamese didn’t question my ethics,” McCain said.

The paper ran the story a few days later. At a news conference, McCain was a changed man. He stood calmly for 90 minutes and answered every question.

On the shopping center, his defense was simple. The deal did not involve him. The shares in the shopping center had been purchased by a partnership set up between McCain’s wife and her father. 

Read More

You’re John McCain, a fallen hero who wanted to become president so desperately that you sold yourself to Charlie Keating, the wealthy con man who bears such an incredible resemblance to The Joker. 

Obviously, Keating thought you could make it to the White House, too.

He poured $112,000 into your political campaigns. He became your friend. He threw fund raisers in your honor. He even made a sweet shopping-center investment deal for your wife, Cindy. Your father-in-law, Jim Hensley, was cut in on the deal, too.

Read More