How Many Homes Does John McCain Really Own?

John McCain really stepped in the McShit when he acknowledged in a Politico.Com interview that he doesn't know how many homes he owns.

A week dominated by vice presidential speculation and the run-up to the Democratic National Convention was quickly overtaken by the McCain miscue. In an interview with Politico.com, the presumptive Republican nominee was asked how many houses he and his wife, Cindy, heir to a beer distributorship, owned.

"I think -- I'll have my staff get to you," McCain replied. "It's condominiums where -- I'll have them get to you."

Obama's campaign and the Democratic National Committee pounced with remarkable speed. By mid-morning, reporters had received a video log featuring Cindy McCain's childhood estate in Phoenix, an Architectural Digest spread on another property the McCains had owned previously, and tax records and photos detailing seven houses and condominiums -- in Coronado and La Jolla, Calif.; Phoenix and Sedona, Ariz.; and Arlington. By 11 a.m., the Obama campaign had produced a television advertisement titled "Seven" and was answering the question McCain could not. Washington Post

Well, John McCain's white, so to many people his "I'm one of you" chatter will sound relatively authentic no matter how rich he is and how many houses he owns. But, economically I know John McCain is nothing like me because (a) I know how many houses I own, and (b) I don't own anywhere near seven houses. And none of my houses have been featured in Architectural Digest.

Cindy McCain Says She's an Only Child, But She's NOT

Why all of the lies?

Mark Silva of the Chicago Tribune's Washington Bureau, writing for the Swamp, reports on a half-sister of Cindy McCain whose existence Cindy McCain regularly denies when she tells the media that she is "an only child."

In the interview airing on NPR's All Things Considered, Cindy McCain's older half sister, Kathleen Hensley Portalski, "talks about their estranged relationship, and the difficulty she has when she hears McCain described as an "only child" by the media, and by McCain herself,'' NPR reports of the talk with Southwest Correspondent Ted Robbins.

Kathleen Portalksi, retired now in Phoenix, was born in 1943, a child of the late Jim Hensley's first marriage, the network says, reporting that his second wife, Marguerite, also had a daughter from her first marriage. Cindy Hensley was McCain's second wife as well - he had a daughter with his first wife and adopted her two sons, and has had three children with his second wife and adopted an orphan from Bangladesh.

NPR's Robbins notes that Cindy McCain often refers to herself as an only child, as she did on CNN last month: "I grew up with my dad. I'm an only child. My father was a cowboy and he really loved me very much, but I think he wanted a son occasionally."

And that's true: She was the only child in her family.

Yet, Portalski tells NPR: "I'm upset. I'm angry. It makes me feel like a non-person, kind of."

Of her relationship with her late father, Portalski says: "I saw him a few times a year. I saw him at Christmas and birthdays, and he provided money for school clothes and he called occasionally."

Documents show Kathleen Anne Hensley was born to Jim and Mary Jeanne Hensley on Feb. 23, 1943. They had been married for six years when Kathleen was born. He flew as a bombardier on a B-17 during World War II. He was injured and sent to a facility in West Virginia to recuperate. During that time, NPR reports, while still married to Mary Jeanne, Hensley met another woman -- Marguerite Smith. He divorced Mary Jeanne and married Marguerite in 1945. Cindy Lou Hensley was born nine years later, in 1954.

Jim Hensley, who founded one of the nation's largest beer distributorships in Phoenix, provided credit cards and college tuition to his grandchildren, and $10,000 gifts to Portalski and her husband, NPR reports. When Jim Hensley died in 2000, Portalski was named in his will, and she was left $10,000. Cindy McCain inherited his fortune and is chairman of the board of Hensley and Co.

Portalski's son, Nicholas Portalski, describes why the family decided to come forward: "I think the fact that we don't exist. The fact that we've never been recognized, and then Cindy has to put such a fine point on it by saying something that's not true. Recently. Again and again. It's just very, very hurtful." The Swamp

Granny says McCain is an Inveterate Bigot

GrannyStandingforTruth points out, citing CapitolHillBlue, that John McCain has a long history of anti-ethnic, color-aroused, misogynistic jokes that he tells his friends and reporters whenever he gets the chance:

McCain's collection of off-color jokes are riddled with racist words and sentiments. Advisors have toned down the raunchy rhetoric of his early years in Congress but close aides say his attitudes have not changed.

McCain opposed making the birthday of slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King a national holiday. During his 2000 campaign for President, he told reporters on his "Straight Talk Express: "I hated the gooks (North Vietnamese). I will hate them as long as I live."

Katie Hong of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, who reported the remark, wrote:

It is offensive because by using a racial epithet that has historically been used to demean all Asians to describe his captors, McCain failed to make a distinction between his torturers and an entire racial group.

It is alarming because a major candidate for president publicly used a racial epithet, refused to apologize for doing so and remains a legitimate contender.

For his 2000 campaign for President, McCain hired Richard Quinn, founder and editor in chief of Southern Heritage Magazine, to serve as his spokesman in South Carolina.

Notes Salon.Com:

Quinn's articles have called Nelson Mandela a "terrorist" and King a man "whose role in history was to lead his people into a perpetual dependence on the welfare state, a terrible bondage of body and soul." In another piece, Quinn said of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, "What better way to reject politics as usual than to elect a maverick like David Duke?" though he did condemn Duke's bigotry.

Irwin A. Tank, author of Gook: John McCain's Racism, notes a long and sordid history of racism from the presumptive GOP nominee, including:

• McCain's use of the anti-Asian slur "gook" publicly for 27 years before dropping the use for his current Presidential run;
• McCain's endorsement of George Wallace Jr., a frequent speaker at white supremacist events;
• His vote against establishing a holiday for Martin Luther King's birthday and then another vote to rescind the holiday.
• In answering a question about divorced fathers and child support, McCain called the children "tar babies."

The list goes on and on.

I tend to believe that McCain's calling his wife a cunt in front of a group of reporters is the incident that will most haunt him throughout this election cycle. Each of the other groups that McCain has targeted for bigoted remarks is a minority for whom the public might not have enough sympathy for the remarks to sway a vote one way or the other. But women are the majority of voters in the United States and, to my knowledge, the vast majority of them are VERY insulted when anyone calls them, or any other woman, a "cunt".

And that's why John Sydney McCain, III is NOT going to become president of the United States: Because women simply don't like being called "cunts", much less by the president of the country in which they live.

"Barack is 'The [Chosen] One', but is he Ready to Lead?" Asks McCain

In the above YouTube video, focused entirely on Barack Obama and the religious subtext to his political message, John McCain concedes, "Barack Obama: He may be the One. But is he ready to lead."

It seems to me that in this ad John McCain falls into the trap of repeating and popularizing his opponents' best lines for the purpose of vaguely trying to punch holes in them.

America is a very religious country, with ninety percent of people saying they believe in God. So a candidate who says that he feels a mission to lead and has been chosen to do so may have a much better change than another candidate who ridicules the religous content of his opponent's mission, without offering any religious content of his own.

John McCain's slogan is, "Barack Obama: He may be "The One", but is he ready to lead?" If American decides that Obama is more ready to lead than McCain, then McCain's McCain may find that it is essentially over.

Religious people take leaps of faith, and "faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen." If McCain's campaign depends on convincing religious people not to have faith, that makes him a negative naysaying, a tool of doom rather than the man to lift up the nation in troubled times.

Hat Tip to Agent X.

YouTube Video Depicts McCain as Klansman

The above video is dispicable. Instead of focusing on the real historical evidence that John McCain doesn't like Black peeople, here and here:

"..McCain, speaking on ABC's "This Week," said he backs a proposed ballot initiative in his home state of Arizona that would prohibit affirmative action policies by state and local governments."
Field Negro

And yet, the abvoe video depicts McCain as a Klansman himself, when the truth is that he has only consorted with Klansman and relied on them for campaign contributions and political support, while taking policy positions calculated to win Klansman votes.

For instance, with 95% of Black in Louisiana supporting Barack Obama, 'I can't help wondering what JiSM was doing olding an (awful) campaign rally in Kenner, Louisiana [last month], considering Kenner's intimate connection with David Duke:

After spending a year in federal prison for mail fraud and tax evasion, David Duke was allowed to spend the final weeks of his sentence in a halfway house in Louisiana in April 2004. Needing employment to meet eligibility requirements, he worked for EURO (the European-American Unity and Rights Organization), his white supremacist propaganda organization.

Duke's sentence ended in mid-May 2004. To celebrate his freedom and to promote unity among white supremacist groups, EURO sponsored a conference on May 28-30 in Kenner, Louisiana, near New Orleans. Several significant neo-Nazi and racist figures attended the event, including speakers John Tyndall, founder of the British National Party; top National Alliance lieutenant Kevin Alfred Strom; Don Black, founder of the pioneering white supremacist Web site Stormfront; Willis Carto of the American Free Press and The Barnes Review; anti-Semitic attorney Edgar J. Steele; and Holocaust denier Germar Rudolf. In his own remarks, Duke urged the audience of 250 not to characterize themselves as white supremacists and racists but as devoted to the "white civil rights cause." AntiDefamationLeauge

Even McCain admits to the Washington Post that he was a "coward" when he flip-flopped on the Confederate Flag in South Carolina:

"I didn't decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president. . . . In truth, I'd had the ambition for a long time."

That ambition led McCain into a moral lapse that appalled him. It involved an ongoing dispute in South Carolina over the tradition of flying the Confederate battle flag atop the state capitol, in Columbia. In a television interview, McCain said the flag was "offensive," and he appeared sympathetic to its critics. His aides were alarmed, fearing the consequences in the upcoming South Carolina primary, and they wrote a damage-control statement that McCain read repeatedly before television cameras. "I understand both sides," McCain said. "Some view the flag as a symbol of slavery. Others view it as a symbol of heritage. Personally, I see the battle flag as a symbol of heritage."

But that, McCain wrote a year later, was "a lie." The flag symbolized both slavery and the South's secession from "the country I love," and "should be lowered forever from the staff atop South Carolina's capitol."

"I had promised to tell the truth no matter what," McCain wrote in the book. "When I broke it, I had not just been dishonest, I had been a coward, and I had severed my own interests from my country's. That was what made the lie unforgivable."

Maybe, as Agent X says,

Anyway, also I'm sure you know about this too, McCain has a race card problem.
The celebrity ad has bit him on the ass (even the Hilton family, his biggest donors, are pissed at him, you can read this article on the Huff) and watch this video as he tries to defend himself by claiming that Obama played the race card against him- I think. Rick Davis, the campaign manager you outed as a lobbyist, was behind that attack.



And since the McCain camp has brought up the race card, I think it's time we delved into his past habits of racist remarks. Ask one of his former colleagues, Doug Thompson. Doug went to some of the same bars as McCain during his early days in the House and recalls several of his racist remarks.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x374031

This site republished the article from Capitol Hill Blue. Let's just say it puts yesterday's smear campaign into play.

Anonymous AgentX said...

From the article, a typical McCain joke:

Two dykes are talking at a bar and one leaves. As she walks toward the door, the other watches her leave and says out loud: "God, I've love to eat her out."

Two men are standing near by and one turns to the other and says: "I'd like to do the same. Guess that makes me a dyke."

Or another:

Question: Why does Mexican beer have two "X's" on the label?
Answer: Because wetbacks always need a co-signer.
When he ran for the Senate, I attended a gathering of GOP operatives at the National Republican Senatorial Committee where McCain outlined his campaign strategy:
"I play to win. I do whatever it takes to win. If I have to fuck my opponent to win I'll do it. If I have to destroy my opponent I won't give it a second thought."
See Agent X's report in Comments.

John McCain calls his wife a "cunt", he calls lesbian women "dikes", and he calls Mexican-Americans "wetbacks". I personally beleive his "cunt statement will turn out to be the "macaca momentof the 2008 election cycle, as soon as the debates arrive and he's forced to admit or deny the issue on national television.

Meanwhile, we've all seen this story before. Charges and counter-charges of "playing the 'race card', which Obama deftly blows off by focusing on the issues while his opponents increasingly focus on color, in an attempt to color-aroused the public. If it didn't work for Hillary Clinton, why would it work any better for John McCain, who is clearly a much less competent campaigner:

McCain Says He Might Increase Payroll Taxes

Here's more of the truth, provided by Agent X:

Another hot tip for you; remember the story you covered back in February when he flip-flopped on new taxes? He's done it again.

Mr. McCain likes to tell voters that he's the presidential candidate who wants to cut taxes.

"Senator Obama will raise your taxes. I won't," he often declares. Or: "If you want to raise taxes, then don't vote for me."

Except there is one tax Mr. McCain might be prepared to raise. When asked in an interview Sunday whether he was prepared to raise payroll taxes to correct social security's funding shortfall, he replied:

"There is nothing that's off the table. I have my positions, and I'll articulate them. But nothing's off the table. I don't want tax increases. But that doesn't mean that anything is off the table."

The Club for Growth, a conservative advocacy group, found the response "shocking.

"Your comments yesterday send American taxpayers and businesses a mixed message about where you stand on this issue," the group's president, Pat Toomey, wrote Monday in an open letter to the senator.

So what is his actual position on Tax increases, if he has one?

JiSM's Had Skin Cancer Three Times

Cross-posted at the Truth About McCain blog.

John McCain, Yahoo News reports, has had skin McCancer three times, (hey, talking about JiSM makes me tasteless) and gets check-ups in Nevada every three months to make sure the cancer hasn't come back. In fact, he was in Nevada today to have a

small patch of skin removed from his face and biopsied as part of a regular checkup with his dermatologist. ( . . . ) The fair-skinned Arizona senator, who suffered severe sun damage from his 5 1/2 years in Vietnamese prison camps, gets an in-depth skin cancer check every few months because of a medical history of dangerous melanomas." Yahoo News

The New York Times said Sunday,

"Along with his signature bright white hair, the most striking aspects of Senator John McCain’s physical appearance are his puffy left cheek and the scar that runs down the back of his neck. New York Times

We all are aware of the normal actuarial risks of being seventy-two years old now, and seventy-six years old when and if his first term expired before he did. However, if elected JiSM would treat the public to a "does he have cancer or doesn't he" check-up every three months. In fact, he'll be getting another check-up like this around November 28.

Everyone's days are numbered, but John McCain's days are more numbered than most everyone else's. Shouldn't we know what his November 28th 2008 check-up will say before we risk electing him president on November 4?

Elizabeth Edwards' possibly terminal cancer became a big issue in the Democratic primaries. Can John McCain's candidacy survive that kind of scrutiny of his health conditions, particularly the risk that cancerous lesions will appear on his face?

What kinds of fluctuations in the markets could we expect on a quarterly basis before and after John McCain's check-ups? If John McCain were elected president, how much of his face would have to be cut off before . . . 2012?

Let's, be realistic, though. Ronald Reagan was 175 years old when he was elected president; was shot; underwent operations for bowel polyps; and probably spent most of his presidency with early Alzheimers Disease. When many of us thought he was nodding meaningfully, some of us knew he was nodding portentously. But he still survived to make liberals miserable for eight years.