Sep 11 2008

Pony Party: Lobbyists for McCain

Billionaires for Bush is back: Join Lobbyists for McCain.

Some of you know that I am a huge fan of public art.  Street theater included.  The best street theater troupe that arose during the past 8 years, imho, is Billionaires for Bush.

Aaaaaand…they’re back!  They’ve renamed themselves Lobbyists for McCain but it’s the same group, now with even more biting video.  This first one is just a teaser:

The next one–it is so true that one could cry–is the best I’ve found:

This is an Open Thread.  Please do not wRECk the Pony Party!

A music video that’s as true now as it was when the Billionaires for Bush produced it in 2004:

Some Christmas jollity for the early shoppers among us–a medley including “O Come Let Us Exploit Them”:

More Lobbyists for McCain: the real story, starring Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow:

And now just Rachel Maddow:

NOT from Lobbyists for McCain:

And here’s one last musical clip from a group called barelypolitical that brings us full circle to Lobbyists for McCain:

15 comments

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  1. Like, why is this up so early?  It was set to autopost at 5 p.m. PDT…whassup?

  2. I have to admit, though, when it comes to MSNBC, I am getting a little tired of watching Kieth Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, and Pat Buchanan talk to each other about politics 24 hours a day.

    Which seems to be all that network is, with an asterisk labeled “Joe Scarborough.”

    • Edger on September 11, 2008 at 04:26
    • #

    And just use Bush or McCain or the industries they lobby for as excuses to make money?


    Left to right: Stephen Payne, Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister
    Ahmad Chalabi, and Randy Scheunemann

    Salon.com

    Aug. 1, 2008

    As recently as last year, John McCain’s senior foreign-policy and national security advisor, a neoconservative who played a leading role in pushing for a U.S. invasion of Iraq, was trying to use his role in promoting the Iraq war to make money off Iraqi oil. In a confidential memo, a company called World Strategic Energy, for which top McCain aide Randy Scheunemann was an executive consultant, told prospective investors that Scheunemann could help World Strategic Energy win oil contracts in Iraq because he was well-connected in the Iraqi exile community and had been a “key player” in getting the U.S. involved in Iraq.

    [snip…]

    Scheunemann was pushing for the use of U.S. military force in Iraq a decade ago. He was a director of the Project for the New American Century, the neoconservative group that sent a public letter to President Clinton in 1998 urging him to remove Saddam Hussein from power. In 1998, while working for Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, he helped author a bill that gave close to $100 million to the Iraqi National Congress, the anti-Hussein exile group run by Ahmad Chalabi. The World Strategic Energy document memo includes a photo of Scheunemann with Chalabi.

    [snip…]

    Scheunemann is McCain’s point man in articulating and defending the senator’s Iraq policy. McCain was also a major advocate of the original invasion. The Worldwide document seems to portray Scheunemann as attempting to profit off the war. It is unclear how much, if any, money Scheunemann made from Worldwide.

    The brochure lists the company’s president as Stephen Payne, who also appears in the photo alongside Chalabi. Payne recently stepped down from a U.S. government advisory role after a report in the Sunday Times of London showed that Payne, also a lobbyist, had offered a foreign official meetings with top Bush administration officials in exchange for a $250,000 donation to Bush’s presidential library. The paper reported that Payne had also boasted to a foreign official that Scheunemann had been “working for me on my payroll for five of the last eight years.”

    The McCain campaign did not return e-mails seeking comment on the document. Payne also did not return a similar call.

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