McCain helped a big developer who is also a big contributor get favorable treatment from the feds on land swaps. Ho, hum.
Wouldn’t you like to pick up a piece of land from the Army — with special water rights where water is all-important — for a quarter of a million bucks and sell it at a $20 million profit two years later? You can. Just make friends with John McCain.
Why the New York Times chose the eve of the Pennsylvania primary to run this story. virtually guaranteeing that it won’t develop any legs, is beyond me. Note that since McCain’s wife — the one with the money, the one who was in a business deal with Charles Keating at the time when her husband helped Keating bilk the taxpayers of $2.3 billion — has refused to release her tax returns, we can’t know what sort of financial goodies Donald Diamond has managed to slip her over the years.
Author: Mark Kleiman
Professor of Public Policy at the NYU Marron Institute for Urban Management and editor of the Journal of Drug Policy Analysis. Teaches about the methods of policy analysis about drug abuse control and crime control policy, working out the implications of two principles: that swift and certain sanctions don't have to be severe to be effective, and that well-designed threats usually don't have to be carried out.
Books:
Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (with Jonathan Caulkins and Angela Hawken)
When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment (Princeton, 2009; named one of the "books of the year" by The Economist
Against Excess: Drug Policy for Results (Basic, 1993)
Marijuana: Costs of Abuse, Costs of Control (Greenwood, 1989)
UCLA Homepage
Curriculum Vitae
Contact: Markarkleiman-at-gmail.com
View all posts by Mark Kleiman