C-Webb Retires.

“‘I really didn’t want to rehab and come back this season because I don’t think that was possible,’ Webber said. ‘Plus, because the way the team is playing, the chemistry is great with these guys, they’re on a roll. I feel like they’re going to win, they have a great chance to go very far in the playoffs. I just felt it was time to let the game go and be able to be happy about what I accomplished without trying to keep coming back.’” Undone by knee injuries, longtime NBA forward Chris Webber calls it quits. (He had recently returned to the Golden State Warriors.)

I always liked C-Webb, and wish he’d won a ring with one of the early-00’s Sacramento outfits. On the debit side of the ledger, there’s his unfortunate timeout and, more importantly, his criminal contempt plea in his perjury trial (concerning loans he received from a booster while at Michigan.) But, still, you have to have some respect for a guy who parlays his NBA millions into an impressive and widely-circulated African-American history collection (probably the coolest basketball-related public project this side of fellow Warrior alum Adonal Foyle’s campaign finance reform group.)

Supers, get Supering. | Pork King for Clinton.

“In Washington, there’s no happier situation for a politician than to be doing absolutely nothing and getting great press for it. But let’s be clear about one thing: keeping their powder dry profits the superdelegates, but comes at the expense of their party. It shouldn’t take Solomon to see that.” The Atlantic‘s Josh Green argues that the superdelegates should get cracking on their decision, if they’re serious about a long race hurting the Dems.

And, in related news, Sen. Clinton picks up her first two superdelegates in a month: DNC rep DNC rep. Pat Maroney of WV and, more notably, Rep. John Murtha of PA. Murtha, a.k.a. “the Pork King,” has not only been an enemy to ethics reform, but has a litany of shady scandals to his name, from Abscam to PAID. (Not for nothing did CREW name him one of the 20 most corrupt representatives in Congress.) And, of course, Murtha led the House in earmarks last year, clocking in at $162 million (thanks to his gig as the Appropriations Defense Subcommittee Chairman.) So, given that he’s part of the problem and not part of the solution, I’m not at all surprised he’s chosen to endorse the candidate who’s rife in lobbyist money and who won’t release her own earmarks. That’s one super you can have, Sen. Clinton.

Tribune: We’re good on Rezko. | Sun-Times too.

“U.S. Sen. Barack Obama waited 16 months to attempt the exorcism. But when he finally sat down with the Tribune editorial board Friday, Obama offered a lengthy and, to us, plausible explanation for the presence of now-indicted businessman Tony Rezko in his personal and political lives. The most remarkable facet of Obama’s 92-minute discussion was that, at the outset, he pledged to answer every question the three dozen Tribune journalists crammed into the room would put to him. And he did.“

After Obama sits down with Chicago journalists on Friday afternoon, the paper deems itself satisfied with regard to the Tony Rezko story. (By way of TNR.) “Less protection, less control, would have meant less hassle for his campaign. That said, Barack Obama now has spoken about his ties to Tony Rezko in uncommon detail. That’s a standard for candor by which other presidential candidates facing serious inquiries now can be judged.” (Previously, Glenn Greenwald surveyed the Rezko coverage and explained why there’s no there there.)

Update: Sen. Obama also spent 80 minutes in the Land of Ebert, answering any and all questions held by the Chicago Sun-Times on Rezko. “I don’t think anybody at this newspaper can make the claim any longer that he hasn’t answered our inquiries after an exhaustive 80-minute interview session Friday evening. I won’t.”

A New Sheriff in Town.

“‘If you have a single ounce of self-preservation, you’ll vote no,’ implored Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.) last night.” The House creates a new independent ethics panel, 229-182. As the WP notes: “Even with two House members under indictment, two others sent to prison, and several others under federal investigation, nearly half the House did not want to submit the body to the scrutiny of a panel not under its control.” Nevertheless, ethics watchdog groups seem pleased with the bill. Said Common Cause‘s Sarah Dufendach: “For the first time in history, you have nonmembers able to initiate investigations. They’re doing oversight. They’re the new police.” (And to tie everything back to the current theme, Sen. Obama advocated an similarly independent Office of Public Integrity for the Senate in his ethics reform package. Sen. Clinton, someone with considerably more than “a single ounce of self-preservation,” voted against it.)

My friends (are lobbyists), my friends. | FEC: Nope.

While the NYT’s botched bombshell involving Maverick and Iseman has thus far only seemed to help Sen. McCain to make nice with his unreconstructed right flank, the WP posts an A1 follow-up showing how the story may bite McCain yet. To wit, his campaign is completely dominated by lobbyists. “[W]hen McCain huddled with his closest advisers at his rustic Arizona cabin last weekend to map out his presidential campaign, virtually every one was part of the Washington lobbying culture he has long decried.“

Meanwhile, concerning the “other” McCain scandal at the moment, the Republican head of the FEC, David Mason, comes down against McCain’s attempted gaming of the public financing system, and argues he can’t duck out of public financing now. “‘This is serious,’ agreed Republican election lawyer Jan Baran. Ignoring the matter on the grounds that the FEC lacks a quorum, Baran said, ‘is like saying you’re going to break into houses because the sheriff is out of town.’”

Update: Newsweek‘s Mike Isikoff, one of the also-rans for the Iseman scoop, pokes a hole in McCain’s denial. Regarding the Paxson letters to the FCC, McCain said yesterday that ““No representative of Paxson or Alcalde & Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC.” The problem? This contradicts a sworn deposition by McCain taken in 2002, when McCain said: “I was contacted by Mr. Paxson on this issue.” D’oh!

Update 2: Now, Paxson says he met with the Senator, despite McCain’s statement to the contrary. “Paxson also recalled that his lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, attended the meeting in McCain’s office and that Iseman helped arrange the meeting. ‘Was Vicki there? Probably,’ Paxson said in an interview with The Washington Post today. ‘The woman was a professional. She was good. She could get us meetings.’“

The Axe Falls on Renzi.

Speaking of Arizona Republicans in hot water, Rep. Rick Renzi is indicted on 35 counts of “conspiracy, wire fraud, money laundering, extortion and insurance fraud.” Kicked off the House Intelligence Committee when news of his shadiness emerged in 2005, Renzi also played a role in the persecuted prosecutors scandal, when it came out that both he and former AG Alberto Gonzales had pressured the US attorney to hold fire on him.

The Money Pit.

“Hillary Clinton ended January with $7.6 million in debt – not including the $5 million personal loan she gave to her campaign in the run-up to the critical Super Tuesday elections, according to financial reports released Wednesday.” With the January FEC reports filed, Politico takes a look at the sinking fiscal ship that is the Clinton campaign. The key graphs: “According to the reports, Clinton raised about $20 million in January, including her loan. She spent nearly $29 million during the month. She reported a cash balance of $29 million. But more than $20 million of that is money dedicated to the general election. Her personal loan accounts for more than half of the remaining approximately $9 million, leaving just about $4 million in cash raised from donors. But even that money is illusionary when measured against the reported $7.6 million in debts.” So add that all up and you get: no money. (Hence, the fatcat 527.) But the silver lining for Sen. Clinton? At least she’s making interest on that loan.

Over at TNR, Christopher Orr emphasizes this finding from the piece: “More than $2 million of the red ink is owed to chief consultant and adviser, Mark Penn.” So that goes a long way toward explaining why he’s still employed over there these days, despite his obvious incompetence.

And a commenter in the same TNR thread teases out another key line buried in the article: “[T]he lengthy laundry list of IOUs also includes unpaid bills ranging from insurance coverage, phone banking, printing and catering at events in Iowa, New Hampshire and California.” Wait a tic: Sen. Clinton, she of the much-touted mandate, is now ducking the insurance bills? Hmm…maybe affordability is the real problem after all.

Update: Politico‘s Kenneth Vogel has more on where the money went, including $10 million to Mark Penn and $1300 to Dunkin Donuts.

Update 2: The NYT piles on the terrible financing issue: “Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s latest campaign finance report, published Wednesday night, appeared even to her most stalwart supporters and donors to be a road map of her political and management failings…’We didn’t raise all of this money to keep paying consultants who have pursued basically the wrong strategy for a year now,’ said a prominent New York donor. ‘So much about her campaign needs to change — but it may be too late.‘”

Vicki don’t lose that number.

“Early in Senator John McCain’s first run for the White House eight years ago, waves of anxiety swept through his small circle of advisers. A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, visiting his offices and accompanying him on a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.“

Remember the hubbub back in December over a spiked NYT story about John McCain and some lobbyist shenanigans? Well, it finally dropped, and it involves possible favorable treatment for — and a possible romance with — a young female telecom lobbyist, Vicki Iseman (who, it must be said, looks eerily like Cindy McCain.) “In interviews, the two former associates said they joined in a series of confrontations with Mr. McCain, warning him that he was risking his campaign and career. Both said Mr. McCain acknowledged behaving inappropriately and pledged to keep his distance from Ms. Iseman.” So there’s definitely smoke, but is there fire? This story doesn’t quite stick the landing on either the romance (both parties deny it, although they did seem to spend some time together) or the lobbyist favors (it does mention McCain urging the FCC in 1999 (before my time there) to back an Iseman client, Paxson Communications, at her request, and it rehashes McCain’s involvement with the Keating 5.) But perhaps there’s more to the story? If there isn’t, I don’t really see this having legs. Update: The WP follows up with their own version, which notes that Iseman used to tout her McCain connections to other lobbyists. Still no smoking gun, tho’.

Update: The McCain campaign has responded here, calling the piece a “hit and run smear campaign.” (This response, however, sidesteps the question of a possible affair. For what it’s worth, McCain has admitted to extramarital affairs during his first marriage. And, while he voted to convict Bill Clinton during the impeachment fiasco, he also said then that “I do not desire to sit in judgement of the President’s private misconduct. It is truly a matter for him and his family to resolve…I have done things in my private life that I am not proud of. I suspect many of us have.“)

Update 2: It looks like release of the NYT piece was prompted by a TNR story about the Grey Lady holding back, which [Updated] came out today. (Apparently, other news outlets have been chasing the story too.) In the meantime, we can content ourselves with a better documented, albeit less sexy, McCain scandal, namely his obvious gaming of the public financing system: “What we know is that McCain found a way to use the public funds as an insurance policy: If he did poorly, he would use public funds to pay off his loans. If he did well, he would have the advantage of unlimited spending. There’s a reason no one’s ever done anything like this. It makes a travesty of the choice inherent in voluntary public financing, between public funds and unlimited spending…Legal or not, it should bring to an end whatever tiny thread of credibility John McCain still has as a straight-talker or reformer of the political process.“

The Clinton Money Crunch.

“We are very frustrated because we have a Supreme Court that seems determined to say that the wealthier have more right to free speech than the rest of us. For example, they say you couldn’t stop me from spending all the money I’ve saved over the last five years on Hillary’s campaign if I wanted to, even though it would clearly violate the spirit of campaign finance reform.”

So said Bill Clinton only a little over a month ago. But, as per the norm with the Clinton campaign, things have now changed: Word leaks out that Senator Clinton is not only planning to self-finance her candidacy with personal “loans” (a la Mitt Romney), but that she already gave her campaign $5 million out-of-pocket last month. (Indeed, money’s gotten so tight around the Clinton camp that, according to Time‘s Mark Halperin, senior staff are now going without pay.)

Meanwhile, Sen. Obama is on pace for another $30 million month and has room to grow, mainly because he’s relying on a wider pool of small donors rather than (as per Senator Clinton) a smaller pool of maxed-out donors and an army of lobbyists. (Which reminds me, Senator Obama accepts donations here.)

I for one doubt Sen. Clinton’s campaign will really run out of cheddar. If anything, the campaign probably put the story out there so as to encourage their supporters to donate in the same fashion as Obama’s have. Still, this Clinton cash crunch further indicates how much of their election strategy was predicated on a Super Tuesday knockout punch. Having swung and missed, the Clinton camp is now nearing broke, and seriously hurting.

More to the point, even notwithstanding the inherent shadiness of self-financing, which no less than Bill Clinton attested to above, this move puts President Clinton’s penchant for troubling deals — such as his recent venture in Kazakhstan — right in the thick of things. Hard to ignore in any event, now this story comes front and center. If the Clintons are breaking into their private stash to get Senator Clinton elected, where did the money come from?

In Our Country, Clinton is Problem.

“I’ve been tested. I’ve been vetted. I have been in the political arena in our country very intensely for 16 years. There are no surprises.” Ah. But, Senator Clinton, what about your husband? A front-page story in this morning’s NYT — a paper so resolutely anti-Clinton it recently endorsed her for president — unearths what look to be some murky political dealings in Kazakhstan involving Bill Clinton and a top donor, former uranium-mining entrepreneur and Lions Gate Entertainment founder Frank Giustra. (He’s the fellow at right.)

It’s a long, convoluted article, but this seem to be the essence of it: Clinton said nice things publicly about the freedom-suppressing dictator of Kazakhstan — in contradiction of US policy, the views of human rights groups, and even Senator Clinton’s professed stance on his government — so his buddy Giustra could land a lucrative exclusive mining contract. A much wealthier man as a result, Giustra later repaid Clinton in absurdly large donations to his Foundation, to the tune of $131 million. Both denied any quid pro quo, and both seem to have lied about at least some of the meetings that took place. This is all explained in more detail below:

In September 2005, President Clinton and Giustra, then head of a company called UrAsia and “a newcomer to uranium mining in Kazakhstan,” journeyed by private plane to Borat‘s home nation, where “a fortune awaited: highly coveted deposits of uranium that could fuel nuclear reactors around the world.“

The reason for their visit? To negotiate an exclusive deal to buy into three mining projects controlled by Kazakhstan’s state-owned uranium agency, Kazatomprom. “Kazakhstan, which has about one-fifth of the world’s uranium reserves, was the place to be. But with plenty of suitors, Kazatomprom could be picky about its partners. ‘Everyone was asking Kazatomprom to the dance,’ said Fadi Shadid, a senior stock analyst covering the uranium industry for Friedman Billings Ramsey, an investment bank. ‘A second-tier junior player like UrAsia — you’d need all the help you could get.’“

Upon arriving, Clinton and Giustra were “whisked off to share a sumptuous midnight banquet with Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev, whose 19-year stranglehold on the country has all but quashed political dissent.” At this dinner, a deal may have been made.

At a news conference soon thereafter, Clinton made a “public declaration [that] undercut both American foreign policy and sharp criticism of Kazakhstan’s poor human rights record by, among others, Mr. Clinton’s wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York…The publicly stated reason for the visit was to announce a Clinton Foundation agreement that enabled the government to buy discounted AIDS drugs. But during a news conference, Mr. Clinton wandered into delicate territory by commending Mr. Nazarbayev for ‘opening up the social and political life of your country.’ In a statement Kazakhstan would highlight in news releases, Mr. Clinton declared that he hoped it would achieve a top objective: leading the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, which would confer legitimacy on Mr. Nazarbayev’s government. ‘I think it’s time for that to happen, it’s an important step, and I’m glad you’re willing to undertake it,’ Mr. Clinton said.“

As noted, this vote of confidence flew in the face of US policy — and statements by Senator Clinton. “Eleven months before Mr. Clinton’s statement, Mrs. Clinton co-signed a commission letter to the State Department that sounded ‘alarm bells’ about the prospect that Kazakhstan might head the group. The letter stated that Kazakhstan’s bid ‘would not be acceptable,’ citing ‘serious corruption,’ canceled elections and government control of the news media…Robert Herman, who worked for the State Department in the Clinton administration and is now at Freedom House, a human rights group, said the former president’s statement amounted to an endorsement of Kazakhstan’s readiness to lead the group, a position he called ‘patently absurd.’ ‘He was either going off his brief or he was sadly mistaken,’ Mr. Herman said. ‘There was nothing in the record to suggest that they really wanted to move forward on democratic reform.’“

Two days after Clinton’s press conference, Giustra — again, basically an unknown upstart in the uranium business — secured the Kazatomprom deal. “The cost to UrAsia was more than $450 million, money the company did not have in hand and had only weeks to come up with…Longtime market watchers were confounded. Kazatomprom’s choice of UrAsia was a ‘mystery,’ said Gene Clark, the chief executive of Trade Tech, a uranium industry newsletter. ‘UrAsia was able to jump-start the whole process somehow,’ Mr. Clark said. The company became a ‘major uranium producer when it didn’t even exist before.’“

Nazarbayev was happy. “in December 2005, Mr. Nazarbayev won another election, which the security organization itself said was marred by an ‘atmosphere of intimidation’ and ‘ballot-box stuffing.’ After Mr. Nazarbayev won with 91 percent of the vote, Mr. Clinton sent his congratulations. ‘Recognizing that your work has received an excellent grade is one of the most important rewards in life,’ Mr. Clinton wrote in a letter released by the Kazakh embassy. Last September, just weeks after Kazakhstan held an election that once again failed to meet international standards, Mr. Clinton honored Mr. Nazarbayev by inviting him to his annual philanthropic conference.“

Giustra got rich. “The monster deal stunned the mining industry, turning an unknown shell company into one of the world’s largest uranium producers in a transaction ultimately worth tens of millions of dollars to Mr. Giustra, analysts said“

Clinton got paid. “Just months after the Kazakh pact was finalized, Mr. Clinton’s charitable foundation received its own windfall: a $31.3 million donation from Mr. Giustra that had remained a secret until he acknowledged it last month. The gift, combined with Mr. Giustra’s more recent and public pledge to give the William J. Clinton Foundation an additional $100 million, secured Mr. Giustra a place in Mr. Clinton’s inner circle, an exclusive club of wealthy entrepreneurs in which friendship with the former president has its privileges.“

Clinton and Giustra spun the whole story with barely plausible statements. “A spokesman for Mr. Clinton said the former president knew that Mr. Giustra had mining interests in Kazakhstan but was unaware of ‘any particular efforts’ and did nothing to help. Mr. Giustra said he was there as an ‘observer only’ and there was ‘no discussion’ of the deal with Mr. Nazarbayev or Mr. Clinton. But Moukhtar Dzhakishev, president of Kazatomprom, said in an interview that Mr. Giustra did discuss it, directly with the Kazakh president, and that his friendship with Mr. Clinton ‘of course made an impression.’…He said Mr. Nazarbayev himself ultimately signed off on the transaction.“

Giustra later helped Kazatomprom’s top man, Moukhtar Dzhakishev, run a new deal by Clinton, one involving a potential Kazakhstani stake in US nuclear tech. “Mr. Dzhakishev, the Kazatomprom chief, said he traveled to Chappaqua, N.Y., to meet with Mr. Clinton at his home. Mr. Dzhakishev said Mr. Giustra arranged the three-hour meeting. Mr. Dzhakishev said he wanted to discuss Kazakhstan’s intention — not publicly known at the time — to buy a 10 percent stake in Westinghouse, a United States supplier of nuclear technology.“

A cover-up was attempted about this later meeting. It failed. “Both Mr. Clinton and Mr. Giustra at first denied that any such meeting occurred. Mr. Giustra also denied ever arranging for Kazakh officials to meet with Mr. Clinton. Wednesday, after The Times told them that others said a meeting, in Mr. Clinton’s home, had in fact taken place, both men acknowledged it.”

And here’s probably the most serious kicker, regarding a Clinton return to the White House. “Mr. Clinton has vowed to continue raising money for his foundation if Mrs. Clinton is elected president, maintaining his connections with a wide network of philanthropic partners.“

I must say, at the very least, this does not sound like change.