Last night’s eclipse was spectacular! We had a thick blanket of clouds here, but the clouds parted long enough to expose the eclipsed Moon through a smoky light. I wish I had decent nighttime photography equipment. Of course it kept me up all night – recently I find I don’t sleep during the Full Moon and this eclipse had a power all its own.

You may remember from my article here a few days ago that the eclipse would conjunct both John McCain and Mike Huckabee’s Virgo Suns. I didn’t make much of it because McCain is undergoing a transit of Saturn to his Sun of which this is the second phase, and it has only strengthened his candidacy. But eclipses can bring about sudden changes and as one reader wrote, the “unmasking” and revelation of Truth.

John McCain wants to be president so badly that after Karl Rove spread whisper campaigns that his adopted Bangladeshi daughter was an illegitimate black child, and that his wife Cindy was addicted to prescription drugs, he still sold his soul to President Bush in exchange for his support (see photo).

Last night’s Keith Olbermann program featured a story on new revelations to come out of the New York Times today that John McCain had had an “improper” relationship with a lobbyist during the 2000 election. Olbermann is a great gossip, but his reporting of this story focused on the tittilation of the possible relationship. Reading the entire NYT article reveals other long-forgotten aspects of John McCain that are in my view more damaging:

• In 1989 the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association collapsed, and its CEO, Charles Keating, turned out to be a major contributor to the campaigns of five senators who asked the chief investigator to back off. One of those senators was John McCain. He is the only one of the Keating Five still in the Senate.
• Subsequent to this debacle McCain reinvented himself as a reformer of campaign financing with the help of Senator Russ Feingold. However, during the 2000 campaign he actively solicited campaign contributions from lobbyists.
• The Reform Institute that he founded to reform campaign financing collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in unlimited donations from companies that had business before the Senate commerce committee of which he was a member.

Regarding McCain’s possible relationship with the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, the New York Times writes:

A champion of deregulation, Mr. McCain wrote letters in 1998 and 1999 to the Federal Communications Commission urging it to uphold marketing agreements allowing a television company to control two stations in the same city, a crucial issue for Glencairn Ltd., one of Ms. Iseman’s clients. He introduced a bill to create tax incentives for minority ownership of stations; Ms. Iseman represented several businesses seeking such a program. And he twice tried to advance legislation that would permit a company to control television stations in overlapping markets, an important issue for Paxson.

In late 1999, Ms. Iseman asked Mr. McCain’s staff to send a letter to the commission to help Paxson, now Ion Media Networks, on another matter. Mr. Paxson was impatient for F.C.C. approval of a television deal, and Ms. Iseman acknowledged in an e-mail message to The Times that she had sent to Mr. McCain’s staff information for drafting a letter urging a swift decision.

Mr. McCain complied. He sent two letters to the commission, drawing a rare rebuke for interference from its chairman. In an embarrassing turn for the campaign, news reports invoked the Keating scandal, once again raising questions about intervening for a patron.

Mr. McCain’s aides released all of his letters to the F.C.C. to dispel accusations of favoritism, and aides said the campaign had properly accounted for four trips on the Paxson plane. But the campaign did not report the flight with Ms. Iseman [after a private dinner with Ms. Iseman’s clients after which McCain flew home with Ms. Iseman on Paxson’s plane.] Mr. McCain’s advisers say he was not required to disclose the flight, but ethics lawyers dispute that.

The timing of the release of this information, which evidently the Times had been holding for months, on the night of the eclipse is pretty interesting. The New York Times is not prone to publishing tabloid speculation, and commentators last night all said that it was likely that there was even more to the report that wasn’t published. The eclipse also conjuncts the Sun in Mike Huckabee’s chart, and wouldn’t it be an incredible thing if McCain’s campaign imploded, forcing his withdrawal, leaving only Huckabee in the presidential race! McCain has an interesting combination of planetary cycles going on right now. Saturn is conjunct his Sun, which often brings tests and challenges but also can give us the strength to withstand them and become even stronger. But transiting Uranus is conjunct Saturn in his chart, breaking up patterns and structures and forcing change, and transiting Pluto is square the Nodes of the Moon, a transit which typically denotes a course correction.

I’ll report more as more news becomes available.