1. Leamer Alleges Schwarzenegger Cover-Up
2. Limbaugh Blasts Dems' "Theocracy Paranoia"
3. China Cyberspying on U.S. Companies
4. CIA-Backed Tech Spots Terrorists in a Crowd

According to Laurence Leamer, author of the new book "Fantastic: The Life of Arnold Schwarzenegger," Schwarzenegger backed away from running for governor in 2002 after the National Enquirer – an American Media tabloid – ran a series of articles on his sex life. [Editor's Note: Get your copy of "Fanastic" with our FREE offer - Go Here Now.]

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A story in April 2001, under the headline "Arnold's 7-Year Affair," included photos of Schwarzenegger with a former TV personality named Gigi Goyette, whom the tabloid called his "mistress."

"Goyette told me that she had a once-yearly relationship with Schwarzenegger and denies that she was ever his mistress," Leamer writes in the Los Angeles Times' Op-Ed section.

"Schwarzenegger declined to discuss Goyette with me on the record."

Flash forward to July 2003, when Schwarzenegger was considering entering the recall election.

The former world champion bodybuilder had a meeting with American Media head David Pecker that was arranged by bodybuilding honcho Joe Weider, Schwarzenegger's longtime mentor, who had just sold his magazine empire to American Media.

Weider said both AMI and Schwarzenegger could benefit if the tabloids stopped doing articles about his past sex life, according to Leamer.

A month later, Schwarzenegger announced his candidacy.

Shortly after that, Goyette said an Enquirer editor told her that American Media wanted to sign her up to write a book. She signed a contract for $20,000.

"Nothing more about Goyette has ever appeared in the tabloids, and Goyette says no one ever mentioned a book again," Leamer writes.

Leamer suggests the $20,000 "book" deal was nothing more than effort to shut Goyette up during Schwarzenegger's 2003 run for governor.

"Pecker says he knows nothing of any agreement with Goyette," Leamer wrote of American Media's denial of such a ploy.

During the recall election campaign, the Enquirer and other American Media tabloids championed Schwarzenegger's candidacy in a series of articles. And soon after his election, Arnold agreed to become executive editor of two of the company's bodybuilding magazines, promising to donate his $250,000 yearly salary to a physical fitness council.

Schwarzenegger's relationship with American Media is just one example of his skill at manipulating the media during his initial forays into California politics, Leamer says.

But now his media muscle has gone flabby, according to Governator expert Leamer.

In fact, the press has made a big splash over the recent disclosure that Schwarzenegger also had a consulting deal with American Media that could pay him as much as $8 million over five years.

American Media's fitness magazines tout dietary supplements. Last year the governor vetoed a bill that would have imposed regulations on the dietary supplement industry.

The bill's sponsor, Sen. Jackie Speier, called on Schwarzenegger to sever his ties with the publisher, saying he "has to make a decision about a conflict of interest – his own."

And Jamie Court, president of the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, went so far as to say Schwarzenegger's veto "deserves legislative hearings and could possibly lead to a charge of misconduct in office."

Said Leamer about Arnold's change in fortune: "During his first year as governor, Schwarzenegger directed his image like Cecil B. DeMille, scripting each moment, calling each shot and scoring boffo at the political box office.

"But Californians are no longer so intrigued by the gigantic figure looming over the stage, and as interest-group anger against him rises and his poll numbers plummet, it's unclear if the incorrigible optimist recognizes the seriousness of his plight," Leamer writes.

In his second year in office, Schwarzenegger has continued his strategy of keeping major newspapers and TV stations largely at bay, but this approach is "starting to fail," according to Leamer.

"He continues to stonewall, but the mainstream California media corps is finally reporting with relish the governor's missteps.

"If he is to succeed, he must abandon his Hollywood obsession with image control and find a way to reconnect to a disconnected electorate."

Despite Leamer's criticism, the author "clearly admires the man of action he portrays," writes Wall Street Journal columnist John H. Fund.

Fund by and large lauds "Fantastic," calling it a "close look at the man who rose from being an Austrian carpenter's apprentice to becoming leader of his adopted land's largest state."

As far back as the 1970s, Schwarzenegger told filmmaker George Butler that he had a "master plan" to marry into a prominent family, become the highest-paid actor in the world and then enter politics.

Said Fund: "For now the cheering from California voters is spotty, but no one can doubt that Arnold's master plan has been admirably executed."

Editor's Note:

• Get a copy of Laurence Leamer's "Fantastic" FREE - Go Here Now
  

2. Limbaugh Blasts Dems' "Theocracy Paranoia"

Rush Limbaugh has launched a blistering attack on what he calls liberals' "theocracy paranoia" – the fear that conservative Christians are seeking to establish a dictatorship governed by the Bible.

"My friends, these benighted people are lost in a self-created hysteria," Limbaugh writes in his publication The Limbaugh Letter.

"And the great irony is – they are lashing out at American believers who are interested solely in preserving freedom.

"Meanwhile, they see no threat whatsoever from the deadly force that is actually bent on ending every American's liberty – the dark medieval power that is determined to establish oppressive theocracy: militant Islam."

Rush asserts that Democrats have been "schizophrenic" about religion since the election, when exit polls showed that 60 percent of regular churchgoers backed Bush.

"Democrats' schizophrenia is the natural result of their having check-mated themselves politically," he writes.

"On the one hand is the electoral map, dominated by Republican 'red state' values voters whom [Howard] Dean says his party is on a mission to win.

"On the other hand is the fringe kook Democratic base, which is convinced beyond a shadow of doubt that a fascist religious right is trying to set up God's kingdom on earth and put them all in concentration camps.

"They are in full-fledged certifiable paranoia about the religious right's desire to set up a 'theocracy.'"

Limbaugh cites several websites run by "unhinged lefties" who spout about the coming takeover of the country by religious zealots and the "end of democracy in America."

But mainstream liberal writers have also taken up the cause, Rush notes. One of them, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, has outrageously written:

"America isn't yet a place where liberal politicians, and even conservatives who aren't sufficiently hard-line, fear assassination. But unless moderates take a stand against the growing power of domestic extremists, it can happen here."

Rush also refers to a recent academic conference in New York called "Examining the Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right," where one speaker described the "basically neo-fascist schemes of the new Republicans."

And prominent Democratic politicians are seemingly suffering from the same paranoia. Sen. Tom Harkin (Iowa) called Christian broadcasters "sort of our own home-grown Taliban." And Al Gore complained that "right-wing religious zealotry is actually a throwback to the intolerance that led to the creation of America in the first place."

Said Limbaugh: "It's an impossible task, but Democrats are trying to appeal both to Christians and Christian-haters at the same time. They can't possibly win without at least some votes from the former, yet the latter – their base – provides the party's energy, activism, and cash."

Editor's Note:

• Rush say the War for the Court has begun – for the full story Go Here Now
  

3. China Cyberspying on U.S. Companies

Chinese computer hackers are stealing American industrial secrets – with the tacit approval of the Chinese government, Forbes magazine reports.

A Trojan horse – code used to steal information from computers via the Internet – emerged last summer and swiped documents from compromised computers.

At least 11 other versions of the program, named Myfip, were widely circulated in the months that followed, and sought to gather files used to store mechanical designs and electronic circuit board schematics, according to Forbes.

Finally in May, a senior researcher at the Myrtle Beach, S.C., security company Lurhq reverse-engineered Myfip's code and found the program was sending stolen information to Tianjin, China's third-largest city and a major center of the country's electronics industry.

"This electronic theft is taking place with the tacit okay, or at least the nonintervention, of the Beijing government," according to Forbes.

Said John Watters, chief of Idefense, a Reston, Va., intelligence firm: "Nothing suggests that Chinese authorities are vigilantly prosecuting those who are attacking foreign interests.

"They turn a blind eye to it as long as it doesn't oppose national interests."

Editor's Note:

• CIA translation of Chinese military manual shocked the Pentagon. More Details Here