McCain site cooks up a recipe for trouble

Ahh, the home cooking of Sen. John McCain's wife, Cindy. You can almost smell her ahi tuna with Napa cabbage slaw or her rosemary chicken with warm spinach salad as you peruse the recipes on her husband's campaign Web site.

Or you could have until Tuesday, when that part of the site was taken down after bloggers revealed that several of the "McCain Family Recipes" were copied word for word from the Food Network.

Cindy McCain's tuna recipe was developed and submitted to the Food Network by cookbook author and former "Cooking Thin" host Kathleen Daelemans. The recipe for farfalle pasta with turkey sausage, peas and mushrooms was a "quick pasta classic" from the TV show "Everyday Italian." That old McCain standby — rosemary chicken — was a creation of TV chef Rachael Ray and was lifted, with few changes, from the same Food Network site.

All three were listed on a McCain Web page titled "Cindy's Recipes."

"Apparently a Web intern added Rachael Ray to our policy team without her knowing it," McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds deadpanned Tuesday.

A blogger for the Huffington Post, freelance writer David Weiner, reported the plagiarism, mocking the incident as "Farfallegate? The Rosemary Chicken Dome Scandal?" He attributed the discovery to Lauren Handel, a New York lawyer who had been searching the Internet for recipes and found identical ones on the Food Network and McCain campaign sites.

"Personally, I'm not sure how an intern can be responsible for messing up the McCain 'family' recipes," Weiner wrote.

"Am I offended?" asked Daelemans, a Democrat. "Absolutely not. I'm flattered. I'd love to cook it for them personally."

Clinton makes plans for first 100 days

WASHINGTON — Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton on Tuesday laid out an ambitious agenda for the first 100 days of her presidency, if she's elected, that includes signing legislation that President Bush vetoed, seeking a moratorium on home foreclosures and beginning the process of withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.

Speaking at an American Society of Newspaper Editors luncheon in Washington, Clinton said she'd ask Congress to eliminate some of Bush's tax cuts — replacing them with reductions targeting the middle class — and press Canada and Mexico to renegotiate parts of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

"In short, starting from Day One, the Bush-Cheney era will be over in name and practice," the New York senator said.

Seattle Times news services