McCain has a lobbyist problem!

[libertypirate]

http://harpers.org/archive/2008/09/hbc-90003510

Does McCain Campaign Chair's Lobby Shop Share Skybox with AT&T?

...

There's no Beltway lobbying shop more closely associated with Senator John McCain than Davis, Manafort Inc. Rick Davis is on leave from the firm while he runs the senator's presidential campaign. Davis was one of Washington's most powerful telecommunications lobbyists and represented various firms that had interests before the Senate Commerce Committee when McCain chaired it. Christian Ferry, McCain's deputy campaign manager, is also a former telecom lobbyist for Davis, Manafort, as is Timothy McKone, a McCain fundraiser and adviser who now lobbies for AT&T. Then there's Charles Black, McCain's chief political adviser and the "chairman of one of Washington's lobbying powerhouses, BKSH and Associates, which has also represented AT&T." John Timmons, a fundraiser for McCain, a former Senate staffer to McCain, and minority counsel to the Senate Commerce Committee, has likewise lobbied for AT&T. It's one big, happy family.

And it works both ways. AT&T, as the Minnesota Independent recently reported, is "the Republican party's biggest donor, shelling out more than $1.3 million for Republican campaigns this year alone, according to campaign finance reports. And more than $168,000 of that has gone directly to the campaign for John McCain, whom AT&T has strongly supported and vice versa." As to McCain's likely policies if elected, a Bloomberg story from July says simply that a "John McCain victory would be good for AT&T."

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Old crusty liar going down!

[notadmblnd]

1. yeah, and I think there's more than one

Posted Thursday, February 21, 2008 2:01 PM
What We Actually Know About McCain and Iseman

In the years that McCain chaired the commerce committee, Iseman lobbied for Lowell W. "Bud" Paxson, the head of what used to be Paxson Communications... In late 1999, McCain wrote two letters to the FCC urging a vote on the sale to Paxson of a Pittsburgh television station. The sale had been highly contentious in Pittsburgh and involved a multipronged lobbying effort among the parties to the deal. At the time he sent the first letter, McCain had flown on Paxson's corporate jet four times to appear at campaign events and had received $20,000 in campaign donations from Paxson and its law firm. The second letter came on Dec. 10, a day after the company's jet ferried him to a Florida fundraiser that was held aboard a yacht in West Palm Beach... When the letters became public, William E. Kennard, chairman of the FCC at the time, denounced them as "highly unusual" coming from McCain, whose committee chairmanship gave him oversight of the agency.

This sort of chronology, which raises suspicions of influence peddling, is par for the course in Washington. But over the past 20 years, McCain has styled himself a crusader for reform, routinely launching stinging critiques of lobbyists and maintaining that he has "never, ever done a favor for any lobbyist or special interest group." Now there's Iseman on one side of the story, " up regularly at meetings of telecom lobbyists in Washington" to "extoll... her connections to McCain and his office," according to the Post. On the other side, there's a cabal of worried staffers struggling to separate her from McCain--and, in so doing, tacitly conceding that McCain's connection to this particular woman was stronger and stranger than any of his dozens of other relationships with lobbyists. And in the middle is the senator himself, perhaps betraying the intensity of that connection in a series of "highly unusual" moves that look a whole lot like favors.

some salacious stuff in the article too.

http://www.blog.newsweek.com/blogs/stumper/archive/2008/02/21/what-we-actually-know-about-mccain-and-iseman.aspx

[libertypirate]

2. There may be more than one, the latest from what I

posted above is very simple. It will resonate in the echo chamber, as well it shows how much of the lobby McCain doesn't know he is friends with. I read the Newsweek is trying to make the NEW McSame lobby problem and extension of the old known problems that went no where... That dog won't hunt!