Ms. Iseman also lobbied for Univision.
http://www.jamd.com/search?text=vicki%20iseman&partner=Google&epmid=3After John McCain's campaign manager Terry Nelson, chief strategist John Weaver, and chief of staff Mark Salter all deserted him today, McCain brought in veteran Republican lobbyist Rick Davis as his new manager.
Meet Rick Davis.
Rick Davis was founder and managing partner of the very partisan Davis, Manafort & Freedman, Inc., a lobbying firm based in Arlington, Virginia. Some of the firm's notable clients include:
Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha: The firm was hired by the Nigerians in March 1998, at a time when the country's dictator, General Sani Abacha, was engaged in an aggressive public relations campaign to persuade Americans that he was the leader of a progressive emerging democracy. Human rights groups described General Abacha as a ruthless and corrupt dictator.
Companies that moved jobs offshore: The firm also lobbied Congress for favorable treatment for Fruit of the Loom in a trade bill that was expected to deliver a quick $25 million to $50 million to the company's bottom line. The company had recently saved additional money by moving about 17,000 of its American jobs offshore, mostly to the Caribbean Basin, and reincorporating in the tax haven Cayman Islands.
Companies with business before McCain's committee: Two of the companies represented by Davis' firm, COMSAT and SBC, had major (and controversial) mergers pending before the Federal Communications Commission in 1999, and both mergers were approved. That same year, Davis was working both for McCain and for the lobbying firm representing the two companies seeking permission from the FCC to merge. McCain refused to recuse himself from the proceedings, despite his connections with the involved parties.
Davis also played a central role in the McCain Reform Institute Scandal. McCain founded The Reform Institute to push for clean campaigns and elections nationwide, but then used the 501(c)3 to draw large donations from industries seeking legislative favors. He also used the Institute to pay political advisors like Davis, who earned $110,000 a year from the Institute.
Many of the Reform Institute donors were also communications industry players with business before the Commerce Committee--when Sen. McCain was its chairman.
Echosphere, a communications company started by Charles Ergen, a founder of EchoStar Communications and the DISH Network, gave $50,000 or more to the institute. So did CSC Holdings, a subsidiary of the Cablevisions Systems Corporation, headed by Charles F. Dolan, and the Chartwell Foundation, the charitable group funded by A. Jerrold Perenchio, the Univision billionaire.
In fact, Cablevision's money accounted for 15 percent of the Institute's fund-raising in 2003.
http://www.democrats.org/a/2007/07/john_mccain_aft.phpand about Univision (and this doesn't even touch on Perenchio's interest in immigration reform):
Perenchio, now a member of McCain's finance committee, funneled more than $1.4 million in soft money to Republican causes in the 1998, 2000 and 2002 election campaigns, often in amounts McCain used to criticize. For one GOP fundraising dinner in the spring of 2001, for example, he donated $250,000. Perenchio has also been a major donor to the 527 groups formed to exploit a loophole in the legislation sponsored by McCain and Feingold.
Taking their name from a little-known provision of the IRS tax code, the groups began raising large donations -- some in the millions of dollars -- and running ads and funding other activities designed to influence the 2004 presidential election. Federal election regulators have refused to rein in the groups and their donations in the past two elections.
Perenchio gave $4 million to a pro-Republican 527 group called Progress for America, which helped Bush in the 2004 campaign. In the 2006 congressional races, Perenchio gave $5 million more to the same group.
In the summer of 2005, McCain's allies in the reform movement went to court seeking to force the Federal Election Commission to regulate the 527 groups and make them abide by the same donation limits as other political committees.
In a friend-of-the-court brief, McCain and Feingold specifically cited Progress for America as an example of what was wrong with 527 groups. The court filing cited one of the group's pro-Bush commercials -- which starred a 16-year-old whose mother was killed in the Sept. 11 attacks -- to illustrate the impact large donations had on the election. Perenchio was not mentioned.
"The deployment of section 527 groups as the new vehicle for using soft money to conduct political activities to influence federal elections is simply the latest chapter in a long history of efforts to evade and violate the federal campaign finance laws," the McCain court filing stated. "Sadly, it is another chapter in the FEC's failure to enforce the campaign finance laws."
Perenchio declined to be interviewed. Salter said Perenchio's support of McCain "pre-dates the existence of 527s. Perenchio served on Senator McCain's fundraising committee in 2000, and the senator is pleased to have his continued support."
That support has come in a number of ways. Tax records show that Perenchio's Chartwell Foundation donated $100,000 on March 1, 2002, to the Reform Institute, a nonprofit foundation of which McCain was co-chairman and which was advocating the end of big political donations.
At the time, McCain was chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees the broadcast industry, and Univision had numerous issues pending before the government. Cablevision, another broadcaster, also donated $200,000 to the McCain foundation around the same time the senator took action in Congress favorable to that company.
McCain's allies in the campaign finance reform movement seem resigned to the fact that he will not abide by many of the principles he advocated for a decade as a reformer, including public financing and its associated spending and fundraising limits.
"Certainly we are disappointed that he has decided not to take the lead in fixing the presidential-financing system he is competing in," said Mary Boyle of Common Cause, the ethics watchdog that cheered McCain's reform efforts for years. "But it is understandable he is opting out.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/10/AR2007021001510.htmlMcCain had the nerve yesterday to ask Obama to be a man of his word and abide by his agreement to have a publically financed campaign. what a snake.
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