(Forget the Woman) McCain the Faux Reformer is in Bed with the TELECOMS!!!

[McCamy Taylor]

I am not going to do one of my usual epics, because I am tired and it is late, and I already wrote War and Peace today about why we need to impeach Cheney.

People like MSNBC are under orders from their corporate bosses at General Electric (who are under orders from their bosses at the Pentagon) to paint this story as a smear job against an American War Hero from the Liberal Media. They will talk about Sex, sex, sex and more sex .

Forget the blonde. John McCain is in bed with the telecoms.

A cursory search of the Internet shows that way back in the Clinton administration, before his 2000 presidential run, when he was still supposedly the Maverick he was already doing favors like

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3169/is_48_39/ai_57842818

"it's the satellite TV company that suffers” McCain wrote after a bill’s passage.

Satellite TV Companies like Echostar, one of Iseman’s clients.

So, McCain is in bed with Echostar

Then there is this 2005 story about services rendered to another cable giant, Cablevision.

http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0309-35.htm

McCain repeatedly intervened on behalf of a policy Cablevision favored -- one which "congressional and private studies conclude could make cable more expensive" -- while his chief political adviser, Rick Davis (who's masterminding McCain's probable '08 presidential rerun) solicited $200,000 in contributions from Cablevision to an institute that promotes McCain and pays Davis a $110,000 annual salary.

Snip

Now, McCain is back at the same old game, this time on behalf of Cablevision and its campaign for an "a la carte" provision, which would allow cable customers to pick the channels they want rather than buy packages of channels. McCain has continued to campaign for this provision even after the independent General Accounting Office -- in a study requested by McCain himself -- concluded that the a la carte provision would considerably raise cable rates for consumers. This is a neat hat trick by McCain: he adds another "reformist" feather to his cap by promoting a populist-sounding measure which, in fact, benefits industry and costs the consumer a packet. And, at the same time he takes money from Cablevision in the form of contributions to a pet group of the Senator's which furthers McCain's presidential ambitions.
The AP investigation found that McCain's assiduous services to Cablevision included "letting its CEO testify before his Senate committee, writing a letter of support to the Federal Communication Commission, and asking other cable companies to support so-called a la carte pricing." Davis solicited the first of two $100,00 installments Cablevision paid to McCain's pet Institute just "one week after Dolan testified before McCain's Senate Commerce Committee in May 2003 in favor of a la carte pricing. And it wasn't until after Cablevision paid up that McCain intervened on behalf of the policy the company sought with the FCC.

That means McCain is in bed with Cablevision, too.

More on 2005:

http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/004015.php

McCain has this charity, see? It is called the Reform Institute and it is supposed to be about keeping politics honest. So, when you want to bribe McCain, you give the money to his charity--which employees all his campaign staff. Saves him a lot of money on expenses. Need trick.

However, with Cablevision, Davis and McCain got sloppy. In an eerily reminiscent action which hearkens back to the Keating 5 scandal, McCain essentially attempted to intervene on Cablevision's behalf by writing a letter to the FCC supporting Cablevision's regulatory agenda of a la carte cable services. Less than a fortnight before, Cablevision made a six-figure donation to RI through a subsidiary, CSC Holdings, directly as a result of Davis' solicitation. Nor is that the only conflict that McCain has had with the communications industry through Davis and RI:

One donation in that category came from an elected Republican official who insisted on remaining anonymous, even to Mr. McCain, Mr. Davis said. Some donors, though, are communications industry giants who had business before the Commerce Committee when Mr. 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.

The stink gets worse with each new revelation. Based on my research yesterday, Davis already has many strange bedfellows for a man who is the closest political advisor to a supposedly conservative Republican. Now it appears that McCain has a track record of using RI to allow donors a roundabout way to buy influence: keeping his staff employed and this bootlicking "independent" policy group afloat.

And now, from December check out this story of the latest McCain telecom scandal:

http://www.opednews.com/maxwrite/diarypage.php?did=5270

Recent reports on McCain's relationship to telecom lobbying focus on his noted opposition to "net neutrality" efforts aimed at preventing broadband companies using their ownership of internet "pipes" to discriminate between content providers based on profitability. At present, the internet is a "neutral" playing field with free and equal access to all, and any censorship or "gatekeeping" by carriers strictly prohibited. On grounds of "free competition," however, McCain has supported the efforts of broadband carriers such as Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon at gaining congressional permission to control access to websites on a two-tiered basis consisting of a fee-based "fast track" for more profitable websites and a "slow track" for sites whose owners can't afford the fee.

Snip

More currently, Wonkette suggests a possible link between the Drudge story and McCain's introduction of a telecom bill (S.744) linked to lucrative lobbying efforts earlier this year. Described as a public-private partnership to build a national broadband network for public safety, the bill would in fact place said public safety network in private hands, causing concern among public safety groups (see MRT).
As Wonkette observes, two companies that stand to benefit from the bill, Cyren Call Communications (also here) and FrontLine Wireless, have hired several lobbying firms to advocate for it according to lobbying records linked here. In fact, the company favored in McCain's authorship of the bill is Cyren Call Communications, headed by Nextel founder Morgan O'Brien, which according to Open Secrets spent more than $1.2 million on lobbying between 2006 and 2007

Oh my god! That horn dog! He’s sharing his bed with Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, Nextel and Frontline Wireless! How does he find time to get to the Senate?

:woohoo:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/20/AR2008022002898.html?hpid%3Dtopnews&sub=AR

According to the Washington Post’s latest write up you can add the Tribune Broadcasting, at least in its pre-Sam Zell days. I found a brief mention about a letter to the FCC in the Clinton years asking them pretty please not to make Tribune Broadcasting sell a TV station somewhere in Florida. I think Tribune Broadcasting will have to sleep on the couch.

Oops. Almost forgot the skeleton in the closet. Keating, you doing OK in there? Looks like you might not fly under the radar after all.

http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/2008/02/11/daily37.html?ana=from_rss

Some business executives and political consultants contacted for this story declined to comment. Two others, who asked not be identified, said it was an unwritten rule in Arizona not to mention Keating and McCain in business circles or to those friendly with the senator.

Hmmm. Is that McCain's version of Don't ask, don't tell?

[NastyRiffraff]

1. Great job!

You're right...it's the lobbyist and telecom connection, not the sex. I couldn't care less about who McCain has sex with (ewwwww), but this stuff is damning.

Unfortunately, the important part of this story will get buried by the media as they push their favorite part...the sex. That's especially true since it involves telecoms.

[johnnydrama]

2. I don't think it's the sex

Except for the fact, that if it's true, why else would he do all that for just some nice lady he met?

[L. Coyote]

3. Top Contributors # 4 AT&T = $181,900 *** #7 Greenberg Traurig $129,587

JOHN MCCAIN: CAREER PROFILE (SINCE 1989)
Top Contributors
http://opensecrets.org/politicians/allcontrib.asp?CID=N00006424

1 	Citigroup Inc 	$201,750
2 	Goldman Sachs 	$195,670
3 	Merrill Lynch 	$195,000
4 	AT&T Inc 	$181,900
5 	Blank Rome LLP 	$147,500
6 	Pinnacle West Capital 	$135,900
7 	Greenberg Traurig 	$129,587
8 	JP Morgan Chase & Co 	$128,003
9 	Qwest Communications 	$116,550
10 	MGM Mirage 	$105,280
11 	Credit Suisse Group 	$94,850
12 	Morgan Stanley 	$93,000
13 	Verizon Communications 	$90,750
14  	FedEx Corp  	$88,792
15 	Hensley & Co 	$88,150
16 	UBS AG 	$84,400
17 	Bank of America 	$83,300
18 	Time Warner 	$82,625
19 	IDT Corp 	$82,150
20 	Univision Communications 	$82,000

[McCamy Taylor]

4. And remember, hundreds of thou a year go to his charity which pays his campaign staff.

So he is getting payola out the wazoo.

[havocmom]

10. Yeah, keeping your campaign staff paid and happy without tapping campaign funds is a pretty good con

Nothing like siphoning $$ off a nonprofit charity to subsidies campaign war chest buying power. And when you think about, the telecoms get the $$ back when McCain has more to spend on air time ads. They get a deduction and their pet pol has more to spend in their stores too. Win/Win for telecoms.

[L. Coyote]

12. Top Donor Dossiers #2 = AT&T Inc @ $38,749,107.00

http://opensecrets.org/orgs/index.asp

Blue Chip Investors
Top Donor Dossiers

Here you'll find total contributions for the 100 biggest givers in American politics since 1989--information that exists nowhere else. Read the full report. Read about our methodology.

    * View top organizational givers by rank
    * View top organizational givers by alphabetical order
    * View top individual contributors from these organizations

Search for an organization by name:

Top 10 donors:
American Fedn of State, County & Municipal Employees 	  	$39,152,384
AT&T Inc 	  	$38,749,107

[The Backlash Cometh]

5. Probably one of the most important threads I'll read today.

Thank you so much. You put a sword through the heart of the beast.

[eShirl]

6. k&r

[McCamy Taylor]

7. Look at this McCain-Abramoff story from JUST LAST WEEK in the Huff Post

that hardly any attention was paid to....

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/02/12/mccain-received-100000-_n_86245.html

A review of campaign finance filings shows that the Arizona Republican has accepted more than $100,000 in donations from employees of Greenberg Traurig, the very firm where Abramoff once reigned.

Those donations include several thousand dollars from registered lobbyists who represent, or have represented, businesses such as NewsCorp, Rupert Murdoch's media empire; Spi Spirits, a Cyprus based company that has fought with the Russian government for the rights to the Stolichnaya vodka brand name; El Paso Corp, a major energy company; General Motors; and the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, a group of businesses and trade associations "concerned" about the shortage of lesser skilled and unskilled labor.

Eeeks! Make room in that bed for Rupert Murdoch! I hope it's king sized!

And there is more. The article accuses McCain of pinning all the blame for Abramoff's dirty dealings with Native American Tribes on Bob Ney, Abramoff and the Tribes themselves and covering up for people like DeLay and

At well over 350 pages, the report was thorough, exploring layers of corruption that had allowed Indian tribes to part with tens of millions of dollars in search of political favors. But it did not include the names of prominent U.S. Senators with Abramoff ties, such as Conrad Burns and David Vitter, or for that matter Bush strategist Karl Rove, who accepted gifts from and met with Abramoff clients.

[blondeatlast]

8. Precisely. I need to come back to this, but in the meantime. k&r. nt

[Hell Hath No Fury]

9. Sadly, some of our own...

(and yes I mean YOU Rockefeller!) seem to have succumbed to the same trend.

Thank you for digging this up -- there's plenty out there to hit McCain with.

[McCamy Taylor]

11. Sadly for McCain, he is not in bed with ALL the Telecoms. I believe that this attack comes

from the telecommunications industry itself, just as the attacks against Rudi Guiliani came from the industry. In Rudi's case, when they discovered that he had agreed to be Roger Aisle's personal fixer at the FCC, the other giants ganged up on him so that NewsCorp would not have an unfair advantage.

I have been speculating for some time that McCain's history of meddling in the internal affairs of the cable industry (combined with the recent Cable Wars being waged within the industry between giants such as Time-Warner and rogue upstarts such as AT&T which is backed by the FCC) would be McCain's undoing.

I finally found a on-line source that agrees with my instinct:

http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/k-street-eyes-mccain-warily-2008-02-11.html

McCain, a former chairman of the Senate Commerce Science and Transportation Committee, also has upset the cable industry by supporting a provision known as a la carte that would allow consumers to purchase only the channels they want.

This may sound like a contradiction. McCain is in bed with the telecoms, right? So how can he upset them? Right now the nation's cable companies operate under a basically wild west system. Anything goes. Chairman Martin of the FCC has been trying to seize control of the nation's cable---at the same time that he has been trying to de-regulate all other news and entertainment media. He has plans for cable that include making changes that favor AT&T over the existing cable operators (presumably as payment for services rendered in domestic spying). He also wants to force cable to switch to A La Carte--you pick a few channels and pay for them. The religious right thinks that this will force left wing and minority and "smut" channels like Nickelodeon off the air--which will help Martin get elected next year as a Republican values candidate somewhere in the south. Existing cable companies hate the whole idea of A La Carte---and they especially hate the idea of losing their independence and coming under federal government control so that Martin and Bush and Cheney can give their business away to other companies.

Unfortunately for McCain, A La carte Cable might as well be his middle name. He has been fighting for this forever. If you review some of the links, you will see why. He has been paid well. And A La Carte will make some cable operators more money--though consumers won't really like it after they try it, and it will drive all the Black and Hispanic and Women's and esoteric channels off the air, eventually dooming cable. Hmmm. Maybe that is what someone wants.

Anyway, if this is another portion of the telecommunications industry raising objections to yet another Republican presidential candidate because of his bias towards a particular industry sector---and shooting a torpedo towards his campaign---I am going to laugh myself silly.

[McCamy Taylor]

13. CNN's Wolf Blizter interviewed McCain's attorney. Robert Bennett

and as Blizter kept reminding the viewer just how many NYT's journalists put their names on this story and that the WaPo (not a liberal rag) has a story too and about Keating 5 and about the actual lobbying scandal details that have been discussed and that it isn't even about sex it is about ethics, all I could think about is No one ever hires Bennett unless they are guilty, do they? Or at least in serious trouble.

[Disturbed]

15. I have posted this for months, way before McLame achieved his

rise from the dead. Unless a sex scandal is involved, hardly any attention is paid to the topic.

“Hypocrisy, my friends, is the most obvious of political sins — and the people will punish it,” John McCain

John McCain Hypocrite
by Doug Ireland

John McCain, the media's darling, has found a clever way around his own campaign finance reform law to take big corporate bucks in furtherance of his political ambitions while carrying water for the corporate mammoth providing the dough. But the national press is ignoring the story.


The Associated Press first ran the story of John McCain's odorous but lucrative Senatorial service to the communications giant Cablevision on the afternoon of March 7. But, while some local papers in McCain's home state (like the East Valley Tribune) have run the story, nothing has as yet made it into the print editions of the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Washington Post, or any of the half-dozen other big city dailies I checked (although, if one searches the hundreds of AP stories available on the Post's website on its Politics page by clicking on "Latest Wire Reports," one can find it there--but how many readers would bother to do that?) One notable exception: the Kansas City Star.


Here's what the AP's investigation found:


McCain repeatedly intervened on behalf of a policy Cablevision favored -- one which "congressional and private studies conclude could make cable more expensive" -- while his chief political adviser, Rick Davis (who's masterminding McCain's probable '08 presidential rerun) solicited $200,000 in contributions from Cablevision to an institute that promotes McCain and pays Davis a $110,000 annual salary.


The Reform Institute was set up to promote McCain and his issues--especially campaign finance reform, embodied in the famous McCain-Feingold law. This Institute is "a tax-exempt group that touts McCain's views and has showcased him at events since his unsuccessful 2000 presidential campaign," and it "often uses the senator's name in press releases and fund-raising letters and includes him at press conferences," the AP says. And, of course, it provides a cushy sinecure with no heavy lifting for McCain's main man, Davis, as he prepares the pontificating Senator's next presidential run. Cablevision's contributions account for a whopping 15% of the Institute's budget.


http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0309-35.htm

[malaise]

14. This is the

story. Great post.

[McCamy Taylor]

16. NYT finds yet another instance, this one from 1998 when McCain went to back for a client

of Vicki Iseman

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/23/us/politics/23lobby.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&ref=us&pagewanted=print&adxnnlx=1203740249-JdAiA/9Dd+KGuuZ+NdLfCw&oref=slogin

In late 1998, Senator John McCain sent an unusually blunt letter to the head of the Federal Communications Commission, warning that he would try to overhaul the agency if it closed a broadcast ownership loophole.

The letter, and two later ones signed by Mr. McCain, then chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, urged the commission to abandon plans to close a loophole vitally important to Glencairn Ltd., a client of Vicki Iseman, a lobbyist. The provision enabled one of the nation’s largest broadcasting companies, Sinclair, to use a marketing agreement with Glencairn, a far smaller broadcaster, to get around a restriction barring single ownership of two television stations in the same city.

[McCamy Taylor]

17. Those who bet this story would die have lost their money. More on the Newsweek story about Paxson

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jN4XqApKN78eKFB8NUMHKwVDtR7gD8V09JM83

To recap, in 2002 McCain said in a deposition that he met with Paxson to discuss writing a letter to the FCC for Paxson, one of Iseman's clients. Recently, he said he did not recall doing it. No prob, right? He is just getting old and forgetful. Except that the press got Paxson to say "Yes, he did meet with me." And now, another arm of the press has gotten some other guy at Paxson's Co. to say "If he met with Paxson, I didn't know about it." which is about as useful for McCain as Tweety getting the former McCain campaign on his show to swear "If McCain was porking that woman, I never saw the two of them doing it." All it really accomplishes is it keeps the story alive.

Here is what I think is happening with McCain. The revelation that he may have left himself open to blackmail by telecommunications companies when the entire industry is in the middle of Cable Wars to see who is going to control the nation's cable has shaken a lot of people and a lot of major telecommunication's giants. Which telecom with a stake in the cable industry would want to see McCain installed as president and then watch his FCC suddenly begin to make rulings that favor Iseman's clients (old ones or new ones) in their pursuit of cable wealth and power at the expense of other telecommunications companies? It would be exactly like the situation that the telecoms found themselves in last fall when Judith Reagan revealed that Rudi Guiliani had made a deal to favor NewsCorp once he became president.

All is not fair in love, war and business. When one business player is able to get the FCC to do everything it can to put it ahead of its rivals because it has dirt on a president, that is about as unfair as you can get. And there are a lot of things that the FCC could do to hurt people like Time-Warner, Disney and others.

At this point, it seems to me that the only thing McCain can do is come forward and say "Yes, I slept with that woman. So what? I am a man. It has nothing to do with my duties as a political leader. Who else are you going to nominate?"

If the threat of blackmail is removed, I think that the telecoms would back off. However, if he keeps insisting that nothing happened, the telecoms are going to see him as an unacceptable risk--and I can not blame them.

[JerseygirlCT]

18. Exactly. It's like they're all throwing glitter and shouting

"Look! Over there! Pretty sparkly things!" So we won't notice that this isn't about the blonde, it's about corruption, period. And timely corruption to boot.

But I'll bet you, unfortunately, that most people chase the glitter.

[varelse]

19. Hmmm. Is that McCain's version of Don't ask, don't tell?

Brilliant :)

Thank you for taking out the red herring factor and setting us all on the right track. This certainly isn't about "that politician" trading favors with "that female lobbyist". It's about a whole other level of prostitution entirely - that of a longtime professional political whore with the classic conservative 'straight talker' facade.

[hay rick]

20. McCain/Buse at the hot sheet telecom motel

Let's not forget that McCain resurrected telecom lobbyist Mark Buse to run his Senate office while McCain is running for President. Buse left McCain's Commerce Committee staff in 2001 to become a lobbyist. Revolving door and/or interchangeable job descriptions?

Interesting that McCain campaign and the entire right-wing media establishment jumped on the sex story angle. They are trying to change the subject. The lobbyist story is much more damaging.

McCain is also using the story as a way to woo the self-described conservative wing of the party by claiming shared victimhood at the hands of the much despised NYT. Look at me! If I'm being picked on by this liberal rag, I must be a genuine conservative!

A sex scandal also works in other ways for McCain. He has been looking a lot like an old man on the primary trail. The implication that he may recently have inhabited a warm body may help to put to rest the recurring question that has dogged his campaign: John McCain, dead or alive?

[McCamy Taylor]

21. On the other hand, you can say that it IS about the sex, because...

1. The stories about McCain's political corruption, esp his ties to lobbyists have been there forever, but no one was paying any attention to them until the NYT found a sex angle to hook the public. Note that the stories I found and linked the day the NYT story broke had all been on Google anywhere from a decade to a month---and the Republicans did not care, because they do not consider money scandals rea; scandals. Republicans slime with sex---which sort of puts to rest the rumors that this is a left wing hit job.

2. This story is going to keep its legs because of sex. Non Democrats who would quickly tire of another bribery scandal will follow this bribery scandal in hopes of hearing more about the sex angle.

3. It is the sex story which (if true) makes McCain subject to blackmail, which makes a McCain presidency subject to blackmail. And remember, all it takes is Iseman changing her story and claiming that she and McCain really did have an intimate relationship and supplying some kind of proof that will look good to a tabloid reporter---or a plaintiffs attorney. Shades of Paula Jones. This makes a McCain FCC very likely a biased FCC--something the telecom community as a whole wants to avoid (except for those individual members who would be the beneficiaries of the bias).

However, it is not a morality issue. It is a corruption and business bias issue.

The RNC might want to sit down with all the major news outlets and have their remaining candidate's vetted. I think they will find that only Romney ( a former governor) is acceptable to all and likely to receive the usual favorable treatment that GOP presidential candidates are used to receiving from the MSM from all.