McCain's Ties to Convicted Felon and Kremlin

This is the photo and the caption that accompanies this story:
Con man Rafaello Follieri and actress Anne Hathaway greet John McCain and his entourage in 2006.
McCain and Palin are no reformers, no mavericks. McCain is a Washington insider to the bone. Palin is just a tool. 

The Nation: Yet despite McCain's tough talk, behind the scenes his top advisers have cultivated deep ties with Russia's oligarchy--indeed, they have promoted the Kremlin's geopolitical and economic interests, as well as some of its most unsavory business figures, through greedy cynicism and geopolitical stupor. The most notable example is the tale of how McCain and his campaign manager, Rick Davis, advanced what became a key victory for the Kremlin: gaining control over the small but strategically important country of Montenegro.
According to two former senior US diplomats who served in the Balkans, Davis and his lobbying firm, Davis Manafort, received several million dollars to help run Montenegro's independence referendum campaign of 2006. The terms of the agreement were never disclosed to the public, but top Montenegrin officials told the US diplomats that Davis's work was underwritten by powerful Russian business interests connected to the Kremlin and operating in Montenegro. Neither Davis nor the McCain campaign responded to repeated requests for comment. (Davis's extensive lobbying work, especially on behalf of collapsed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has already attracted critical media scrutiny.)
At the time, Putin wanted to establish a Russian outpost in the Mediterranean, and Montenegro--a coastal republic across the Adriatic from Italy--was seen as his best hope. McCain also lobbied for Montenegro's independence from Serbia, calling it "the greatest European democracy project since the end of the cold war." For McCain, the simplistic notion of "independence" from a country America had gone to war with in the late 1990s was all that mattered. What Montenegro looked like after independence seemed not to interest him. This suited Putin just fine. Russia had generally sided with Serbia against the West during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, but for the Kremlin, cutting Montenegro free from Serbia meant dealing with a Montenegro that could be more easily controlled. Indeed, today, after its "independence," Montenegro is nicknamed "Moscow by the Mediterranean." Russian oligarchs control huge chunks of the country's industry and prized coastline--and Russians exert a powerful influence over the country's political culture. "Montenegro is almost a new Russian colony, as rubles flow in to buy property and business in the tiny state," Denis MacShane, Tony Blair's former Europe minister, wrote in Newsweek in June. The takeover of Montenegro has been a Russian geostrategic victory--quietly accomplished, paradoxically enough, with the help of McCain and his top aides.
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In mid-September The Nation's website published a photo of McCain celebrating his seventieth birthday in Montenegro in August 2006 at a yacht party hosted by convicted Italian felon Raffaello Follieri and his movie-star girlfriend Anne Hathaway. On the same day one of the largest mega-yachts in the world, the Queen K, was moored in the same bay of Kotor.
Read it all and spread it around. McCain-Palin need to be swiftly brought to a close.

McCain spends his birthday with con man and starlett on a yacht. 

McCain Likes to Gamble - In Las Vegas Too

We've all seen how much McCain likes to gamble. I didn't realize that he's into all forms of gambling, or as they say in Vegas, gaming. I guess with 7 houses and 11 cars, it's easy to come up with some gambling money.

NYT: In May 2007, as Mr. McCain’s presidential bid was floundering, he spent a weekend at the MGM Grand on the Las Vegas strip. A fund-raiser hosted by J. Terrence Lanni, the casino’s top executive and a longtime friend of the senator, raised $400,000 for his campaign. Afterward, Mr. McCain attended a boxing match and hit the craps tables.

For much of his adult life, Mr. McCain has gambled as often as once a month, friends and associates said, traveling to Las Vegas for weekend betting marathons. Former senior campaign officials said they worried about Mr. McCain’s patronage of casinos, given the power he wields over the industry. The officials, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity.

“We were always concerned about appearances,” one former official said. “If you go around saying that appearances matter, then they matter.”

The former official said he would tell Mr. McCain: “Do we really have to go to a casino? I don’t think it’s a good idea. The base doesn’t like it. It doesn’t look good. And good things don’t happen in casinos at midnight.”

“You worry too much,” Mr. McCain would respond, the official said.

Here's more:

As a two-time chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee, Mr. McCain has done more than any other member of Congress to shape the laws governing America’s casinos, helping to transform the once-sleepy Indian gambling business into a $26-billion-a-year behemoth with 423 casinos across the country. He has won praise as a champion of economic development and self-governance on reservations.

“One of the founding fathers of Indian gaming” is what Steven Light, a University of North Dakota professor and a leading Indian gambling expert, called Mr. McCain.

As factions of the ferociously competitive gambling industry have vied for an edge, they have found it advantageous to cultivate a relationship with Mr. McCain or hire someone who has one, according to an examination based on more than 70 interviews and thousands of pages of documents.

Mr. McCain portrays himself as a Washington maverick unswayed by special interests, referring recently to lobbyists as “birds of prey.” Yet in his current campaign, more than 40 fund-raisers and top advisers have lobbied or worked for an array of gambling interests — including tribal and Las Vegas casinos, lottery companies and online poker purveyors.

McCain hangs with Las Vegas titans. Sig Rogich loves McCain:

But he has rarely wavered in his loyalty to Las Vegas, where he counts casino executives among his close friends and most prolific fund-raisers. “Beyond just his support for gaming, Nevada supports John McCain because he’s one of us, a Westerner at heart,” said Sig Rogich, a Nevada Republican kingmaker who raised nearly $2 million for Mr. McCain at an event at his home in June.

Only six members of Congress have received more money from the gambling industry than Mr. McCain, and five hail from the casino hubs of Nevada and New Jersey, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics dating back to 1989. In the presidential race, Senator Barack Obama has also received money from the industry; Mr. McCain has raised almost twice as much.

The McCain camp won't answer back on this story. You might want to give the whole thing a read.

McCain's Lies Again: Aide Linked to Freddie

McCain is knee-high in the slime, in danger of going under.
His republican wingnuts also have raised the bar in attack ads, exploiting race and trying to paint Obama as scary.
Want some commentary on McCain's latest bold lie about his campaign manager Rick Davis, Steve R has it right. Here's what the NYT found: 

WASHINGTON — One of the giant mortgage companies at the heart of the credit crisis paid $15,000 a month from the end of 2005 through last month to a firm owned by Senator John McCain’s campaign manager, according to two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement.

The disclosure undercuts a remark by Mr. McCain on Sunday night that the campaign manager, Rick Davis, had had no involvement with the company for the last several years.

Mr. Davis’s firm received the payments from the company, Freddie Mac, until it was taken over by the government this month along with Fannie Mae, the other big mortgage lender whose deteriorating finances helped precipitate the cascading problems on Wall Street, the two people said.

They said they did not recall Mr. Davis’s doing much substantive work for the company in return for the money, other than to speak to a political action committee of high-ranking employees in October 2006 on the approaching midterm Congressional elections. They said Mr. Davis’s firm, Davis Manafort, had been kept on the payroll because of his close ties to Mr. McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, who by 2006 was widely expected to run again for the White House.

Mr. Davis took a leave from Davis Manafort for the presidential campaign, but as an equity holder continues to benefit from its income. No one at Davis Manafort other than Mr. Davis was involved in efforts on Freddie Mac’s behalf, the people familiar with the arrangement said.

A Freddie Mac spokeswoman said the company would not comment.

Jill Hazelbaker, a spokeswoman for the McCain campaign, did not dispute the payments to Mr. Davis’s firm. But she said that Mr. Davis had stopped taking a salary from the firm by the end of 2006 and that his work did not affect Mr. McCain.

“Senator McCain’s positions on policy matters are based upon what he believes to be in the public interest,” Ms. Hazelbaker said in a written statement.

The disclosure comes at a time when Mr. McCain and his Democratic rival, Senator Barack Obama, are sparring over ties to lobbyists and special interests, seeking political advantage in a campaign being reshaped by the financial crisis and the plan to bail out investment firms.

Mr. McCain’s campaign has been attacking Mr. Obama for ties to former officials of the mortgage giants, both of which have a long history of cultivating Democratic and Republican allies alike to fend off efforts to restrict their activities. Mr. McCain has been running a television advertisement suggesting that Mr. Obama takes advice on housing issues from Franklin D. Raines, former chief executive of Fannie Mae, a contention denied by Mr. Raines and the Obama campaign.

Freddie Mac’s payments of roughly $500,000 to Davis Manafort, the people familiar with the arrangement said, began in late 2005, immediately after Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae disbanded an advocacy coalition that they had set up and hired Mr. Davis to run.

From 2000 to the end of 2005, Mr. Davis received nearly $2 million as president of the coalition, the Homeownership Alliance, which the companies created to help them oppose new regulations and protect their status as federally chartered companies with implicit government backing. That status let them borrow cheaply, helping to fuel rapid growth but also their increased purchases of the risky mortgage securities that proved to be their downfall.

See McCain lie! See Rachel Maddow take him to task!

Can Your Family Trust John McCain

New ad -- not by the Obama camp -- but good nonetheless. It's a reminder of who McCain really is, not who he says he is.