Iseman goes down to Florida that is.
And McCain sets the cruise industry free from regulations
Follow for the salacious details coming out all over the place.
The main problem being it is all coming out too quickly and, dare I say, prematurely.
It's like the press swallowed all McCain's Viagra and all at once have the courage to stand up against the Maverick.
Let's hope they work this hard all the way to November.
Salon lays out these details
The most troubling incident linking the senator and the lobbyist, according to staffers interviewed by the Times, occurred on a February night when McCain and Iseman flew back together on a Paxson corporate jet from Florida to Washington. That evening they had attended a small dinner party at the "Miami-area home of a cruise-line executive," who was raising money for McCain's "reform" presidential campaign.
It may be just a coincidence that around the same time, McCain became a dedicated sponsor of bills to deregulate the cruise and passenger ship industries, which have been hobbled for decades by protectionism and national security laws. Year after year, he promoted legislation that would have permitted greater freedom for foreign-flag cruise ships to operate in U.S. coastal waters, even while he occasionally scolded the cruise operators for persistent safety problems on their boats.
Also fascinating is this gem:
Among the loudest McCain mouthpieces is Charlie Black, a seasoned Republican operative whose client roster dates back to such paragons as the late Filipino President Ferdinand Marcos and several African dictators, and more recently has featured Erik Prince, the mercenary entrepreneur who founded Blackwater. (Black's wife is a lobbyist too, and his firm, known as BKSH, is owned by Burson-Marsteller, the enormous P.R. conglomerate chaired by Hillary Clinton's top campaign advisor, Mark Penn.)
So since McCain's spokesman works for Penn, Hillary is the guy to beat him?!? She can just have Penn tell Black to run a campaign worse than hers and she will win, otherwise Penn will fire Black, right?
Black is the guy using McCain's bus as his personal Lobbyist office.
WaPo Link
But even as Black provides a private voice and a public face for McCain, he also leads his lobbying firm, which offers corporate interests and foreign governments the promise of access to the most powerful lawmakers. Some of those companies have interests before the Senate and, in particular, the Commerce Committee, of which McCain is a member.
Black said he does a lot of his work by telephone from McCain's Straight Talk Express bus.
In the Boston Globe
To sum up McCain deceptively quotes one uninvolved retired FCC chair to justify his actions that are offending the then current FCC chair!
WASHINGTON - Senator John McCain yesterday defended pushing a government agency to decide whether to issue a TV license to a major donor, asserting that the agency's former chairman had cleared his role as "appropriate."
But the Federal Communications Commission chairman involved in the case, William E. Kennard, actually wrote a letter to McCain at the time saying that his request for the agency to take action was "highly unusual" and that he was concerned that McCain's action would interfere with the agency's "due process."
Thankfully as someone diaries elsewhere Dean is making this stick.
Let's hope the Maverick can be rebranded now and it will stand until November. The counterattack on the press will be vicious, let's hope they don't go limp.