16
September
2008

Does McCain Believe That People Are Incapable of Doing Any Fact-checking for Themselves?

McCain brags about being computer illiterate. It is obvious that he doesn’t recognize that people have the ability to “Google” and check the facts for themselves these days, and can find McCain’s previous public positions on issues that he has reversed himself on today.

For almost all of the major issues that he created his “Maverick” image from, he’s reversed himself on his previous positions today.

He was against the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy before he was for them.

He was against torture before he was for it (in order to get Gov. Mitt Romney’s endorsement.)

He was against extremist preachers who preached hate, until he sought their endorsements for their followers’ votes.

He was against offshore oil drilling until he got a $2 million donation from the oil companies.

He was against lobbyists until he needed them to run his campaign. http://www.campaignmoney.org/node/258444/print

Campaign Money Watch, a nonpartisan campaign finance watchdog group, announced today the result of a new analysis of the fees Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) lobbyist bundlers, advisors and staff members have collected from domestic clients over the past decade.

The total? A staggering $930,949,819.

“The McCain campaign relies on big money lobbyists, and they’ll rely on him,” said David Donnelly, director of Campaign Money Watch. “In the ‘you-scratch-my-back, I’ll-scratch-yours’ world of Washington, $931 million gets the special interests the best government money can buy. But just think of the payday these lobbyists might expect in a McCain Administration.”

Campaign Money Watch’s analysis of data provided by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics (http://www.opensecrets.org [1]) also found that employees and Political Action Committees of these lobbyists’ clients have donated $11,750,051 to McCain’s campaigns, a fact that raises its own set of problems, Donnelly said.

For more information on the lobbyists that McCain has on his campaign staff click here: http://www.mccainslobbyists.com/

Here’s a Washington Post story on some of his top lobbyist advisors: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/21/AR2008022101131_pf.html

FOX News attempted to whitewash McCain’s connections to lobbyists with tainted reputations claiming that the McCain campaign was issuing a new conflict of interest policy after McCain’s campaign was embarrassed by lobbyist staffers were connected with lobbying work that McCain has previously spoken out against http://elections.foxnews.com/2008/05/16/mccain-reevaluates-campaign-staff-hunts-for-ties-to-lobbyists/

“McCain adviser Craig Shirley was asked to leave the campaign following inquiries about his work with a “527″ group that sharply criticized the Democratic presidential candidates.

The 527s, named for the part of the tax code that regulates them, are independent special interest groups formed mainly to influence elections.

Shirley was advising McCain while his firm also was doing public relations work for the group Stop Her Now, according to the article. The Stop Her Now group initially targeted Hillary Clinton — in part through cartoons and animated features on its Web site — but has changed its message to “Stop Him Now,” going after Barack Obama as he’s taken the lead in the Democratic contest.

Shirley was ousted after two other high-profile McCain aides resigned their positions following reports that they were working for a firm that lobbied for the Burmese military junta in 2002.

One of the two was Doug Goodyear, the man picked by McCain’s campaign to run the 2008 Republican National Convention. A Newsweek story scrutinizing Goodyear and his firm DCI Group’s $348,000 contract with the junta also drew attention to DCI’s work with 527 groups. Goodyear then stepped down from his convention role “so as not to become a distraction in this campaign.”

Personally, I think that the reason that FOX News made such a big deal out of this story was to make it appear as if McCain was willing to cut strings with Craig Shirley, who had attacked Senator Hillary Clinton, in order to court the people who voted for her. If McCain gets elected, I suspect that he will hire Craig Shirley back in some capacity.

McCain has at least 115 lobbyists on his campaign staff, including ten who represent brutal dictators, human rights abusers and other unsavory foreign interests. Sign a petition here to tell him to fire his lobbyists NOW. http://firethelobbyists.com/

Here are more links for information on more of McCain’s lobbyists and the money men behind him:

http://blog.mccainslobbyists.com/?p=64
http://www.campaignmoney.org/mccaintech

McCain’s national finance co-chair, former Texas Rep. Thomas G. Loeffler, one of McCain’s key fundraisers, resigned when it became public that Loeffler’s lobbying shop “The Loeffler Group” represented European Aeronautic Defence and Space Co., the parent company of plane manufacturer Airbus. EADS won a lucrative contract to provide air refueling tankers for the Air Force after McCain helped scuttle an earlier contract in 2004 that would have gone to a competitor, Boeing.Co.

More here: http://license.icopyright.net/user/viewFreeUse.act?fuid=MTA1MTk5NQ

Public Campaign Action Fund investigated and reported on a deal between German owned shipping company DHL and UPS that will transfer jobs 8,000 jobs from Ohio to Kentucky. Even though McCain has expressed concerns about anti-trust issues, McCain played an important role in allowing a foreign owned company to own DHL in the first place. But McCain wouldn’t join the Ohio delegation in investigating a possible anti-trust violation. Why would he? His top advisors recently earned more than $1 million from the companies involved to help make the deal that is under scrutiny today.

Three McCain staffers have lobbied on behalf of the companies involved, and one of them, John Green, has lobbied for both of the companies involved in the anti-trust issue.
• Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, and Christian Ferry, McCain’s e-campaign director, both lobbied for Deutsche Post, the company that bought DHL and Airborne in 2002 and 2003, between October 2003 and December 2005. During this time their firm, Davis-Manafort, billed $465,000 in fees.
• Davis and Ferry both also lobbied on behalf of Airborne in 2003, earning an additional $125,000 in fees. Their work involved lobbying the Senate to approve the DHL-Airborne merger, which it did. (5)
• John Green, McCain’s liaison to Congress, lobbied for Deutsche Post from June 2003 to April 2006, earning $600,000 in fees.
• Then, Green recently lobbied on behalf of UPS, earning $40,000 for lobbying work between August 2007 and March 2008.

More here: http://www.campaignmoney.org/mccaindhl

Do working-class Americans really believe that McCain is going to improve their futures with these types of policies?

Didn’t McCain say he is going to clean up Washington? Aren’t these lobbyists on his staff, the guys he claims he is going to protect us from?

So if you like a candidate who works to allow foreign owned companies to acquire U.S. companies, and lose American jobs, while failing to investigate anti-trust violations; who works to give foreign companies contracts with the U.S. government while preventing U.S. companies from getting those contracts, then John McCain is your man.

McCain was against the GI Bill before he took credit for its passage (even though he didn’t bother to show up to vote for it). And he was a straight talker (or claimed to be), before he turned to sleaze and lies.

Even Karl Rove is saying that McCain’s commercials are lies – “McCain went too far”…“attributing things to Obama that are beyond the truth test”. He must have “jumped the shark” in order to get a comment like that from Rove.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/09/14/campaign.wrap/index.html
http://www.pensitoreview.com/2008/09/14/karl-rove-says-mccain-went-too-far/

McCain is proving that he would rather lose his integrity than lose an election - at the expense of his country.