Is this really interesting: Mark Buse
His current Senate chief of staff, Mark Buse, went from directing McCain’s Commerce Committee staff to being a telecom lobbyist and then back to running McCain’s Senate office.
John McCain’s staff campaign and Senate is populated with lobbyists who have worked for many of the very companies for which McCain is charged with holding accountable.
John McCain is proving to be no different from the swift-boating, vote-suppressing Republicans of years past.
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There has been a sporadic blip here and there, but very little pick-up of the finer details on a lot of this in terms of long-term lobbyist relationships with McCain — and the ins and outs of the revolving door to his staff.
For registered lobbyists, employment histories may be incomplete prior to 1998 because the Senate Office of Public Records does not make registrations and reports available electronically for those years.
I’m going to Digg reading all this.
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In the legal business, we call this an appearance of impropriety.
Clearly Charlie Black who lobbies for Blackwater and AT&T and other large telecoms, among many others is just working for the McCain campaign out of the goodness of his little ole Southern heart.
That revolving door lobbyist access makes the “Straight Talk Express” look more like an In-n-Out drive-thru.
That raises a cloud with regard to an appearance of impropriety that ought to be explored further, but instead we get a “nothing to see here” far too often from reporters who make excuses rather than doing the digging work that ought to be done on this.
Getting inside the “red zone,” to steal a metaphor from Washington Post reporter Jeffrey H. Birnbaum’s feature about the tourism industry’s recent lobbying efforts, is almost as good as a touchdown.
And what DeLay, Abramoff, Norquist, Santorum and their pals did with their smarmy implanted K Street project has made it far, far worse.
