A top foreign policy adviser to John McCain has lobbied the National Security Council, Congress and the State Department on behalf of Stephen Payne, the Texas businessman and longtime Republican fundraiser caught up in a controversy over whether he sought to sell access to the Bush White House.

According to records on file with Congress, McCain foreign policy adviser Randy Scheunemann lobbied the Senate and House on behalf of Payne's firm, Worldwide Strategic Partners Inc., in 2002.

Scheunemann also lobbied the National Security Council and the State Department regarding energy issues in the Caspian region in 2005 and 2006 on behalf of another Payne firm, Caspian Alliance Inc., according to the records.

It may not sway many voters, but on Friday, as Barack Obama embarked on an extended trip abroad intended in large part to relieve concerns about his commander in chief bona fides, the terms of debate on Iraq began a dramatic shift that appears to favor his candidacy. [...] Saturday, the shift continued when the German magazine Der Spiegel ran an interview with Maliki in which he called for U.S. troops to withdraw “as soon as possible, as far as we're concerned. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right time frame for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.” [...] For the first time in the national security debate, Obama’s advisers believe that McCain has been placed on the defensive, since his reluctance to support a “time horizon” now differs not only with the position of his Democratic opponent but also with those of the White House and the Iraqi prime minister.

After Sen. John McCain publicly repudiated his close friend and adviser Phil Gramm's comments about a "nation of whiners" and a "mental recession," the two old political comrades patched up their relationship.

Gramm apologized to McCain for his remarks that gave Democrats an opening against the Republican presidential candidate and provided several days of ammunition for blogs, cable television and radio talk shows. McCain told Gramm not to worry about the expected pitfalls of a campaign surrogate. Gramm will continue as an adviser and surrogate.

On Monday, John McCain’s campaign released a statement signed by 300 economists who “enthusiastically support” his “Jobs for America” economic plan, providing a heavyweight testimonial to the presumptive Republican nominee’s “broad and powerful economic agenda.”

There’s just one problem. Upon closer inspection, it seems a good many of those economists don’t actually support the whole of McCain’s economic agenda. And at least one doesn’t even support McCain for president.

In interviews with more than a dozen of the signatories, Politico found that, far from embracing McCain’s economic plan, many were unfamiliar with—or downright opposed to—key details. While most of those contacted by Politico had warm feelings about McCain, many did not want to associate themselves too closely with his campaign and its policy prescriptions.

Experts agree that McCain's budget balancing rhetoric is just wishful thinking:

The package of spending and tax cuts proposed by Senator John McCain is unlikely to achieve his goal of balancing the federal budget by 2013, economists and fiscal experts said Monday.

“It would be very difficult to achieve in the best of circumstances, and even more difficult under the policies that Senator McCain has proposed,” said Robert L. Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a nonpartisan budget watchdog group.

McCain’s taxing proposals would only 'dig the hole deeper'

McCain also proposes a one-year freeze on the growth of non-defense government programs, which might cut the deficit by all of 2% to 3%. On defense, he says he would steer any peace dividend from concluding the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan to deficit reduction. That amounts to a kind of imaginary lockbox for hypothetical savings. [...] By endorsing a continuation of the Bush tax cuts and adding others, McCain digs the hole deeper. Obama would roll back the Bush tax cuts for high-income earners, but he'd spend the revenue on new programs for health coverage, alternative fuels and more.

Maybe he should get his story straight.

To the degree that happens, the employer-based market will become less healthy as sicker, older workers stay with their employer-based coverage while more of the healthier workers move to the individual market.

"What you'll see happening is average cost in the employer-market will go up and average cost in the individual market will go down," Fronstin said. "You'll start to get into a cycle where people at the margin start to leave employer coverage for individual coverage. At some point, employers will start to ask: Why am I doing this if my workers don't value it anymore? If I don't need to do this to be competitive in the labor market, why should I do it?"

And he'd do little to ease Americans’ healthcare pains:

Why should insurers work to lower prices or health care use when they can shun high-cost people in the first place? And what incentive do insurers have to invest now in promoting better health and improving the system when others will benefit later?

Sen. John McCain's, R-Ariz., health-care plan would replace the existing tax exclusion for employer-sponsored coverage with a refundable tax credit for all Americans. The tax change is intended to create a more equitable system that provides everyone -- including those who do not receive their health coverage from their employer -- with the same tax advantage. And since it is refundable, it would provide a cash benefit to those who earn too little to pay federal income taxes.

But if the cost of health care continues to outpace inflation in the economy at large, McCain's health credit would morph into a tax hike for those who currently receive a tax exclusion for employer-sponsored coverage, according to a study released Wednesday by the liberal Center for American Progress.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made a veiled swipe at Republican presidential hopeful John McCain on Thursday when he said at a climate conference here that anyone suggesting offshore oil drilling could bring down gas prices was "blowing smoke."

The remark was also a dig at his host, Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, who riled environmentalists, tourism promoters and the state's political leaders on both sides of the aisle last week when he voiced support for McCain's proposal to lift bans on exploring for oil off the coasts of California, Florida and the Eastern Seaboard.

For almost two years former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge failed to register a nearly half-million-dollar lobbying contract that he had with the government of Albania.

Ridge filed a registration statement on behalf of the country earlier this month after being contacted by the Department of Justice.
[...]
Ridge, the former Pennsylvania governor, represented Albania from October 2006 through the end of August 2007 on issues ranging from homeland security to NATO membership.

Maybe McCain doesn't mind lending his name to the oil industry's cynical efforts to scrap a wise policy, using sky-high gas prices as an excuse. Or maybe he really thinks more offshore drilling - which would take a decade to yield even modest amounts of oil - will bring prices down right now. Either way, McCain is disturbingly willing to sell out the marine environment to preserve an oil-guzzling status quo.

There's too little oil off the US coast to have much effect on the world market. As the earth's climate warms, the federal government should be promoting conservation and identifying alternatives to fossil fuels - not just because rising demand from China and India makes oil ever more expensive, but because the welfare of the planet depends on it.

As others have pointed out, McCain's "trying to have it both ways:"

Even as Democrat Barack Obama kept fighting to win his party's nomination for president, his campaign was hiring staff, opening offices and registering voters for the general election in Wisconsin.

Months after Republican John McCain became his party's presumptive nominee, he had no paid staff or offices open until Monday in Wisconsin, a state that barely went Democratic in 2000 and 2004 and is up for grabs this year.

But without any visible signs of a campaign for months, Wisconsin Republicans privately wondered about McCain's strategy. McCain has faced similar criticism in other states where frustrated aides and supporters questioned whether the campaign squandered its three-month head start while the Democratic primary continued.

And even those lobbyists out there got a thank-you.

“I’m going to thank some corrupt unscrupulous lobbyists that are destroying America as we speak, everything we stand for and believe in,” McCain joked at one fundraiser.

Right.

McCain claims he supported "every" investigative Katrina Commission, but the votes don’t lie:

But, as both the DNC and Obama campaign are quick to point out, he opposed proposals in 2005 and 2006 to create a congressional commission.

But for half a decade in the 1980s, Black was also Jonas Savimbi's man in the capital city. His lobbying firm received millions from the brutal Angolan guerrilla leader and took advantage of Black's contacts in Congress and the White House.

Justice Department records that Black's firm submitted under the Foreign Agents Registration Act detail frequent meetings with lawmakers and their staffs and lavish spending by Black and his partners as they attempted to ensure support for Savimbi, whose UNITA movement was fighting the Marxist Angolan government.

In addition to Savimbi, Black and his partners were at times registered foreign agents for a remarkable collection of U.S.-backed foreign leaders whose human rights records were sometimes harshly criticized, even as their opposition to communism was embraced by American conservatives. They included Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos, Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, Nigerian Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, Somali President Mohamed Siad Barre, and the countries of Kenya and Equatorial Guinea, among others.

The top McCain lobbyist/advisor’s client roster reads like a who’s who of notorious foreign leaders.

A consultant to Sen. John McCain hired a public-relations firm last year to burnish the U.S. image of a Ukrainian political party backed by Russian leader Vladimir Putin, according to documents filed with the Justice Department.

The lobbying firm of Davis Manafort Inc. arranged for the public-relations firm's work through an affiliate last spring, at the same time Davis Manafort was being paid by the Republican presidential candidate's campaign. The firm is co-owned by lobbyist Rick Davis, manager of Sen. McCain's presidential campaign, and longtime Republican strategist Paul Manafort.

McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers said Mr. Davis receives no income from Davis Manafort, although he still owns a share of the firm. "He earns no money from their activities while he is on leave," Mr. Rogers said.

It's just another notch on his lobbyist belt:

But like a little yipping dog that won’t go away, questions about the potential sway of lobbyists on the Arizona Republican continue to follow the “Straight Talk Express.” McCain has repeatedly said he learned much about avoiding undue influences, or the appearance thereof, from the Charles Keating scandal while he was a congressman representing the East Valley. One outcome of his connection to the Keating Five was his persistent efforts to pass campaign reform in the hope of reducing the influence of money over national politics.

… But what really hurts is that McCain complained about these tools of politics at the same time he continued to use them to benefit his constituents and his own career.