Even with two weeks to go until the election, yet another connection between John McCain and troubled mortgage giant Freddie Mac has come to light.

Word came out this weekend that Freddie Mac secretly paid Republican firm DCI Group to lobby GOP senators to oppose legislation that would have increased regulations on its lending.

Does DCI Group sound familiar? It might – it turns out that DCI Group’s CEO is Doug Goodyear, who was John McCain’s choice to organize this year’s Republican National Convention. And, as Newsweek reported in May, Goodyear’s firm also made money representing Burma’s brutal military junta.

As for McCain’s VP pick, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, The New Yorker has a lengthy article on the governor’s rise to prominence among the GOP elite – the very “Good Ol’ Boys Network” she so often decries. Part of that, the story mentions, was her quick desire to cozy up to powerful Washington lobbyists after she became mayor of Wasilla.

Of course, McCain spent Sunday questioning the legitimacy of Barack Obama’s staggering $150 million in September fundraising, saying on Fox News Sunday, “What’s going to happen, particularly if you’ve got an incumbent president, and we no longer stick to the … public financing, which was a result of the Watergate scandal?”

Sen. McCain might want to ask this question of himself, as “sticking to public financing” proved to be, well, a sticky point during the Republican primaries. You may remember that McCain opted into the public financing system for the primaries and then decided to change his mind once his campaign took off. Despite the questionable legality of this move, the FEC eventually let him off the hook.

Finally, The Dallas Morning News explores why an Obama administration, combined with a Democratic Congress, would likely result in new regulations on AT&T. As for a McCain administration, the story notes that “AT&T’s executives and lobbyists have longstanding ties to Mr. McCain,” including the company’s top lobbyist, Tim McKone, who has raised $500,000 for the GOP nominee. The article also points out that some of McCain’s “top campaign aides are former AT&T lobbyists, including Charlie Black and Rick Davis, Mr. McCain’s campaign manager. Some of Mr. McCain’s Senate aides later worked as lobbyists for AT&T.”

We’ve all been there – you’re in a remote area and cellphone coverage is lacking or sometimes non-existent. Most of us resign ourselves to being out of touch for a while.

But when you’re Cindy McCain, you get two cellphone towers built right on your property by Verizon and AT&T – two companies that have given John McCain both hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions and over a dozen lobbyist bundlers.

That’s the story, according to The Washington Post’s James V. Grimaldi, and it’s one that goes to the heart of why John McCain’s lobbyist ties are so important. The article makes it clear that the towers were completely unnecessary in terms of providing coverage, and so few people lived near them that they could never be profitable.

Of course, none of that may matter when the McCains are the customers. Why? Well, Sen. McCain has been a friend to AT&T, Verizon and other telecom giants during his service on the Senate Commerce Committee, where he is a senior member and former chairman. And it turns out that McCain and these two companies have had a healthy exchange of money and lobbyists over the years.

According to a Campaign Money Watch analysis of data from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, AT&T employees and PACs have given McCain $480,408.00 since 1989. Verizon has contributed $282,572.00. AT&T is his No. 3 all-time contributor; Verizon is No. 11.

A list of the people who have lobbied for AT&T and Verizon forms a virtual who’s-who of McCain’s campaign staff, advisors and fundraisers. They include: national finance co-chair and bundler Wayne Berman, senior advisor Charlie Black, McCain’s Senate chief of staff, Mark Buse, VP vetter A.B. Culvahouse, campaign manager Rick Davis, deputy RNC chair Frank Donatelli, deputy campaign manager Christian Ferry, congressional liaison John Green, former finance chair Tom Loeffler, mega-bundler Tim McKone, George W. Bush national finance chair Jack Oliver and transition team head William Timmons.

In total, AT&T has paid nearly $20.9 million in lobbying fees to lobbyists now connected to McCain’s campaign, with Verizon paying just over $7 million. Those same lobbyists have bundled $600,000 for McCain.

The best way to illustrate these many, many connections is to visit our home page – click on one of the lobbyists mentioned above to see just how complicated this web (with McCain at the center) really is.

All those connections appear to have helped the McCains get good cellphone reception, even though AT&T and Verizon had to navigate through plenty of red tape to do it. That they’re willing to do such favors for McCain suggests they might expect a lot from him if he were elected to the White House. With so many of their lobbyists in McCain’s orbit, they’d definitely have reason to be hopeful.

On this blog, we’ve already looked at John McCain’s ties to Russia through one of his top aides, Charlie Black. We’ve also discussed his ties to Georgia through another lobbyist, Randy Scheunemann. Now, the questionable ties of his campaign manager, Rick Davis, are under scrutiny.

In a piece in The Nation, Ari Berman and Mark Ames write that Davis “advanced what became a key victory for the Kremlin: gaining control over the small but strategically important country of Montenegro.” The country is now known as “Moscow on the Mediterranean” and is dominated by Russian influences.

The lengthy article goes on to note McCain’s and Davis’ ties to a shady aluminum magnate who doubles as a surrogate for Vladimir Putin. It’s a pretty tangled web involving Davis’ partner, Paul Manafort, a Ukrainian oligargch, and plenty of international intrigue. The story suggests that McCain was playing both sides of the issue – praising one Ukrainian political party with Western sympathies, while knowing that some of his most prominent lobbyist allies were aiding the pro-Russian opposition.

Berman and Ames’ final paragraph sums up the problem the best: “The story of how McCain’s closest aides and employees have been undermining his vociferously expressed opposition to Putin and Russia’s oligarchs offers a highly disturbing preview of what a McCain administration might look like. When McCain’s campaign proclaims “country first,” one has to wonder, Which country? The one with the highest bidder?”

Campaign Money Watch has prepared a new ad for television broadcast that brings up a part of John McCain’s past he’d rather the media ignore: The Keating Five. The spot details the help John McCain provided to Charles Keating and the $112,000 in contributions and trips to the Bahamas McCain received from him.

McCain claims the Keating scandal was a turning point for him, an “ah ha” moment that set him on the right path. But as the ad points out, his own campaign manager’s firm received undisclosed payments from Freddie Mac (as recently as last month).

The New York Times’ Julie Bosman has more coverage of the ad, along with a few other third-party advertisements that have cropped up recently.

And, on the day of the vice presidential debate, we learn from the Winston Salem-Journal that John McCain’s VP pick, Sarah Palin, will attend a fundraiser in Greensboro on October 16.

See any stories you think we should mention here? Send them to [email protected].

The latest chapter in the story of Freddie Mac and John McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, came out this weekend, from Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Holly Bailey: The McCain camp claims that Davis separated from his firm, Davis Manafort, in 2006. Yet the McCain campaign started paying the firm $20,000 a month when Davis came on board, suggesting the ties hadn’t been severed at all.

This weekend, The New York Times published a lengthy report by Jo Becker and Don Van Natta Jr. on McCain’s ties to the gambling industry, especially Indian gambling. It touches on McCain’s investigation into now-imprisoned lobbyist Jack Abramoff, saying that “McCain and a circle of allies — lobbyists, lawyers and senior strategists — also seized on the case for its opportunities,” including the chance at some revenge on the people who helped sink McCain’s 2000 bid for the GOP nomination.

Finally, the AP’s Brett J. Blackledge reports that McCain’s VP pick, Sarah Palin, looks into the favors and special treatment Palin received as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska – the latest in a series of reports that run against her reformer image. The list includes everything from winning a zoning exemption to help her sell her house to allowing a friend to speak before the city council… so he could ask for advertising business for his radio station.

Heard anything good out there? Send it to our tipline at [email protected].

Even as bailout negotiations dominate the news, it looks like some reporters are still examining John McCain’s VP pick, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, with a microscope. Today, The Washington Post’s James Grimaldi and Robert O’Harrow Jr. report that Palin has accepted $25,367 in gifts as governor, despite making such practices a key part of her ethics reform agenda.

Of note: “About a quarter of the entities bestowing gifts on the governor are represented by one of Alaska’s most influential mining lobbyists who said in an interview that she was not involved in the tributes.”

Also covering Palin, The New York Times’ Michael Luo notes her disappearance from the campaign trail – turns out the campaign needs her more to draw people to McCain rallies.

In charting McCain’s “suspended campaign,” NPR notes that McCain saying he’s abandoning fundraising isn’t a meaningful gesture – the campaign itself is required to rely on $84 million in public financing. But the RNC can raise money, and hasn’t indicated it’s going to stop doing so.

And even then, it appears top campaign officials are still hob-nobbing with donors. National Journal’s Peter Stone notes that campaign manager Rick Davis did just that in meeting with “a dozen top Nw York-based fundraisers” after McCain announced the suspension. (The AP has more on how the suspension is more of a slight slow-down.)

And speaking of Davis – who, we learned this week, was helping his firm pull in money from Freddie Mac as recently as last month, and who appears to still be listed as an official at the firm, despite claiming to have severed all ties – there are now questions being raised about payments the McCain campaign made to Davis’ firm, after they claim Davis no longer worked there. Then what’s that money going toward?

Finally, the Wall Street Journal reports more bad news for, well, Wall Street: Since becoming “the campaign season’s favorite political piñata,” all those contributions they made to Barack Obama and McCain are looking like yet another bad investment.

John McCain may have suspended his campaign, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped the flow of stories about his money and his ties to lobbyists, especially one day after the New York Times/AP/Newsweek revelation that campaign manager Rick Davis’ firm took in money as recently as last month from scandal-plagued mortgage giant Freddie Mac.

The Los Angeles Times’ Stephen Braun writes that McCain’s image as a reformer has taken a hit due to Davis’ Freddie Mac ties.

Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, one of the reporters to break the Davis/Freddie story, explores the McCain campaign’s contention that Davis never profited from the arrangement and had severed all ties with his old firm, Davis Manafort. But, Isikoff reports, “Davis was still listed as one of only two corporate officers and directors of the firm” as of April of this year.

AP’s Pete Yost describes Freddie Mac’s relationship with Davis as “access insurance.” Yost also goes on to note that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae both had an extensive bipartisan lobbying operation that ensured any reforms were “buried under a cascade of dollars that went to both Democrats and Republicans.” (This point is echoed by a Wall Street Journal blog post that goes into the complicated web of Fannie and Freddie’s influence.)

In other news, The Washington Times’ Jim McElhatton notes that while McCain declared a war on earmarks this campaign, some of his top congressional bundlers appear to be big fans of them. And an LA Times blog post notes the highlights of a New England Journal of Medicine article on “the millions of dollars making their way to the campaign coffers of both parties and both presidential candidates.”

Don’t forget – if there’s anything you want to see written about here, e-mail us at [email protected].

Dominating the headlines this morning is a New York Times report about McCain campaign manager and lobbyist Rick Davis’ ties to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. No, this is not a repeat. While the Times’ original reporting had Davis on the mortgage giants’ payroll until 2005, the new report finds that, after that arrangement ended, Davis’ firm received $15,000 a month from Freddie Mac until last month – when a federal takeover brought its lobbying to an end.

While the money went to Davis’ firm, it was really all about Davis himself, and his closeness to John McCain: “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.”

As recently as Sunday, McCain had claimed Davis’ connection to Freddie Mac ended years ago.

Davis isn’t the only one of McCain’s Lobbyists under the microscope. The Chicago Tribune’s Andrew Zajac has been taking an exhaustive look at Charlie Black’s ties to a Russian think tank with ties to Vladimir Putin – here’s his latest report.

A key line in Zajac’s piece quietly attacks the McCain camp’s assertion that since Black, Davis and company are former lobbyists, there’s nothing wrong with their influential campaign positions: “It beggars belief that his retirement marks a departure from the Washington influence business for Black, since he retains other business interests at the juncture of the private sector and the federal government and he remains a prince of the capital’s permanent government.

Meanwhile, the New York Times’ Michael Luo looks at the work of bundlers who once backed Hillary Clinton and their efforts to do the same for Barack Obama, even as some of those donors are feeling the impact of the recent market meltdown.

Hot on the heels of a new Obama ad on McCain’s support of insurance companies headquartered in Bermuda, the Wall Street Journal’s T.W. Farnam notes the financial support those firms have given McCain: “A few months after Sen. McCain’s visit there, top insurance executives held a fund-raiser on the island that netted an estimated $50,000. Since then, Sen. McCain has raised an additional $70,000 from employees of Bermudan insurers. Sen. Obama, in contrast, has gotten $12,500 in total from employees of those companies.”

Any suggestions on what we should be talking about here? E-mail us at [email protected].

This morning The New York Times plays what might be the trump card in the debate over which candidate, John McCain or Barack Obama, is more tied to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac: McCain campaign manager Rick Davis’ firm was paid $30,000 a month for five years (2000-05) by the mortgage giants “to defend them against stricter regulations,” the paper’s David D. Kirkpatrick and Charles Duhgg report.

Among the highlights: Democrats and Republicans both say Davis’ value was based on his “closeness to Senator McCain and the possibility that Senator McCain was going to run for president again,” according to a former Fannie Mae spokesman. Yet he also said Davis “didn’t really do anything.”

The L.A. Times’ Dan Morain reports on the details of Obama and McCain’s August fundraising. Worthy of note: Of Obama’s $66 million raised, $22 million was in small contributions. While that’s a decent percentage, it’s way down from what we saw during the heat of the primaries – a fact that underscores big money’s continuing importance to both parties. (The Chicago Tribune has more details about Obama’s fundraising obligations.)

The Washington Post’s Matthew Mosk takes a hard look this morning at the fundraising race, noting that McCain has made good use of his joint committee with the RNC — an entity that allow donors to write checks up to $70,000. Moreover, McCain and the RNC have been working together on “hybrid ads,” those that “purport to advance the cause of his campaign and the fortunes of other Republicans … with the only requirement being that the ads mention, in some fashion, other elements of the GOP ticket.”

The DHL-UPS merger, which threatens to put thousands of Ohio jobs on the chopping block, is back in the news. The story made headlines earlier this year when it was reported that McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, had lobbied in favor of an earlier merger between DHL and Airborne Express, and that another campaign advisor, John Green, was a lobbyist for UPS. Marilyn Geewax of the The Columbus Dispatch reports this morning that Rep. JIm Oberstar (D-MN) believes the DHL-UPS deal violates anti-trust law. ” “It’s called price squeezing. … Competition will be reduced; prices will go up,” he said

And Congressional Quarterly reports that at least 250 lobbyists failed to properly report their campaign contributions, while more than 900 “failed to file their first mid-year reports by the deadline of July 30. Hundreds were submitted more than a week past the due date, without penalty.”