From Captains Quarters (more links to sources at website):
* The Proteus Fund, which also opposed the Yucca Mountain repository, spending $75K to stop it. That pales in comparison to the $935K they spent on supporting gay marriage initiatives, which McCain strongly opposes. They have also spent over $800,000 funding nuclear-disarmament and antiwar causes in each of the last two years. Their Security Policy Working Group contains nothing but left-of-center groups like Project on Defense Alternatives, which calls the Iraqi elections "faulty" and predicted disaster for the Bush administration's "program of coercive transformation throughout the region."
Inside McCain's Reform Institute, March 9, 2005Screaming Hypocrisy, March 8, 2005 [McCain, Cablevision, and the Reform Institute](snip)
As the Times notes, the Reform Institute helps keep McCain's staff gainfully employed between campaigns, allowing McCain to do less fundraising while retaining the best of the available talent. For instance, Carl Hulse and Ann Kornblut note that Rick Davis managed McCain's presidential campaign in 2000 before founding Reform Institute. Now its president, he gets over $100,000 a year from RI for "consulting services". That money allows Davis to remain available for McCain's future campaigns, and the funding he raises for RI gives him inroads for building support.
However, with Cablevision, Davis and McCain got sloppy. In an eerily reminiscent action which hearkens back to the Keating 5 scandal, McCain essentially attempted to intervene on Cablevision's behalf by writing a letter to the FCC supporting Cablevision's regulatory agenda of a la carte cable services. Less than a fortnight before, Cablevision made a six-figure donation to RI through a subsidiary, CSC Holdings, directly as a result of Davis' solicitation. Nor is that the only conflict that McCain has had with the communications industry through Davis and RI:
One donation in that category came from an elected Republican official who insisted on remaining anonymous, even to Mr. McCain, Mr. Davis said. Some donors, though, are communications industry giants who had business before the Commerce Committee when Mr. McCain was its chairman. Echosphere, a communications company started by Charles Ergen, a founder of EchoStar Communications and the DISH Network, gave $50,000 or more to the institute. So did CSC Holdings, a subsidiary of the Cablevisions Systems Corporation, headed by Charles F. Dolan, and the Chartwell Foundation, the charitable group funded by A. Jerrold Perenchio, the Univision billionaire.The stink gets worse with each new revelation. Based on my research yesterday, Davis already has many strange bedfellows for a man who is the closest political advisor to a supposedly conservative Republican. Now it appears that McCain has a track record of using RI to allow donors a roundabout way to buy influence: keeping his staff employed and this bootlicking "independent" policy group afloat.