Some thing’s fishy in the McCain campaign. Washington Post:

McCain had already taken a $3 million bank loan in November to keep his campaign afloat, and he sought from the same bank $1 million more shortly before this month’s Super Tuesday contests, this time pledging incoming but unprocessed contributions as collateral. He never used the funds of the most recent loan, because his win in the South Carolina primary helped him raise enough money to compete in Florida, his campaign aides said last night.

The loans, revealed yesterday in documents a McCain attorney filed with the Federal Election Commission, offer fresh details about how the Republican senator from Arizona scrambled to secure money as his shoestring campaign navigated a rapid-fire succession of primary contests.

The unorthodox lending terms also raised fresh questions from McCain’s critics about his ability to repeatedly draw money from the Maryland-based Fidelity & Trust Bank. Campaign finance lawyers speculated whether McCain may have inadvertently committed himself to entering the public financing system for the remainder of the primary season by holding out the prospect of taking public matching funds in exchange for the $1 million loan in December.
…
Under FEC rules, a candidate who uses a certification for federal funds as collateral for a loan is obligated to remain within the public financing system. “We very carefully did not do that,” Potter said.

Cleta Mitchell, a veteran campaign finance lawyer and a McCain critic, said she has never encountered a similar agreement.

“They’ve clearly got a sweetheart deal with this bank,” Mitchell said. “This bank is just a cash register for them.”

I guess being a “maverick” means you don’t have to follow normal procedures to get loans or live up to requires to take federal matching funs when you’re running for President. Whatever happened with this loan, you can be sure that McCain signed off on how it moved forward.

Let’s not forget that McCain is already in political hot water over campaign finance. Despite the fact that his campaign is attacking the Obama campaign over public financing, McCain is backing away from his pledge to take public financing if he’s the nominee. Steve Benen reminds us:

McCain apparently hopes we’re not paying attention to what his campaign said as recently as a few days ago: “Mr. McCain’s advisers said that the candidate, despite his signature legislative efforts to restrict the money spent on political campaigns, would not accept public financing and spending limits for this year’s general campaign.” Indeed, for those keeping score at home, McCain has been for and against public primary funds, and for and against public general-election funds — all within the span of a single year.

It’s been clear for a long time that McCain will say and do anything to win this election. Earlier this week se sold what little principles he had down the river to appeal to the rapid, pro-torture Republican base. Expect similar actions aimed to keep him in lock-step with the Republican Party throughout the campaign. And dodgy campaign finance work is no different.

Channel 12 in Connecticut covers the reaction of Chris “Mad Dog” Russo to Chris Shays actions in Congressional hearings on steroids in baseball. This might have legs as the cycle progresses.

Congressman John Larson (CT-01) has the GOP pegged. Via email:

“The political theater enacted by my colleagues on the other side of the aisle today was akin to Otter and Boone leading the Deltas out of the student body at Faber College. If this issue wasn’t so important to the nation, we would have to consider holding the Republicans in double secret probation.

In article 1, the Constitution lays out the authority of the Congress. For too long, that authority has been ceded to an executive branch that consistently overreaches and ignores our system of checks and balances.

When Republicans left the floor of the House of Representatives, they again abdicated their responsibility as members of this body to oversee the actions of the executive branch. It is both irresponsible and unconstitutional. The Executive Branch must answer questions about the firing of U.S. Attorneys. No one in this country is exempt from a legal subpoena and Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten are not above the law.

The Republican’s stunt on the House floor today is just another example of their rubber stamp of this administration’s disregard for the Constitution and our civil rights in the pursuit of its own political purposes. Let’s remember that the need for new FISA legislation – the legislation that Republicans claimed they were leaving the floor in protest over- became apparent only when the administration’s secret and illegal use of unwarranted eavesdropping was revealed. This is yet another example of the Bush Administration’s dismissal of the Congress as a co-equal branch of government.

Today, Democrats in the House stood up to the Administration, reasserted the power of Congress and held executive branch officials accountable for their actions. Under the leadership of our Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, we have fought to reclaim the power that the Executive Branch tried to steal and House Republicans tried to give away. I am very proud of the actions of the Democratic Caucus today.” [Emphasis added]

“Mike and the Mad Dog” is the drive time sports talk radio show on WFAN, in the tri-state area. It has a huge audience and its hosts, Mike Francesa and Chris “Mad Dog” Russo are very respected sports commentators in the New York sports media with their show being simulcast on the YES cable network and Francesa having a TV show during football season on another network that I’m forgetting.

Yesterday Mike and Chris were following the baseball steroid hearings and, not surprisingly, had very strong opinions about the grandstanding they saw House Republicans doing, lead by Chris Shays. They just eviscerated Shays for not knowing what he was talking about and being a complete Roger Clemens fan boy. It got so bad that Russo, who is a registered Republican from New Canaan, CT and one of Shays constituents, decides that he has to support Jim Himes, Shays challenger. “Get Shays out, get Himes in there!” By the end of the show, the hosts were going through Himes background and informing their listeners that a couple could donate up to $4,600 to Himes campaign!

CT Blogger at My Left Nutmeg pulled video from the show. First (and this is probably the least interesting clip), Mike and Chris run through Shays behavior during the House hearings on steroids yesterday:

Then they start taking callers to respond to Shays. In completely bipartisan fashion, listeners to WFAN agree that Shays was a disgrace and that they wanted him out of there.

The best segment, in my mind, is this clip where Mike and Chris first decide that Himes is their guy:

It merits repeating that “Mike and the Mad Dog” are on cable in the tri-state area for about five hours every day of the week. If they decide to make bashing Chris Shays a regular issue, Shays is in serious trouble. Connecticut’s 4th CD, which Shays represents, is completely within the broadcast range of WFAN. There is a huge base of sports fans from CT that listen to WFAN religiously. I grew up in Shays district and used to listen to “Mike and the Mad Dog” every single day after school. Now that I’m back in their broadcast range, I frequently listen to their show.

MLN commenter joejoejoe notes:

From the NY Daily News 4/07: “For nearly 20 years, Francesa and Russo have either been No.1 or No.2 in the market in terms of ratings, among men 25-54, the key demographic.”

From Wikipedia: “During the day, WFAN’s groundwave signal can be heard faintly as far south as Washington, DC and as far north as the I-90 corridor (the New York State Thruway and Massachusetts Turnpike), about 150 miles north of New York City. WFAN can also allegedly be heard clearly on the northern beaches of North Carolina’s Outer Banks during the day. Signal strength varies depending on factors such as weather and elevation. Still, a good car radio can pick up WFAN cleanly in most of eastern Pennsylvania and throughout Connecticut”

This could actually be a big deal in the Himes vs. Shays race. If Russo and Francesa decide they are going to regularly blast Shays and promote Jim Himes, then there’s the potential to give a lot of people who vote in this race a very solid hook to turn them against Shays.

Oh and I hope you caught it at the start of the 3rd video, but the Himes campaign had Jim call the WFAN studio while Mike and Chris were on air. That’s a very impressive response to a timely issue and it looked like it impressed the hosts.

Learn more about Jim Himes at his campaign website, HimesForCongress.com.

One of the things that we’ve always been told about Joe Lieberman is that he votes with Democrats most of the time, but might buck the party from time to time on issues like the war in Iraq. Having watched a great deal of the 110th Congress’s 2nd Senate Session in the last month, I can say that Joe’s squarely with the GOP these days.

There have been 22 roll call votes in the Senate this session. Lieberman has missed five of them while he was traveling around the country campaigning for John McCain (sidebar: I’d hope the CT papers that editorialized about Dodd missing votes while campaigning to get himself elected President take note of Lieberman’s absenteeism). Of the remaining seventeen votes, Lieberman has only voted with the Democratic majority five times — but four of those votes were essentially non-partisan, with margins between 65-88 votes on the same side as Lieberman and the Democrats (Roll Call Votes 1, 9, 10, 21).

That is, of the five occasions where Lieberman voted with the Democrats out of seventeen votes cast, only one could be identified as partisan. That vote, RCV 8, was on cloture on the economic stimulus package. It failed cloture 58-41, but had support of some Republicans.

The remaining votes, though, all saw Lieberman vote with the Republican Party and against the majority of Democrats. Eleven of those roll call votes were FISA related (RCV 2, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20). The twelfth (RCV 22) was on the Intelligence Authorization conference report, which would have banned torture.

In total Joe Lieberman has voted with the Republican Party and against Democrats in twelve out of thirteen votes that broke on partisan lines. Instead of voting with Dems 90% of the time, he’s voting with the GOP 92% of the time. And none of these votes have been on Iraq!

Even if we were to speculate on how Lieberman would have voted on the votes he missed, the picture wouldn’t be much better for those who think Lieberman is valuable to the Democratic caucus now. Three of the five votes Lieberman missed were FISA related (RCV 3, 4, 7) and based on his other FISA votes, we could expect him to vote with the GOP. The other missed votes two were broadly bipartisan. RCV 5 was cloture on the stimulus and it passed 80-4, making it a non-partisan vote. Likewise, RCV 6 was almost as non-partisan as the cloture vote and HR 5140, the ecnonomic stimulus bill, passed 73-12.

The reality is that Joe Lieberman votes with Democrats when other Republicans vote with Democrats. He isn’t voting with Democrats on issues that are breaking in a very partisan way – he’s voting with Republicans.

This is an admittedly small study with a small sample that was prompted by my interest in just seeing the lay of the land when it comes to Lieberman’s votes this year. I’d be curious to see a full analysis of Lieberman’s votes in the 110th Congress, but doubt I’ll have the time to do the legwork myself anytime soon.

John McCain in November on using the Army Field Manual to govern interrogation techniques:

I would hope that we would understand, my friends, that life is not 24 and Jack Bauer. Life is interrogation techniques which are humane and yet effective. And I just came back from visiting a prison in Iraq. The army general there said that techniques under the Army Field Manual are working and working effectively, and he didn’t think they need to do anything else. My friends, this is what America is all about. [Via ThinkProgress]

ThinkProgress has more on McCain’s previous anti-waterboarding stance:

McCain has said the practice “is not a complicated procedure. It is torture.” He has previously called waterboarding “very exquisite torture.”

John McCain today voted against Intelligence Authorization conference report, which makes the Army Field Manual the governing document when it comes to torture. Here’s the relevant section:

SEC. 327. LIMITATION ON INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES. (a) Limitation- No individual in the custody or under the effective control of an element of the intelligence community or instrumentality thereof, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to any treatment or technique of interrogation not authorized by the United States Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collector Operations….

Let’s be clear. McCain has said he’s against torture, he thinks waterboarding is torture, and he thinks the Army Field Manual is the best guideline for how we should treat prisoners. Then he votes against making the Manual the benchmark, which would have banned waterboarding and torture. That is, McCain was for banning torture before he was against banning torture.

Anyone who thinks John McCain is a moderate or a maverick should go to TheTruthAboutJohnMcCain.com.

Sheer genius.

Via John Aravosis.