Lindsay Beyerstein

The McCain campaign claims that campaign manager Rick Davis separated from his lobbying firm, Davis Manafort, in 2006:

This record, which I retrieved from the Virginia State Corporations Commission shows that Davis is still an officer/director of Davis Manafort, Inc. He is also currently the clerk/treasurer of Davis Manafort Partners, Inc. (Click on the image at left to view a larger version.)

Barack Obama is up 9 points over John McCain, according to a new poll. Analysts attribute Obama’s surge in the polls to voters’ anxieties about the economy. Quite simply, and reasonably, the average voter doesn’t trust John McCain to handle the economy.

Senior McCain adviser Charlie Black lobbied for a mysterious Russian think tank in 2005, public records show. Black’s firm was paid $50,000 to lobby on behalf of an entity that could have been named by Borat, the Center for the Development of Information Society (CDIS).

Like McCain’s top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, Black is a career lobbyist with recent and lucrative ties to foreign interests. He is not a registered lobbyist today, but his firm continues to represent overseas interests while Black has unparalleled access to McCain.

Intrigued, I did some digging into the CDIS…

Sen. Ted Stevens asked for permission to periodically skip out on his corruption trial in order to address the current financial meltdown.

The McCain campaign has successfully stalled the inquiry into Sarah Palin’s alleged abuses of power. The campaign dispatched a small army of operatives to Alaska to handle the Troopergate issue. The Alaska State Legislature hired an independent investigator to review the matter. But the McCain campaign will not let the him speak to Palin or her husband Todd. Palin also refuses to release emails relating to the firing of public safety commissioner Walt Monegan.

Alleged war criminal Henry Kissinger will give VP candidate Sarah Palin a crash course in foreign policy this week in New York.

The St. Paul City Attorney’s Office announced yesterday that it will drop misdemeanor charges against journalists arrested during the Republican National Convention earlier this month.

The Washington Post reports that Sarah Palin culled the email addresses of nearly 23,000 Alaska business owners from a state database and used the information to spam them.

Palin wanted to reduce the fee for a business license, and she needed the cooperation of the state senate to do it. There were only three days left in the legislative session, and Palin was keen to get home to collect her per diem.

Vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin refuses to say whether the Vice President belongs to the executive branch. There are a number of ways to parse Palin’s non-remarks: i) She doesn’t know, or, alternatively, ii) She’s building on Dick Cheney’s legacy and preemptively declaring the constitutional status of the Office of the Vice President a secret.

John McCain appears to have confused Spanish prime minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero with the Zapatista Army of National Liberation …