The Washington Post reported the following yesterday:

Sen. John McCain championed legislation that will let an Arizona rancher trade remote grassland and ponderosa pine forest here for acres of valuable federally owned property that is ready for development, a land swap that now stands to directly benefit one of his top presidential campaign fundraisers].

Initially reluctant to support the swap, the Arizona Republican became a key figure in pushing the deal through Congress after the rancher and his partners hired lobbyists that included McCain's 1992 Senate campaign manager, two of his former Senate staff members (one of whom has returned as his chief of staff), and an Arizona insider who was a major McCain donor and is now bundling campaign checks.

When McCain's legislation passed in November 2005, the ranch owner gave the job of building as many as 12,000 homes to SunCor Development, a firm in Tempe, Ariz., run by Steven A. Betts, a longtime McCain supporter who has raised more than $100,000 for the presumptive Republican nominee. Betts said he and McCain never discussed the deal.

For some who have bought into the "reformer image" this may come as a shock. For those who have read my book, The Real McCain, this will not. The list of questionable characters McCain chooses to associate with is too long to enumerate here--it took me 3 chapters in my book. But I will provide an excerpt to display McCain's close relationship with those shadiest of the bunch, the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth. My humble thanks go to Bob Geiger for contributing this section and utilizing his expert knowledge of the workings of the senate to do so:

Adding insult to injury, McCain has since filled his war chest with contributions from Swift Boat funders. According to the Federal Election Commission, 8,600 individual contributions of more than $200 each have been made to the Swift Boaters. McCain has gratefully accepted cash to boost his senatorial or presidential aspirations from 262 of these donors. Through February 2008 [Ed note: In the three months since, this number has most likely climbed, precipitously], the contributions of these 262 donors adds up to roughly $600,000. (Some of these contributions were made before the Swift Boat Organization was created).

Of the ten men who contributed the most money to the Swift Boat ads, John McCain has accepted money from seven: Bob Perry, Harold Simmons, T. Boone Pickens, Carl Linder Sr., Harlan Crow, Jack E. Caveney, and Albert Huddleston.

To as honestly as possible provide a window into McCain's many sordid associations, friendships, and corporate and political relationships, from here on in, every day when I am blogging, we will provide a "questionable association of the day," which will often come straight out of The Real McCain.