Quite interesting, however, I think the advantage for a shipping magazone to be found under the term 'webmaster' is not that much use to them ! Granted, the
PR is passed on but probably primarly due to links with the irrevant anchor text. In these cases (which are quite rare for PR9) I agree that Google's high weight to anchor text works against them and can result in irrelevant results.
I don't think there is something suspicious about the mckinley case though. My guess would be that maybe the search company owned the domain name but it was claimed by mckinley due to trademark issues.
Just my $0.02..