Tonight, John McCain will attend a fundraiser for his presidential campaign in Michigan. According to the invitation, he will be joined by the chair of his Michigan Victory 08 committee, John Rakolta, Jr., and McCain Michigan co-chairman Robert Liggett. What the invitation does not say, however, is that Rakolta and Liggett were two of the key backers of an organization that helped finance an ad that compared Democrats to Adolf Hitler in the 2006 election. Rakolta and his wife contributed $10,000 to a group called Voice the Vote, which used the money to buy a newspaper ad that compared Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm and a procession of Democratic presidents to Hitler.

In his 22 years in the Senate, John McCain has never voted against a single Republican judicial nominee at any level. How far to the right does a judicial pick have to be for John McCain to vote against him or her?

Why would John McCain tout his so-called "moderate" views on issues like campaign finance reform and climate change when the right wing judicial nominees he favors would gut those reforms and dismantle the regulatory framework designed to implement them?

John McCain often cites John Roberts and Samuel Alito as examples of the types of judges he would appoint to the Supreme Court. Would he also appoint extremist judges like Robert Bork, William Pryor and Pricilla Owen to the Supreme Court?

The offensive ad is scheduled to air on the same day as Cheney’s Raleigh fundraiser.

North Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Jerry Meek today called on Vice President Dick Cheney to demand that state Republican leaders withdraw a degrading and divisive ad, or himself withdraw from a scheduled fundraising trip to North Carolina.

Cheney is slated to raise money on Monday in Raleigh on behalf of the state Republican Party’s “Victory Fund”.

NCGOP leaders are adamant that a controversial ad will begin running the very same day.

We launched our first national television ad of the presidential election cycle, highlighting how little John McCain understands the economy. Watch it:

N & O Editorial
April 17, 2008

John McCain is running for president on his character and integrity. Indeed, the qualities of courage and many others in the former Vietnam prisoner of war are stellar. But McCain's early speeches on the nation's economy are troublesome indeed in a man who wants to be president -- of all the people.

One of the more disturbing aspects of a McCain speech on the economy Tuesday, in Pittsburgh, was his suggestion of a federal gas tax holiday, from Memorial Day until Labor Day. That would cut 18.4 cents from a gallon of gas. It also would cut billions of dollars from federal highway revenue. Ordinary folks are stressed by the price of gas. But what would prevent oil companies from just raising gas prices even more to take up the slack?

The New York Times noticed:

Senator John McCain likes to present himself as the candidate of the “Straight Talk Express” who does not pander to voters or change his positions with the political breeze. But the fine print of his record in the Senate indicates that he has been a lot less consistent on some of his signature issues than he has presented himself to be so far in his presidential campaign.

This morning, John McCain launches his effort to reinvent himself for the general election with a week of speeches.

After running as a so-called "maverick" and "outsider" in his failed 2000 campaign, John McCain cast aside his principles and morphed into a Bush Republican for this year's primaries. Now, after embracing the President's budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthy, abandoning his own immigration reform plan to cozy up to the right wing of his party, and turning his back on the campaign finance and lobbying reforms he once championed, McCain is trying to reinvent himself yet again.

We live in a "gotcha" media culture that revels in exposing the foibles and hypocrisies of our politicians. But one politician manages to escape this treatment, getting the benefit of the doubt and a positive spin for nearly everything he does: John McCain. Even during his temporary decline in popularity in 2007, the media continued to bolster him by lamenting his fate rather than criticizing the flip-flops and politicking that undermined his media-driven image as a "straight talker."

In Free Ride: John McCain and the Media, David Brock and Paul Waldman show how the media have enabled McCain's rise from the Keating Five savings-and-loan scandal to the underdog hero of the 2000 primaries to his roller-coaster run for the 2008 nomination. They illuminate how the press falls for McCain's "straight talk" and how the Arizona senator gets away with inconsistencies and misrepresentations for which the media skewer other politicians.