CNN has a story running on its political ticker revealing that John McCain’s campaign is down to only $250,000. But actually the number is a bit misleading. McCain’s got $2 million in cash but $1.75 million in debt. Now that’s really, really bad news for anyone interested in McCain’s candidacy. But campaign debts are notorious for being honored in the breach — or years later for 10 or 20 cents on the dollar. That may be a bit of an exaggeration. But good luck if McCain owes you a hundred grand and you think you’re going to get some of that 2 mill before McCain spends it trying to pull out of his tailspin.

In any case, I’m interested to hear what political pros out there make of this and what insider insight they can provide.

The one thing I know — a campaign ain’t a bank. There’s no holding asset reserves against liabilities.

Fred Kaplan takes a close look at President Bush’s ridiculous Iraq ‘progress’ report.

TPM Reader DV yanks something out of the memory hole …

Remember the War Czar? Anyone heard anything from him lately? Shouldn’t he be pretty prominent what with all the news from Iraq and the surge in full swing now? Oh, maybe he’s off “coordinating” or something.

Here’s, arguably, the most powerful military man in the country and I’ll bet 9 out of 10 Americans (even the informed ones) don’t even know the guy’s name (it’s Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute). Talk about another brilliant idea.

Tom Edsall has a new article up at Huffington Post gaming out whether there’s any strategic options left for McCain to salvage his collapsing campaign. Tom’s verdict is that there’s one high-stakes hail mary approach: reinventing himself as the anti-Bush Republican — come out against the Republicans’ culture of corruption, K Street and the rest, preach against the sea of red ink and most of all let Bush have it on the colossal fiasco he’s made of Iraq and argue “that conditions in Iraq are so terrible that withdrawal is now the only reasonable alternative; that resources and taxpayer dollars should be put into Afghanistan and into supporting anti-terrorist activities in Pakistan, Africa and South Asia – not to mention an infusion of cash into domestic security.”

To say this is a hail mary pass is, I think, something of an understatement. It strikes me more as an antic counterfactual on the lines of that classic Saturday Night Live sketch ‘What if Spartacus had a piper cub’? What if John McCain hadn’t flipflopped on pretty much everything he’d stood for from the very late 1990s through around 2003 instead of casting his lot with George W. Bush in an attempted political merger that makes AOL-TimeWarner look like a shrewd deal.

One of the lesser problems, K Street and the culture of corruption — that’s just so yesterday. Don’t get me wrong. The issues are no less important. And you have to figure that shark’s going to yank Rep. John Doolittle (R-CA) under the waves some day pretty soon. So it still makes for good copy. But that train’s definitely left the station. Coming out against Tom DeLay just doesn’t have quite the same crackle now that he’s selling hams on QVC after midnight or whatever he’s doing.

And then of course Iraq. Very hard for me to see how you can base take two of your campaign on the need to leave when take one was based on the need to stay.

And that brings the whole matter into focus. I’m not one for a lot of sentimentality about what might have been with McCain. Put me down with those who think his liberal and moderate acolytes never appreciated the extent of his conservatism on a number of key issues. But the issue for me was less that he was going to become a Democrat — though I suspect that was actually more possible than some realize — than that he was simply an example of an honorable center-right American conservatism.

But you can’t undo the last three-plus years. Someone who is a master of the politics of opportunism can manage countless transformations. Not someone whose whole schtick is candor, authenticity and integrity. McCain is a good example of the fact that life can take almost everything away from you, and usually does. But your dignity you’ve got to give away. And he did.

Times-Picayune interviews the hooker Vitter went to when he was back in the district.

And a little more digging finds that when Vitter was in DC he made some of his calls during roll call votes in the House. (This is when he was a rep.)

On this Vitter subject, I was talking to our in-house Vitterologist, Eric Kleefeld, and reading between the lines on Vitter, he as much as admitted in the past that there were problems. But he ‘reformed’ in 2002. So I’d say he’ll probably try to hold on until someone comes up with something post-2002.

Any thoughts on how long until they pull the plug on this guy?

Here we have a headline from the New York Times …

Senate Narrowly Backs Bush in Rejecting Debate on Increasing Time Between Deployments

Well, no, I’m sorry. That’s not right. The vote was 56 to 41. A solid majority of senators supported increasing time between deployments.

Republicans blocked a vote on the bill. Say it again: They blocked a vote. They filibustered it.

Don’t mistake me. I support the right of the minority party in the senate to do this, just as I did in the previous Congress when Democrats were in the minority. And I would completely oppose any effort to changes the rules, as Republicans effectively threatened to do in the previous Congress. But you can entirely support the right to filibuster, as the Republicans are now consistently doing, while also insisting that the party in question be held to account for exercising the power.

It’s about accountability. Inaccurate reporting undermines accountability.

All the big press outlets seem to suddenly have forgotten how this works. The headline is Republicans block the vote. That’s not spin. That’s what happened.

Hadn’t thought of it that way, but, yeah, good point from TPM Reader JM …

I may have missed any commentary on this, but no one seems to be pointing out that Bush spent the whole press conference say we are fighting Al Queda, then concluded by disagreeing that Al Queda is stronger then it was in 2001. In 2001, they highjacked four airliners using box cutters and today, according to administration spin, they have the entire United States Army bogged down! How do people sit there and not start laughing, I don’t know.

Okay, I don’t like to make a habit of giving space to cornball neologisms that one campaign comes up with as part of its spin against another. But I’ll make an exception for Mitt-Amorphosis, which comes to us courtesy of the Brownback campaign.

Why? Because some people are such transparent and craven phoneys that they deserve their own words.

Ahhhh, yet more evidence the New York Times is committed to forcing the filibuster back into the closet.

Senate Narrowly Backs Bush in Rejecting Debate on Increasing Time Between Deployments, July 12, 2007

Democrats Block a Vote on Bolton for the Second Time, June 21, 2005

C’mon. This one isn’t even close, folks. Please stop spinning this to obscure what’s actually happening.

Just say it: ‘Filibuster’. It gets easier every time.

(ed.note: Special thanks to this guy for doing the legwork.)

Bush appointee judge doesn’t think much of the president’s jurisprudence …

A lawyer who admitted leaking grand jury transcripts about athletes’ steroid use to The Chronicle was sentenced to 21/2 years in prison Thursday by a federal judge who upbraided President Bush for commuting the sentence of Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the former vice presidential aide who faced an identical prison term on nearly identical charges.

“Under the president’s reasoning, any white-collar defendant should receive no jail time, regardless of the reprehensibility of the crime,” U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White, a Bush appointee, said before sentencing attorney Troy Ellerman to prison.

Ellerman’s lawyer, in seeking a lesser sentence, had cited Bush’s July 2 decision to commute the prison sentence for Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff. Libby was convicted of lying to federal agents and a grand jury investigating the leak of a CIA operative’s identity.

Perhaps there’s some appropriateness, in as much as that in the decision that put the president in office — Bush v. Gore — the Supreme Court said that decision was a one-off reasoning which shouldn’t be held to have applicability in any other cases. Same with Scooter justice.