Obama pulls out of North Dakota. That and the day’s other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

Last week I got a mountain of emails asking me to call the McCain campaign out for ‘lying’ about former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines’ relationship with the Obama campaign. It was pretty clear, as Karen Tumulty noted in Time, that the McCain camp was happy to play up Raines’ race. And all the McCain camp could find to justify calling Raines an Obama ‘advisor’ was a stray reference in an article in the Washington Post which reported that Raines had taken a couple phone calls with people tied to the Obama campaign.

Still, in the rough world of politics, this amounted to basically a lie and not the usual McCain standard of 100% lie. But now we learn from the NY Times that McCain’s campaign manager and right hand man Rick Davis bagged more than $2 million running a front group set up by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to defend them against stepped up federal regulation.

Obama gets his turn with Spanish-language radio and says John McCain’s refusal to meet with Spain’s prime minister is a continuation of the Cheney foreign policy.

In case you missed it, Newsweek did a tally on the number of cars owned by the two candidates and their spouses: McCains 13, Obamas 1.

As Zachary Roth points out at TPMmuckraker, the McCain campaign has largely succeeded in its mission to shut down the Trooper-Gate investigation into Sarah Palin until after the election.

The legislative investigator still plans on issuing his report in October into whether Palin abused her power as governor, but with Palin and the McCain camp refusing to comply with his subpoenas of key witnesses, his report will be incomplete at best.

If there’s one lesson to be drawn from the Bush years, it’s that the old chestnut about the cover up being worse than the crime is just not true. It’s a lesson the McCain camp has learned well. They made the calculation that whatever political price would be paid by impeding the duly authorized investigation of the Alaska legislature would be less than the political damage resulting from a full investigation. So far, it looks like they calculated correctly.

Sen. Ted Steven’s corruption trial got underway today, and he’s contemplating calling a slew of fellow senators and other luminaries, like Colin Powell, to testify in his defense.

McCain camp quite touchy about being pegged as liars. Very upset at the NYT for revealing that Rick Davis got $2 million from Fannie and Freddie to help them fight off tighter regulation.

According to McCain enforcer Steve Schmidt, reporting on Davis’ Fannie/Freddie connection means the Times “is not today by any standard a journalistic organization.”

I guess Schmidt is pining for those 2002-2003 lickspittle days.

This morning in an interview with John McCain on Today, Meredith Viera reasonably enough pointed out that, while McCain has been railing against golden parachutes for CEOs, his adviser and surrogate Carly Fiorina received a $40-million-plus severance package when she was fired from H-P.

McCain said he didn’t know anything about Fiorina’s compensation, but was back at it soon after, railing against golden parachutes at a rally later this morning:

Time‘s Mark Halperin has declared that John McCain “wins the week.” Which week he’s referring to is anybody’s guess, because the prevailing consensus on the past week of financial turmoil is that John McCain lost badly:

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

Republicans have decided that their argument on the credit crisis will be to argue that Democrats created the crisis by forcing banks to give too many loans to black people and other minorities.

And here’s a similar argument written by Kevin Hassett for Bloomberg. In case you don’t remember, he’s the genius who wrote Dow 36,000 just before the tech bubble burst.