As TPM Election Central reports, the Obama camp is coming to grips with the fact that the new book by swiftboating author Jerome Corsi isn’t going away anytime soon. Set to remain at the top of the NYT bestseller list for another week, Obama Nation will test whether the campaign can mount a more effective response to such smears than John Kerry did in 2004.

From Roll Call (sub. req.):

The Federal Election Commission will decide next Thursday whether presumptive presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) broke campaign finance laws late last year by taking out a bank loan to keep his then-struggling campaign afloat.

In the recently rebooted agency’s first major test, the FEC distributed a draft opinion Thursday siding with McCain, whose fate the commission’s three Democrats and three Republicans must still decide at the public meeting next week.

The agency’s legal department concluded that McCain did not break the law by taking the loan — and then exceeding contribution limits — despite warnings to the contrary from since-ousted FEC chairman David Mason, who had a tense back-and-forth with the campaign in early 2008.

“We believe that the matching payment act does permit candidates to withdraw after they have been declared eligible,” the FEC’s lawyers concluded in their new draft guidance. “Although no eligible candidate may exceed the expenditure limits, the statues simply do not say whether the commission has discretion to reverse its eligibility determination and decertify a candidate.”

Bernard Avishai, William Hartung and Dr. C.A. Rotwang weigh in at TPMCafe.

McCain promises a “dramatically different relationship” with Russia if he becomes president.

This is one I’m really looking forward to. The Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) has a new film in the works on Jack Abramoff. It’s not expected to be released until 2009, but when we caught up with Gibney last month in Austin, where he was previewing the film at Netroots Nation, he was already well-versed in the arcana of the Abramoff scandal. We got a chance to talk with Gibney about Jack and the other colorful characters in that circle: Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist, and … Dolph Lundgren:

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

An informed observer writes in …

Here’s the first reaction from the Obama side to the Wall St Journal article bruiting McCain’s tech plan: It appears he plans to give a $2 billion cash handout to 10 companies (the big employers of engineers). We can’t be sure right away how many have hired the lobbyists on the McCain campaign team.

Might be worth checking which of McCain’s lobbyists helped him put this plan together.

From the Post …

Standing behind a lectern in Michigan this week, with two trusted senators ready to do his bidding, John McCain seemed to forget for a moment that he was only running for president.

Asked about his tough rhetoric on the ongoing conflict in Georgia, McCain began: “If I may be so bold, there was another president . . .”

He caught himself and started again: “At one time, there was a president named Ronald Reagan who spoke very strongly about America’s advocacy for democracy and freedom.”

I am curious how this interlude in the campaign ends up playing. McCain’s stance on this issue shows him to be close to certifiable — not only on specific policy points but also in what I guess I would call affect. But it’s not lost on me that people without much background on what actually happened might think this shows him at his strongest, best, etc. On the other hand, he really has gone considerably beyond what’s ever been considered appropriate or acceptable for a presidential candidate. He’s worked at fairly evident cross-purposes with the president of his own party. He’s been in several times a day phone contact with one of the key players in the drama. He’s dispatching his own faux diplomatic delegations to the scene. Probably it’s all too much inside baseball to register with anyone who’s not already watching closely and decided. But who knows?

Late Update: On the other hand, the Times gets wobbly in the knees over McCain flexing his credentials.

Just how odd is John McCain’s move in sending his own delegation to Georgia? That and the day’s other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

It seems Georgian President Saakashvili’s tear of international showboating continues unabated. In a press conference with Secretary Rice currently being televised he is claiming that Europe is to blame for the Russian invasion because of the failure to grant NATO entry to Georgia. This is followed by some odd arguments about why Georgia didn’t at the least give Russia a robust pretext by launching into South Ossetia last weekend. It’s Czechoslovakia (1938 & 1968), Poland, Kuwait, Afghanistan and several other crises of the past rolled into one and we don’t greet this like standing up to Hitler and Stalin our honor is lost today and our freedom tomorrow.

I know there are a lot of people out there whose sense of personal grandiosity wants to puff this guy up into some sort of world historical figure. But he’s trouble. And to our great national misfortune the same cabal responsible for scheming the US into Iraq is working hand and glove with him to pull this country into deeper misfortune. And one of them might be president in 6 months.

You’ve probably heard a lot about how, in the wake of the Georgia crisis, we need to allow Ukraine into NATO. This is from the International Herald Tribune back in June …

According to polls conducted recently by the independent Democratic Initiatives Foundation in Kiev, 59 percent of Ukrainians would vote against joining NATO, up from 53 percent last December, while 22 percent would vote in favor, down from 32 percent.

Other polls have shown similar levels of support.

Now, one point to bear in mind. There’s a profound division between east and west in Ukraine — with the east leaning strongly toward Russia and the west leaning toward further integration with the West. So in western Ukraine, support undoubtedly runs much higher. Still, to the extent we’re dealing with Ukraine as a unified country, which we are if we’re planning on agreeing to go to war with Russia over Ukraine, then the fact that NATO membership has very thin support in the country should play into the calculus.