From Isikoff in Newsweek …

One of John McCain’s most celebrated achievements in recent years was his crusade to block a Pentagon contract with Boeing for a new fleet of midair refueling tankers. Incensed over what he denounced as a taxpayer “rip-off,” McCain launched a Senate probe that uncovered cozy relations between top Air Force officials and Boeing execs. A top Air Force officer and Boeing’s CFO ended up in prison. Most significantly, the Air Force was forced to cancel the contract–saving taxpayers more than $6 billion, McCain asserted.

But last week, McCain’s subsequent effort to redo the tanker deal was dealt a setback. Government auditors ruled that the Air Force made “significant errors” when it rebid the contract and awarded the $35 billion project to Boeing’s chief rival, partners European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co. (or EADS) and Northrop Grumman. It’s likely the Air Force will have to redo the bid yet again, which analysts say will delay the replacement of the fleet’s 1950s-era refueling tankers. The auditors’ ruling has also cast light on an overlooked aspect of McCain’s crusade: five of his campaign’s top advisers and fund-raisers–including Tom Loeffler, who resigned last month as his finance co-chairman, and Susan Nelson, his finance director–were registered lobbyists for EADS.

Read the rest here.

MoveOn wants to hold Obama to his campaign’s 2007 promise that he would filibuster any FISA bill that included lawsuit immunity for the telecom companies. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Sunday Roundup.

Francis H. Powers, the leading GOP candidate for retiring Rep. Vito Fossella’s Staten Island seat, died Sunday of natural causes at the age of 67.

From WaPo …

Al-Hurra — “the Free One” in Arabic — is the centerpiece of a U.S. government campaign to spread democracy in the Middle East. Taxpayers have spent $350 million on the project. But more than four years after it began broadcasting, the station is widely regarded as a flop in the Arab world, where it has struggled to attract viewers and overcome skepticism about its mission.

Beyond all the dingbat problems with Bush-era ‘public diplomacy, this seems like the key point …

According to critics, the U.S. government miscalculated in assuming that al-Hurra could repeat the success of Radio Free Europe during the Cold War, when information-starved listeners behind the Iron Curtain tuned in on their shortwave radios.

Al-Hurra, by contrast, faces cutthroat competition. About 200 other stations beam Arabic-language programming to satellite dishes reaching even the poorest neighborhoods in the Middle East and North Africa. More rivals loom, including an Arabic-language news channel that the BBC is set to launch this year.

Symptomatic of a much broader and more profound failure of comprehension.

Late Update: It turns out that ProPublica, the new non-profit investigative journalism site that is among other things the new home of TPM alum Paul Kiel, also has an extensive new report on the al Hurra trainwreck. It would seem here too there’s plenty of Bush administration failure to go around.

With all the time John McCain is spending these days lamenting the harsh treatment Sen. Clinton got during the campaign and reaching out to her supporters, I was reminded of this special moment of McCain’s from last November …

For the first time, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) loses the endorsement of the Alaska AFL-CIO. That and the other latest political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

Turns out the Bush Administration is actually good at something: creating an anti-American TV and radio network (and blowing through tons of cash to do it).

MoDo takes one on the chin from the NYT public editor.

I happened yesterday on this article in The Atlantic by Jonathan Rauch about the Chevy Volt. GM is throwing tons of resources into a breakneck schedule to produce an electric powered car that is dramatically more advanced than the hybrids currently on the market. The question is whether they can have the technology developed in time for release date.

It’s sort of inspiring to see an American company try something so ambitious.

On a related note, I’ve been finding myself thinking more and more about alternative energy sources — or more specifically non-fossil fuel energy sources. Politically, I’ve always been pretty progressive on environmental issues. I was reared to it in a way since my father was a marine botanist — so these concerns and points of interest were some of the building blocks of my childhood. But for all that, as I got older and thought more about politics and began to write about it for a public audience, I cannot say it’s ever been a real focus for me. But that’s changed over the last several months: most of the key issues that face us today, from environmental issues proper, to our geostrategic position vs. other great powers and the future of our economy, all turn on our reliance on fossil fuels. Not just ‘foreign’ ones, all of them. It’s not hard to imagine historians of 50 or 100 years from now writing the history of our period — stretching back almost forty years now — around that central focus.

When you’re the pro-life Republican in the race, it’s just not good when your ex-girlfriend comes forward to confirm that you pressured her into having an abortion — especially when it was only seven years ago.