We’ve covered extensively the GOP’s obsession with “voter fraud” as a means to reduce ballot access and otherwise lower turnout, especially among minorities and the elderly. A favored tool for this purpose has been requiring voters to produce some sort of identification at the polls, and today the Supreme Court upheld one of the strictest of these photo ID laws, the one in Indiana.

Sen. McCain’s extreme makeover continues. And Sunday show yakkers are eager to sign on …

High-res version at Veracifier.com.

SurveyUSA has their first post-PA poll of Indiana and it has Hillary Clinton up by 9 points over Barack Obama. That’s down from a 16 point margin in mid-April.

Bob Schaffer, the Republican senate candidate in Colorado, gave an interview to PolitickerCO.com and roughly the first half of the interview seems to have been Schaffer refusing to answer any questions about his advocacy of the Marianas guest worker program or his junket to the Marianas on Jack Abramoff’s dime. Schaffer now seems to be claiming that the trip was not in fact funded and organized by Jack Abramoff’s lobbying operation.

The reporter, Jeremy Pelzer, didn’t seem to be as prepared as he needed to be if Schaffer was going to deny all the facts of the case. But this one is pretty straight forward — Abramoff used the ‘Traditional Values Coalition’ as a front to launder money for setting up various trips and events as part of his lobbying connection.

The rather abundant evidence that Schaffer helped execute Abramoff’s strategy in hearings on the Marianas also makes the Abramoff-Schaffer connection pretty clear.

TPM Reader PP writes in and asks my view on Obama’s interview on Fox since it’s generated a lot of heat from progressive blogosphere. My take is that it was stupid for an unnamed Obama advisor to tell TPM Election Central’s Greg Sargent that Obama was going to “take Fox on” in the Sunday interview, since obviously he didn’t. But I think it would have been even stupider for Obama to have actually done so.

I’m totally down with the idea that Fox News is an immense pile of crap and essentially a fraudulent operation. And for that reason I think it’s in general a good idea for Democrats to shun the network. Certainly, Fox shouldn’t be hosting any Democratic debates since it essentially operates as an arm of the Republican National Committee. But once Obama agreed to sit down for an interview with Chris Wallace I think it would have been crazy to try to make it into some sort of ‘take on fox-fest’. Totally, nuts.

Presumably Obama wanted to introduce himself to people who actually watch Fox. And getting in a tussle with the moderator of their show would not have been the way to do it, especially since he’s campaigning on an ability to reach across the partisan divide, and so forth. In addition, it’s virtually impossible to have that work when the people you’re ‘taking on’ control the editing.

As for whether he should have gone on in the first place, I have mixed feelings. It was pretty sickening watching the Fox tease the interview in advance by playing up the idea that he’d finally caved and was shamed into doing so with their Obama clock or whatever it was. But at the end of the day, all I really find fault with was saying Obama was going to do something he wasn’t.

U.S. Versus Them: How a Half-Century of Conservatism Has Undermined America’s Security, by Peter Scoblic, is up for discussion in this week’s edition of the TPMCafe Book Club.

Scoblic kicks things off arguing that neo-conservativsm isn’t an aberration, but an extension of basic manichean conservative foreign policy.

Jacob Heilbrunn, author of They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, responds that Scoblic is too quick to exculpate the left for perpetuating American exceptionalism.

At the end of today’s TPMtv Sunday show roundup episode, Howard Dean and Tim Russert are going back and forth about the DNC’s McCain 100 years ad and after Dean’s made his point, Russert comes back at Dean saying “and yet Sen. McCain is tied or beating both Clinton or Obama in most of the national polls.”

The truth I think is that he’s basically tied against both Democratic candidates. But ‘basically’ is just an issue of the margin of error. I could run you through all the most recent polls. But a good shorthand is simply to look at the composite numbers put together by Prof. Charles Franklin at pollster.com, which shows both Clinton and Obama slightly ahead of McCain.

It’s a minor point. But false facts to spin an argument is always worth calling out.

The pro-Hillary 527 — American Leadership Project — is putting $700,000 into a new Indiana TV ad targeting Obama on the economy.

Hillary polls better among independents against McCain than Obama does, according to the latest AP survey.

It seems the AP has fallen for the McCain campaign’s and the RNC’s effort to prevent anyone from using McCain’s own words against him during the 2008 presidential campaign. As noted earlier, what the McCain campaign is pushing for here is a standard in which any negative ad targeting McCain must be delivered with the McCain camp’s own spin included in order to be within bounds — a standard few politicians, to say the least, have ever been granted. And even though the political press has been highly indulgent of the McCain campaign on this issue, I don’t think I’ve seen any news organization so egregiously buy into McCain’s false statements as the Associated Press.

The AP article lede reads: “The Republican National Committee demanded Monday that television networks stop running a television ad by the Democratic Party that falsely suggests John McCain wants a 100-year war in Iraq.”

So, as you can see, the AP begins by stating as fact the McCain camp’s claim that the ad is false. Then it actually directly misstates what the ad says.

As you’ll remember, there was some jousting a few weeks back over whether it was accurate to say that McCain is willing to continue the ‘war’ in Iraq for 50 or 100 years. This is because McCain adds the caveat that it’s fine with him because he thinks that the occupation will soon be like our longstanding presence in Germany, Japan and Korea in which we have a substantial troop presence but no soldiers dying in hostile action since the population and governments are content to have us there. So is it really ‘war’ or only ‘occupation’ or ‘presence’?

The truth is that McCain’s wishful thinking doesn’t change the fact that he’s saying he’s happy to have US troops stay in Iraq essentially forever (a century, in political terms, is essentially forever), something very few Americans think makes any sense. But the ad doesn’t even get into this question of definitions or McCain’s special pleading about whether it’s ‘war’ or ‘occupation’ or ‘presence’ or whatever. The ad literally just has McCain speaking in his own voice.

In case you haven’t seen it, here’s the ad …

The ad begins with a questioner at a New Hampshire townhall saying to McCain, “President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for fifty years … ” McCain responds, “Maybe a 100.” And then later, “That’d be fine with me.” It doesn’t get into ‘war’ or ‘presence’ or any of the second or third order spin. It just has McCain’s own words. And not only does the RNC and the McCain campaign say that’s false and unacceptable but the AP agrees it’s unacceptable too.

If you have questions about the full context and the multiple times McCain made this pledge, I encourage you to watch this episode of TPMtv from earlier this month where we play the full video of his different statements with every word of context …

The rub here is this: McCain does not want to leave Iraq. Period. He wants tens of thousands of troops to stay in Iraq permanently. He made a big point of this during the primaries when it was politically advantageous to do so. And he followed up with a qualifier explaining that it’s okay because our occupation of Iraq will soon be like our presence in Germany and Japan where nobody gets killed. But there’s little reason to believe our occupation of Iraq will ever be like that. We tried this in Lebanon; the French tried this in Algeria; the British even tried it in Iraq. Western countries have a very poor history garrisoning Muslim countries in the Middle East. Iraq isn’t like Germany or Japan, not simply because of the history of the country but because both countries accepted decades-long US deployments as a counterweight to threatening neighbors. The relevant point is that McCain believes American troops should stay in Iraq permanently. His pipe dream about Iraq turning into Germany doesn’t change that. It just shows his substitution of wishful thinking for sound strategic judgment.

If there is an unfair supposition at work here, there is a simple way to find out. Someone should ask McCain how long he’s willing to have us stay in Iraq even if we are sustaining casualties. Since he believes it is in our strategic interests to stay there on a permanent basis I doubt very much he’ll say that in that case he’d only be comfortable staying two or five or some other relatively short span of years. That is because he believe we should stay there on a permanent basis, ideally with no casualties but with casualties if that’s what it takes. The New Yorker’s Rick Hertzberg put it all quite elegantly back in January just after McCain started saying this. “McCain,” he wrote, “wants to stay in Iraq until no more Americans are getting killed, no matter how long it takes and how many Americans get killed achieving that goal–that is, the goal of not getting any more Americans killed. And once that goal is achieved, we’ll stay.”

McCain’s position is miles away from where the American people are on Iraq. It’s no mystery why his campaign doesn’t want the Democrats to be harping on this point. But the AP doesn’t need to spin or fib on McCain’s behalf.

Beyond all this there is still a simpler point. There is a way foreign policy questions are hashed out in quiet symposia and a way they are fought over in political campaigns. They are not the same. McCain and his surrogates are demanding something no one else gets: namely, the right to have their words repeated only in their fullest context and most generous, most amply spun interpretation. He wants his own set of rules, an election with a stacked deck. If the Democrats have any intention of winning this race, that’s not something they can possibly accede to, or accept reporters going along with.