Given the high regard John McCain has previously said he has for Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), the former civil rights leader, you’d think Lewis’ particularly direct criticism of McCain’s recent campaign tactics would have some impact. And McCain has now said that Lewis’ remarks “stopped me in my tracks.” But maybe not in the way you’d think.

If you missed it over the weekend, here’s what Lewis said in a statement released Saturday:

Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin are sowing the seeds of hatred and division, and there is no need for this hostility in our political discourse.

During another period, in the not too distant past, there was a governor of the state of Alabama named George Wallace who also became a presidential candidate. George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who only desired to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed one Sunday morning when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.

As public figures with the power to influence and persuade, Sen. McCain and Governor Palin are playing with fire, and if they are not careful, that fire will consume us all. They are playing a very dangerous game that disregards the value of the political process and cheapens our entire democracy. We can do better. The American people deserve better.

Earlier this year, McCain had said that Lewis would be one of “three wise men” he’d consult if elected president. But he’s not taking this advice. Instead, he’s gone on the attack, suggesting it’s the Georgia Congressman who’s gone past the bounds of acceptable discourse.

“It’s unfair and it is outrageous,” McCain said during an interview with CNN on Monday. “The accusation that Congressman Lewis made is so far out of bounds and so disturbing to me. Of course it stopped me in my tracks. I never believed that John Lewis, who is an American hero, who I admire, would every make a comment of that nature. He even referred to the bombing of a church in Birmingham. That’s unacceptable. It is totally unacceptable. And of course I’m not going to accept it and I’m going to reject it… [W]hen anybody says anything like that, it is so beyond the pale that it stuns me.”

McCain also expressed indignation over Barack Obama’s failure to repudiate Lewis’ words.

It’s not quite the theme song for “Monday Night Football” — heck, it’s not even “Yes, We Can” — but Hank Williams Jr. has written and recorded a new song dedicated to this year’s Republican ticket.

Williams debuted the song, titled “McCain-Palin Tradition,” at a Palin rally in Virginia Monday. It’s sung to the tune of his song “Family Tradition,” which isn’t normally the kind of thing you’d repurpose for a campaign song, considering its lyrics, which are  about the country music establishment rejecting him in part because of his drinking and marijuana use. (“If I get stoned and sing all night long, it’s a family tradition.”)

Here are the updated lyrics, as sent to reporters by the McCain camp. Audio is at the bottom of this post.

The left wing liberal media have
Always been a real close knit family
But, most of the American People
Don’t believe em anyway ya see
Stop and think it over
Before you make your decision
If they smell something
They’re gonna come down strong
It’s a McCain–Palin tradition

Now this old Union’s got problems
That is plain to see
The Democrats bankrupted Fannie Mae N Freddie Mac
Just like 1, 2, 3
The bankers didn’t want to make all those bad loans,
But Bill Clinton said you got to
Now they want a bail out, what I’m talking about
Is a Democrat liberal who doo

CHORUS
John N Sarah tell ya
Just what they think
And they’re not gonna blink
And they’re gonna fix this country
Cause they’re just like you N ole Hank Yes John is a maverick
And Sarah fixed Alaska’s broken condition
They’re gonna go just fine
We’re headed for better times
It’s a McCain–Palin tradition

I am very proud of America’s name
But no society is perfect
And we have had our stains
If I’m down at the coffee shop and
Somebody wants to give our flag friction
We say please move on
Cause we’re standing strong
That’s an old John McCain tradition

CHORUS

Some are bound to tell you I’m
Preaching to the choir
And that is very true
And we are going even higher
Like a mama bear in Idaho
She’ll protect your family’s condition
If you mess with her cubs
She’s gonna take of the gloves
It’s an American female tradition

CHORUS

Things took a turn toward the hypothetically ugly Monday when Sarah Palin reacted to what she thought was a protest during a rally at the Richmond International Raceway in Virginia.

Supporters at the far reaches of the audience apparently couldn’t hear what Palin was saying, and began chanting “Louder, louder!” the Associated Press reports; the chant spread from there.

Perhaps too used to seeing protests at this point — and, in her defense, it’s not often that supporters interrupt the candidate they’ve come to see in this fashion — Palin responded, “I hope those protesters have the courage and honor to give veterans thanks for their right to protest.”

ACORN seems unhappy in its new role as a villain, cast by John McCain’s campaign and others on the right as being part of a constellation of shadowy leftists behind Barack Obama’s throne.

Maybe the McCain camp’s call for an investigation of ties between the group and the Obama campaign was the last straw, because on Monday ACORN started reminding people that as recently as March 2006 McCain himself appeared at an event the group sponsored. At the time, the Republican nominee was still campaigning for the immigration reform deal that nearly killed his presidential hopes.

Michelle Malkin — who is, unsurprisingly, angry about the connection — has a press release promoting the event, while Politico’s Ben Smith has a photo of McCain smiling at a room full of ACORN volunteers (visible, Smith says, in other pictures), with a statement by the group’s chief organizer:

It has deeply saddened us to see Senator McCain abandon his historic support for ACORN and our efforts to support the goals of low-income Americans.

We are sure that the extremists he is trying to get into a froth will be even more excited to learn that John McCain stood shoulder to shoulder with ACORN, at an ACORN co-sponsored event, to promote immigration reform.

“We’re proud of the campaign we’ve run, it’s been a positive campaign.”

These were the words of Steve Schmidt, who is chief operating officer for the McCain campaign, in an interview on NPR’s “Morning Edition” Monday. Asked about the barrage of vicious exclamations against Barack Obama by frenzied crowd members at McCain-Palin campaign rallies over the last week, Schmidt said, “of course we condemn it.”

Of course. Who would’ve thought that having Sarah Palin accuse Obama repeatedly of “palling around with domestic terrorists” would have whipped up any blood lust?

But don’t think it’s such a big deal, anyway. Schmidt promptly went on to insist that the kind of epithets and incitements to violence screamed by McCain-Palin devotees — “terrorist” and “kill him” and “off with his head!” — are par for the presidential campaign. The problem, Schmidt said, is that the media has been covering the McCain side unfairly:

“Now, both campaigns have thousands of people in their crowds, and we had one person yell something inappropriate at ours, and of course we condemn it. You see that happen at Obama rallies. The difference is, it seems that when it happens at a McCain rally it gets covered on television; when it happens at an Obama rally it doesn’t get covered.”

Unfortunately, NPR’s Renee Montagne seemed to let Schmidt’s nakedly spurious comments go unchallenged. I e-mailed Schmidt twice today asking him to provide specific examples from any Obama or Biden rally in which crowd members have shouted anything about McCain that would be equivalent to calling him a “terrorist” or promoting his violent death. We’d be glad to cover them, should they exist. Schmidt did not respond.

Rep. Tim Mahoney, D-Fla., finds himself in some seriously hot water today. ABC News’ investigative team is reporting that Mahoney paid $121,000 in a settlement with a former mistress he fired from his congressional staff. And that’s only the beginning.

Mahoney met the woman involved, Patricia Allen, during his 2006 campaign, and the affair reportedly began then. She volunteered on Mahoney’s campaign and later got a job on his congressional staff in Florida — her salary of $36,000 a year was paid for by taxpayer money. ABC reports that Allen was then moved to Mahoney’s campaign staff “after complaints about the affair circulated in Washington.”

When Allen learned that the married congressman was having other affairs, ABC says, she tried to break off their relationship, and told friends that Mahoney said the end of their relationship would also mean the end of her job.

The network has obtained a tape of a telephone call between the two in which Mahoney fired Allen. Here’s part of their conversation, as reported by ABC:

“You work at my pleasure … If you do the job that I think you should do, you get to keep your job. Whenever I don’t feel like you’re doing your job, then you lose your job,” Mahoney can be heard telling Allen.

“And guess what? The only person that matters is guess who? Me. You understand that. That is how life really is. That is how it works,” Mahoney says on the call.

“You’re fired,” Mahoney tells her. “Do you hear me? Don’t tell me whether it’s correct or not.”

Allen says, “Tell me why else I’m fired.”

“There is no why else,” Mahoney responds.

Later, Allen says, “You’re firing me for other reasons. You don’t, you’re not man enough to say it. So why don’t you say it.”

Allen reportedly hired a lawyer and threatened to sue her former employer; the two settled out of court for a total of $121,000. Allen was also promised a $50,000 a year job, for two years, at the agency that handles Mahoney’s campaign advertising, ABC reports.

There’s a special irony to this story. Mahoney’s seat in Congress was once occupied by former Rep. Mark Foley, who was himself brought down by a scandal that began in October 2006 with an ABC News report. And in Foley’s case, the fact that his party’s leadership in the House had apparently looked the other way when it came to the errant congressman hurt Republicans that year. This year, it could be the Democratic Party that gets hurt by the connection to Mahoney.

ABC reports:

Senior Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives, including Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-IL), the chair of the Democratic Caucus, have been working with Mahoney to keep the matter from hurting his re-election campaign, Mahoney staffers said.

A spokesperson for Emanuel denies that account, but said Emanuel did confront Mahoney “upon hearing a rumor” about an affair in 2007 and “told him he was in public life and had a responsibility to act accordingly.” The spokesperson added that it was a “private conversation” that had nothing to do with Mahoney’s re-election prospects.

Emanuel’s spokesperson said Emanual had not had any further contacts with Mahoney on the subject and did not know the woman involved worked on Mahoney’s Congressional staff until informed by ABC News.

It’s no secret that the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page is in the tank for Republicans, and often makes factually dubious claims and arguments in arguing for its position. But it’s not often that it says something so silly that it actually makes me laugh out loud — that happened today, though.

The editorial, which is on Barack Obama’s tax plans, begins this way:

One of Barack Obama’s most potent campaign claims is that he’ll cut taxes for no less than 95% of “working families.” He’s even promising to cut taxes enough that the government’s tax share of GDP will be no more than 18.2% — which is lower than it is today.

It’s a clever pitch, because it lets him pose as a middle-class tax cutter while disguising that he’s also proposing one of the largest tax increases ever on the other 5%. But how does he conjure this miracle, especially since more than a third of all Americans already pay no income taxes at all?

John McCain has also made this claim. It is, frankly, ridiculous, a little like a child’s attempt at a zinger — they think they’ve got you, that this point is devastating and proves that Obama is a liar. Except it’s, in this context, a meaningless statistic. It’s totally irrelevant.

Why? Two words: Payroll taxes.

Notice the qualifier the WSJ used in that last sentence? Not “more than a third of all Americans already pay no taxes at all,” but more than a third of all Americans already pay no income taxes at all.”

But Obama’s plan just doesn’t deal with income taxes, as the author or authors of that editorial know perfectly well. And with good reason — as William G. Gale and Jeffrey Rohaly of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center pointed out in 2003, most Americans pay more in payroll taxes than they do in income taxes:

In 2003, workers and employers each owe 6.2 percent Social Security tax on the first $87,000 of a worker’s earnings, and a 1.45 percent Medicare tax on all wages. Although the statutory obligation to pay payroll taxes is split between the worker and the employer, most economists believe that workers bear most or all of the economic burden.

About 74 percent of filers owe more payroll taxes (including the employer portion) than individual income taxes, including 85 percent of those with income below $40,000. Among returns with wage earnings, 83 percent have higher payroll taxes than income taxes, including 97 percent of those with AGI below $40,000 and 90 percent of those with income below $100,000. If only half of employer payroll taxes are attributed to workers, 48 percent of filers and 53 percent of wage earners pay more in payroll taxes than income taxes, including 76 percent of wage earners with income below $40,000.

Sometimes I’m willing to give people credit and assume that they don’t know about the falsity of claims like this. But really — this editorial was written by people who work for the Wall Street Journal. Presumably they know about the details of tax policy. (If not, well, that’s even more embarrassing.) So in this case I just wonder: Does the paper think its readers, who presumably also know a little something about tax policy, won’t pick up on this?

Naturally, this claim is being gleefully — and uncritically — repeated throughout the right blogosphere today.

Levi Johnston, Sarah Palin’s future son-in-law, has broken his silence and given an interview to the Associated Press.

• Johnston on the rumors about his fiancé, Palin’s daughter Bristol, specifically that the two are being forced to wed: “None of that’s true. We both love each other. We both want to marry each other. And that’s what we are going to do.”
• Johnston on how the McCain campaign is treating him, after its initial advice that he avoid the media: “They’re not telling me anything right now. It’s pretty chill.”
• Johnston on joining his future mother-in-law on the campaign trail: “At first, I was nervous. Then I was like, ‘Whatever.’”

Johnston also said friends created his MySpace page, which briefly gained him some infamy, as he was described on it as a “fuckin’ redneck.”

John McCain knows a lot of people are writing off him and his campaign, but he remains — publicly, at least — optimistic. In a speech to be delivered Monday, McCain had this to say, according to prepared remarks:

Let me give you the state of the race today. We have 22 days to go. We’re six points down. The national media has written us off. Senator Obama is measuring the drapes, and planning with Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid to raise taxes, increase spending, take away your right to vote by secret ballot in labor elections, and concede defeat in Iraq. But they forgot to let you decide. My friends, we’ve got them just where we want them.

Bill Kristol, meanwhile, thinks otherwise. In his latest column for the New York Times, the conservative writer says, “It’s time for John McCain to fire his campaign.

“He has nothing to lose. His campaign is totally overmatched by Obama’s. The Obama team is well organized, flush with resources, and the candidate and the campaign are in sync. The McCain campaign, once merely problematic, is now close to being out-and-out dysfunctional. Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic. If the race continues over the next three weeks to be a conventional one, McCain is doomed.”

Interesting headline on a McClatchy article published Sunday: “Daring to utter the ‘L’ word: Obama on track to a landslide.”

In the piece, reporter Steven Thomma writes:

Barring a dramatic change in the political landscape over the next three weeks, Democrats appear headed toward a decisive victory on Election Day … The victory would send Barack Obama to the White House and give him larger Democratic majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate — and perhaps a filibuster-proof margin there.

That could mark a historic realignment of the country’s politics on a scale with 1932 or 1980, when the out party was given power it held for a generation, and used it to transform government’s role in American society.

Thomma has some guts making this sort of prediction. Personally, I always try to avoid looking into the future like this, because even with just a few weeks left in the election, anything can happen.

Of course, by the same token, there’s good reason to believe that what Thomma predicts will come true. To see that, one need only look at another recent article, this one in the New York Times, about the worry inside the GOP over John McCain’s current campaign woes. The Times quotes Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman who was a prominent supporter of McCain’s in 2000 but supported Mitt Romney during this year’s primaries, as saying, “The main thing [McCain] needs to do is focus on a single message — a single, concise or clear-cut message, and stick with that over the next 30 days, regardless of what happens.

“He’s had a lot of attack lines. But it’s time to choose.”

The paper also cites Saul Anuzis, who chairs the Republican Party in Michigan. McCain recently decamped from that state, giving up after months of trying to swing it from the Democratic column. (It went for John Kerry in 2004.)  “I think you’re seeing a turning point,” Anuzis told the Times. “You’re starting to feel real frustration because we are running out of time. Our message, the campaign’s message, isn’t connecting.”