Truthdig reports that respectable news organizations have questioned the claims as racially charged and misleading:

"Americans need to ask themselves if they've ever befriended an unrepentant terrorist," says McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds. The AP called similar remarks by running mate Sarah Palin "racially tinged" and Time said the claim was "simply wrong," but the McCain campaign shows no signs of backing down from its new strategy.

Though the campaign -- especially McCain running-mate Sarah Palin -- pushed the theme all weekend, it was mysteriously absent from Tuesday's town hall meeting in Nashville, leading Obama himself to throw down with a dare to McCain during an interview with ABC's Charlie Gibson, stating that if McCain had an accusation to make, he should make it when they're both in the same place.

Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly's Political Animal put it this way:

One almost gets the sense that Barack Obama wants John McCain to confront him directly with some of these guilt-by-association attacks...He's practically questioning McCain's fortitude, calling him out for using sleazy tactics behind Obama's back, but not to his face.

That didn't stop the McCain camp from putting out another ad that leads with Ayers, and somehow mixes in the subprime mortgage meltown, somehow trying to lay that mess of deregulatory debauchery at Obama's feet.  Salon's Alex Koppelman reports that the ad is lated to run "nationally".  [Video included at link.]

As mentioned, on the stump, the purveyor of the Ayers smear is none other than Sarah Palin, who appears to have some pretty interesting friends of her own, according to Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert writing at Salon.  Take, for example, a guy called "Black Helicopter Steve" Stoll, "a John Birch Society activist," according to Blumenthal and Neiwert, whom Palin tried to appoint to a vacant city council seat in Wasilla.  Or Mark Chryson, the former chairman of the the secessionist, who showed the reporters the  9-millimeter Makarov PM pistol he keeps in the glove compartment of his truck, adding, ""I've got enough weaponry to raise a small army in my basement."  Todd Palin belonged to the Alaska independence Party for seven years.

If that's not enough to give one pause about the company Palin keeps, check out Michelle Goldberg's piece in The Nation about the churches Palin attends, and their political pull.

It wasn't until the 1990s that local churches like the Wasilla Assembly of God, which Palin grew up attending, became aggressively political. A few years before Palin became mayor, a group of preachers confronted the school board with questions about social issues that had never before surfaced in local politics, according to O'Hara, who wrote first for the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman and then for the Anchorage Daily News. "They started asking me, 'Would you allow a homosexual to teach in schools?' and 'Do you favor abortion?'" she said. "At the time, I didn't know what was coming. I said, 'This is not a school board issue. We have overcrowding. We have funding problems.'" The last time O'Hara ran, conservative pastors mounted an effort to defeat her, saying she favored hiring homosexuals, but they failed. Nevertheless, in 1996, feeling increasingly alienated in a place she'd lived for twenty-five years, she quit the school board and moved to more liberal Anchorage.

If those revelations weren't enough bad news for Camp McCain, the week ended with word that Christopher Buckley, the conservative son of  William F. Buckler, founder of the modern conservative movement, has endorsed Barack Obama, prompting Kevin Drum to write at Mother Jones:

The modern GOP is the party of Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Karl Rove, George Bush, Dick Cheney, John McCain, and Sarah Palin. It's not just off the rails. It doesn't even know where the rails are anymore.

--Adele M. Stan

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting
about John McCain. Visit JohnMccain.NewsLadder.net
for a complete list of articles on McCain.  And for the best progressive reporting on two
critical issues, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net.

JohnMcCain.NewsLadder.net is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.  Adele M. Stan is executive editor of The Media Consortium's syndicated reporting project.