Do you want to know why John McCain looked so horrified yesterday when he had to answer questions about the NY Times story? It's interesting to me because the RW Noise machine would like nothing better than to attack the NY Times. It's their favorite pastime after all.

Are you ready? Because he now knows that reporters will be digging into his business for the past decade or so to examine how far and deep his love affair with lobbyists actually goes. Immediately, Newsweek busted John McCain over his denials that he spoke to anyone at Paxson or Alcalde & Fay.

A sworn deposition that Sen. John McCain gave in a lawsuit more than five years ago appears to contradict one part of a sweeping denial that his campaign issued this week to rebut a New York Times story about his ties to a Washington lobbyist.

But that flat claim seems to be contradicted by an impeccable source: McCain himself. "I was contacted by Mr. Paxson on this issue," McCain said in the Sept. 25, 2002, deposition obtained by NEWSWEEK. "He wanted their approval very bad for purposes of his business. I believe that Mr. Paxson had a legitimate complaint."...read on

I'll point to Glenn Greenwald's piece now:

In issuing a very specific, point-by-point denial of the NYT story, McCain specifically denied that he ever talked to Paxson's CEO, Lowell Paxson (or any other Paxson representative) about this matter:

No representative of Paxson or Alcalde and Fay discussed with Senator McCain the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proceeding. . . . No representative of Paxson or Alcalde and Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC regarding this proceeding.

But Newsweek's Mike Isikoff today obtained (or was given) the transcripts of deposition testimony which McCain himself gave under oath several years ago in litigation over the constitutionality of McCain-Feingold. In that testimony, McCain repeatedly and unequivocally stated the opposite of what he said in this week's NYT denial: namely, that he had unquestionably spoken with Paxson himself over the pending FCC matter:

While McCain said "I don't recall" if he ever directly spoke to the firm's lobbyist about the issue -- an apparent reference to Iseman, though she is not named -- "I'm sure I spoke to [Paxson]." ...read on

Check out Slate's Believability scale video during John's presser and watch as McCain's stock plummets.

Now there's another issue surfacing. John McCain refused to talk about the NY Times story today.

After no one in the audience brought up the issue, the national press tried to keep it alive, by asking him about his campaign's assaults on the Times. McCain did not bite. "I do not have any more comment about this issue," McCain said, noting that he had answered questions about the Times story Thursday morning. "I do not intend to address the issue further."

Here's the scary part of the story.

And it seemed to work.

Say what? What an embarrassing admission. Michael Scherer and the rest of the press should not let this happen and we shouldn't either. They need to treat this story like they would if they were talking to Dana Perino.

It was, all in all, a good morning, following a difficult day. The campaign is moving on, beyond the tension and relative silence that typified yesterday afternoon, when his most interesting public utterance was "Play Abba."

Are you kidding me? Michael Scherer is acting as if the press will be derelict in their duty "my friends." And that would be a shame.