Now that Sen. John McCain has officially lost the presidency, Politico reminds him that he still has an audit to look forward to.

According to the report, President-elect Barack Obama, who opted out of public financing for his general election bid, will likely avoid an examination of his campaign’s books by the Federal Election Commission. Because McCain did accept public funding, an FEC audit is mandatory, at the campaign’s expense. Fortunately for him, Politico reports the McCain campaign allocated $9.4 million to pay for it.

Obama is expected to escape that level of scrutiny mostly because he declined an $84 million public grant for his campaign that automatically triggers an audit and because the sheer volume of cash he raised and spent minimizes the significance of his errors. Another factor: The FEC, which would have to vote to launch an audit, is prone to deadlocking on issues that inordinately impact one party or the other – like approving a messy and high-profile probe of a sitting president.

McCain, on the other hand, accepted the $84 million in taxpayer money, which not only barred him from raising or spending more – allowing Obama to fund many times more ads and ground operations – but also will keep his lawyers busy for a couple years explaining how every penny was spent.

I would recommend the FEC closely examine the McCain campaign’s billing of the media. This was a much-discussed potential scandal among the reporters on the McCain plane that never got reported, I suspect, for fear of getting kicked off the plane.

I never flew on the Obama plane, so I can’t say if this was an issue there as well. However, it was not uncommon to hear complaints from reporters on the McCain plane about being billed $150 for a lunch that they were not even able to eat because they were on pool duty.

Here’s a sample of some of the charges from one receipt I received from the McCain campaign:

7/7/2008 396 DENVER CENTER FOR WI-FI $191.06

7/15/2008 402 BREAKFAST $82.23

7/16/2008 411 DUKE ENERGY CENTE WI-FI $205.85

7/17/2008 414 BREAKFAST $60.58

The meals were never extravagant. Breakfast almost always consisted of a standard buffet of eggs, potatoes, sausage/bacon, coffee and juice, a selection of cereals, etc. How that could possibly cost $82 per head is quite a mystery. Similarly, $205 for wireless Internet at a rally venue seems a tad expensive.

Perhaps the campaign was just paying whatever a vendor asked, and not caring because they would simply pass the costs on to the media outlets. Either that, or the media appears to have been illegally subsidizing the campaign.

Yesterday, FOX News Vice President John Moody wrote: “If the incident turns out to be a hoax, Sen. McCain’s quest for the presidency is over, forever linked to race-baiting.”

I guess the race is over.

UPDATE: My TWI colleague Matt DeLong smartly ties this story to the case of Charles Stuart, who in 1989 murdered his pregnant wife and heightened racial tension by blaming a nonexistent black man. Obviously, the scale is very different here, but the comparison is still apt.

Also, KDKA reports that according to a Pittsburgh police commander, Ashley Todd will be facing charges.

From The Washington Post:

When mortgage giant Freddie Mac feared several years ago that Sen. John McCain was too outspoken on the issue of executive pay, it pinpointed a lobbyist known for his closeness to McCain and hired him to work with the senator.

Mark Buse, a longtime McCain adviser who had been staff director of the Senate commerce committee, signed on as a Freddie Mac lobbyist, and his firm, ML Strategies, earned $460,000 in lobbying fees in late 2003 and 2004, according to lobbying disclosures. Buse is now chief of staff at McCain’s Senate office.

Buse was one of many strategic hires made by Freddie Mac in its efforts to sew up support and manage opponents on Capitol Hill, a push that peaked in 2004 with the retention of 34 outside lobbying firms. Over the past decade, Freddie spent more than $95 million on lobbying, while its sister company, Fannie Mae, spent more than $79 million.

It would probably be wise for the McCain campaign to 86 any criticism of Sen. Barack Obama’s ties to former Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson.

With the revelations that McCain campaign manager Rick Davis, a longtime lobbyist, pocketed millions from the mortgage industry; and now this — it is clear that McCain’s ties to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are far closer, and more questionable, than Obama’s.

John McCain is pulling out of Michigan, according to two Republicans, a stunning move a month away from Election Day that indicates the difficulty Republicans are having in finding blue states to put in play.

McCain will go off TV in Michigan, stop dropping mail there and send most of his staff to more competitive states.

Martin reports that the campaign has canceled an event in Plymouth, Mich., scheduled for next week. As my colleague Ari Melber reported, a rally featuring Sens. Barack Obama and Joe Biden in Detroit last week drew nearly 30,000 people.

If Martin is correct, the McCain campaign’s decision to abandon Michigan represents the acknowlegment of a real setback for the GOP presidential candidate. The campaign clearly viewed Michigan as one of its best chances of taking a major battleground state away from the Democrats.

To that end, it devoted significant time and resources to winning Michigan, which Sen. John Kerry won in 2004. For much of the summer, the GOP presidential nominee visited the state on an almost weekly basis

The move also demonstrates the McCain campaign is seriously re-evaluating its priorities as the race enters the home stretch.

Yesterday, veteran GOP operative Mike Murphy skewered the campaign’s top staff for wasting McCain’s increasingly valuable time in Iowa this week, where Obama holds a sizeable lead in the polls. While there, McCain engaged in what has come to be viewed as a disastrous interview with the liberal editorial board of The Des Moines Register.

Perhaps more important, the abandonment of Michigan greatly increases the pressure on McCain to win Ohio and Florida — both of which President George W. Bush carried in 2004 — and recent polling shows Obama is opening up leads in both states as well.

If Obama wins either state, it becomes increasingly difficult to imagine a realistic scenario in which McCain can win the election.

One thing is certain: the size of the electoral map appears to be growing in the wrong direction for the McCain campaign.

Rick Davis, John McCain‘s campaign manager, has remained the treasurer and a corporate director of his lobbying firm this year, despite repeated statements by campaign officials that he had ended his relationship with the firm in 2006, according to corporate records.

The McCain campaign this week criticized news stories disclosing that, since 2006, Davis’s firm has been paid a $15,000-a-month consulting fee from Freddie Mac, the troubled mortgage giant recently put under federal conservatorship. The stories, published Tuesday by NEWSWEEK, The New York Times and Roll Call, reported that the consulting fees continued until last month even though, according to two sources familiar with the arrangement, neither Davis nor anybody else at his firm did any substantial work for the payments.

Stefanie Mullin, a spokesperson for the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which has taken over Freddie Mac and its sister entity Fannie Mae, confirmed Wednesday that the Davis Manafort contract is being terminated. “All lobbying activity has stopped and political consulting contracts at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are in the process of being terminated,” said Mullin.

The McCain campaign twice lashed out at The New York Times for being a “partisan paper” that is “in the tank” for Sen. Barack Obama.

It is now clear that one of two things is true: either Sen. John McCain himself lied when he said Davis “had nothing to do” with lobbying for the mortgage industry; or Davis lied to McCain about his activities.

Either way, Davis is becoming a major liability for the campaign. The two men have longstanding ties — Davis headed McCain’s presidential campaign in 2000 — so it won’t be easy for McCain to toss him under the bus.

But with these revelations coming at such a rapid pace — three so far this week — McCain will have to address his Davis problem at some point.

Without denying the veracity of The Times’ story, Schmidt lashed out today at the journalistic integrity of the newspaper and it’s alleged bias in favor of Sen. Barack Obama, during a 45-minute conference call with what seemed to be just about every political reporter in Washington.

“We are first amendment absolutists on this campaign, in that the press, and anybody who wishes to cover this race, from the blogosphere perspective or a media perspective, of course is constitutionally-protected with regard to writing whatever they want to write.

But let’s be clear and be honest with each other about something fundamental to this race, which is this: whatever The New York Times once was, it is today not, by any standard, a journalistic organization. It is a pro-Obama advocacy organization that every day attacks the McCain campaign, attacks Sen. McCain, attacks Gov. Palin and excuses Sen. Obama. There’s no level of public vetting with regard to Sen. Obama’s record, his background, his past statements. There’s no level of outrage directed at his deceitful ads.

This is an organization that is completely, totally, 150 percent in the tank for the Democratic candidate, which is their prerogative to be. But let’s not be dishonest, and call it something other than what it is. Everything that is read in The New York Times that attacks this campaign should be evaluated by the American people from that perspective: that it is an organization that has made a decision to cast aside its journalistic integrity and tradition, to advocate for the defeat of one candidate — in this case, John McCain — and advocate for the election of the other candidate, Barack Obama.”

Davis got two questions about his ties to the Homeownership Alliance, the group that was the focus of The Times’ piece. Both times, Schmidt changed the subject to a critique of The Times and the news media in general.

Schmidt also blasted reporters for not pursuing the Obama campaign’s questionable connections as aggressively as it had McCain’s. Schmidt specifically cited Sen. Joseph Biden’s son, whom Schmidt referred to as a lobbyist on behalf of the credit card and banking industry (Marc Ambinder notes The Times has published two articles on Biden’s son); Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod’s lobbying activities, and Obama’s relationship to former Weatherman William Ayers.

Schmidt alleged the existence of a “fierce campaign of intimidation” against Obama critics.

“The reality is this: you may not read it on the front page of The New York Times, but the Obama campaign is surrounded by people who have worked in the lobbying industry, and he has been able to make these charges for months with no scrutiny about the reality of his record, and the reality of the records of the people around him. We would hope that in the final 43 days of this campaign, there is a restoration to some degree of the level of symmetry in coverage on these type of issues, because the American people deserve no less.”

While reporters were looking for quotes to follow up on The Times’ article — following a string of ads released by the McCain campaign hitting Obama for his campaign’s ties to Fannie Mae –  Schmidt appeared to have pretty successfully deflected questions about Davis’ own connections to the current financial crisis by engaging in the classic now standard conservative pasttime of bashing The New York Times.

I’m reading an article from October 1996, in which a reporter named Laura Mitchell Harris asks Palin about her intentions for a shake up. How would she effectively run a city without experienced leaders? “”It’s not rocket science,” Palin said, “It’s $6 million and 53 employees.”

Note: A big thank you to the Frontiersman for opening their newsroom to me!

Update: Internet access is a bit tough to come by here, so I update frequently on twitter via phone.

Here’s what Laura’s telling us:

Gearing up for a press conference with the mayor. Only four other reporters here. (5:31 PM EST)

City of Wasilla site got 686k hits on Friday. (5:42)

City council members are not full time. (5:55) (Palin served on the council from 1992-1996.)

Press conference over. (6:05)

Evidently, it wasn’t terribly eventful. But what do you expect, when the biggest story on the front page of Wasilla’s top newspaper is about a thwarted piglet theft?