VoteVets, an independent group that leans Democratic and supports Barack Obama's plan for Iraq, has just released its newest ad. This one uses Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's recent comments to criticize John McCain's position on Iraq.

In the spot, Brandon Woods, a veteran of the war, says:

What did we fight for in Iraq? I have some idea. I fought in Operation Iraqi Freedom, and "freedom" means when the Iraqi people -- and their prime minister -- ask us to make a plan to leave, we do. But Sen. McCain would occupy Iraq indefinitely, against their wishes. That's not what freedom means, that's not what we fought for. Senator -- I thought you would know better.

The ad -- which seems to me a pretty effective way of countering the McCain camp's spin on Maliki's words, and on the issue of who voters should listen to, American politicians and generals, or Iraqi politicians -- will be running on CNN and MSNBC starting on Friday. The group spent $100,000 on the buy, the New York Times' Caucus blog reports.

The Caucus also has a response from Alex Conant, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee. In his statement, Conant stuck to the standard message coming from the right these days regarding Obama and Iraq, saying:

Barack Obama voted against funding for the very troops this ad claims to represent. By continuing to oppose the surge strategy and rejecting the advice of General David Petraeus, Obama is putting political expedience ahead of victory. Rather than attacking John McCain for listening to General Petraeus, this group should ask why Obama lacked the strength to stand up for our troops during a time of war.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal had frequently been mentioned as a possible running mate for John McCain. Almost as frequently, one of the things mentioned about him was that he might make for a good matchup against Barack Obama. I've even seen a fair amount of overly reductive analysis suggesting that Jindal could be the Republicans' own version of Obama. (They're both young, they've both excited people, and they're both nonwhite. You see how it works?)

But Jindal has now taken himself out of the running for the Republican ticket; Wednesday, he gave what's known in the business as a "Shermanesque" statement. Appearing on Fox News' "Fox and Friends," Jindal said, "Let me be clear: I have said in every private and public conversation, I've got the job that I want. And I'll say again on air: I'm not going to be the vice presidential nominee or vice president. I'm going to help Senator McCain get elected, as governor of Louisiana."

Ever have one of those weeks where you just want to go home, have something strong to drink and then maybe crawl into bed until the weekend comes and brings sweet relief? I'm getting the feeling this may be one of those weeks for John McCain -- his political strength, Iraq, seems to be slipping away from him.

First, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said he supported Barack Obama's plan for Iraq. Now, a new poll from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal shows that, despite the McCain campaign's push against discussing or setting a timeline for U.S. withdrawal from that country, by a wide majority Americans are in favor of a timetable. Sixty percent of respondents think a timetable is a good idea, NBC's First Read blog reports; only 30 percent disagree.

Here's my latest video for our partners at Current. In it, I discuss legendary hedge fund man T. Boone Pickens. Pickens, who is based in Texas, specializes in investing in energy, and he has used the money he has made that way to become an important financial backer of Republican causes. In 2004, he gave $1 million to the Swift Boat Veterans and $2.5 million to the Progress for America voter fund, which supported Republicans and specifically President Bush. This year, though, Pickens has a different cause in mind.

Pickens says that he won't be giving any money to partisan political causes this year, but that instead he'll devote more than $50 million to promoting a plan he has come up with to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil. The plan involves creating wind farms -- he calls the U.S. "the Saudi Arabia of wind power" -- and shifting cars to using natural gas. Notably, he's not bullish on the idea of drilling for more oil here at home, which separates him from the Republican Party's current position on energy independence.

Given the general doldrums in which the Republican Party finds itself, the loss of Pickens' dollars can't be happy news. As blogger see-dubya wrote at Michelle Malkin's site, "Here's a prominent conservative who put up money and got personally involved on the Republican side in the 2004 election, who's now not putting his time and money into getting Republicans elected this cycle but instead is advocating for a single issue. He's not even pushing that issue from a partisan standpoint. That's got to lead to an uptick in Maalox consumption at RNC HQ."

Update: I was basing the above statement about Pickens' position on drilling for oil here in the U.S. on what he says on his Web site, but as Hot Air points out, using video of a recent appearance Pickens made on CNN, he apparently does favor extensive drilling in the U.S. My apologies.

Barack Obama's campaign has released a new, Spanish-language radio ad. Titled "Bootstraps," it makes a case for the candidate by using his personal history.

Here's the English script for the voice-over in the ad:

Some people have power and connections.

But most of us have to make our own way through life.

This is true even for the man who could become the next president ... Barack Obama.

He grew up without a father -- raised by his mother with the support of his grandparents.

Through student loans and hard work, he graduated from college.

Obama never forgot his roots ...

He worked with churches to help families get job training and after-school care for their children.

In the state Senate, he passed a law that helped reduce the welfare rolls by over 80 percent by helping families to secure jobs.

And despite the political pressure, Obama has stood with us for immigration reform and spoke out for our veterans.

It's time we had a president who understands we all deserve a chance to make our own way.

In an interview with CBS News on Tuesday, John McCain made a major mistake in recounting the history of the surge in Iraq. McCain credited it with the development of the "Anbar awakening," the movement of Sunnis in that province away from al-Qaida and toward working with the U.S. The problem? The awakening began before the surge was even announced.

The McCain campaign has -- deservedly -- been getting hammered on this, and it has struck back, somewhat angrily. "Democrats can debate whether the awakening would have survived without the surge ... but that is nothing more than a transparent effort to minimize the role of our commanders and our troops in defeating the enemy," spokesman Tucker Bounds said. (Of course, that's not what's being debated -- McCain said the surge "began" the awakening.)

Now, all of a sudden, the McCain campaign has canceled a press availability that was scheduled for Wednesday. Both the Atlantic's Marc Ambinder and Politico's Ben Smith rightly wonder about the McCain camp's reasons for doing so.

"My bet is that the campaign much prefers local and regional interviews. Us national press folks will ask qualitatively different questions -- McCain v. the press, McCain v. history, McCain v. Obamania ... The priority here in northern Pennsylvania's 10th Congressional district is on getting good local news coverage," Ambinder, who is traveling with McCain, wrote.

"McCain's avail today was the one with more promise to make news," Smith wrote, then cited a list of potentially uncomfortable things -- with the awakening first among them -- that McCain could expect to be asked about before noting, "And now he's canceled the avail."

On Tuesday, John McCain said, "I had the courage and the judgment to say I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war. It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign."

This is not a new message for his campaign. But it is unusual to see the candidate himself attacking his opponent in such terms, which are usually left to surrogates. That McCain would stoop so low raised the ire of Time's Joe Klein, who wrote, on the magazine's blog Swampland:

I can't remember a more scurrilous statement by a major party candidate. It smacks of desperation. It renews questions about whether McCain has the right temperament for the presidency. How sad ...

There is a reason why politicians who want to be President don't say these sort of things: It isn't presidential ...

McCain should be proud that he helped salvage a disastrous situation by pushing the counterinsurgency plan. It's something to run on. But, at this point, McCain must sense that it's not a winning hand. Obama, the poker player, has drawn to an inside straight: the Iraqis favor his plan over McCain's long-term bases. That must be galling. But it's no excuse to pop off the way McCain did. It was, shockingly, unpresidential.

It was the shot heard 'round the world: in an interview with German magazine Der Spiegel, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki said of U.S. troop withdrawal from his country, "U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes."

Almost immediately, the Iraqi and U.S. governments made half-hearted attempts to walk Maliki's statement back. And supporters of the war have claimed that Maliki's words were mistranslated. But the Columbia Journalism Review has a bit of detail that should quiet such claims, at least to the extent that they haven't been quieted by events since Maliki's statement that have made clear he meant what he said.

CJR's Clint Hendler quotes the magazine's Mathias Müller von Blumencron as saying, "We have a policy at Der Spiegel when we do a question and answer session to provide a transcript to our counterparts in case they want to have a minor thing changed." In this case, Hendler reports, the magazine -- which has a content-sharing agreement with Salon -- verified that Maliki's aides had received the transcript. They reported no complaints.

A reader just let me know about President Bush's latest piece of trenchant analysis of the country's economic situation. Seems Bush was at a closed fundraiser in Houston, Texas on behalf of a Republican congressional candidate last week, and had asked for the cameras to be turned off, but not everyone complied.

ABC News' Houston affiliate obtained some footage from the event, and the Houston Chronicle's Beltway Confidential blog has posted that video, which can be seen below. In it, Bush says:

Wall Street got drunk -- that's one of the reasons I asked you to turn off your TV cameras -- it got drunk and now it's got a hangover. The question is how long will it sober up and not try to do all these fancy financial instruments.

And then we've got a housing issue. Not in Houston -- evidently not in Dallas, because Laura's over there trying to buy a house today.

It's not even Labor Day yet, but one reporter for Time magazine is already speculating that John McCain's campaign may be headed for defeat in November.

Michael Grunwald argues that when the prevailing political wind, which is blowing against the GOP, is combined with McCain's own inability to find a voice and Barack Obama's natural political talent, we may have that dreaded cliché that pundits are so fond of using: a "perfect storm."

"Oh, let's just admit it: John McCain is a long shot," Grunwald writes. "He's got a heroic personal story, and being white has never hurt a presidential candidate, but on paper 2008 just doesn't look like his year. And considering what's happening off paper, it might be time to ask the question the horse-race-loving media are never supposed to ask: Is McCain a no-shot?"

Grunwald quantifies McCain's long-shot chances using figures from Emory University's Alan Abramowitz, who has whipped up a formula that, in 14 of the last 15 elections, has correctly predicted the winner of the popular vote. The measure uses three factors -- the approval ratings of the incumbent president, the economic growth rate and whether the incumbent's party has controlled the White House for two terms. McCain's score is the lowest since Jimmy Carter ran for reelection in 1980.

Of course, it's pretty easy to knock down any argument against McCain's viability at this point. In fact, you can do it in two words: It's July. Beyond that, McCain trails Obama by just over 4 points in Real Clear Politics' poll of polls. That's hardly an insurmountable lead. No one knows what will happen between now and November, an eon in political terms. And lest anyone forget, McCain has already come back from the dead once this campaign season -- in fact, he seems to relish being the underdog.

The real danger for McCain from a story like this is that it may be a self-fulfilling prophecy. It creates the narrative that his campaign may be in trouble, which can be a drag on the motivation of McCain's supporters, staffers and donors.