It should be noted, however, that the McCain campaign says that they will shift focus to Wisconsin, where state Attorney General and -- wait for it -- co-chair of the Wisconsin McCain campaign, J.B. Van Hollen, has filed a lawsuit against the Government Accountability Board demanding verification of all voter registrations since January of 2006.  The GAB claims full compliance with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), and that Van Hollen's lawsuit is baseless as HAVA does not require retroactive verification.  Moreover, such short notice makes the task impossible and will inevitably turn up mostly typos and name variations.  Hilariously, it appears that Van Hollen's own voter registration would not pass his registration requirements, that names match exactly.  The GAB estimates that as many as 20% of registered voters could be affected by a ruling favourable to Van Hollen's lawsuit.

The real goal, of course, is voter disenfranchisement, as one of the GOP bedrock electoral principles is the fewer voters, the better.  State Democrats point to Van Hollen's obvious conflict of interest in serving the needs of the electorate and the McCain campaign.  As usual, Van Hollen says no such conflict exists.  Really.

"There was no discussion with anybody involved in leadership with the Republican Party (or the McCain campaign) about this lawsuit before it was brought.

Which, apart from its syntactical awkwardness, is one of those statements at which one can only marvel, as though the co-chair of the state's presidential campaign need "talk" to anyone in the GOP before he would know what to do.

But even that appears to be a lie, as the chair of the Wisconsin Republican Party says that there were numerous conversations between the state GOP and the Attorney General's office.

The state Republican Party chairman said Monday he had multiple conversations with Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen's top aide before Van Hollen filed a lawsuit against the state election agency to compel expanded voter registration checks.

This won't be the end of the voter purge effort in Wisconsin.  In fact, now that the McCain campaign has decided to "focus" on that state, the effort will only intensify.

Wisconsin voters, I urge you, if you have no other metric by which to judge John McCain, just watch that interview and ask yourself that ever-so-quaint heartland, "joe six pack" question the Beltway pundits seem to think you use to judge a person's fitness for office.