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This morning, commuters in New York City were handed free copies of what appeared to be copies of the New York Times. In fact, what they had been given was a surprisingly elaborate forgery: A fake version of the paper dated July 4th, 2009 that offers as its lead story "IRAQ WAR ENDS."

Other headlines in the paper, which is full of stories that, if true, would be cause for celebration among liberals, include "USA Patriot Act Repealed" and "National Health Insurance Act Passes"; the fake newspaper's slogan is "All the news we hope to print."

Here's a video from the creators of the fake newspaper explaining what they did. They claim 1.2 million papers were printed and that the planning took six months:

New York Times Special Edition Video News Release - Nov. 12, 2008 from H Schweppes on Vimeo. The fake paper also has a Web site with all of its articles, which is here, though it has been loading slowly this morning. Gawker traces the effort to a "longtime liberal prank group" known as The Yes Men.

This morning, commuters in New York City were handed free copies of what appeared to be the New York Times. In fact, what they had been given was a surprisingly elaborate forgery: A fake version of the paper dated July 4th, 2009 that offers as its lead story "IRAQ WAR ENDS."

Other headlines in the paper, which is full of stories that, if true, would be cause for celebration among liberals, include "USA Patriot Act Repealed" and "National Health Insurance Act Passes"; the fake newspaper's slogan is "All the news we hope to print."

Here's a video from the creators of the fake newspaper explaining what they did. (Note: The video includes an interview in front of the real New York Times building that appears staged, and other interviews may be as well.) They claim 1.2 million papers were printed and that the planning took six months:


New York Times Special Edition Video News Release - Nov. 12, 2008 from H Schweppes on Vimeo.

The fake paper also has a Web site with all of its articles, which is here, though it has been loading slowly this morning. (That's a screengrab of the Web site above.) Gawker traces the effort to a "longtime liberal prank group" known as The Yes Men.

The war between the McCain campaign and the New York Times continues.

The campaign is livid about a Times story out today called “Husband’s Hopes Fuel Cindy McCain’s Journey,” deeming it an “unprecedented trash report.”

“Under the guise of a 'profile' piece, the New York Times fails to cover any new ground or provide any discernible value to the reader other than to portray Mrs. McCain in the worst possible light,” McCain-Palin spokesman Michael Goldfarb said in a statement released Saturday morning. “Though Mrs. McCain’s battle with drug addiction and even her miscarriages are again reported, the paper entirely ignores a life devoted to family and charity work in the most impoverished and violent corners of the world -- except when a detail can be quibbled with so as to imply some kind of deceit. This campaign made every effort to share personal accounts of Mrs. McCain’s good works with the paper, but apparently they were deemed unfit for publication in the New York Times. This is gutter journalism at its worst -- an unprecedented attack on a presidential candidate's spouse.”

Here’s a taste of the Times story:

Mrs. McCain, 54, describes herself as her husband’s best friend, though for the last two decades they have mostly lived apart, she in Arizona, he in Washington. She seemed like an ideal political partner initially, giving Mr. McCain a home state, money and contacts that jump-started his career. But as the years passed, Mrs. McCain also became a liability at times. She played a role in the Keating Five savings-and-loan scandal, and just as her husband was rehabilitating his reputation, she was caught stealing drugs from her nonprofit organization to feed her addiction to painkillers. She has a vast fortune that sets the McCains apart from most other Americans, a problem in a presidential race that hinges on economic anxieties. She can be imprecise: she has repeatedly called herself an only child, for instance, even though she has two half-siblings, and has provided varying details about a 1994 mercy mission to Rwanda.

Along with its statement, the McCain campaign also released what it says is a Facebook message by New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor to a 16 year-old schoolmate of John and Cindy McCain's daughter Bridget, “trolling for information on Mrs. McCain,” as well as a letter from Johd Dowd, Cindy McCain’s attorney, to Times Managing Editor Bill Keller. Both are below.

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After The Drudge Report broke the news that The New York Times had rejected an opinion piece submitted by John McCain on his views on the military situation in Iraq, the newspaper issued the following statement:

"It is standard procedure on our Op-Ed page, and that of other newspapers, to go back and forth with an author on his or her submission. We look forward to publishing Senator McCain's views in our paper just as we have in the past. We have published at least seven Op-Ed pieces by Senator McCain since 1996. The New York Times endorsed Senator McCain as the Republican candidate in the presidential primaries. We take his views very seriously."

The New York Times' rejection of the McCain piece on Friday came less than a week after it published an op-ed on Iraq penned by presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama.

McCain's submission to the Times touted the success of the troop surge and also heavily criticizes Obama, according to The Drudge Report.

"Senator Obama has said that he would consult our commanders on the ground and Iraqi leaders, but he did no such thing before releasing his 'plan for Iraq.,'" McCain wrote. "Perhaps that’s because he doesn’t want to hear what they have to say."

Yesterday, the New York Times ran a story on what it characterized as a "Democratic convention effort marred by costly setbacks and embarrassing delays."

"With the Denver convention less than two months away, problems range from the serious — upwardly spiraling costs on key contracts still being negotiated — to the mundane, like the reluctance of local caterers to participate because of stringent rules on what delegates will be eating, down to the color of the food," wrote the Times.

The story painted a damning picture of the planning of the event, and also suggested that the campaign of Barack Obama was frustrated with "organizers who they believe spent too freely, planned too slowly and underestimated actual costs."

The story was so damning, in fact, that it has prompted a response from Democratic National Committee chair Howard Dean and Democratic National Convention Committee C.E.O. Leah D. Daughtry, who suggested that it was "gross misrepresentation of the groundwork that has been laid to date."

Dean and Daughtry wrote that contrary to the Times' claims, the convention has been well-managed and costs and contracts are under control.

"Despite uninformed criticism in the New York Times and the city’s worries about the color and fried nature of food among other things, our focus remains on putting on an historic event that helps keep Senator Barack Obama on a path to victory in November," they concluded. "When August comes, the eyes of the world will be watching. And we’ll be ready."

The DNC and DNCC have struggled to raise money during this election cycle, in part because the Democratic candidates themselves attracted unprecedented fundraising support, drying up some of the DNC and DNCC's traditional sources in the process. Convention fundraising has also been slowed by the fact that the Obama campaign doesn't allow the DNC or groups related to it to take money from corporate lobbyists.

(That hasn't, however, stopped both the Republican and Democratic conventions from shaping up as what the Los Angeles Times characterizes as "a multimillion-dollar infomercial underwritten by corporations and lobbyists whose influence both presidential candidates decry." Click here for more on that.)

In a conference call today on the Democrats' decision to hold the final day of the convention at Invesco Field (not the Pepsi Center, where the rest of the convention will be held), Dean suggested that the DNC wouldn't be able to make the move if the convention were over budget.

In a full-page ad on page A-9 of the New York Times this morning, a political action committee called WomenCount urges Clinton to stay in the presidential race until “every vote is cast, every vote is counted and we know that our voices are heard.” From the ad:

“We are the women of this nation. We are rich and poor, young and old, married with children, married without children, single moms, gay, straight and widowed. We are every color. We are of every religion. We are from all political parties. We love our country. Now more than ever, so much of what we cherish is at risk – our homes and out health, our safety and our planet, our children and our values. We raise our voices, in one glorious, defiant chorus to tell the world that these times demand strength, courage and vision. And that is why we stand united in our unwavering support for Hillary Clinton.”

Here we go indeed. The McCain campaign has turned what looked to be a potentially devastating story into, what else, a fund-raising opportunity. In an appeal sent to supporters today, campaign manager Rick Davis writes:

"Well, here we go. We could expect attacks were coming; as soon as John McCain appeared to be locking up the Republican nomination, the liberal establishment and their allies at the New York Times have gone on the attack. Today's front-page New York Times story is particularly disgusting - an un-sourced hit-and-run smear campaign designed to distract from the issues at stake in this election. With John McCain leading a number of general-election polls against Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the New York Times knew the time to attack was now, and they did. We will not allow their scurrilous attack against a great American hero to stand."

Mitt Romney used the New York Times' endorsement of John McCain last month as proof that the Arizona Senator was not a true conservative. Now that the paper has published it's controversial story about his alleged relationship with a Washington lobbyist, it may be the push conservatives need to convince them he is. Or at the very least, begin the healing.

In his opening comments on his nationally syndicated radio show today Rush Limbaugh, a fierce McCain critic throughout the primaries, claimed vindication. Limbaugh noted he had long predicted that the media, who McCain has had an exceptionally close relationship to, would "turn" on him if he won the nomination. Limbaugh did not embrace McCain but offered that the episode offers an educational opportunity for the senator.

"They are what they are," Limbaugh said of the paper. "A snake is a snake, a tiger is a tiger, the New York Times is the New York Times … the important question for John McCain today is, is he going to learn the right lesson from this? And what is the lesson? The lesson is, liberals are to be defeated. You cannot walk across the aisle with them, you cannot reach across the aisle, you cannot welcome their media members on your bus and get all cozy with them and expect eternal love from them. You are a Republican. Whether you are a conservative Republican or not, you are a Republican. And at some point, the people you cozy up to … are going to turn on you. … And if the right lesson is not learned from this, it will have proved to be of no value."

Talk-show host Laura Ingraham, another McCain critic, likewise did not race to offer a defense of McCain but blamed the Times of hit-and-run-journalism. "You wait until it’s pretty much beyond a doubt that he’s going to be the Republican nominee, and then you let it drop — drop some acid in the pool, contaminate the whole pool. That’s what The New York Times thinks," Igraham said according to a report in the Politico.

Conservative talker Sean Hannity tolde viewers of his television show last night that the story was not believable. "I have read this New York Times piece now three times,” Hannity said according to Politico. “And what I see here is nothing but innuendo, rumor. They want the reader to draw conclusions.”

And GOP consultant Greg Mueller tells CBSNews.com that this will only help McCain among conservatives. "It was a poor and revealing attempt by the New York Times to try and smear McCain at a time when he is starting to define Obama as an inexperienced liberal, so the New York Times takes up for Obama's defense," Mueller said in an e-mail. "If anything, this helps energize conservatives to come to McCain's aide in beating back attacks by The New York Times and other liberal media outlets."

The New York Times dropped its long-rumored bombshell story alleging that a past relationship with a female lobbyist so worried advisers of his 2000 presidential campaign that they engineered an intervention of sorts to put an end to it.

The implications could not be more clearly stated in the second paragraph of the story: "Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself – instructing staff members to block the woman's access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him."

The story also suggests McCain may have done favors for the lobbyist, Vicki Iseman: "A champion of deregulation, Mr. McCain wrote letters in 1998 and 1999 to the Federal Communications Commission urging it to uphold marketing agreements allowing a television company to control two stations in the same city, a crucial issue for … one of Ms. Iseman's clients."

The story includes denials from both McCain and Iseman about the suggested romantic relationship and the campaign released a statement calling the story a "hit and run smear campaign."

Politically speaking, the story is threatening to McCain on two fronts. First, with the nomination not yet completely in the grasp, it threatens to spark more concerns among a party he is trying to unite for the fall campaign. The reaction of those conservative agitators who have opposed McCain in the primary campaign will be telling to how harmful even the vague allegations raised by this story to his attempts at consolidating the GOP. There could be a "told-you-so" reaction but the fact this story is being leveled by a news organization that has been a longtime whipping post for conservatives may help McCain.

Possibly more harmful in the long run is any denting of McCain's image as a crusader against special interests and the Washington establishment. The inference that a personal relationship (romantic or not) could have influenced him to do anything that even appear to have bent the rules could damage his appeal and blunt his attempts to broaden the base of his votes among independent voters.

McCain is scheduled to appear at a press availability this morning at 9:00am ET. This will be his first test as the presumptive nominee to demonstrate how he will perform under this kind of pressure. The "straight talk" he has long championed will be parsed a hundred different ways and compared to the story and the public record. How he handles the allegations raised could set the pattern for his general election campaign.

You can watch McCain's press conference live on CBSNews.com at 9:00am ET.

Rudy Giuliani is playing the liberal media card.

In a new Web-only ad targeting Florida voters, "Not Endorsed," an announcer casts Giuliani's lack of endorsements from "the liberal New York Times" and other "liberal newspapers" as a reason to vote for the former New York City mayor.

“Rudy Giuliani is not endorsed by The Tampa Tribune," the announcer says in the spot. "Not endorsed by the Orlando Sentinel. Not endorsed by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. In fact, he’s not endorsed by any of the liberal newspapers.”

The reason, according to the ad? Giuliani wants to cut taxes, appoint conservative federal judges, grow the military, make citizens speak English, and force welfare recipients to work. And when those are your positions, the spot concludes, "you’re the last person on earth to be endorsed by the liberal New York Times."

When the Times is mentioned, the screen shows the newspaper's banner and the words "The New York Times Endorses John McCain and Hillary Clinton." It's a double-shot at McCain, linking Giuliani's rival to both the Times and to Clinton. Script and video here.

Giuliani, who has staked his campaign on winning the Florida primary, sits in third or fourth in most Florida polls. Voters in the state go to the polls tomorrow.