MoveOn.org was forced to pay The New York Times an additional $77,508 for its newspaper advertisement that implied General David Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, is a traitor.  The ad has been roundly criticized and was even condemned in a bipartisan vote of the U.S. Senate.  The New York Times reported yesterday on this episode which has surely been an embarrassment for both organizations.

Columnist George Will took on this topic yesterday as well, exposing the biased views and hypocrisy of The New York Times.  His column is definitely worth a read.

An article in Roll Call (subscripton required) today pointed out that Senator McConnell's approval ratings and polling numbers remain strong and unchanged despite recent negative attack ads run on television by a slew of out-of-state liberal activist groups.  Here are some excerpts:

A slew of recent ads targeting Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have been flooding TV sets in the Bluegrass State and appear to be setting the table for a strong Democratic challenger to step in for the 2008 cycle.  But as of right now no one has accepted the invitation to dinner.

But despite all the activity designed to weaken McConnell politically, Democrats currently have no top-tier challenger to McConnell. And a poll conducted last week by the Louisville Courier-Journal showed that the Minority Leader’s statewide approval rating at 54 percent, the same number as when the paper last tested his popularity in February.

“As far as I’m concerned right now, the table is bare,” said David Hawpe, editorial director of the Courier-Journal who writes a twice-weekly column on state politics. “There is a lot of people who would like to sit down to a meal of McConnell meat. A lot of people who don’t like him and would like to see him retired from the Senate. But being honest about it, politically I don’t see anybody coming to the table yet.”

National Republican Senatorial Committee spokeswoman Rebecca Fisher called any plans to knock off McConnell a pipe dream.  “Democrats know they are not going to find a top-tier candidate to run against Sen. McConnell, so they are going to use these ads as the candidate,” she said. “They are going to have these Democrat front groups dump a ton of money into the state. If you look at Sen. McConnell’s polling ... they are not having any kind of effect. They are just going to waste their money in the state.”