What API reported as Mrs. Obama’s words are fairly benign, but enough to get a segment of the blogosphere riled up. In an incredibly poorly spelled and punctuated post, API said she criticized them for supporting “American white racists” who had made an issue of Obama’s adoption by his Indonesian stepfather. Strangely based in Norway and publishing via WordPress, API also reported Mrs. Obama told them “not to dig that which will support evil people who are out to stop her husband from getting the presidency,” and that black people who opposed Obama did so “because of envy.”

Jake Tapper, ABC News’ Senior National Correspondent based in the network’s Washington bureau, has word from the Obama campaign that the interview API claims to have conducted is “100% bogus.”

He writes:

"This morning my inbox is filled with the ‘WHY ARENT YOU COVERING THIS?’ e-mails on the subject. The answer is: because it doesn’t appear to be in any way real."

If you think ABC News is too liberal and somehow less credible than API—established, so the blog header says, in 2006 and virtually invisible in Google search results other than the blog posts mentioning this very controversy—then maybe you’ll believe the National Review, conveying from campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor, “The answer is no, it’s not real, the report is made up.  She did not speak to the organization.”

API, which seems to be in pretty tight with, or likes at least to make mention of smear-master Jerome Corsi and misspells words like “Farakhan” and “innoguration,” is sticking to its story, and says if you call them, they’ll tell you the same. They provided their phone number in an update if you’d like to verify with them.

According to a subsequent post, API says it will release audio recording of the phone call “when we are satisfied it is not intended to be misused in any way or for any gains by an group.”

Or, my guess anyway, as soon as they can create one. The better question for ABC would be why they killed a 2006 whistleblower report by former ABC investigative reproter Rebecca Abrahams about how evoting machine company Diebold rigs elections, or why nobody’s talking about Stephen Spoonamore and Mike Connell just a few short weeks before the election. And if candidate wives are going to be a big controversy, Verizon and AT&T rushing out to Sedona to install special cellular towers just for Cindy McCain should be a bigger one.
 

Maybe John McCain’s spouse is a little different than most people worth millions, and enjoys the challenge of juggling pots, pans, and ingredients. Her resource for good old family recipes, published on the McCain campaign website, had a heaping helping of something else, namely theft.

The Huffington Post described how they found out Cindy McCain’s cookbook bore far more than a passing similarity to that of the Food Network:

This past Sunday, Lauren Handel, an eagle-eyed attorney from New York, was searching for a specific recipe from Giada DeLaurentis, a chef on the Food Network. Yet whenever she Googled the different ingredients in the recipe, the oddest thing happened: not only did the Food Network’s site come up, as expected, but so did John McCain’s campaign site.

On a section of McCain’s site called “Cindy’s Recipes,” you can find seven recipes attributed to Cindy McCain, each with the heading “McCain Family Recipe.” Ms. Handel quickly realized that some of the “McCain Family Recipes,” were in fact, word-for-word copies of recipes on the Food Network site.

The lame explanation for this, well, there isn’t an explanation. It’s being blamed on some “low-level unpaid staff” person, meaning whichever volunteer was asked by the campaign to find recipes for the website and slap Mrs. McCain’s name on them has been thrown under the proverbial campaign bus.

Maybe this doesn’t seem like a big deal to people; we’re sure the man who would be President isn’t losing any sleep over this. We’re pretty certain if the potential First Lady really did publish a cookbook, and someone looted it to spiff up a cooking website, she and her hubby wouldn’t accept some BS excuse about a lowly functionary stealing it without anyone’s knowledge.