And we think that politics can get dirty in Australia...

From the Los Angeles Times on the weekend:

Casual Web surfers who click on Obama-Biden.org or Obama-Biden.com might assume they'd find information about the Democratic presidential ticket.They'd be wrong.
Both addresses divert people to a website that is harshly anti-Obama, the website of the American Issues Project.That's the newly formed nonprofit group that flooded cable television in the battleground states of Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania with ads decrying the relationship between Barack Obama and William Ayers, a founder of the radical Weather Underground who is now a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.It wasn't clear who is behind the trick. Christian Pinkston, spokesman for the American Issues Project, said his group had nothing to do with it.

Now American Issues Project may not have arranged this, but I do wonder about >bt: Brain-Terminal which carries this rather roughly made stationery in a pdf which purports to contain a legal letter on behalf of Barack Obama.

That letter is rather at odds with another on the American Issues Project website here.

The whole matter appears to be destined for the courts if The Wall Street Journal article is any indication:

The Obama campaign has run a response ad linking the charges to Sen. McCain and has mounted a campaign to combat the advertisement by encouraging supporters to make phone calls and write emails to TV stations airing the commercial, alleging it is both false and illegal. The campaign says its supporters have sent about 93,000 emails to the Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc., which owns many of the stations running the spot.
The Obama campaign's general counsel, Bob Bauer, has sent two letters to the Justice Department asking for an investigation of the group and the $3 million contribution by Mr. Simmons, the only funder who has been disclosed.