Maybe it’s just me, but this sounds like a post hoc justification from the McCain campaign whose federal election compliance team must have taken a peek at the law and said "ooops-a-daisy!" See what you think:

The move is largely procedural, and McCain’s campaign said yesterday that it has not yet decided whether to accept public funding or to raise money on its own for the November presidential election. But the decision to return checks – which was made as the Democratic candidates announced raising $60 million combined in March, nearly as much as McCain had raised for the entire campaign through February – indicates that McCain is laying the groundwork for doing so. "Senator McCain has made it clear that he expects to participate in the general election public financing system, and he hopes the Democratic nominee will do so as well," Brian Rogers, McCain spokesman, said in a statement. "The campaign reserves the right to change course, but these developments reflect our current plans." (emphasis mine)

Look, I understand the need for the campaign spin folks to continue to put lipstick on the "hell, we got our hands caught in the campaign finance cookie jar" pig and all, but does the media have to ignore the violations in the room as the means for forcing their turnaround on this? Don’t you think that this sudden case of Maybe We Ought To Comply With The Letter Of The Law-Itis might have the teensiest bit to do with the fact that McCain’s campaign finance hypocrisy was exposed to the light of day for all the public to see?

And, frankly, it’s not enough. As Jane said last evening, we’ve now got 38, 543 cosigners to the FEC complaint. When we get to 50,000 we’ll do another delivery. Who would you like to see schlepping boxloads of signatures to the FEC?

You can cosign the complaint here, and you can tell your friends about it here .

We’re going to keep up the pressure for McCain to actually follow the law — because clearly the media isn’t going to bother. The whole, short piece reads like a fax-blast press release from the campaign, utterly ignoring the fact that McCain had to be pressured into the least bit of compliance with a public shaming. You’d think THAT would be news, wouldn’t you?