Updating my post from earlier this week, John McCain has still not found any news of note for his Spanish-language audience. The news sections on his Spanish-language Web site, launched just this week, have not been updated once since the launch. That is despite McCain making a major speech on judicial nominations and announcing he would address the National Council of La Raza's convention. In fact, the site doesn't even mention his honoring the Mexican Cinco de Mayo holiday, which was the occasion for announcing the site.

Of course, that could be because the site is paper-thin in Spanish. The Spanish links to McCain's speeches take viewers to English-language transcripts, and the links to news items go to the Republican National Committee's site.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

Sen. John McCain today announced his Spanish-language campaign Web site in honor of Cinco de Mayo, a Mexican holiday commemorating an 1862 battle. But it appears news only happens in English — the most recent posting under his news section is from April 16. The English-language site, by contrast, has dozens of news items since April 16.

And while the video on the main screen showing McCain's biographical commercial has Spanish subtitles, clicking on the link "La historia de un gran heroe Americano que esta listo para ser nuestro lider" takes you to an English-language version instead.

The McCain campaign says the Spanish-language site will "feature regular updates in Spanish throughout the election."

One thing those who study Spanish-language advertising have concluded is that campaigns cannot simply take English-language ads and convert them to Spanish. The candidates must tailor their pitch. That's a technique President Bush and Republicans used to great advantage in 2000, 2002 and 2004.

The McCain campaign yesterday also announced he will attend the National Council of La Raza's annual convention in San Diego in July, and it will be a chance for him to continue his outreach to what could be a critical swing group for this year's election.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

If he had anything like the campaign cash Barack Obama or Hillary Rodham Clinton have, John McCain could be on the airwaves right now making sure voters know he didn't mean to endorse a 100-year war in Iraq.

But he doesn't have the cash, which leaves the airwaves to the Democratic National Committee and MoveOn.org, which are running ads blasting him for what was an easily miscontrued remark he made in January when he answered a question about whether U.S. troops could be in Iraq 50 years.

"Make it 100," McCain responded. "As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, that'd be fine with me, and I hope it would be fine with you, if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al Qaeda is training, recruiting, equipping and motivating people every single day."

The DNC and MoveOn.org say that shows McCain wants 100 years of military engagement — and hint that could mean 100 years of war. McCain says it's a "falsification," and says he envisioned a troop deployment similar to South Korea, where the U.S. still has troops more than 50 years after the Korean war.

Without money, McCain is left to argue his case to reporters — and hope that the voters who are seeing the attack commercials are also reading his defense in the papers. It's probably not a good bet.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

Even as he seeks to grab control of the Republican Party state by state, Ron Paul is showing he has staying power on the Internet, the medium that helped launch his insurgent presidential campaign.

Paul announced this afternoon his new book, "The Revolution: A Manifesto," being released today, is No. 1 on Amazon.com's "Hot New Releases in Books" list.

Now will John McCain's campaign take the congressman's supporters seriously?

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

The Winston-Salem Journal reports that Fred Thompson, who for much of last year's presidential shadow campaign was the great conservative hope, will finally campaign in person with John McCain.

Thompson, like most of the rest of McCain's former opponents for the Republican presidential nomination, has endorsed McCain but, unlike the others, had not appeared with him on the campaign trail.

Thompson gave only a terse endorsement to McCain after dropping out of the race earlier this year, saying, "This is no longer about past preferences or differences. It is about what is best for our country, and for me that means that Republican should close ranks behind John McCain."

He'll have to say something more about McCain in this appearance — and it will be interesting to see how far he can go, given his sharp distinctions with McCain during the campaign, including charging that the senator had abandoned the Constitution and the Reagan coalition.

— Stephen Dinan, national political reporter, The Washington Times

As if Sen. John McCain's current poverty tour wasn't enough of a clue, his campaign manager Rick Davis made it explicit in a strategy memo yesterday: They see the road to the White House running straight through poor people's pockets.

"Our targeting and analysis of the 2008 political landscape puts voters who are on the lower economic brackets at the heart of either party's winning coalition," Davis said in the memo dissecting exit polling from Tuesday's Democratic primary in Pennsylvania.

Davis' conclusion is that the protracted Democratic race has exposed some serious fault lines, and while he appears to believe Sen. Barack Obama will still be Democrats' nominee, Obama is not very competitive among union households and poor voters. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton easily won among both of those demographics in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, reprising the results from Ohio's primary last month.

That matters, of course, because Ohio and Pennsylvania are two of the three states pundits predict will determine the election, along with Florida.

As for how McCain capitalizes on this year's poverty-powered election, that's not exactly clear from Davis's memo. He points out McCain is visiting poor areas and asking for votes, and says McCain next week will lay out a health care plan. But McCain is still in a difficult spot: He's angered enough Republican voters over his career that some won't turn out to vote for him, and he's got to make up ground in the middle. But he can't swing too far back to the old McCain without losing still more Republicans.

As McCain strategist Charlie Black told me for an article today on McCain's domestic brand identity, they've got to try to take conservative principles and prove to voters those principles are a better answer than Democrats' solutions.

That, more than likely, means attacking Democrats repeatedly over taxes and spending.

— Stephen Dinan, political and national reporter, The Washington Times

Sen. John McCain has written the North Carolina Republican Party asking it to take down an ad showing Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, calling for God's condemnation of America in his now-famous pulpit sermon.

"The television advertisement you are planning to air degrades our civics and distracts us from the very real differences we have with the Democrats. In the strongest terms, I implore you to not run this advertisement," McCain wrote to state party Chairwoman Linda Daves.

The ad is directed at the two Democrats running for their party's gubernatorial nomination, but with Obama and Wright taking up most of the oxygen in the ad, and with both Democrats linked to Obama in the ad, it's likely to affect Obama's chances in the May presidential primary far more than it affects the state Democrats.

The state GOP hasn't responded to e-mail or phone messages yet, but North Carolina Democrats say McCain is still on the hook because he should have acted sooner.

"News of this story has been buzzing for the past 24 hours. If McCain really wanted North Carolina Republicans to be worthy of the principles he believes, he could have picked up the phone and called Ms. Daves," said Democratic Party Chairman Jerry Meek.

The back-and-forth shows McCain's difficult position. Some Republicans clearly want him to go further than he has in attacking Obama, seeing an opportunity in the Democrat's associations. But McCain, among all the Republicans who sought their party's nomination this year, may be the least able to capitalize on Obama's gaffes.

But it increasingly appears McCain's campaign goal is to replace right-wing voters, who they don't expect to win, with independents and some Democrats, and McCain's clean-campaign approach is much more likely to be successful with them.

— Stephen Dinan, political and national reporter, The Washington Times

Lost in the shuffle of Democrats' bruising Pennsylvania primary was the fact that John McCain didn't even top 75 percent of the vote in Republicans' primary.

With only two other names on the ballot, Republicans' presumed presidential nominee was unable to pull off the commanding sort of showing that would have put to rest the talk among Republican voters about displeasure with their nominee.

McCain, with 99.44 percent of precincts reporting, has garnered 72.7 percent of the vote in the primary, which was open only to Republican voters. Despite having dropped out of the race and even campaigning for McCain, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee won 11.4 percent of the vote. And Rep. Ron Paul, who is still running but has put his campaign into a lower gear, won 15.9 percent of Republicans in the primary.

Paul has said the McCain campaign has made no effort to try to win over his supporters, nearly 1 million of whom have voted for him in the Republican primaries and caucuses so far. This morning Paul campaign spokesman Jesse Benton said his candidate's showing proves Republican voters are still "hungry for leadership that will protect the traditions that made our country so great."

The McCain campaign has said it is on the same timeline for uniting the Republican Party as then-Gov. George W. Bush in 2000. In that year, Mr. Bush won 73 percent of the Republican vote in Pennsylvania's primary, held April 4. His biggest challenger was McCain himself, who won 23 percent, despite having dropped out of the campaign weeks earlier.

But McCain was a far more imposing figure in 2000 than Paul and Huckabee were in 2008, and McCain has also had more time before Pennsylvania to consolidate his lead than Bush had in 2000. To continue to post less-than-dominant showings will only prolong talk that McCain has more work to do within his own party.

And to truly match Bush's 2000 performance may be out of the question for McCain. Out of 18.5 million votes cast in the primaries so far he has won 43.2 percent. By contrast, Bush finished 2000 with 62 percent of the Republican primary vote.

Update at 11:58 a.m.:

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds says they're not worried about Pennsylvania's showing, since at this point they feel they've already pivoted into general election mode. He also said the exit polls from Pennsylvania suggested the McCain campaign strategy of finding votes in the political center will pay off.

"There are poll numbers that come out of Pennsylvania that indicate a strong likelihood John McCain will play strongly with Republicans and independents, but also will make a play for conservative Democrats," Bounds said.

— Stephen Dinan, political and national reporter, The Washington Times

Sen. John McCain has sent a signal to conservatives that he understands what they're looking for when it comes to judicial nominations.

In a response letter to Sen. Arlen Specter, McCain said he wants to see three conservative nominations confirmed to the federal appellate courts by Memorial Day and would support Specter's effort to have the Senate Judiciary discharge the nominations of Peter D. Keisler, Robert Conrad and Steve Matthews. Republicans say all three of those nominations are being slow-walked by the committee. Discharging the nominations would get them to the Senate floor, where an up-or-down vote could be help.

McCain, in his letter to Specter, even twists the knife a bit with Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, the Democratic chairman of the Judiciary Committee, noting Keisler has been delayed two years, and pointing out he was rated "well qualified" by the American Bar Association — "and Chairman Leahy has previously referred to the ABA's approval as 'the gold standard by which judicial candidates are judged.' "

The letter is straightforward and uses numbers to show President Bush is faring worse in his final two years in office in total appellate judges confirmed than President Clinton fared in his final two years. The comparison is apt since both were facing Congresses controlled by the other party.

McCain (or whoever in his shop put the letter together — it came from his Senate office) has taken a substantive step toward showing he understands the importance of the courts to conservatives, and also understands what types of nominees the Republican political base would like to see.

Specter, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, also asked Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama their opinions on discharging the three judges, and they both said they would defer to Leahy to run the committee.

Clinton's answer is predictable, but as Curt Levey from Committee for Justice notes at ConfirmThem.com, Obama's response is intriguing since his campaign is based on trying to move past political divisions. If there's one area where pure partisan politics still controls, it's judicial nominations.

— Stephen Dinan, political and national reporter, The Washington Times

Republicans have hoped that Sen. John McCain's reputation as a maverick and his appeal to independents would help them in this year's congressional elections. Democrats are now putting that to the test.

House Democrats' campaign arm, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, today fired off press releases against about three dozen House Republicans or Republican challengers asking them to choose between siding with or against McCain's comment this week that the economy made progress under President Bush.

The McCain campaign is saying it's an unfair charge taken out of context — most of that answer, on Bloomberg TV, was spent on the pain Americans are feeling economically — but the DCCC is trying to make McCain a problem for Republicans anyway.

Democrats have long feared McCain as the toughest Republican to beat, given his reputation as a maverick, and know that could help marginal Republican races in swing states.

The DCCC provided a list of 35 districts they are sending the releases to, but said that was not a complete list of their Republican targets this year.

Included are candidates ranging from perennial target Rep. Christopher Shays of Connecticut to challenger Tim Bee, seeking to replace Rep. Rick Renzi in Arizona's 1st 8th district, to Rep. Virgil Goode in Virginia's 5th district, usually thought of as a safe incumbent — he won with about 60 percent of the vote in 2004 and 2006.

— Stephen Dinan, political and national reporter, The Washington Times