The attempt by the McCain campaign to deflect criticism of their insane choice of running mate by assailing the media is already ridiculous. Steve Schmidt whined to Howard Kurtz about hypothetical questions asked by journalists that have not resulted in stories printed anywhere. They boycotted Larry King because Campbell Brown dared ask mean questions of Tucker Bounds. Now their surrogates are grasping at the most sublimely ridiculous straw of all: when asked by Chris Matthews to name the major media outlets engaged in character assassination of Sarah Palin, adorable Florida Congressman Adam Putnam named Us Weekly. Us Weekly! Yes we did just reveal their radical secret agenda today but still, this is the best you can do? Chris Matthews then calls it "the U. S. Weekly." Now the McCain campaign will boycott magazines, probably.

At last, in one convenient clip, three of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin's most embarrassing on-tape moments! There's her laughing in agreement as a political opponent and cancer survivor is called a bitch (and a cancer!)! There's newscaster Sarah Palin reporting on LOTS OF DOGS! And there's Sarah Palin of a couple months ago wondering what the fuck the Vice President does. Ha ha silly Sarah Palin, they run the shadow government!

Governor Palin is greeting John McCain at the Minneapolis airport right now! Exciting! She's going to address the Republican National Convention tonight! This is great, because there was a small danger that Vinegar Joe Lieberman and the proper start of the RNC would quiet the nonstop over-the-top Palin coverage that's had the national press in a hilarious tizzy for a week. But this morning brought more front-page stories of McCain campaign incompetence and additional and more insane conspiracy theories, and with a speech from Palin tonight, we can guarantee that Palin coverage will continue unabated for the rest of the week. So what shall we expect from here? Some thoughts and predictions: Unless bloggers and enterprising commenters come up with actual evidence of weird natal misdeeds, their investigations will likely lead to just another MSM crisis about how the "bloggers" are devious and evil. Especially because the conspiracies are getting so dark. As far as we know, the story as it's currently postulated is that a) Palin covered up for her daughter Bristol's first pregnancy, and then Bristol either got knocked up again immediately afterwards or she's faking this pregnancy; or b) that Palin was indeed pregnant and her amniocentesis followed by her insane and inexplicable schedule the day of Trig's birth are proof that Palin was trying to cause a miscarriage. This is weird and horrible stuff and the very act of suggesting it will make respectable people queasy. But hey, it's out there! The "blog conspiracy theories", as cable people are surely already calling them, will make these responsible journalists (pls add own scare quotes) probably less likely to do their own digging into and speculating on the story of Baby Trig. Families: off-limits! (That reductive construction is a facile and childish simplification of issues that are newsworthy and even related to actual policy- and decision-making but whatever. The press doesn't want to look bad beating up supermom.) Soon the "the press is victimizing Sarah Palin" narrative will ramp up even further. Already poor Clarence Page got in trouble for calling Governor Palin a nice "young lady." That is mildly condescending, yes, but sexist? "Lady" is a bit old fashioned, maybe, but Lieberman just referred to the Democratic party nominee for president—a black man, btw—as "an eloquent and gifted young man" in a speech before the Republican National Convention on primetime television last night. And no one but TNR noticeed or cared. But this speech tonight! It was just explicitly spelled out on MSNBC: "the bar is not very high." Everyone will be pleasantly surprised at how well she does, how she's a breath of fresh air, how she is so much better than the terrible old white men of the Republican party. Unless she accidentally makes some huge factual fuck-up, like talking about that damned bridge to nowhere again. But they are probably being careful about that. The media has most likely dug up every salient detail there is to find about Troopergate and her early political career, and now it's up to Obama's people to exploit those, but where it may still get interesting is in the celebrity media. Specifically with Levi Johnston. The campaign will be dragging Levi to the RNC tonight, and presumably this shotgun wedding will go on as planned, but there are rumblings, already, that Levi is a brickheaded young thug who's maybe knocked up girls before, whose parents don't approve of this foolishness, and we've even heard that he had to dry out in rehab before the sham wedding could take place. So we rely on the Enquirer and, to a lesser extent, Us Weekly to pursue these stories. Because honestly the families that relate to a working mother dealing with her oldest daughter's understandable mistake will surely not relate to forcing that poor girl into marrying a local drunken hoodlum, as it is no longer 1910 or something. The McCain campaign knows—and indeed has explicitly stated—that they've been totally successful in making this campaign not about "issues" (even lazily defined "issues" like "the economy" and "Iraq") but about "character" which means personality and hagiography. Palin was the perfect pick in that sense, because she's aggressively blue-collar suburban normal, but she may soon become the sort of "normal" that people can't fucking stand—your uptight god-loving neighbor who makes you look bad but can't keep her own house in order. This, against the adorable nuclear Obama family, is not a good narrative for McCain.

• Reporters have been sent to Alaska! "The world arrived here more than a century ago with the gold rush and later the railroad," the New York Times reports from Wasilla. Yet one aspect of American life did not come to town until this week: the national press! William Yardley reports that frontier maverick Sarah Palin introduced culture war "wedge politics" to a sleepy little Northern Exposure town by turning the friendly mayoral race into a Newt Gingrich scorched earth battle for the soul of Wasilla. Then on her way out as mayor she campaigned against her own step-mother! ICE COLD. [NYT]

Finally, it's come to this: McCain is pulling out of an interview with professional softballer Larry King, because King's CNN peer Campbell Brown accidentally asked McCain proxy Tucker Bounds some tough questions about Sarah Palin's readiness to be commander in chief. (As we said before! The media forgives everything besides violating your own narrative!) This will teach Larry to keep everyone else at the network in line! Here are some of the many many lies John McCain's increasingly whiny campaign is accusing the liberal media of spreading: First of all, every single word of today's Elisabeth Bumiller story on Sarah Palin. All of it is FICTION, they say! Like that thing about how she was a member of that secessionist party because she attended their conference and her husband was a member of their party until be became an "independent" in the '90s? That is false because Palin has been a registered Republican since 1984. More:

Sarah Palin! Do you know anything about her? Neither does John McCain! But now we must learn, because we will be hearing a lot of crazy things about her over the next month (unless she drops out). Which of these things are true? Which are false? WHO'S THE FATHER? We will tell you the TRUE things, below, and then we will speculate wildly as to the crazy conspiracy nonsense. It will be fun. It's All True! "Book burner." Not literally. Though as mayor of the tiny, presumably quirky little Alaska town of Wasilla, Palin did inject a bit of old-fashioned culture war politics into the local library. From Time, via Kos: "'She asked the library how she could go about banning books,' he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. 'The librarian was aghast.'" Hah. So much for the "sexy librarian" thing, right? She has a crazy preacher! Once again, sort of. Though this one is less likely to be relevant to anything, because it's a crazy right-wing white preacher, and we are quite used to seeing them on TV and not even bothering to be shocked by them anymore. Anyway. Sarah spoke before her old church in Wasilla a couple months ago. She grew up and was baptized there. The senior pastor there since 1999 is, obv, a crazy right-wing evangelical nutcase named Ed Kalnins. He once said Kerry voters will go to hell, and people who criticize the president will go to hell, and Iraq and 9/11 were wars of faith and other fairly doctrinaire beliefs for the modern-day Christian right, their recently scrubbed moderate-ish image notwithstanding. Anyway, crazy pastor! She is a secessionist! So yeah, there's a wacky political party in Alaska that wants to secede from the union. It's called the "Alaskan Independence Party" and Sarah Palin was a member back in the '90s, until she ran for mayor. They hate America! Sarah Palin hates America! Also, awesome logo. Conspiracies! Trig Still Not Hers Sarah Palin's most recent baby, four-month-old Trig, was rumored to actually be Palin's oldest daughter Bristol's baby, back until the campaign announced that Bristol is five months pregnant now. Some people are unconvinced! Read the entirely circumstantial evidence right here. The "real" story still has weird holes. Why was Bristol pulled out of school, is Levi the real father and does he actually intend to go through with this ridiculous wedding? But honestly we're inclined to believe the 44-year-old woman actually did give birth to the baby with Down Syndrome. But still, the timeline is weird. Now, finally, the Enquirer weighs in: they say the Bristol pregnancy was supposed to be announced after the RNC, at which point the shotgun wedding would've been finished. But Bristol rebelled! Or something! Myths She strangled a fucking bear to death once. There is no evidence to support this rumor. (Up top, the alleged cover of this week's Us Weekly.)

"North! To Alaska—c'mon, the rush is on." Caribou, moose, and redneck jokes, gun porn, and now a real, live, out-of-wedlock teen pregnancy. How will the chattering classes of the blue states respond to the family saga of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin? Why, with the same flinty-eyed suspicion and close-mindedness that we profess to hate in the "God, gays, and guns" country of rural Americans. The Palin family background gives otherwise intelligent people the chance to indulge in the basest and most cartoonish of regional and rural stereotypes.Exhibit 1: The use of the word "Baby Daddy" by everyone from Drudge to Radar to Us Weekly to the Daily Intel. Everyone's using this phrase, because it's easy and snarky. It's not particularly original, though, and it's no longer funny if everyone else is saying it. Cut it out. (Also, I am aware that many persons of color sometimes use this phrase un-ironically, but you sound like an ass if you're white.) Exhibit 2: Alaska, OMG! Even the highfalutin' Bill Maher couldn't help reaching for some easy laughs, jumping into the fray with, "when [Palin] got a phone call at three in the morning, it was because a moose had gotten into the garbage can." Funny! But also: "If [McCain dies] this stewardess can handle it." Snob! Exhibit 3: Redneck Hillbilly White Trash Hicks Levi Johnston, Bristol Palin's soon-to-be teen dad, called himself a redneck out of pride, so there's his excuse. Everyone else, however:

If we're dragging politicians' families through the mud it seems only fair to do some digging into the distant past of the mysterious Barack Obama. His ancestors came, of course, from an exotic foreign land: a mysterious, magical island called "Ireland." According to an Irish genealogy site: "Obama's earliest known relative, his 6th great grandfather, was a member of a family of wealthy wig makers who included an Irish politician, Michael Kearney." This Michael "Hussein" Kearney was apparently exactly like his distant descendant Barack Obama. A contemporary scurrilous pamphlet said of him: "No man alive was equally fired with ambition." Zing...?

There's no better example yet of John McCain's sudden inability to work his beloved national press like the mess that is the Sarah Palin pick. It's actually hard to remember now that John McCain used to be the coziest man in Washington with the political press corps. Just like it's hard to remember now when "experience" was the McCain campaign's primary selling point, but whatever. You know what happened—McCain was supposed to pick his buddy Joe Lieberman, or lightweight right-wing Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, and then suddenly he's introducing this charming Sarah Palin woman. The move was supposed to signal "maverick," but as allegations of ethical misdeeds and family drama painfully leaked out over a long holiday weekend, it became apparent that the pick was so maverick-y as to be positively outside the bounds of logic. So don't listen to people who say the media is beating up on Sarah Palin over some private family matters—they're beating up on McCain for acting like an idiotic political novice. It seemed so simple, at first. A young woman governor, beloved in her ultimate frontier state. You pull soccer moms, right-wing Christians, maybe a couple disgruntled Hillary voters, and independent Westerners. She even had a bit of energy cred! But when McCain runs as the "experience" candidate and ridicules Obama's lack of foreign policy experience and seriousness and then defends Palin by saying her foreign policy experience is that her state is close to Russia it causes the "serious"-minded commentators to take notice of the only sort of political malfeasance they genuinely can't abide: violating your own message. As Michael Kinsley puts it:

Sarah Palin, a "hockey mom" who was once a mayor of a tiny town and has been the governor of a huge, empty state called "Alaska", will be the Vice President under 100-year-old President John McCain. She's cute tho! Also she is like the only not-corrupt Alaska politician ever, as far as we know.

Missed the convention so far? Want to know what all the fuss is about? Truthfully it's a series of mediocre-to-decent speeches and then hours and hours and HOURS of utter bullshit. The speeches are too long anyway, so our video department cut the whole thing down to 90 seconds. You got your Michelle Obama, your Ted Kennedy, your Clintons, and, of course, the next President of the United States, Dennis Kucinich. Enjoy!

Barack Obama promised his adorable daughters that he would get them a puppy if he won the presidency (they would surely mention this fact more often if they really wanted to win). The American Kennel Club had a poll to decide what sort of dog Obama should get. (Of course, Obama should rescue a dog from a shelter and not select an expensive purebred, but whatevs.) The winner? A poodle. A little fucking girly elitist poodle! Who's responsible for this? The fatcats at the AKC won't say!

How many times now has the New York Times columnist come away from a post-primary Democratic event having apparently only talked to the one insane Nobama PUMA lady in attendance? First there was, of course, the ear plug lady, who managed to get the attention of every journalist at the campaign rally. But one imagines the incomparable Dowd had to search a bit to find this nut in Denver, where the attendees are a little more carefully screened:

Bill Ayers was a founding member of the Weather Underground, a patently ridiculous white radical organization that specialized in being dumb hippies. They liked to blow up symbolic things like statues. Once they put a bomb in the Pentagon! No one was hurt except for some files. Anyway. This was years ago and since then, Bill has become so goddamn respectable that Mayor Richard Daley tapped him to head a "public-private partnership" dedicated to improving Chicago public schools. Barack Obama was on the board of a philanthropic foundation with Bill in 1999 which means, according to this fantastic attack ad, that Barack Obama wanted to blow up the Pentagon just like the terrorists of 9/11. Except worse! Ha ha this ad is ridiculous and you won't see it on TV because no one will air it, except for an obscure little company that owns local stations covering a quarter of the country. (And us. And we cover the world! Except for China probably.) A McCain fundraiser named Harold Simmons funded the ad through one of those shadowy nonprofits the kids are so into these days called the "American Issues Project." Simmons was, you may be shocked to learn, also a Swift Boat Veterans for Truth funder. This particular ad is so distorted that CNN and even Fox News have refused to run it! Which leaves, of course, the local channels owned by Sinclair Communications. The Sinclair Broadcast Group owns the largest number of local TV stations in the country, mostly throughout the South and Midwest. They last made headlines in 2004, when the company refused to allow its stations to air the Nightline segment that named American casualties in Iraq (they hate the troops!), and then six months later when they made all their stations broadcast a crazy Swift Boat documentary about how John Kerry committed treason in Vietnam. Oh, and then they were the ones behind the Armstrong Williams debacle, in which Williams was revealed to be a White House-paid propagandist while hosting a syndicated show as an ostensibly independent commentator. The show was produced out of Sinclair's "New Central" office, which produced much of the insane "news" content Sinclair feeds to its many stations. (Sinclair received a $36,000 FCC fine for their trouble.) But besides a GQ story on Sinclair back in '05, no one really pays any attention to the work of Sinclair. They reach nearly as many homes as an actual television network and purposefully exert more control over the message they broadcast than any 24-hour news network, but because they own podunk affiliates in flyover country, no one notices. Per Wikipedia:

We were told Ted Kennedy, who's battling advanced brain cancer, had mere weeks to live. We were told there'd be a macabre video salute to the man in lieu of an actual appearance in Denver. So when he actually showed up on stage at the DNC to deliver a genuinely rousing speech, well, it was an emotional moment. So emotional that the major tabloids of both New York and Boston could not come up with original headlines. The Post raves!

The convention just started!!! Howard Dean screamed (with his eyes, anyway) and now a lady is praying! Then the announcer lady from the Oscars introduced some Navajo Indians who are presenting the colors. The colors of the USA, the country that tried to kill them all. Then a lady said the pledge of allegiance and a chorus of children sang the national anthem and killed all Navajo dudes' cattle. Oh, Wolf just explained that those guys were the Navajo code-talkers from WWII. They are heroes and patriots! Jack Cafferty is babbling about how he is stealing things from Wolf's office as Wolf flies from Denver to Saint Paul in his tiny flying machine. Barack Obama is not even there yet! Someone here will tell you about Michelle Obama's speech, later tonight, probably. Now you are informed.

Dave Matthews, Kanye West, and Sheryl Crow are all performing like monkeys for VIPs in Denver this week. Also expected to be skulking around Denver this week are Ben Affleck, Josh Brolin, Annette Bening, Spike Lee, Anne Hathaway, Susan Sarandon and Charlize Theron, according to AFP. Oh, and Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi are performing before and after Obama's acceptance speech, at that stadium! Soooo many celebrities! Because America loves its celebrities, except that it also despises and resents them. You know how most of America's problems are caused not by the disastrous failure of government over the last like 30 years but by, uh, Tim Robbins? Yes, of course you do! So do Republicans, who learned long ago that the only thing America loved more than obsessively consuming pop culture object is loudly decrying the creators of those objects as unAmerican queers. The fact that Hollyweird (along with the music and television weird-ustries) caters directly and scientifically to every desire of every American demographic does not mean that anyone actually likes famous people, because, obviously, they are misanthropic wealthy blinkered assholes whose lives bear no resemblance to the lives of their audiences. Which is true! They are! Just like politicians and their constituencies! Except no one knows who their Representative is, and everyone knows who Ben Affleck is. He is the Vince Vaughan who isn't funny! And then it gets really odd, because even someone like Bruce Springsteen-who is unreservedly beloved by basically all white people older than 30-suddenly becomes a loathed example of garish flashy wealth when he sings a song for a Democrat. But, you may say, if you actually like Bruce Springsteen it is patently obvious that he has always sang bleeding heart songs about losers betrayed by their countries! But he also sings about cars which cause the Global Warming, which is a myth except when liberal celebrities have big houses, and then it is real. So. Now Obama has to "stay away" from these famous people, except for the ones singing to him on TV, and also George Clooney has issued a press release announcing that he's never texted Barack Obama. George Clooney, in case you are unfamiliar with him, is basically the single most well-liked man in America, which is why his support for Barack Obama is the kiss of death. Of course, if you are a Republican, you get to have the support of shitty country acts who are massively, hugely, insanely popular across the entire country except in the places where journalists live, so they don't count as "celebrities." Get it? Photoshop: Steve Dressler

We saw this earlier today, and we were like, "wtf, did we just see John McCain introduce Daddy Yankee for some reason?" but before we could figure out what the hell was going on CNN cut to something boring and non-Daddy Yankee-related. Thankfully, C-Span had the context. (Not that we watched this entire clip, because it's still a John McCain campaign appearance.) ENJOY. [Radar]

There's another vivid memory I have of Hunt. It was maybe two years later. In the middle of one of our hang-around days, I put the question to him: "So, Hunter, what do you want to be when you grow up?"

"I want to be important." I knew what he meant.

It's time for the Democratic National Convention in lovely, boring Denver! Are you psyched? Journalists are! Because they're going to be drunk for a week, thousands of miles from home! Just two of the many venues in which hardworking journalists will be getting their drink on the over the next few days are the bars taken over by the cable news networks. Fox's hip FOX Experience and the down-home CNN Grill. Which one looks more like the worst possible place you could ever get drunk? Let's see!