So hey, John McCain wants to hold "question time." Have you seen it? It's this thing they do in the UK where the Prime Minister is forced to actually take questions from Parliament, and answer them, and everyone's all abusive and mean and basically hilarious (illustrated in the attached clip). You know, McCain is good at speaking extemporaneously, so he could maybe pull this off. Except that he'd resort to very unPresidential insults and probably cursing when it got too heated (although—with this Senate?—it would not get heated). If it did work, and became tradition, we'd be thrilled! Oh, and the New York Post has another talking-related idea for saving America. Their opinion page today takes a nostalgic look at the legendary Lincoln/Douglas debates of 1858. And they bemoan the current state of political discourse and all that. The scheduled Obama/McCain debates, they lament, will not "even approach the unforgettable exchange of ideas that took place when Lincoln and Douglas shared the stage." The Post, arguing for reasoned, logical exchanges of ideas on The Important Topics!

Congratulations to Barack Obama for finally running a no-holds-barred attack ad against John McCain. It's a masterpiece of the genre (the "more in sorrow than in fearmongering" attack), taking one odd biographical detail as proof of mendacity, with a touch of underhanded smear thrown in. You are poor and broke and the bank is taking away your house, but John McCain? He is so old he doesn't remember how many houses he has! (Narrator: "It's seven. Seven houses.") It's a fun little number. But as you watch our above compilation of some of our favorite attack ads of the last forty-odd years, well, you may notice that no modern candidate can touch the '60s for mean-spirited spite. LBJ will cut you to win reelection. Click to see the compilation, and Obama's modern attempt at the genre is below.

Barack Obama has a half-brother who lives in a shack and hasn't spoken to the candidate in years. Just like in The Onion the other day! Ha ha ha! Except this one lives in Kenya and lives on less than a dollar a month and is too embarrassed to admit to people that he's related to the American presidential candidate. Plus side for Obama: George is too far away to embarrass him like Roger Clinton or Billy Carter. Downside: His brother lives in a shanty town on Kenya. Barry Hussein met young George Hussein Obama back in 2006 for the first time since they were children. They haven't spoken since. "I am good with my fists," George Obama reports. All in all, we liked the wacky Onion story better! [Daily Telegraph]

A screaming headline on Drudge, and a new Zogby poll showing McCain pulling ahead of Obama by five points means one thing only: media meltdown. Barring an Obama VP pick, this poll is certain to lead tonight on Chris Matthews, CNN and the rest of cable news – even though it's just one single data point that (for now) contradicts other polls, and even though Zogby's methods and accuracy are controversial at a minimum. ("The house of sand and Zog," Mickey Kaus memorably mocked.) It's one number, scarcely different from the last month's worth of data. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't be way more worried. The Cocoon Frank Rich isn't worried. His Sunday column takes comfort in the race's underlying stability:

The Daily News and the Post today both led with goofy excitable front page stories on Michael Bloomberg's threat to cover our bridges and skyscrapers with hideous power-generating windmills (both front pages: "WINDY CITY"). Both mention that Bloomberg dined with millionaire windpower enthusiast T. Boone Pickens. Page Six also reports on how Rudy Giuliani ignored the advice of Pickens, "a leading advocate for alternative energy," during his failed presidential run. Pickens just did a conference call with Harry Reid. And he just met with McCain. And he's got a book out! The oil billionaire-turned-pseudo-environmentalist is everywhere. And so we ask, upon learning that Obama's met with him too: what the hell? Why is everyone playing nice with the evil old jackass? We'd expect him to informally advise Giuliani. Pickens, the old oilman, is a longtime funder of Republicans. He very very famously is responsible for those Swift Boat people who lied about John Kerry. He's spent the last 30 years ensuring that his business-friendly Republican friends remained in power, and now the old man spends millions pushing... wind power? Alternative energy? It almost sounds like environmentalism! Why waste time trying to convince Republicans to... act like liberals?? The oilman has given up oil, you see. Now he's investing millions in wind power and natural gas. Both are less environmentally terrible than petroleum, but his magic windmill plan does not seem to us to be very viable. Because there's a lot of wind in those big empty plains states, yes, but not any people. So transporting this power across the entire country adds even more to this power's price tag and enriches T. Boone and his investors yet more! But merits of his plan aside, the question is why Democrats like Reid and Obama are giving the jackass the time of day and legitimizing him as anything other than a zillionaire who thinks the presidency and now the energy policy of this country are his to buy. Start a think tank or something dude, don't just get all "rogue vigilante billionaire crisis-solver"! And further, why the hell aren't anyone but random columnists and Cato Institute libertarians examining his plan seriously and reporting on his conflicts of interest? Hell in a week's worth of stories entirely about how important famous elected officials are meeting with Pickens, only today's Obama stories even mention the Swift Boat Veterans. What the hell, T. Boone Pickens. Just because you're rich doesn't mean everyone has to take you seriously.

"It was February 2006 in Munich, and John McCain's eyes were flashing with the mischievous spark that comes when he's about to fire a verbal rocket. 'I've got a zinger coming,' he told me, referring to a speech on Russia he would give a few hours later at the annual Munich Conference on Security Policy." Wow! What sort of zinger did McCain have planned for the Munich Conference on Security Policy? Did Gunther Beckstein, Minister-President of Bavaria, look like a painted trollop? Or was it the one where a gorilla rapes Richard Holbrooke? Tell us, David Ignatius, what was this zinger you've set up so thrillingly?

It looks like the smart money is on Delaware Senator Joe Biden for Obama's running mate. Mark Halperin's already announced it in his typical cryptic way (after erasing his "if I don't know the selection it hasn't happened yet" post from last night): "Bo knows," he says, which probably refers to Biden's son, Beau, though why Beau would know is unknown. Why would Obama choose Biden? Our theory is that Obama just likes Biden. He's a funny guy. But is it a terrible choice? We think it is! But we'd love to be wrong! Pros and cons (mostly cons), below. The official line is age, experience, and foreign policy expertise-Biden matches up well against McCain by outdoing him on most of his strengths besides the "tortured for five years by homos" thing. But with Biden comes the history of saying insane and inappropriate things and, you know, the plagiarism. (We said he matched up well with McCain!) And hey, let's look at some of our favorite moments of Biden saying something insane-taken entirely from his recent run for the presidency! July, 2006:

Timesmen Nagourney and Zeleny say Obama's found a running mate. But he has only told his closest advisers. And not the person he chose, even! Who is either Evan Bayh (ugh), Tim Kaine (eh), or Joe Biden (!). He will text you, his supporters, whenever he decides to make his announcement. Last night political expert hack loser Mark Halperin said Nagourner and Zeleny (and Drudge!) were all flat-out wrong but now he must've have been informed that they're right so he took his post down and replaced it with something about how Joe Biden is the guy (and when it turns out to be Bayh he'll take that down too.) Morning! [NYT]

Back in 1973, when young John McCain had just been released from his five hellish years of torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese, he became a media sensation back home. His tale of heroism inspired the nation, and his refusal to back down and give in to his captors demands was thrilling stuff. Queerty tracked down what may be McCain's first personal account of his captivity and torture, for US News & World Report in May of 1973. They posted it online in January, but maybe it's because we're all so familiar with his tale at this point that no one noticed, until now, the bit where he says all his captors were homosexuals who got off on whipping him. No, that is not made up.

Nothing makes us prouder to be Americans than knowing, at least, that we are free. Free specifically to post insane allegations against any media or political figure accusing them of conspiratorial scurrility on YouTube, where it will be viewed by millions of our fellow crazies and followed up by response videos even less grounded in any sort of observable reality. So you can imagine how thrilled we are that this post-modern citizen campaign work can now be showed on real tv right next to T. Boon Pickens windfarm fantasia and Obama clubbing with Paris Hilton or whatever. It's all thanks to Saysme.tv, a new service that allows your average man-on-the-street the chance to have his 25-second commercial aired in various local cable markets for a tiny, tiny fee. Listen to Saysme.tv's chief executive on how this is all about freedom:

The only news that actually happened during that unprecedented Saturday debate at the Saddleback Church is that John McCain spent the Obama-questioning portion of the evening in his bus instead of the "cone of silence." Then, when Andrea Mitchell mentioned this on TV the next morning, his campaign sent out one of those furious letters that NBC News head Steve Corpus keeps getting from various outraged candidates. Of course the story was confirmed by CNN and Rick Warren and Kit Seelye but no matter. The entire debate was already a pointless exercise with a predetermined winner, designed to help McCain appeal to the wary nut vote and make Obama look good just for showing up. What's funny about this "debate" before cartoonish Stuart Smalley-esque touchy-feely evangelical megachurch pastor Rick Warren and his million followers is that we know Obama's gone to church every week for years and the closest we've seen McCain to worshiping Yahweh is when that North Vietnamese prison guard he borrowed from the Solzhenitsyn anecdote scratched that cross in the sand. (Amusingly, this plagiarism was first noted by the right-wingers of Free Republic back when Conservatives hated McCain for being a MAVERICK.) But what matters, obviously, is not actual religion conviction-or even the facade of conviction that actual church-attendance lends-but kowtowing to morons. McCain, who first bit his tongue to appeal to his party's idiots about five years ago and has not yet let up on it since, won the debate by proudly announcing that he has the moral authority to recognize and personally wipe out evil in all its forms, while Obama foolishly went for the "humble and meek" vote. The pundits will probably call it his "complexity" problem but he actually erred in sounding like a real Christian. McCain, not even sure which denomination he is supposed to pretend to be, only had to assuage these politically exhausted evangelicals that, like Republican presidents before him, he would ban abortion forever and shut down the ACLU and make it a crime for newsreaders to not wear flag pins. And, while everyone rightly says Obama "lost" the debate, it also happened on a Saturday night during the damn Olympics, and as we already said, just showing up for the photo-op was more or less the entire point of his attendance. Hooray for Michael Phelps! Click to view

This photo—of John Edwards being filmed by occasional mistress Rielle Hunter—reportedly was taken December 30, 2006. As we all know, Edwards claims he ended his affair and confessed to his wife in 2006. Hunter's contract with the Edwards campaign ended on December 31, at which point there are no more photos of her at campaign events. So. Either Edwards is lying about the date of the end of the affair and his confession, or... this is the night he did it? The campaign stopped paying her too, except for that $14,086 payment they made to Hunter in April of 2007. This story was so much simpler when everyone was just denying everything. See the full, uncropped photo at DBKP.

Good news! You thought the career of Mark Penn, scurrilous bastard Clinton pollster and world's worst PR guru, was finished? You thought he'd never ineptly manage the press strategy of another big Democrat again? Especially after those wonderful, wonderful Clinton campaign memos all got dumped on the Internet this week? The joke, as always, is on you, where "you" means "common sense and the hope that the Democratic party won't once again shoot itself in the foot." If Barack Obama chooses Even Bayh as his running mate (please, no, not The Ethanol Ticket), Penn's back on top! "For years, Penn and his wife, Nancy Jacobson, have been close advisers to Indiana Senator Evan Bayh." He'll lose this one for us yet! We'd be happier with fucking Biden. At least he's poor! [Atlantic, Photo-illustration]

Did you know that charismatic Virginia governor Tim Kaine is on Barack Obama's Vice Presidential short list? It's true, according to today's New York Times! "Now the Obama campaign is eyeing Mr. Kaine as a potential running mate, seeing in him a like-minded breath of fresh air who has also shown he can win in a red state," Kate Zernike reports today. Pretty convincing! In totally unrelated news, the Washington Post reports today that the selection of former Virginia governor Mark Warner to give the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention is a "hint" that current Virginia governor Tim Kaine will not be Obama's VP choice. "If Kaine were chosen as Obama's running mate, two Virginians would have back-to-back prime-time speaking slots, a scenario that party officials regard as unlikely." This is great media management by Obama, right? No one knows anything! [WP, NYT]

Back in the day, confused Republicans used to like to pretend that careerist military hack Colin Powell would be the first Black President, because he is a Republican who is mostly well-liked. Powell never wanted the job, because he generally refuses to accept positions that force him to do anything other than follow orders (he is a very good soldier! cf. that fucking UN speech), and now he's a pariah for embarrassing the Republican Party in the UN speech and not being a very good Secretary of State. Now terrible hack Bill Kristol—who, as far as we can tell, has no professional or notable personal relationship with Powell—claims he knows for sure that Powell will endorse Barack Obama at the Democratic National Convention. What a scoop! You know, if it's true.

Former Hillary Clinton spokeshipster Howard Wolfson says Hillary Clinton totally would be president right now if the John Edwards scandal had gone public last year. "I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee," he told ABC. And furthermore: Wolfson says the Clintons knew the story but didn't push it. "Any of the campaigns that would have tried to push that would have been burned by it." Ha. Bullshit. If they had the story, they would've planted it without getting their hands dirty. And furthermore, Edwards would've had to drop out right before Iowa, and not after. And furthermore, their Iowa ground game sucked and Obama's didn't. And frankly their campaign didn't kick into gear until they were losing and started taking shit seriously; being the frontrunner was a liability. But all that aside, playing alternative history is totally fun! So let's all pretend the Edwards revelations broke close enough to the Iowa caucus to force Edwards to drop out but not so far from them that everyone had already forgotten or stopped caring. What would our world look like now?

Kinda spooky crane shots through futuristic windfarms are the new adorable little girls sleeping at 3 a.m.. Or puppies, maybe. Both Barack Obama and John McCain used the same damn shot in recent ads, suggesting that their energy policies are both based on pissing off Ted Kennedy and his neighbors. They really ought to have someone vet stock footage, right? Our own Richard Blakeley spotted the matching footage and put together the damning clip that will swing this election to Ron Paul. Paul only uses fiercely independent stock footage the mainstream media are too scared to show you.

Yesterday the Washington Post reported an odd and sort of complex story about "bundlers" raising money for John McCain. The gist: the biggest of these bundlers net GOP candidates huge donations from weirdos and losers who often have never even voted before. The almost-accusation: the bundlers are funneling their own cash to the candidates via third parties, which is illegal. Clinton donor Norman Hsu got in trouble for this. One small problem-the most unlikely of these donations went to Giuliani and Clinton, not McCain. The Post's lede and photo implicated McCain. Correction time! "Those donors — Rite Aid manager Ibrahim Marabeh, and lounge owners Nadia and Shawn Abdalla — wrote checks to Giuliani and Clinton, not McCain." Oh, but here's the important part: Ana Marie Cox found Nadia and Shawn Abdalla's lounge's MySpace page (watch out for the [AWESOME] song!) and it's AWESOME. We're just going to reprint their entire "About Me" section after the jump, because it's great.

John McCain's been hammering home his "Obama's a celebrity" angle for weeks now. The not-so-hidden message behind those ads is an old and effective one-Obama is the candidate of Europeans and Hollywood nutjobs. Get it? Now Democrats are upset that Obama's not fighting back hard enough. Meanwhile, the polls remain infuriatingly even. Attached, a graph of InTrade market predictions closing prices for Obama over the last couple months, measuring how likely an Obama victory is. As you can see, the polls are nearing a statistical tie but Obama's still the odds-on favorite to win. Here's the thing, though-nothing that happens in the campaigns between now and the conventions means a damn thing. We're in stasis. Silly season. It's media Groundhog Day, replaying and debating the same stories and narratives over and over again. Sometimes they'll switch the players around-now McCain's on top! But we're still in the post-primaries hangover. Once that campaign finally ended, Obama got his requisite little bump and then things evened back out. But the campaign stories now are just an excuse to pass the time. The citizens who care about politics were already energized by the primaries. As those dragged on, the likely voters all made up their minds. The undecideds and uninformed maybe grew briefly interested or invested, but by the end they were burned out. The campaigns they don't want to energize everyone again until the final leg of the battle, so for the most part they're treading water (Obama) or just throwing shit out to see what sticks (McCain). The majority of Americans, even the ones who probably will vote this year, are not going to pay attention again until the conventions provide something interesting to look at. Those of us who are still obsessing over every little campaign detail are just torturing ourselves. The polls will remain in stasis until Denver and St. Paul, then we get to actually see where this godforsaken nation is heading. In the meantime, enjoy your stupid Paris Hilton videos and tire gauges and trips to Sturgis and surprisingly pleasant Entertainment Weekly interviews (McCain loves Viva Zapata, the forgotten Elia Kazan/Marlon Brando collaboration. Obama says Shrek 3 was "not as good at the original.").

Hillary Clinton wants—no, needs—some recognition for so valiantly and gloriously melting down and losing a nomination that a few short months ago she was supposed to walk away with without breaking a sweat. Remember how proud we all were as she became increasingly desperate, holding the Democratic Party hostage like Brett Favre, as her husband began making incomprehensible racial gaffes and she quaffed bourbon and divorced herself from reality? Yes. So. Let's relive the magic of Hillary '08 at the Democratic National Convention in Denver! The Clinton Camp (they still have a camp!) is demanding that Hillary's name be placed into nomination so that she can rack up one more in her growing list of symbolic defeats. (Of course this remains a highly unlikely possibility, so it's actually irresponsible of ABC to run with it like it's news and irresponsible of us to play along with their stupid game. But hey! Still the silly season.) [ABC]