As promised, John McCain finally made it to the Late Show with David Letterman tonight, and we've got CBS-supplied footage of many of the highlights. Not included: the twenty minutes of relentless McCain jokes that Letterman opened the show with to signal that this would hardly be a pushover appearance for McCain. And it wasn't!Things started to get somewhat heated just before the first commercial break, when Letterman clearly surprised McCain by meeting his Ayers reference with a question about McCain's association with Watergate criminal G. Gordon Liddy. As McCain struggled to figure out a response (eventually, he decided to embrace Liddy), Letterman pricelessly threw to commercial, leaving the candidate stranded. Also, Letterman? Not that confident in Sarah Palin's ability to lead! Peruse some of these highlights and see for yourself. [CBS]

Here's a preview of John McCain on Late Show tonight. He told host David Letterman, "I screwed up," then laughed and did a little "gee whiz" shrug, and made an awkward joke about being tortured in Vietnam. "What can I say?!" the Republican presidential nominee asked. Um, maybe give a reason why you lied about having to fly back to DC when you bailed on Letterman's show last time? Apparently that wasn't in the cards. Letterman later hit McCain for paling around with Watergate burglar and would-be firebomber G. Gordon Liddy, even though McCain has slammed Barack Obama for an arguably more distant relationship with 1960s radical William Ayers. By the end of the segment McCain appeared to be in full retreat on the Ayers issue. Witness McCain statement at the end of the clip after the jump (along with more bizarre face-pulls).

The entire political season has been leading up to this moment: no, not November 4, but tonight's appearance of John McCain on the Late Show with David Letterman! Ever since the presidential candidate canceled his September appearance at the last minute, the McCain/Letterman War of '08 has raged on, with a celebrity army (comprised of Paris Hilton and Julia Louis-Dreyfus) ready to fall on their swords for the late-night host. Now, finally, McCain has taped a make-up appearance set to air later tonight, and details are beginning to trickle out:

♦ Barack Obama locked up 17 newspaper endorsements over the weekend compared to just two for John McCain. [E&P]
♦ John McCain will make an appearance on Letterman on Thursday. [CNN]
♦ Don't mention the recession to Tina Brown: Her new site will burn through $18 mil. over the next three years and most staffers are making more than 100K. [AdAge]
♦ Is the tween magazine over? [AdFreak]
♦ Jon Stewart's Daily Show is heading to the Middle East. [THR]

Now that everything else has failed for him, John McCain is crawling back to David Letterman to appear on the Late Show this Thursday, after weaseling out of an earlier appearance under the lie that he was needed in Washington to work on the Wall Street bailout. McCain's people are, well, stupid. If he'd appeared when he was supposed to, Letterman would have treated him to a gentle ribbing while the candidate tried to get his talking points out. Now that McCain has lied to the famously testy talk show host—and now that there are tons of new gaffes and missteps that simply didn't exist when he was originally supposed to appear—what can he expect? Slaughter. Letterman isn't some lovable funnyman. He practically invented the contemporary asshole while Seinfeld and Larry David were first working out their club routines. And when a guest pisses him off, he can turn serious and downright mean. Just last week, he was discussing the possibility of having McCain back on the program when he said, ""In an attempt to save his campaign, they're talking about coming back. So we said, sure, we'd love you to come back ... but they're being squirrely. Politicians can be squirrely. ... I just don't know if we can trust him." Previously, Letterman remarked, "This just in…a backwoods hiker has found the wreckage of John McCain's campaign." So if McCain actually does show up on Thursday (though there's no reason to believe he will; Joe Six-Pack Americans watch Leno, his staff may conclude) it's not likely to be a slightly awkward goof-down like we've seen McCain engage in on The Daily Show after he'd given up his last few beliefs to win the GOP nomination. With any luck, Letterman will simply demand over and over again that McCain explain himself, show him evidence of the fact that he totally lied, and belittle his non-role in that bailout plan that didn't work anyway. Hopefully, McCain will lose it in the face of repeated questioning by some mere celebrity that he publicly snubbed, unable to believe that Letterman won't just drop it and make with the funny already. And, hopefully, next Friday's news channels and papers will be full of John McCain—bitter, rigid, elitist, crybaby. [Washington Post]

As we watched David Letterman tear into John McCain with renewed vigor during last night's Late Show monologue, we couldn't help but think that this might make the rumored negotiations for McCain's reappearance a little awkward. Turns out, scheduling stipulations between the two camps had already turned contentious, as Letterman revealed when he sat down at his desk. Still, McCain's loss is Letterman's gain, because the talk show host gleefully continued to demolish McCain using some of his slyest, most cutting language yet.At this point, should McCain cut his losses and abandon renegotiations with Letterman, knowing full well he's likely to be slammed to his face if he finally put in his guest appearance? Or does he have no choice but to stop the Late Night bleeding by any means necessary? Ladies and gentlemen, the McCain/Letterman War of '08 has officially resumed after collapsed talks. Stock up on your munitions now.

Change We Can Believe In: Though John McCain recently made headlines for conceding the swing state of Michigan to Barack Obama, there's one battle he's not giving up on, and that's the perilous McCain/Letterman War of '08. Begun not with the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand but with McCain's Late Show cancellation, the war has raged on for two perilous weeks without a peep from the presidential candidate, allowing Letterman to gather strength (as well as a celebrity army comprised of Paris Hilton and Julia Louis-Dreyfus). Now, says the New York Post, "McCain representatives and Late Show executives are negotiating an appearance on Letterman's show sometime around the final presidential debate on Oct. 15," when McCain will be in New York for the Hofstra University-set debate. Start steeling yourself for the awkward, self-effacing "heh heh hehs" now. [New York Post]

♦ David Letterman is in talks with John McCain about rescheduling his appearance on the late night show. [NYP]
♦ Sarah Palin will make two appearances on Fox News this week. [Politico]
♦ If your copy of the Times looks a little bit different today, that's because the paper has been busy shuffling around its various sections. [E&P]
♦ The LA Times may lay off as many as 75 staffers this week. [Variety]
♦ How big banks are handing their ad campaigns during this turbulent time. [NYT]
♦ CBS has had a solid start to the fall season. NBC has not. [AdAge, THR]
♦ Anne Hathaway has signed on to appear in Alice in Wonderland, which Tim Burton is directing. [THR]
♦ Why is Jim Cramer employed? That's what we'd like to know. [Romenesko]

Page Six thinks it has figured out why Bill Clinton gave such a tepid endorsement of Barack Obama on The View and David Letterman last week. Not that anyone was really scratching their heads, befuddled, as to why the ex-president couldn't get past his wife's bitter loss of the Democratic primary to Obama. But Page Six gets specific: Obama supposedly refused to promise Hillary Clinton a Supreme Court nomination as she demanded, so Bill exacted revenge. Clinton on the high court is not exactly a new idea. And her people deny the new version of the rumor. The timing of the gossip is interesting, though. As the Obama ticket battles it out with Sarah Palin, star of Thursday primetime TV, for former Clinton supporters, painting Hillary as shrill and demanding makes Obama look a bit more sympathetic. And celebrity gossip sheets may be nearly as good a way to reach Hillary Democrats as The View.

As if Anne Hathaway didn't have enough to contend with this week while facing her Rachel Getting Married press grind and her debunked predilection for... well, you know, the beleaguered actress joined David Letterman on Tuesday to sift through the detritus of her doomed relationship with Raffaello Follieri. In apparent exchange for omitting those rumors from his intimate line of questioning, however, pretty much every other subject was fair game. And to her credit, Hathaway played along even livelier than you'd expect a woman getting the third degree over an ex who's just about start a five-year term in federal prison. And, praise God, she reclaimed her dog! Screw Mickey Rourke, seriously — this is a comeback story for the ages, and just about all the happy ending we can stand. [The Late Show]

David Letterman naturally wanted some dish last night on Anne Hathaway's train-wreck of a relationship with Rafaello Follieri, the Italian con-man doing time for fraud, conspiracy and money laundering. He had complimented her at length, agreed to show her clip and phrased his questions politely. But the starlet became exasperated only one-minute into the good stuff. "I'm just kind of promoting my movie," she said. Ha ha ha, um, no. You don't get to sweep the imprisoned swindler ex under the rug. And no one cares about the movie anyway. By getting testy — at one point Hathaway asked Letterman, "Do you want to know his shoe size, too?" — Hathaway is just keeping the issue hot and herself entangled in Follieri's scandal even longer. Cringe at her battle with reality in the attached video (click the thumbnail to watch).

David Letterman continued to hammer John McCain last night, taking obvious glee in the fact that he has finally found an adversary worthy of supplanting former bête noires like Les Moonves and the entirety of NBC Broadcasting. If you'll remember, McCain incurred Letterman's wrath by canceling a Late Show appearance under the guise of heading immediately to Washington D.C. — something Letterman debunked by cutting to a live feed of McCain's interview with Katie Couric just down the street. Last night, after taking shots at McCain in his monologue ("He loves bailouts — he bailed out on me"), Letterman welcomed guest Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who promptly swore her allegiance to the Late Show host, then demonstrated it with another live feed cut to a lonely Katie Couric. Clip above. [CBS]

♦ David Letterman ripped into John McCain once again last night, which he'll probably continue to do as long as he gets this much attention for it. [NYT]
♦ Sarah Ivens is out as the editor-in-chief of the moneylosing tabloid OK! And, no, Bonnie Fuller is not taking over. [NYP]
♦ CNBC's David Faber is writing a book about the Wall Street meltdown, too. [NYO]
♦ ABC won the Thursday night ratings war thanks to the two-hour season premiere of Grey's Anatomy. [TV Decoder]
♦ Brigitte Quinn and Page Hopkins are leaving Fox News. [TV Newser]
♦ The Magazine Publishers of America will announce the winner of the cover of the year on Monday; here are the three finalists. [Jossip]

It looks like John McCain will be heading to tonight's presidential debate after all (according to this priceless pool report from McCain's plane, which also states, "General atmosphere is utter confusion"), but one no-show is continuing to cost the candidate, and that's McCain's now-notorious skipped Late Show appearance. David Letterman continued to rip into McCain during his monologue yesterday, even conscripting guest Paris Hilton (who had her own memorable run-in with McCain) into the proceedings. Meanwhile, executives at CBS News are up in arms about the live news feed Letterman tapped into on Wednesday night's broadcast that showed McCain getting made up in advance of his Katie Couric interview:

That's why Edward Murrow—famed for his measured wartime broadcasts from London—had such an effect when he took on red-baiting Senator McCarthy. (Here's a scene from Good Night and Good Luck, a movie account of that confrontation.) And it's why Late Show host David Letterman's disillusionment with Republican candidate John McCain, evidenced two nights in a row now, could swing the presidential campaign. "The road to the White House runs through me," joked Letterman on Wednesday night when he berated McCain for suspending his campaign and canceling a planned appearance on the CBS late-night show.

Not only did John McCain ditch Late Show host David Letterman for Katie Couric and mislead him about it, it turns out the Republican presidential nominee spent the entire night in New York and didn't fly to DC until the next morning. So, in a reprise of last night, Letterman will spend a good chunk of his show this evening bashing the Arizona senator. "The economy just barely held on long enough for him to get back" to DC, Letterman joked. As theatrical as the Letterman-McCain feud has become, Letterman could probably score more points talking about the $700 billion banking bailout than about the mechanics of late-night TV booking. Here's to hoping that, when the full show airs, he does. (Click the video icon to watch some excerpts.)

♦ Financial news outlets are performing well, not surprisingly. CNBC's Closing Bell saw ratings increase 70% last week. [AdAge]
♦ HBO has optioned the Tom Wolfe novel I Am Charlotte Simmons with Tina Brown producing. [Variety via NYO]
♦ Furniture mogul Eric Villency is teaming up with Cotton (yes, the industry trade group) on a web-based reality TV show. [AdAge]
♦ Sarah Palin got cozy with Rupert Murdoch last night. [Politico]
♦ Thanks to hefty tax breaks, a record 19 primetime series will be filmed in NYC in 2008-9, compared to 12 last year. [NYT]
♦ David Letterman ripped into John McCain last night after the senator cancelled his scheduled appearance. [Gawker]
♦ Should Andrea Mitchell really be covering the financial crisis given her husband is former Fed chair Alan Greenspan? [CJR]

Well, isn't this interesting. Hours before the anticipated David Letterman evisceration of John McCain aired on the East Coast, a YouTube popped up (by a user who had never posted any videos before and registered today) with all the highlights. Thanks, CBS mole! Video after the jump:

Somehow, YouTube already has a copy of David Letterman tonight lacerating John McCain for skipping the Late Show and suspending his campaign in the midst of the Wall Street meltdown. As reported earlier by Drudge, Letterman became especially upset when he caught the Republican presidential nominee in a live feed from New York being interviewed by his own network's Katie Couric. McCain had personally told Letterman he was canceling because he was headed back to the capital to handle the financial crisis. Whoops.

John McCain announced today that he would suspend his presidential campaign until the current economic crisis is settled, leaving some big holes in this week's TV schedule — most especially, this Friday's suddenly in-jeopardy presidential debate, which McCain is seeking to postpone (Barack Obama and debate organizers have rejected the idea). In the short-term, however, McCain pulled out of his planned appearance tonight on Late Show with David Letterman, and the host is pissed. Seems McCain told Letterman that he was canceling so that he could rush back to Washington D.C., but then Dave caught wind that McCain hadn't gone anywhere — that, in fact, he was just down the street taping an interview with CBS anchorwoman Katie Couric. What followed was an on-screen excoriation, according to the Drudge Report: