Congratulations to the John McCain campaign, which has now officially been told off on all three big cable news networks! Attached is a video of MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell taking some hard swings at McCain's sacrificial spokesman, Tucker Bounds, about campaign lying Monday. Also attached: Video of Fox News's Megyn Kelly doing the same thing on right-leaning Fox News Channel. Wow. Remember when CNN did this to Bounds, so McCain cancelled a Larry King interview in a snit? Guess that won't work anymore. Bounds has become a human piñata like Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan before him, as the media hold him responsible for the crimes of his boss, who they can't get at. It's awesome to see, but still all too rare — on all the networks. Click through to watch a compilation video of Bounds getting creamed.

The Atlantic has said it didn't vet Jill Greenberg's politics before hiring her to shoot John McCain. Even if it had known about her controversial anti-George Bush photographs, it wouldn't have cared, as a matter of policy. The policy may soon change: Greenberg is gloating she left McCain's eyes bloodshot and skin gnarly for the Atlantic's October cover. Worse, from the magazine's perspective, is that she tricked the Republican presidential nominee into standing over an unflattering strobe light, then posted the worst shots and Photoshops to her personal site:

Times food writer Kim Severson spends her time these days not with restaurateurs but in Alaska, where her background at the Anchorage Daily News has suddenly become a very valuable asset. Severson today reeled in a tasty scoop: Confirmation, first, that Levi Johnston, the teen father who is marrying into Sarah Palin's family, has in fact dropped out of high school, as rumored, amid slipping grades and unwelcome pressure from his family to play hockey. Severson also delivered the most credible explanation yet for why Track Palin, son of the Republican vice presidential nominee, enlisted in the Army. The rumor mill had him caught up in a drug bust, or perhaps nailed for vandlizing some school buses, and under pressure to join as a corrective. It sounds, for now at least, like the reality is more mundane, if still quite sad. It seems Track, a top Wasilla hockey prospect prone to rink rage, met his fate on the ice:

Apologies are in order to Charles Gibson, widely presumed to be too soft to credibly interview Sarah Palin. If anything, the ABC News anchor's first exchange with Palin, aired last night, is all the more embarrassing to Palin precisely because Gibson was hand-picked by her handlers. The Republican vice presidential nominee's awful performance is apparent enough from the transcript, which contains her horribly stilted answer to a question about Iran, invoking "nucular weapons... given to those hands of Ahmadinejad" and already compared to Miss South Carolina's famous thoughts on "the Iraq" at a teen beauty pageant. But things are even worse on video, as seen after the jump.

Key difference between Barack Obama and John McCain: Unlike his notoriously temperamental Republican opponent, Obama tends to keep his cool even in the most trying of circumstances. For communicating that message to voters, Obama's appearance on David Letterman last night was effective politics. The presidential nominee joked about the ginned-up scandal around his use of the phrase "lipstick on a pig," and that phrase's alleged ties to McCain running mate Sarah Palin. He even got in a clever wisecrack about being jealous of Palin's celebrity. The only snag is that Letterman's audience, at least compared to its competitors, tends toward the younger coastal "elites" who were already going to vote for Obama. Sigh. At least we'll always have the clip. Click the video icon to watch. [via Huffington Post]

CBS News may be home to the once-groundbreaking newsmagazine 60 Minutes and even the instigator of an evening-news segment called "free speech," but it'll be damned if it's going to let John McCain use footage of Katie Couric to smear Barack Obama as a sexist. CBS said the ad took Couric's comments out of context, which it apparently did, implying a swipe at Obama that was never taken. But instead of pursuing a lengthy court case that would have to contend with extensive case law protecting political ads, CBS is borrowing a tactic from the Church of Scientology and alleging a copyright infringement, at least according to YouTube's statement on the matter. That got the video removed nice and quick-like, though it still exists on the McCain campaign website. Surely CBS news executives could have taken a a more elitist road than low-grade YouTube censorship. [Politico]

Barack Obama has long needed to take his first real swipe at his presidential rival John McCain as the Republican hammers away at Obama's lead in the polls. That makes it all the more tragic that Obama's attack yesterday missed its mark so widely. The Democrat's profoundly careless statement that "You can put lipstick on a pig — it's still a pig" was seized upon by supporters and opponents alike as a brutal attack of McCain's running mate Sarah Palin. It might be clear in context (see video after the jump) that Obama wasn't referring to the VP candidate. But Obama should have known it would be read that way after Palin's famous convention line, "What's the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick." The inevitable backlash and media firestorm will not only consume several precious days of the campaign news cycle — it will make it harder for Obama to take the hard swings he needs to take.

An expanded version of this story about the Republican running mate's son—with details from the National Enquirer's print edition—is here.

We've updated our guide with three more rumors about the Republican vice presidential candidate.

After his comparatively disastrous speech at the Republican National Convention, it wouldn't seem John McCain could teach Sarah Palin much about public relations. But the Republican presidential nominee appears to have imparted an important lesson in one-on-one media manipulation: Sometimes the best response to a skeptical reporter is to draw him in as closely as possible. Politico said Palin will meet with ABC News' Charlie Gibson not only on Sunday, as originally reported, but in multiple interviews Thursday and Friday, as well, including at the prospective vice president's home in Wasilla, Alaska. Much as McCain used to score points with campaign reporters with seemingly chummy off-the-record chats, Palin no doubt hopes to soften Gibson up with a tour of her home state. Gibson, meanwhile, is supposedly racing to become the sort of interviewer who needs softening up:

Keith Olbermann may have been pushed out of his gig anchoring MSNBC's election coverage, but the Countdown host actually made out pretty well, with the cable news network widely reported to be in the process of extending his contract. Far sadder is the case of Olbermann's fellow shouting head Chris Matthews, also ejected from the election team over his on-air feuds. Matthews' contract is up in 2009, two years sooner than Olbermann's, and yet no one is talking about buttering him up! That's probably because lantern-jawed Olbermann, by far the more overtly partisan of the two, has done more to gin up ratings. But apparently it's also because parent company GE's shareholders — that is, people primarily concerned with making money off a sprawling multinational corporation and with no expertise in running media operations — were unhappy with the network's convention coverage. Report the MSNBC haters at the Post:

Even false rumors can be revealing. It wasn't true that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was a secret Muslim, or that his wife hated white people, but the persistence of those claims in email chain letters, online comments and blog posts told you what a chunk of middle America feared, namely scary foreign terrorists in disguise. What to make, then, of the flood of conspiracy theories about Sarah Palin that are flooding the dark corners of the internet? We thought rumors about the Republican vice presidential candidate and her family were going to dry up last week, but since our last comprehensive factsheet they have just kept coming. There's some genuine scandal. But a fake pregnancy? Secret rehab stints? Maybe the Bush and Clinton years left the blue states dreading anyone who seems too country-fried. Or maybe the Palin's really do have this many skeletons in their closet! Trudge through the thickening swamp of Palin mud and decide for yourself, one rumor at a time, after the jump.

It can be hard to sift truth from myth from conspiracy theory when it comes to Sarah Palin, even if that's what you're paid to do. But one would hope a professional journalist's natural skepticism would be piqued by the now-notorious Photoshop job at left of Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin holding a rifle next to a swimming pool while wearing a bikini. Too good to be true! But Lola Ogunnaike, entertainment reporter for CNN's American Morning, seems to believe the image is authentic. Yesterday she told Reliable Sources host Howard Kurtz that Palin should maybe avoid posing with guns like this, because it might come back to bite her in the ass:

Wait, is it really the New York Times that assigned at least four reporters to essentially investigate those conspiracy theories about how Sarah Palin didn't really give birth to her son Trig? Because while internet rumors are never mentioned in the Times's lengthy Palin baby story this morning, it's hard to imagine any other reason the newspaper went to such great lengths to write about Palin's fifth and most recent child, despite a lack of cooperation from the Republican vice presidential candidate. The Times has not always been so eager to delve into the private lives of politicians, as John Edwards well knows! The bottom-line on Palin, for those who study intricate flow charts about why she took such a lengthy trip home when childbirth seemed imminent, or wonder why there are precious few photos of her pregnant:

It was unthinkable that MSNBC could come out of the Democratic and Republican National Conventions without a major, public shakeup of its political news team. The incessant fighting between the cable network's most opinionated anchors — Keith Olbermann, Joe Scarborough and Chris Matthews — marred the chance to retain all those new young viewers Olbermann has attracted over the past year or two. But now that the other shoe has dropped, with the anchor team of Olbermann and Matthews being replaced by comparatively neutral White House correspondent David Gregory, it would be a mistake to think MSNBC has undergone some sort of deep existential crisis that will pull it back from the brink of becoming the Fox News Channel of the left. The network's ratings growth, driven by Olbermann, has been too good and too long coming, and the lefty anchor (according to the Times) is about to re-up his plush contract, which in any case has three of four yeas left on it. And MSNBC will have done plenty if it simply gets its big-name blowhards acting at a high school level of maturity rather than yelling at one another like a bunch of kindergartners. Network executives appear to appreciate this! From the Times:

Maybe it should have been obvious that the celebrity weeklies were going to politicize as soon as Hillary Clinton and her supporters showed strong resistance, during the primary season, to acquiescing to Barack Obama, thus highlighting the importance of women voters in 2008. But the heightened political importance of the magazines, whose readers are overwhelmingly female, wasn't in anyone's face until this week, when Us Weekly made waves with its controversial "Babies, Lies & Scandal" Sarah Palin cover. The issue, unflattering to Palin, has so far resulted in 5,000-10,000 cancelled subscriptions, MSNBC.com's gossip column is reporting. (Though MSNBC's Courtney Hazlett is close to Us Weekly's rivals; and-see below-the magazine's Janice Min says the losses are overstated.)

Elitist New York media obsessives keep alerting us to the guy who cheered John McCain tonight at the Republican convention with a sign reading "THE Mavrick [sic]." So here's the money shot, liberals! This image was, of course, captured by the Bolshevik intelligentsia at MSNBC, probably through a camera personally operated by Rachel Maddow, since Keith Olbermann was in New York. Cut this patriot a break, linguistic totalitarians. He's probably a farmer or factory worker who could barely afford that finely tailored suit or the donations necessary to score good convention seats, much less a fancy college education. Besides, John McCain was tortured in Vietnam, so you can shut up and apologize for laughing at this now The End.

As a speaker, John McCain had no hope of pulling off a capstone convention speech like his Democratic rival Barack Obama. The Republican presidential nominee could not completely banish the minor verbal stumbles that sometimes mark his campaign speeches, and his party's internal security apparatus apparently could not banish the opposition protesters who infiltrated the convention hall and repeatedly interrupted the speech and made everyone nervous. And besides, McCain was never going to get the added energy of being surrounded by 70,000 fans in a giant stadium while being filmed by CNN's $100,000 hovercam. But McCain's lack of polish might as well have been by design. He was far from an unelectable, W-level bumbler, but rough enough that he can now keep calling himself the underdog, and continue framing Obama as a fancy arrogant elitist. He even manages to look slightly heroic — to some, at least — while doing so.

Who said Cindy McCain was going to be some kind of weight around her husband's neck in his campaign as the Republican nominee for president? Only fools, because McCain just opened for her husband at the Republican convention and totally killed. Some more pictures of the crazed audience for her address after the jump.

Why is Cindy McCain speaking so slowly and making everyone at the Republican Convention pull embarrassed faces right now? Probably because there are two minutes and God-knows-how-many time-outs and commercial breaks left on the NFL season opener, threatening to keep red-blooded, football-loving Republicans and right-leaning Democrats away from John McCain's climactic speech, just as was feared. Go long, Cindy, go long! [via Wonkette]