The plight of sad Rachel Maddow of MSNBC was revealed in the Times this weekend, as expected. The clearly underpaid anchor splits her time between a 275-square-foot tenement in New York and a 140-year-old cabin in a remote corner of Massachusetts, where she is forced to moonlight as garbage hauler. She has no proper shoes, or even a television, so she drinks fermented "sugar-cane juice" and dreams of a bygone "golden age." But things are looking up!

The last days of the presidential campaign were about to make Keith Olbermann's head explode, what with the racism and Islamophobia and calls for death and so forth, so the MSNBC Countdown host is suspending the specialness of his special comments and just doing them every night until he feels like stopping. He knows he "frequently insisted he would never" do this, and he's sorry, but "I suspect this will be the first of nightly pieces, most shorter than this one, until further notice." In other words, the special comments will be regular for a special period, until they go back to being special, as they regularly are. (Olbermann explains in a video after the jump.)

John McCain's presidential campaign won't let Time columnist Joe Klein aboard its campaign plane because, according to an official statement, " we don't allow Daily Kos diarists on board either." Translation:

Good news, Barack Obama supporters: Your Democratic presidential nominee is winning the campaign for newspaper endorsements in a landslide, with 112 newspapers to rival John McCain's 39! By circulation it's 13 million to 4 million. Sadly, however, those endorsements are almost definitely useless.

Here is Barack Obama and a few of his friends getting together under the Gateway Arch in St. Louis yesterday. "All I can say is wow," said Obama as he took the stage. Meanwhile, let's take a gander at what was going on with the 400 to 500 people who showed up to watch Sarah Palin boost for Senator Norm Coleman in Duluth, MN, the other day.

Former Secretary of State under George W. Bush, Colin Powell, endorsed Barack Obama for President on Meet the Press this morning. Powell, a Republican and longtime friend of John McCain, said, "I think he is a transformational figure, he is a new generation coming onto the world stage, onto the American stage, and for that reason I'll be voting for Sen. Barack Obama... He's thinking that all villages have values, all towns have values, not just small towns have values." As for McCain and his supporters' straw-grasping, "terrorist" and "Muslim" talk, "I have been disappointed frankly in some of the approaches Senator McCain has taken recently... The party has moved even further to the right and Governor Palin has indicated a further rightward shift. I would have difficulty with two more conservative appointments to the Supreme Court, but that's what we'd be looking at in a McCain administration." Click through to watch the full endorsement. Click to view

Terry Tate, the linebacker-turned-office manager who starred in one of the greatest Superbowl commercials of all time, has returned. In the first installment of his triumphant move from advertising to politics, Tate appears at Palin's infamous interview with Katie Couric to express his mild displeasure with the Alaskan ice queen's infuriating double-talk.

" Wednesday, Michelle Obama called room service and ordered lobster hors d'oeuvres, two whole steamed lobsters, Iranian caviar and champagne, a tipster told Page Six." [Post]

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).

Negative ads usually work, despite the fact that everybody whines about them. Not this year! Political scientists (A real job title? Not sure) say that this year's campaign is—as old Bob Schieffer grouchily pointed out last night—the most negative in the history of history. But they also say that this time, that negativity is actually backfiring, for once. Apparently "imaginary bullshit" ranks lower on voters' priority lists than ever before:

Sure, John McCain is a MAVERICK, but there is, as many voters have learned, a flipside to that. The Republican presidential nominee can be impulsive and temperamental, and it's only been getting worse toward the end of the campaign, making past incidents, like his hollering at Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller or his meltdown in front of the New Republic's Jeff Dearth, look like part of a very real pattern. Last night's debate was probably the last straw. McCain posted his worst-yet ratings in the post-debate polls, with his numbers falling most sharply, within live-reaction panels, in the wake of his comments on William Ayers, ACORN and opponent Barack Obama's alleged negative campaigning (which voters were predisposed not to believe). His incessant face-pulling, insane blinking and cranky interrupting (see videos after the jump) were equally destructive to his cause.

After three presidential debates, everyone has a pretty good idea of what they'll be able to mock (gently at first) about their next president. For George W. Bush it was his cocky, frat-boy persona and mispronunciations. That stopped being funny real fast. If Barack Obama wins, mockery will get more difficult, but he does tend to start sentences with "I believe" this and "I think" that. So arrogant and elitist, God! Plus, the ears. John McCain, meanwhile, says "my friends" too much and, especially tonight, blinks like a maniac. How erratic! Also, he pulls all kinds of just weird sarcastic faces when he's not interrupting people, as seen in the graphic at left, which appears to have already been crafted from tonight's footage. (In came from somewhere on Tumblr, but we don't yet know who made it.) McCain may be behind in the polls, but Saturday Night Live should really be in the tank, in its own self-interest.

Do you hear that? It's the sound of dozens of campaign reporters working the phones in a desperate attempt to scare up the first reaction quote from about Joe Wurzelbacher, aka Joe The Plumber, a small business owner who pointedly questioned Barack Obama on the campaign trail and became an incessant talking point for John McCain in tonight's otherwise boring presidential debate. McCain once again failed to deliver a performance that will help him steal supporters away from frontrunner Obama. Sure, his "I am not George Bush" line was a nice zinger that will be talked about tomorrow, but his Joe The Plumber fetish is far more fascinating.

There's a big dinner in New York tomorrow in honor of Al Smith, the first Catholic presidential candidate. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, CBS News' Katie Couric and various other smug media elitists will be there, along with Sen. Hillary Clinton. The Democratic and Republican presidential nominees have been asked to give 15-minute speeches, but only one has requested an a teleprompter to keep him from just repeating "Who is the REAL Barack Obama, my friends" over and over for the entire speech. Organizers are confused, the Post reports, because they've never met a politician who couldn't give a 15-minute address without elaborate technological aids, and in fact no one has asked for a teleprompter for this event, ever, but really McCain just knows he'll be tired out from personally insulting and snubbing Barack Obama in a variety of innovative new ways at tonight's debate.

Jim Downey was once fired from Saturday Night Live, along with cast member Norm Macdonald, for repeated "OJ Did It" jokes on Weekend Update. He eventually made his way back to the show as chief political satirist, which basically puts him near the center of both politics and pop culture this year, with his sketches, no less pointed than his OJ material, earning mention in televised debates and re-airing on cable talk shows. But the influence of Downey and his show has been artificially inflated, he tells the Observer, by fearful news networks, who would "like to make sarcastic comments about candidates , but their role as news people prevents that:"

New York magazine's daily online chats about the election are usually just mildly interesting, since the journalists involved tend to be overly polite to one another, because who knows who you're going to be sending a job application to someday? Even Gawker Media veterans and that Daily Kos maniac act all pleasant. But Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has never been one for such fraternal niceties, and when nymag.com threw him a sparring partner from National Review, the predictably caustic lefty went to work with his fangs, at one point typing, "tell me you're not ashamed." It was awesome and just really uncomfortable at the same time. Highlights:

You know a story is sketchy when even a British tabloid looks at it and goes, "You know, this seems a bit salacious and over the top," as the Daily Mail has just done with the rumor, dating to August but now resurfaced, about how Barack Obama maybe got too close to an anonymous young staffer during his 2004 senate campaign, before Michelle had her exiled to the Caribbean, but probably the whole thing is just a big Republican smear. The Mail tracked the woman down somewhere in the West Indies — they won't give her name or location, dodgy Fleet Street hacks! — and she said "nothing happened. I just left... I switched careers. That’s it." Then the paper got a mysterious call from a London lawyer, and now the right-wing bloggers are saying the scandal has been basically proven.

The aspiring fashionistas at Teen Vogue know a hot trend when they see one, and they're not about to let Us Weekly, Saturday Night Live and the National Enquirer have a lock on randomly and unexpectedly influencing American politics beyond all reason. So they've started something called, adorably, the "Political Partier Blog," which is all about how hot college boys are reshaping the election and, like, other political stuff, such as a funny Peanuts website. Anyway, let's have a look at the five young people (four of them boys, squee!) mentioned, always with their ages attached, in blogger Lindsay Talbot's 10 posts:

Those people making Barack Obama monkeys and booing John McCain for saying Obama is a person "you do not have to be scared of?" Some of them have blogs! Which means they are free to put all sorts of terrible things on the Web, like the virtual poster at left, the one with Obama, a noose, and the headline, "Asphyxiation/The Fucking Solution." The gent who made that lovely thing, and posted it to his website Sunday night, said he did so in retaliation for comparably nasty images of Sarah Palin (also at left), apparently created by anti-Sarah Palin artists and spread by conservative blogger Michelle Malkin. Want to guess how long his over-the-top act of revenge stayed on the internet?

When Barack Obama was 10, his grandfather would take him over to ole Frank Davis' house, where the two older men would drink whisky out of jars and play Scrabble. Sometimes Obama would help the men compose dirty limericks, or listen as Davis read poetry. This went on until the Democratic presidential nominee was 17, and during that time Davis acted as a mentor, according to Obama's memoir. It later emerged that Davis pseudonymously wrote a "hard-core pornographic autobiography" detailing his sex with a thirteen-year-old girl. This was all known in August, after a widely-blogged report in Britain's Telegraph, but the National Enquirer is now reporting it as an "Exclusive OBAMA SEX PERV SCANDAL," because Obama should be ashamed of almost being molested, or something: