Somewhere in America, the next Karl Rove is paying his dues, and odds are good he's doing so in part by crafting a narrowly-targeted attack website. The first one of these I saw accused police of conspiring to falsely convict the son of an Oakland politician of sexual assault. Russell Harding's is much more impressive. Convicted of embezzlement and child-porn possession, Harding has established a site called Rudy Veritas, where he tells unflattering stories involving his old boss Rudy Giuliani and Giuliani's associates. A convicted felon who just last year asked Giuliani for money is not the most credible source, as the Times points out this morning. But that didn't stop the newspaper from relaying some of Harding's allegations involving Giuliani's mistress Judith Nathan, and it won't stop others from checking out his description of marathon gambling and alleged illegal perks granted to John McCain.

On Katie Couric's website, it's always "Sen. Biden" this and "Sen. Biden" that, but the Democratic VP nominee's Republican counterpart gets the catty treatment. She's just plain "Sarah Palin." Conservative slam book American Spectator even found a CBS News editorial aide saying Couric sought approval to not call her "Governor." Because otherwise, you see, Palin might have looked all executive and so forth in her disastrous interviews. Couric is obviously just scared of a more powerful cougar. When will the jealous media elites stop conspiring to make Sarah Palin look bad? Watch Couric finally give Palin the respect she deserves, after the jump.

You know what's really needed at a presidential debate on delicate foreign policy matters and capital markets paralyzed by their own complexity? Random internet heckling via Twitter! Or at least that's what Al Gore's cable network Current believes. Why not turn on Current, if you get it, and fire up Twitter, if you're into it, during the debates, if you're home, and enjoy seeing your 140-character tweets superimposed on Barack Obama as he debates a plastic skeleton. This will save our politics from being subsumed by the celebrity-industrial complex and maybe briefly forestall the rapidly accelerating collapse of our society. Sort of like good old Al Gore himself!

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.)

Rupert Murdoch seems to have transferred his politician crush from Barack Obama to Sarah Palin. His tentative support for Palin (and her obscure running mate) on the financial meltdown tonight evolved into a "quite chummy" run-in at a charity gala for the Manhattan media elites Palin claims not to care about. Murdoch gave Palin a pat on the back and said "thank you very much" as Palin left the gala, while Palin wore the "radiant smile" of not caring, according to a media pool report summarized by Politico. And to think that just four months ago Murdoch called Obama a "rock star." What happened?

"After telling the press (his base) that he was going to announce his run in March 1999, he melodramatically 'postponed' the announcement because of the U.S. bombing of the Serbs in Kosovo." [Wonkette]

The first half of Sarah Palin's interview with Katie Couric aired tonight and it's already making the wrong sorts of headlines. This is looking a lot like Palin's train wreck sit-down with ABC News' Charlie Gibson. (Video of the most damaging moments — this time around — 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.

After giving short shrift to Barack Obama on two major broadcast TV shows Tuesday, Bill Clinton could hardly mention the Democratic presidential candidate's name enough on the basic cable Daily Show Wednesday. Perhaps comedian Chris Rock's well-aimed barbs in Clinton's wake on Late Show With David Letterman got through to the ex-president. But when host Jon Stewart brought up the Letterman incident, Clinton said Rock and other critics miss the point.

This is University of Tennessee student David Kernell, the Democratic state senator's son who reportedly accessed Sarah Palin's email account by guessing the answers to her "security questions." This is what qualifies as hacking in 2008, and the family lawyer is saying "this is a difficult time" instead of denying anything, so Kernell will go to prison forever as soon as the Grand Jury indicts him, which has not yet happened. Ha ha, Democratic politicians have immoral families, unlike small-town Republicans like vice presidential nominee Palin. (Photo via Wired)

As in his appearance on the View, Bill Clinton offered the most tepid support possible for Barack Obama's presidential ticket on David Letterman's Late Show last night. After repeatedly invoking his vanquished wife Hillary, Clinton said the typical American voter will recall John McCain's heroic torture in a Vietnamese prison camp before deciding to "go the other way" and vote for... whoever that other candidate for president might be. In an inspired feat of booking, Letterman had comedian Chris Rock lined up to follow Clinton and, uh, remind him who won the primary. Video after the jump.

Bill Clinton will appear on David Letterman's show later tonight, but he gave a sneak preview of what he might say earlier today on the View. Don't expect the former president to come out swinging against Sarah Palin the way he did against Barack Obama during the primary. Asked a question that tied sexist treatment of his wife during the Democratic primary to supposedly sexist treatment of the Republican vice presidential nominee now, Clinton didn't utter a peep to challenge the shaky premise that Palin has been seriously hurt by a sexist media. Instead he talked about what a powerful force sexism has become — more ignored than racism, even! (Click the video icon to watch the clip.) But this doesn't necessarily mean Clinton is still bitter toward Obama.

Last year's Emmy Awards hit a 17-year ratings low. The prizes themselves mostly go to TV shows no one watches, so you'd think organizers would eagerly seek other ways to spice up the telecast. But the hot topic of the moment, celebrity magazine covergirl and Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, was off limits to speakers, according to red-carpet reports of a ban on political speech. The Wall Street crash wasn't brought up much either. That left celebrities confined to making veiled, mostly boring references to current events. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert made the best of the situation. Click the video icon to watch.

By email, by telephone and by cable television comes a consistent message for Gawker: We should all be woken in the middle of the night, hauled off to jail, and locked away maybe forever for publishing some of Sarah Palin's emails, including her daughter Bristol's phone number and husband's previously-known email address. Some people would also like us shot, because God only knows the terrible things that can be done to someone with email addresses and phone numbers. Bizarrely, the only person who disagreed with our legal culpability was a Scientologist, because despite the many negative things we've written about that "church" the law is apparently clear: "Gawker's fine," Fox News's Greta Van Susteren said. Click the video icon to watch the TV coverage; some emails and a voice mail we "liberal Jews" received is after the jump.

>The hacker who broke into Sarah Palin's email account has, of course, been roundly condemned for his actions, but he has for the moment succeeded in reviving the unanswered question of why the Alaska governor had two quasi-official email addresses, gov.palin@yahoo.com and gov.sarah@yahoo.com. So central were the private accounts to Palin's state office that her secretary admonished a government aide who accidentally used a government email address instead. This use of the accounts is a naked affront to public records laws in Alaska. But it's not exceptional: It's one battle in a 30-years war between conservatives and civil libertarians over government openness, during which the current presidential administration itself blurred the linese between public and private email. Is there any way to finally stop these hijinks?

The hacker who obtained Sarah Palin's personal email covered his tracks using proxy servers from CTunnel.com. Some of the screenshots he posted show Web address starting with CTunnel.com and ending with codes that could ultimately get him caught. That scenario seems particularly likely given that the webmaster behind the proxy servers is all but begging law-enforcement authorities to request his records, since he believes the Palin hacker abused his service. As quoted in the Register, the webmaster practically draws the Feds a map:

Sure, the elitists at the Washington Post reported Sarah Palin "Left [A] Trail Of Bad Blood" as mayor of tiny Wasilla, Alaska, and local homemaker Anne Kilkenny famously emailed the whole world to say the Republican vice presidential nominee was a "ruthless" city politico. But as the attached clip show, Palin at least started out wanting to spread CHANGE and HOPE, not unlike a certain other politician now on a presidential ticket. "I want to bring a positive energy and determined voice to your ideas," Palin said in her debut mayoral campaign spot, signed "Positively Sarah." The feathered hair and keyboard-and-trumpet score will brighten your evening all on their own! The clip is after the jump.

Sarah Palin may have railed against the "Washington elite" at the Republican National Convention and bragged about how being an "average hockey mom" from a small town. But she obviously wants to fit in with American aristocracy, because according to Page Six she wore a "shantung silk Valentino [Gravani] jacket worth $2,500" while giving her down-home talk. Shantung silk, whatever the hell that is, sounds like it's from China, while Valentino is clearly Italian, which makes this thing one of the most treasonous garments ever invented. It gets worse!

Saturday Night Live cast members sounded really concerned about the level of fairness on their sketch comedy show the other night, the Times' Brian Stelter noticed. Head writer Seth Meyers said the show tries to be "as fair and evenhanded as possible." It was "safer," he added, to mock both Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton in a recent sketch, since without the latter it might have seemed "like an attack piece." Wait, since when is SNL so jittery about offending people? Is this the level of conscientiousness that comes with unexpectedly influencing the Democratic primaries? Sure, but more importantly this is the latest evidence all media will soon have to watch their political step. A few more signs:

If Page Six is to be believed, Sarah Palin's "second big interview" will come next week, when the Republican vice presidential nominee will travel with CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric. (Ha ha, apparently Sean Hannity's interview doesn't count as "big," even within News Corporation.) It remains to be seen whether Couric will lay Palin embarrassingly bare as ABC's Charlie Gibson did last week. But just scoring the sit-down adds to the evidence Couric is mounting a sort of comeback from the dark days five months ago when she was said to be leaving CBS. A summary of Couric's oh-so-modest recent victories: