Democrats are thrilled to see Obama ahead by more than 10 points in the polls. But they're not counting their chickens just yet: Al Gore was leading the polls in mid-October of 2000 and then, well, he won except that he lost. But if you're a Democrat and looking for further evidence that you're going to have a reason to celebrate on November 4th, there's good news courtesy of an authority you can really have faith in: Rose Rosetree, face reader! Salon had the expert physiognomist gaze at pictures of all the important people, and Barack's great big forehead might as well have "leader" tattooed on it: Its wideness means "having ideas, goals, ideals" that will overcome the "obstacles that might get in your way." Even more reassuring: Obama and Joe Biden are "nostril twins."

One might expect a right-wing shouting head like Bill O'Reilly to help the Republican Party ratchet down expectations for John McCain ahead of tonight's presidential debate. But the Fox News Channel host is raising the stakes. A few minutes before the debate started, O'Reilly said the event will mark the Republican presidential nominee's "last stand." "McCain has to do well tonight, or say goodbye," he added. We're still pretty sure there's a scheme here — O'Reilly's probably got an easy definition of "well" — but this makes it all the more difficult for McCain to spin if he does poorly. Click the video icon to watch the clip. (PS: The commenter liveblog is here in case you missed it.)

Set aside for a moment the fact that Bill O'Reilly wore a cowboy hat for part of his show last night. (Apparently it was some sort of tribute to John Wayne.) If you watch the clip to your left, you'll see Bill's take on Richard Fuld, the CEO of bankrupt investment bank Lehman Brothers. "I just want to slap him," Bill says before adding him to his "pinhead" list. We're guessing that Bill was unaware that his work has already been done. [Dealbreaker, Clusterstock]

This is our LAST DITCH ATTEMPT to stir anticipation for the VP debate set to air in about 18.3 minutes. It's Bill O'Reilly talking to Karl Rove about precisely how dumb Sarah Palin is or is not. O'Reilly assures everyone the vice presidential nominee reads the work of professional John McCain nemeses over at the Times. And Rove postulates that the reason she didn't bring up Plessy v. Ferguson when Katie Couric asked her about Supreme Court decisions is that she just got flustered and froze. Oh yes, that is totally why the landmark decision legalizing abortion was the first and only decision that came to her beautiful mind. How random a brain fart was that? Especially since Palin has shown so much concern for the stubborn legacy of slavery, like that time she mocked Obama for being a community organizer.Anyway, if she only had "confidence" like O'Reilly she would be fine. Because "confidence" is what the Sarah Palins of this world need more of.

With all due respect, Cecily von Ziegesar, I must dispute your contention that Barack Obama is Blair Waldorf. He is so totally not Blair. I realize that I could not be writing this post at all had you not blazed the trail by authoring the transcendent works of literature on which the meta-popular Gossip Girl television series is based, whereas I have watched said derivative television show exactly once. But perhaps in that relative ignorance I can claim a kind of wisdom you are too enmeshed, too beholden, too blinded by detail and deep-seated loyalties to your own creations, to possess. In that way you would be not unlike ex-Hillary Clinton aide Howard Wolfson, who last month described awakening "Rip Van Winkle"-like after his boss finally conceded to her charismatic young rival "to a world transformed by political currents we had stood against." Wake up and smell the green tea mimosas, Cecily! Like the country, Gossip Girl is bigger than you now.And when you glibly state, pollster-like, that "the truth is, Barack is just not blond enough or vague enough to be a Serena" as if that is just the accepted truth, like "America is not ready for a black president" or "socialism is for Europeans", you are failing to detect the paradigm shift underway that had the "smart money" backing the Serena as Obama metaphor all the way back in Season One:

Bill O'Reilly got a $5 million dollar advance for his new book, A Bold Fresh Naughty Piece of Humanity Learns to Say 'No' To Drugs. But who's looking out for you? (Hint: Nobody, loser.) [NYP]

The brilliance of Bill O'Reilly, such as it is, is his ability to put an emphatically populist spin on any Republican policy, no matter how plutocrat-friendly, and also to get comically enraged about random external stimuli of every sort. By those standards, the Fox News pundit's radio show tonight was a virtuoso performance. Suddenly, to defend a $700 billion bailout aimed at Wall Street banks but opposed by Congressional conservatives, O'Reilly lashed out at "right-wing liars" and "rich guys" with "big cigars," (Those rich cigar smokers aren't bankers, as you might logically conclude, but elitist right-wing talk show hosts.) Then he promised to severely beat both the House and Senate finance committees, personally, by breaking off their fingers. If only Hank Paulson had thought of that! Click the video icon to listen.

After a 4chan message board user broke into Sarah Palin's Yahoo Mail account and posted screenshots of her emails online, conservative Fox News pundit Bill O'Reilly went on the air and yelled about it. "I'm not going to mention the Web site that posted this, but it's one of those despicable, slimy, scummy websites," said O'Reilly on his show. "Everybody knows where this stuff is, OK, and they know the people who run the website, so why can't they go there tonight to the guy's house who runs it, put him in cuffs and take him down and book him? " 4chan management responded by changing the banner atop its random image posting board so that it read: "DESPICABLE, SLIMY, SCUMMY." One of the site's members took a more aggressive course of action, and hacked into O'Reilly's subscription-only site, BillOReilly.com, and posted the names, billing addresses, email addresses and passwords of 205 paying subscribers to Wikileaks and 4chan. In a statement, Wikileaks expressed no sympathy for O'Reilly — calling his site's security "nonexistent" — but had plenty for O'Reilly's attackers: "The hack was a response to the pundit's recent scurrilous attacks over the Sarah Palin's e-mail story — including on Wikileaks and other members of the press."

Screeching red-faced millionaire everyman Bill O'Reilly howled for all of us to be dragged from our homes and locked in dungeons because Gawker published those infamous Sarah Palin emails after someone hacked her Yahoo! account. Well, it seems the hackers have fired a warning shot at O'Reilly via his website, which they hacked on Friday. They didn't do much of anything, aside from taking a screenshot of a list of new subscribers' names, passwords, and billing addresses, which they posted on WikiLinks. They sent us the same snapshot, but I'm not posting it. Not because it's illegal to publish material illegally obtained by a third party (It isn't; O'Reilly just says it is because his audience wants him to say that.) but because I'd have to blur out pretty much every word in the document to protect private citizens who are not seeking the office of Vice President of the United States. Wired has more on the story. [via MediaBistro]

We were hurt when voluble Fox News conservatalker Bill O'Reilly called Gawker a "despicable, slimy, scummy" website last night. Ha, not really. We wouldn't have expected anything less! O'Reilly has always had trouble controlling his temper, ever since his "Fuck it!" days on Inside Edition, when he still had hair. Click to watch this neat one-of-a-kind compilation of Bill's angriest moments over the years. And then SHUT UP.

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.

If you're even remotely curious about oft-vilified media mogul Rupert Murdoch or his News Corporation empire, there are plenty of gems to pluck from Esquire's lengthy interview with the mogul. There is, for example, Murdoch's baldfaced assertion that Fox News Channel is "very, very fair;" his wild accusation that Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger tried to bar the hiring of white males for five years; and the mild rebuke that Fox host Bill O'Reilly "shouldn't be so sensitive" to Keith Olbermann's attacks. The biggest takeaway, though, is that Murdoch is softening in his old age, despite a punishing work regimen. The quotes in the Esquire piece reinforce the idea, floated by Michael Wolff in Vanity Fair earlier this month, of this change in Murdoch toward the "magnanimous" and "further nuanced:"

Ok. A couple things to note here. The Fox and Friends morning crew are actually stupider than the stupidest people currently participating in the national discourse, because they don't understand the basic tenets of Biblical Literalism or creationism (or they're just pretending not to). But more importantly: the guy who isn't Steve Doocy totally referenced Fox mascot Bill O'Reilly's famous meltdown, on Fox, and cracked everyone up. It's... weird. This show creeps us out, even when it is "funny."

Yesterday CBS had a new John McCain attack ad pulled from YouTube because it took footage of Katie Couric out of context. Hey, "out of context" is the theme of the ad! Elitists. Now the McCain campaign itself has apparently gotten embarrassed enough by the ad—which pointed out that elitist Indonesian celebrity candidate Barack Obama called hockey mom Sarah Palin a dirty pig—that it has removed it from McCain's website. "Today is not a day for partisanship, it's a day for remembrance," a McCain spokesman said by way of explanation. Here's a clip of average American Bill O'Reilly (who, in a total coincidence, recently scored a nice interview with his friend Barack) graciously taking the side of the black man, blaming the "pig" uproar on the media. "We are driving the pig train," says Bill. Indeed. Click to watch. [Mixed Media, video via Huffington Post]

Hope a Fox News production assistant has been dispatched to pick up a big box of cupcakes: right-wing cable blowhard Bill O'Reilly is celebrating his 59th birthday today. Fellow News Corp. employee (and Irishman) Keith Kelly is turning 54. Guy Ritchie is celebrating his 40th. Manorexic fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld is 75 (although he tells people he's only 70). Ryan Phillippe is 34. Nightlife vet Tracy Westmoreland is 52. British actor Colin Firth is 48. Golfing great Arnold Palmer is 79. Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry is 58. And Sanjaya Malakar, the former American Idol contestant best known for his hair styling talents, is turning 19.

• According to Nielsen, John McCain's acceptance speech at the RNC was watched by more people than Obama's speech last week. [TVWeek]

Did you miss Barack Obama's sit-down with Bill O'Reilly on Fox News's O'Reilly Factor last night because were watching the convention, or you had better things to do altogether? You didn't miss all that much. Video of the relatively gentle interview below.

The Daily Show did one of their patented "public figures contradicting themselves on tape" routines last night, and this time they had a wealth of material. It was all related to Governor Sarah Palin, the Republican nominee for Vice President. She is by all sane accounts inexperienced. Also she has a bit of family drama with her unwed teen daughter being all pregnant and stuff! This, obviously, is "off-limits" because everyone has declared it "off-limits" to talk about children that way. Unless those children are, like, related to famous people and on TV sometimes! Then their parents are nimrods. Just click through for Bill O'Reilly to explain it all.

• Barack Obama, who had a secret sit-down with Roger Ailes three months ago, will appear on The O'Reilly Factor on Thursday night. [WaPo, The Caucus]