In case you didn't know, Cindy McCain is a recovering pillhead. Why is this news? Well, the doctor who lost his license for writing prescriptions for Cindy under the names of various employees just gave an interview to the Washington Post. Would you believe the whole sordid affair sort of ruined his life? Yeah so let's get to the real mystery: how did it not end hers? Because the available evidence suggests that Cindy was taking an unbelievable amount of painkillers as the height of her addiction. We went back and consulted the insane excerpts of the "Diary of a Madwoman" kept by her old employee (and registered — and convincing-looking! — Republican) Tom Gosinski. (Tom marked good days as "on Percocet" or "OP"; not good days were "NOP" but she seemed to enjoy Vicodin as well.) Did you realize Cindy had five doctors writing prescriptions for this shit? (Four of them didn't really know; Cindy just sorta hacked their DEA numbers.)Experts say she could have faced 20 years in prison if not for the whole centimillionaire heiress Senator's wife thing. But forget prison, how did she not die? Alternet estimates she was taking between 30 and 50 pills a day during the height of her addiction, but only the DEA knows for sure, and the sheer quantity of pills referenced in Gosinski's diary — in one case two prescriptions for 400 or 500-count bottles of painkillers written by the same doctor in two weeks — suggests, per the typical addict's "just-in-time" fulfillment policy, that she was probably up at least into the 70 or 80-a-day range around September 1992. 80 pills a day! Who lives through that? (Much less quits cold turkey, as Cindy allegedly did.) Well, this guy did, but he looks like he might have a somewhat hardier constitution than Cindy McCain. In any case, we have something newfound — respect? awe? complete bafflement?? — for Cindy McCain, who Gosinski described as a very hard worker in his early days working for her MASH-modeled charity team, before she turned into the Anna Nicole of the NGO community:

By the end of September, Amazon.com will begin selling wine, the director of Napa Valley Vintners told the Wall Street Journal. Online wine stores are possible now in part because of a 2005 Supreme Court ruling that knocked down New York and Michigan laws prohibiting it. Hooray legislating from the bench!Now those of us who wear sweaters and wish we could read only by candlelight will be able to annoy our friends even more trying to pretend we know something about the red grape juice we're drinking and that's making me talk too damn much again and somebody just kicked me under the table. In related dinner party fodder news, Amazon plans to sell the biographies of first ladies-in-waiting Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama on the its e-reader the Kindle before they're sold in hard-copy anywhere else. Which makes sense, if only because there's not enough time to rush out these opportunistic political potboilers in paper form. (Photo by paul goyette)

No really, I checked with Jezebel editor Anna Holmes, seriously no one cares this year. I even checked with the anonymous comments left on New York Times fashion critic Cathy Horyn's blog; this is like the most irrelevant-feeling Fashion Week since the terrorists got involved. Why? Well I thought of five good reasons! This guy (pictured) is your first clue…Marc Jacobs is the only designer anyone cares about and, even though his collection was sort of cool this year, his collection has always been sort of a loss-leader funded by his insane diva behavior and that behavior mostly stopped this year. Last September Marc Jacobs started his 9 p.m. show two and a half hours late and everyone had a hissy fit about it, which in turn caused Marc Jacobs to have a hissy fit over how he was an "artist" and people should not be thinking about quotidian details such as whether their dogs had been fed. Then he dyed his hair blue, went insane and maybe also to rehab. Anyway, that is as good as it gets, in fashion. (That should tell you something.) But he is sane this year. It's all about the clothes, and no one really cares about clothes! Everyone who isn't Russian is poor. Times Thursday Styles regular Stephanie Rosenbloom has a story about the nation's thrift stores. This is hugely significant for two reasons: 1. It is actually a story, and last year around this time Stephanie Rosenbloom was writing about horseback riding in the Hampton's, but it turns out she has been hiding out in the Business section lately, getting down to proverbial business. 2. The story is that the demand for other people's cast-off ill-advised purchases has exceeded the nation's supply of ill-advised purchases. Cindy McCain is the new Victoria Beckham. Example: last week Us Weekly decreed Michelle Obama to have hands-down better style than Cindy McCain. This week the selfsame magazine has a whole feature on Cindy's supposed "makeover" and how pretty she suddenly supposedly looks! And that is not even to mention the matter of Sarah Palin's disappearing-reappearing beehive, and Michelle Obama's Thakoon dress and the cool shirt pictured above, which we found on Philebrity. Political fashion icons are the new celebrity fashion icons, and that is bad for the industry because unlike worthless celebrities who are allowed to change outfits as fast as they can spill tequila and Sparks on the ones they were wearing, politicians, at least when they are not wearing $300,000 dresses, have to pretend they understand the realities of working-class Americans busy raiding thrift stores/insurgent safe houses. The must-have item this year is the jumpsuit. Perhaps you heard about the school in Texas that recently decreed that all kids who chose to violate dress code requirements by rolling up their skirts or whatever would risk being forced to don prison jumpsuits for the remainder of the school day. Now, there is always going to be that one group of totally cool high schoolers who make the prison jumpsuits into some sort of "subversive" fashion statement, but bottom line is that high schoolers would not be incurring dress code violations if they did not want to show off their skinny high schooler legs etc. etc. and those high schoolers grow into the adults who consume fashion. So this gives me pause:

Know what's kinda funny? Just as the whole Republican convention has transpired with basically negative five mentions of George W. Bush because he is so grotesquely unpopular even among all weird hat people, the bleeding-hearts of the Media Elite are having a moment of premature nostalgia for his wife thanks mostly to Curtis Sittenfeld's epic new work of Laura Bush fan fiction American Wife. Because, as the novelized Laura says: "All I did is marry him. You are the ones who gave him power." And, "the single most astonishing fact of political life to me has been the gullibility of the American people…[What] caught me by surprise was the way the American people and the American media egged him on, how complicit they were in Charlie's cultivation of a war-president persona…Even in our cynical age, the percentage of the population who is told something and therefore believes it to be true - it's staggering." I know, right? I really want to believe the real Laura Bush would say the same thing. But would she?Some critics are calling this characterization of Laura a "liberal fantasy." But why do we cling to the fantasy even when Real First Lady Laura Bush totally hung out with Sarah Palin just the other day? Because she actually has very little in common with Sarah Palin, which is why we're all pondering working on our painkiller addictions right about now! The evidence. 1. Laura Bush is a librarian and Sarah Palin bans books.(Sort of in the way Jesus was a community organizer and Pontius Pilate was a governor!) Which brings me to the funniest thing about the story of how Sarah Palin, upon becoming mayor of Wasilla, called up the local librarian to inquire about banning books: the idea never went anywhere because she didn't seem to know what books she'd ban. Sarah Palin doesn't read! Duh. Neither, probably, does Cindy McCain. Laura Bush's favorite book is The Brothers Karamazov, a fact that I still find sort of mindblowing, but anyway, that is what makes this sort of shit so funny. 2. Laura Bush is pro-choice. When Cindy McCain found herself in that messy conundrum over whether Roe v. Wade ought to be overturned earlier this week, to whom did she turn for guidance? According to Katie Couric, Cindy's spokespeople said that she, like Laura Bush, did not want Roe overturned. Who knows why Laura Bush is pro-choice; maybe she read American Tragedy, maybe it's just because she killed someone herself and the law had gone easy on her; maybe she's just a rational person, but whatever the case, women like Laura Bush — not Northeastern Marxists like me or "I Choose Life For My Daughter And Everyone Else In America" Alaskan prophets like Sarah Palin— are ones who live in those crazy states that are always trying to add little "abortion banning" amendments to transportation bills and such, the ones who actually live in states where this stuff comes up on the ballot every November. And as such, women like Laura Bush are the only reason Roe has yet to go back before the Supreme Court. 3. Laura Bush raised Jenna Bush. Laura Bush's other vocation besides library science was being a mother, and even that Communist organ Us Weekly agrees that Jenna Bush turned out pretty good. Laura Bush raised a fun underage-drinking socially-conscious charter school teacher who spent months in the ghettos of that little country her granddaddy invaded learning about the tragic life of a teenage mom with AIDS for the purpose of writing a cautionary tale of what happens when you don't use condoms. Sarah Palin raised a fun underage-drinking cautionary tale of what happens when you don't use condoms. 4. Laura Bush is a walking living and in some ways tragic symbol of the emotional core of liberalism, which is to say, our bottomless capacity to forgive. She had a tragedy in her early life and for that reason alone most of us will forgive her unwillingness to try and make herself into some sort of internal dissident in the Cheney White House. She reads Russian lit, she knows how it goes for dissidents. She forgives her ignorant husband the way we all forgive our ignorant racist grandmas. She accepts his differences and we preach acceptance. She is from a Red State and married to a red meat Republican but she defies all the usual pithy pollster cartoonology; she has never had big hair even though she's from Texas, she has never been blonde even though that is a major rule for Republicans in DC; she has never seemed Stepfordy, she smokes cigarettes. And like with Laura, said sentimentality can lead us to be forgiving to a fault! Remember how we hated Clinton for his triangulation and his beholdenness to Wall Street and his generalized moral turpitude? Ha ha ha, yeah. Don't let's let this become the election that gets us all misty-eyed for the Bush years in a couple years time, Laura Bushes of the world! (God did you ever think that would even be a possibility? Christ.) OH AND BONUS EXTRA THING I FORGOT: She defended Michelle Obama against those ridiculous attacks on her patriotism that both Cindy and Sarah Palin have milked well into elementary school at this point. Thanks for pointing out, readers!

Katie Couric was supposed to be a terrible overpaid diva whose terrible "soft" overhaul of the CBS evening news had dragged the network down to dead last in the ratings and whose entire career was on life support due to the poor return on investment the network was booking on her annual $15-22 million salary. But look, it turns out her flagging Q-rating has not completely robbed her of all talent and skill! Today's Times suggests this presidential campaign might rehabilitate her broken reputation. Because she gets "more interesting answers" from politicians. Like, holy shit! On Wednesday night, she interviewed Cindy McCain, and it turns out Cindy McCain does not know what Roe V. Wade is! No really, check the transcript:

• Lindsay Lohan is turning down a $700,000 offer to pose nude for Playboy, even though she took her top off for New York for free earlier this year. Maybe Hugh should call Dina Lohan? [P6]

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.

Elisabeth Hasselbeck flew into Minneapolis today to host a luncheon for the terrifyingly taut-faced First Lady candidate Cindy McCain, and though The View's resident conservative has hardly hid her feelings on the presidential election, she's also remained relatively mum on the subject of Michelle Obama — until now. The two women met for the first time when Obama guest-hosted The View in June, and Hasselbeck's catty comments may ensure that the visit was Michelle's last. Says the New York Times:

Cindy McCain's outfit on Tuesday night at the Republican National Convention cost between $299,100 and $313,100. [Vanity Fair]

• Matt Damon's wife Luciana gave birth to the couple's second child together yesterday, a girl named Gia Zavala Damon. [NYDN]

Does America prefer its First Ladies to be weird uptight robots incapable of saying anything rational for fear of eclipsing or contradicting their husbands? Well yeah, obviously. Still. Parse this: "Cindy McCain says voters don't have to look past her husband's support of the troops to realize that he is 'pro-woman.'" Some of the troops are women...? Is that what that means? Some suicide bombers are women, too! Anyway. Her Good Morning America appearance was less successful at humanizing her than Michelle Obama's charm offensive has been. It did lead to this amusing quote that Google News magically highlighted without context, though. Click to see.

Remember when John McCain called his wife the worst possible word? Not enough! But that's solved with this sketch from the same YouTube comedy group that made john.he.is, a clever and popular parody of will.i.am's "Yes We Can." In the sketch, a TV news team argues about whether to publicize that the Republican presidential candidate once called Cindy McCain a cunt. The self-aware humor of the team constantly reciting this fact, then saying how if only they were online they could drive the association into people's brains, actually doesn't get old! The clip is below, and warning: half the dialogue is, obviously, an extreme obscenity.

Breaking! Cindy McCain! In person! Spotted shopping at Oscar de la Renta's showroom at 550 Seventh Avenue! "What was the taut Mrs. McCain shopping for? An inauguration, perhaps?" No comment! [WWD]

Britain's Daily Mail this weekend tackled head-on an issue most U.S. papers have danced around: John McCain's first wife, Carol, who faithfully raised his children and awaited his return from a North Vietnamese prison. Unfortunately, she was in a terrible car accident while McCain was a P.O.W., and the doctors had to cut away at her leg bones and pump her full of medication, making her both shorter and fatter than the swimsuit model she had once been. McCain bought her a beach house, ran around with other women and left her for his current wife, Cindy, then 25 and rich.

On June 18, Michelle Obama will be on daytime lady talk show The View, and not as some piddling guest, either, as producers originally proposed: The prospective first lady is going to be a full host, just like Cindy McCain, except unlike Cindy she's widely expected to call Barbara Walters "whitey," curse and burn an American flag. As a full host, Obama will get "to help interview guests and participate in the opening 'hot topics,' or banter about what's in the news that day," and also shift uncomfortably as her randy co-hosts ask about husband Barack and his, uh, physical fitness. I guess this is Michelle Obama's big chance to prove to prospective Barack supporters that she's not the crazy, mouthy free-thinker she's been made out to be. Just like a certain other would-be presidential wife had to do 16 years ago. How far we've come. Michelle should totally show up in a burka. After the jump, how the View ladies welcomed Michelle's husband.

John McCain, who is running for president, will release his medical records to the media. To a select group of reporters, anyway. Only two print journos. It's 400 pages, and no one can make copies. And it will happen on the afternoon before a three-day weekend. Hah. An amazing example of the Friday Night Newsdump. But we've all become sooo media savvy that it just looks pathetic and worrying. What the hell is in there? For that matter, what's up with his wife's tax returns? She won't say, though she will pose for Vogue looking all saucy on a couch. Click to enlarge! Surely if McCain is healthy enough for that fox, he's healthy enough to lead the nation! [Radar, WT]

Drug-stealing charity-defrauder Cindy McCain, the lady John McCain left his other wife for and is now forced to stay with because she's fantastically wealthy, is not particularly well-known by the American public. The McCain campaign insists they're trying to change this but obviously they'd be fools to. The less people know about the biography of either McCain—besides the torture thing!—the more likely they'll be able to pull off a victory against Barack Obama, whose biography Americans are largely content to make up themselves out of things they find around the house, like suspicion of people who are different from them and racism. After the jump, John McCain refuses to even deny that he called his wife a cunt. (Which he did, in 1992.)