Listen up, voters: It was not Sarah Palin's idea to try and fool you by wearing fancy clothes she would not normally have anything to do with! The Republican National Committee bought an opulent $150,000 wardrobe for her and seven family members before she even showed up at the convention, the former vice presidential nominee told Fox News Channel's Greta Von Susteren Tuesday night. The legendary MAVERICK was just "goin' with the flow... if that's the way they do this." She's never even been to a Saks or Neiman Marcus. Why on earth is she telling everyone this now?

He's not the most trustworthy source, granted, but Fox News host Chris Wallace claims to have heard that CNN is all embarrassed about its election-night holograms, which teleported the likes of singer Will.I.Am and correspondent Jessica Yellin into CNN studios in New York. Wallace, who serves as Fox's ambassador to the Godless liberals at the Daily Show, also maintains ties to CNN, via an old college roommate who is a technical producer there. He called this buddy at 5 pm on election night, resulting in the following exchange, according to Broadcasting & Cable:

The Daily Show weighed in on whether it will face a CRISIS OF COMEDY in a new, much more competent Obama Administration. As host Jon Stewart made clear Wednesday night, the show thinks it'll be fine, and as we predicted, the show will hedge its bets with other targets — namely, Fox News and Democrats not named Barack Obama. Here's what Daily Show writer J. R. Havlan said at the New York Comedy Festival, via the Times:

After calling Fox News Channel to task for its Barack Obama coverage, the Daily Show's Jon Stewart asked Fox host Chris Wallace if the network might need to change its stripes under the incoming Democratic administration. Actually no, Wallace said, because Obama, like all presidents, will inevitably screw up, and skeptical coverage will be rewarded. "Let me just say," Wallace added, "I worry about you. That William Ayers joke bombed. This crowd is not ready." He had a point.

Were you aware that Fox News Channel sometimes fails "to question... anonymous, and quite absurd, claims?" Or that the right-leaning cable news network sometimes inflates implausible narratives by deciding on a "thematic link" in advance and searching for footage to fit that storyline? Yes, for several years now? Well then you're several steps ahead of conservative blogs like the A-List Ace of Spades or Michelle Malkin's startup Hot Air, which all of a sudden are none too happy with Fox News for claiming Sarah Palin doesn't know that Africa is a continent. Welcome to the last gasps of what Hillary Clinton called the "vast right-wing conspiracy!"

From the moment we heard those first three words — Fox, News, and Channel — you felt like there should be just one more word after that: University. Yes, Roger Ailes' venerable cable institution has begun training young Shepard Smiths and molding cheaper, less Jewish versions of Bill Kristol to endure the tough times ahead. There's no better time to "educate" the next generation of young people who can't read or write than at FNCU. Apply today!Intern duty usually includes penning hit pieces against Hamas and the bonuses are huge:

Face it, Sarah Palin is now a fixture among the East Coast elite whether she wins or loses Nov. 4. The Republican vice presidential nominee has lodged herself like some kind of tumor in the media psyche. Saturday Night Live is quite lucratively obsessed with her, as are newspapers, magazines, websites, the list goes on basically forever. And now, says the Hollywood Reporter, "producers and agents across the entertainment world" want her to star in a daytime talk show, news program or reality TV series, at least in between her attempts to rule the free world.

"The call ends with [Fox's Sean] Hannity's declaring: 'Obama's list of friends reads like a history of radicalism.'" [Huffington Post]

"Fox is expected to formally announce the four-year deal today, and the decision by O'Reilly — who will be paid more than $10 million a year — was not unexpected... The O'Reilly Factor has been the top-rated program in cable news for nearly eight years." [Washington Post]

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:"

Andy Martin is the habitual politician and "researcher" who created the original smear of Barack Obama as a secret Muslim in a 2004 press release, begetting a mutating series of email forwards still coursing through the internet. Last week, he was featured in a Fox News special that, in the words of the Times, "allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government." But, hey, Martin isn't just worried about Obama and Islam, he's also deathly afraid of the Jews! The Times' Jim Ruttenberg dug into Martin's anti-Semitisim in this morning's paper after Martin tried to deny and brush off the issue last week:

Fox Business Network ran ads in the Times and Wall Street Journal this week mocking rival CNBC for showing informercials during a heated weekend in the middle of the Wall Street meltdown. Fox concluded: "We own this story." Not quite. Financial panic did grow the year-old cable network's tiny audience to the point where it could be rated by Nielsen for the first time. But the results won't add any swagger to the step of Fox News chief Roger Ailes: Fox Business peaked at about 81,000 average viewers. During the same period, when Congress voted on the banking bailout Monday, CNBC averaged nearly 900,000 viewers, the Times reported this morning. It appears Fox will need to sweat it through many more weekend shifts to catch up — and pray for a bit more panic, for good measure.

Pakistan's new president, Asif Ali Zardari, had some amazing stories to tell Fox News' Greta Van Susteren Tuesday. He might have even impressed viewers with the one about how his late wife, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, called President George H.W. Bush in 1988 to complain about the destabilizing influence of Osama bin Laden, with whom Bush was supposedly unfamiliar. But Zardari then shot his credibility to hell by following up with a story about how Lt. Col. Ollie North, ringleader of the Iran-Contra scandal, also warned about bin Laden in the late 1980s, in testimony to the U.S. senate. Very not true!

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.

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.

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:

It's been more than three years since the identity of Bob Woodward's famed Deep Throat source was broken in Vanity Fair rather than in Woodward's Washington Post, as he had planned. So perhaps the newspaper is not all that bitter that Woodward, a longtime editor there, has yet let another book project emerge first in a competing news outlet. Last night it was Fox News Channel, not the Post, with exclusive first details of Woodward's fourth book on President Bush, The War Within. Among them was the revelation that John McCain, while standing in the West Wing, clenched his fists and said of the Bush team, "everything is f—-ing spin." Now that's a revelation that's well-timed for the McCain campaign. Wonder who leaked to Fox?! (*McCough.*) Anyway, the Post apparently had its own Web story ready on a hairtrigger, and published it, bringing forth slightly terrifying revelations like how a cadre of generals organized to do something about the inept civilian Commander in Chief:

MSNBC's Rachel "Maddow tried to replace all the staffers who work on the 9 p.m. time slot, which she takes over on Monday, but management refused... 'She is Olbermann's protégé and is behaving like he does.'" [Post]

It should really come as no surprise that News Corporation Chairman Rupert Murdoch wants to be respected by the limo liberals who (officially) disdain his politics and tactics. That's why he paid so dearly for the Wall Street Journal, and was proud for having done so, right? But no one really thought age and young wife Wendi Deng would gentrify Murdoch's barbarian soul to such an extent that he now spins fantasies about buying the Times from one side of his mouth while betraying his conservative shock troops at Fox News Channel out of the other. Murdoch's brash past is becoming an embarrassment to him as his portfolio becomes more respectable, at least according to Michael Wolff, who excerpted his sanctioned Murdoch biography in the October Vanity Fair. And yet the Aussie can't help but revert to his old ways, like when he told Wolff that Muslims are, as a group, inbred: