The highest paid member of the McCain/Palin campaign during the first two weeks of October? That would be Amy Strozzi, Sarah Palin's make-up artist who was nominated for an Emmy for her work on So You Think You Can Dance. [The Caucus]

John McCain's brother Joe got in a bit of trouble earlier this month for inventing the McCain campaign's new justification for losing in red states like Virginia: the part of Virginia they are losing in is not real Virginia, it is "communist country." Joe McCain, 65, is a former reporter who has largely stayed out of the spotlight this year because he's worried he might say something damaging to his brother's campaign. Something like, you know, calling half of Virginia "communist country" or maybe calling 911 to complain about traffic, cursing at the 911 operator in disgust, and then calling back to complain further. It would really be a shame, a hilarious shame, if the recordings of those two 911 calls were released to the local media, and then posted on this blog. Did we mention that he calls back after cursing and hanging up? Click and enjoy! [ABC7]

Returning alumni Will Ferrell (as George W. Bush) and Tina Fey turned last night's Thursday edition of Saturday Night Live into a veritable class reunion, but one other notable name returned behind the scenes: Ferrell's frequent collaborator Adam McKay. Little over a month ago, McKay (Step Brothers, Anchorman) lit up the left with a sky-is-falling Huffington Post blog entitled "We're Gonna Frickin' Lose This Thing," but to judge from the opening sketch he co-wrote, he now finds the Republican ticket about as threatening as a Jackie Mason PSA. The clip, after the jump:Click to view

[Update: The attack was made-up!] The Smoking Gun found the Twitter stream of the John McCain campaign volunteer who reported being attacked by a Barack Obama supporter earlier tonight. The volunteer, Ashley Todd, was blogging just before and after the incident, and her Twitter posts were available to the public up until a few hours ago, when she set them to private. That's probably prudent: a presidential campaign trying to peel working-class voters away from the Democrats probably doesn't want people getting the wrong idea about what it means when one of its volunteers calls Little Italy "the wrong side of Pittsburgh."

It's a stark reality of American politics that (gulp) most of the grainy election spoof videos that you find online are really terrible. Tired old jokes done unoriginally without any thought toward editing and seeing if your joke has been made five thousand times before. So it is a rare treat when you stumble upon a little gag clip skewering the presidential candidates (but, um, usually mostly John McCain—what's that thing about funny Conservatives, again?). Again, there aren't many, but there are a proud few. We've put five of our favorites (plus a little bonus!) after the jump. Feel free to add your own in the comments. Portrayal Of Obama As Snob Hailed As Step Forward For Blacks Trenchant and sad, like all the best 'Onion' pieces.

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

So the story of Sarah Palin spending $150,000 on clothes? Brother, it gets better. See, the RNC is required by law to list who exactly bought all the fancy clothes. And all the Sarah Palin fancy purchases—at Barney's, Bloomingdale's, and Saks Fifth Avenue—were made by one guy: Jeff Larson. Jeff Larson is one of the men behind FLS Connect, a Republican robocalling firm! They're famous this cycle for terrible robocalls about Barack Obama and Bill Ayers. And back in 2000, they made their name with robocalls smearing John McCain. It's funny because John McCain sold his soul and all it got him was a fancy new wardrobe for Sarah Palin. [Atlantic]

This picture of presidential hopeful Barack Obama doing pull-ups in Missoula, MT was taken by the photographer Callie Shell for Time magazine last April. I like it! Shell has snapped an entire collection of wistful shots of the great black/white Hope from Illinois, some grand and sweeping, others mundanely human. Just like those ones of his rival, John McCain! Click through for larger image.

Samuel L. Jackson and Barack Obama may have a certain amount of preternatural cool in common, but there's one thing Jackson can do that the presidential candidate can't: curse up a storm! While promoting his new film Soul Men, the actor opined at length on all things Obama, and thanks to Hollywood Outbreak, we have the NSFW audio (caution: as though he were back on the set of a Tarantino film, Jackson lets fly with a torrent of "n-words").You may be interested to hear Jackson hold court on Sarah Palin rallies, how Obama is hamstrung by what society wants to see in a black man, and his greatest fear involving the candidate, but our favorite moment was Jackson's brief, jowly McCain impression. Hey Sam, we hear SNL is hiring — sure, there's that whole racial barrier thing, but that hasn't stopped Fred Armisen from playing Obama, has it?

The explosive New York Times Magazine story on the complete disarray of the McCain campaign is live online! It's full of revealing exclusive info that one was previously forced to just infer based on the available evidence! Like: the tone, strategy, and narrative of McCain's campaign has been inconsistent because the candidate himself is terrible with organization and consistency, and has relied on metanarrative crafter/biographer Mark Salter, Rovian media guru Steve Schmidt, and close friend and day-to-day campaign head Rick Davis to work it all out between the three of them. And there is infighting, of course, and everyone will soon blame everyone else, but honestly the ultimate responsibility for the failure of the campaign (should it fail in two weeks, obv) comes down to Senator McCain. He's a terrible candidate, unable to read from teleprompters and unwilling to do campaign events before 9 a.m.. He chafes at taking directions—told to gently explain once in the first debate that Obama might not understand an issue, McCain condescendingly repeated the mantra "Senator Obama doesn't understand..." ten times. These are unfair and surely maddening criticisms—ability to read from a teleprompter is not actually that presidential a quality, or else Sarah Palin would be qualified—but this is the world we live in, and GOP strategists certainly helped create it. But more importantly, his high self-regard makes him utterly unable to forgive or get over minor personal slights. He can't understand why everyone else doesn't see how much of an unprepared phony Barack Obama is, and the "I can't believe I'm losing to this guy" attitude is always, always a loser—ask the last five Democrats to run for President not named Clinton. His ability to justify his own inconsistencies isn't shared by the electorate either. In his mind, he can square Palin's inexperience and robocalls and negative campaigning with the honorable man he's always been. The constant schizophrenic narrative changes are, of course, Steve Schmidt's fault. And here's some inside shit on the Palin pick—the serious grownups had a decent shortlist that included Pawlenty, Romney, and even Bloomberg. But they weren't exciting and mavericky ernough, so Schmidt and Davis quietly picked Palin based entirely on image without examining substance.

Cindy McCain is the saddest figure in this miserable election. Seriously, we feel real sympathy for this woman, rich and brittle and Obama-smearing though she may be. We read the Ariel Levy story. She's got a distant, temperamental, emotionally abusive husband she never sees (until election season!) and she can't even develop a painkiller addiction in peace without the press jumping all over it (because her family certainly didn't notice or care). So it's cruel, really, that the National Enquirer is jumping all over the various obvious easily disproved lies she's told on the campaign trail about meeting Mother Theresa and visiting her husband's Vietnamese hospital bed. You can click to read the story, though you won't learn anything you didn't learn from the Levy profile and the New York Times piece on her sad life.

Everyone is always babbling about the "Bradley Effect"—the supposed tendency of white people to tell pollsters they'll vote for a black guy even though they're racist and won't—and how it might hurt Barack Obama in two weeks. But honestly the Bradley Effect doesn't seem to be applicable this year. Not because white people are less racist, but because they have no good reason to lie about supporting McCain. John McCain's current Election Exit Strategy seems to hinge on Western Pennsylvania and Virginia, and he's going to get those states back in his corner by scaring the shit out of white people. Will it work? McCain might want to look at the dire position modern white supremacist organizations are in; they can barely rile up the neo-Nazis to care that a black guy might be the next president! American National Socialist Workers Party head Bill White may be a neo-Nazi, but he's not voting for John McCain.

What business does Sarah Palin have spending $75,000+ at Neiman Marcus and $50,000 at Saks if she's not planning to be part of the "Washington elite" or "seek their good opinion," as she told the Republican National Convention in September? She probably wants to look snazzy on TV, because the poors get the same channels as the elites, and appearances matter more than they should. John Edwards knew that, so he spent $400 on hair cuts until he was accused of being a slick poverty pimp by various conservatives. Now that Politico has caught the Republicans' designated working-class icon being far more profligate — Edwards could get 10 haircuts just on the Palin/McCain ticket's monthly hair and makeup bill — reps for the "small town... hockey mom" aren't even bothering to deny their hypocrisy:

What has Mark Penn, the scandal-plagued strategy guru for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, been up to as of late? He's back to doing what he does best: conducting useless marketing research. The "2008 Presidential Image Power Survey," conducted by Penn, Schoen & Berland and Landor Associates, asked voters to associate the presidential candidates with various brands, including "fictional spies, retail outlets, snack foods and cars." The answers? Voters connected Obama to BMW, Google and Target, while Mr. McCain was compared to Ford, Wal-Mart, and AOL. Translation: Obama is associated with cool stuff; McCain makes people think of a car company about to go bankrupt, a big-box retailer that abuses its employees, and an Internet company that peaked 11 years ago. [AdAge]

♦ The election, the economy, and Madonna and Guy all faded into insignificance last night when MTV aired the first clip of The City, and we saw our girl Whitney stepping inside Diane von Furstenberg HQ and getting ambivalently eyeballed by Olivia Palermo (who seems to have a weirdly strong screen presence). [NYO, NYP]
♦ The sixth season of Project Runway has wrapped: Rebecca Romijn, Eva Longoria and Lindsay Lohan reportedly make guest judge appearances, although regular judges Nina Garcia and Michael Kors earn less airtime than before. Yet due to legal issues we can't wrap our mind around much less summarize, no one knows when or where the show will air. [WWD]

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.

So we all know, of course, that Sarah Palin loves Real America, which means the parts of America that are pro-American, which according to recent polls is pretty much between 40 and 45 percent of America, population-wise (but much more, maybe, geographically!). And part of loving pro-America America is hating, obviously, East Coast Elitists and Washington DC and the Beltway and the Georgetown Cocktail Circuit and New York City, and also Hollyweird and San Francisco. The Coasts are not Real America! And especially not Real America are the Media Elites who are threatened by Sarah Palin and John McCain. Except of course obviously those Media Elites created John McCain and Sarah Palin. And Palin and McCain are both crippled by their all-consuming desire to be accepted and loved by those Media Elites. Jane Mayer wrote a very informative piece for this week's New Yorker about how all the chattering classes and cocktail circuit insiders created and sold the Myth of Sarah Palin.

The New York Times had its resident medical doctor reporter examine all the available medical records of all the candidates for president and vice president. The only problem is that none of the campaigns would turn over any records! But, you know, Barack Obama seems healthy enough, besides the smoking. And Sarah Palin didn't release any records at all, not even about her crazy "giving birth en route from Texas to Alaska" thing, but they only devote like one paragraph to that. Because the point of the story is to let you know that John McCain is an old, sick man. He has all the cancers, everywhere, all over his face. Breaking! Ok, sure, McCain's doctors say he's pretty much recovered from his skin cancer, and the chance of it recurring during his first term, say, is like 10%. But they are maybe not letting us know how serious the last bout of melanoma was!

God, John McCain is just sick of running for president. Even in the cozy environs of Fox News Sunday, questioned by the friendly Chris Wallace, he's absolutely unable to justify to himself the various hideous missteps of his miserable campaign. That Sarah Palin pick? Well, he half-heartedly argues, it'll piss off the feminists. What a great reason to make her your successor, John. And then he offers, on the subject of Governor Palin's selection, the type of "joke" that is utterly serious: "as a cold political calculation, I could not be more pleased." Ugh.