The Atlantic has said it didn't vet Jill Greenberg's politics before hiring her to shoot John McCain. Even if it had known about her controversial anti-George Bush photographs, it wouldn't have cared, as a matter of policy. The policy may soon change: Greenberg is gloating she left McCain's eyes bloodshot and skin gnarly for the Atlantic's October cover. Worse, from the magazine's perspective, is that she tricked the Republican presidential nominee into standing over an unflattering strobe light, then posted the worst shots and Photoshops to her personal site:

Rejoice, interwebs! After weeks of intense lobbying, Tina Fey finally gave America what it so loudly demanded: a full-fledged, mercilessly accurate Sarah Palin impression on last night's season premiere of Saturday Night Live. Lipstick jokes? Check. Appalling lack of knowledge about the Bush Doctrine? Check. Akaskan accent by way of Fargo's Marge Gunderson? Check, mate, you betcha. And while there was no sign of Maya Rudolph as Michelle Obama (and Barack Obama had to withdraw from his cameo in the wake of devastation from Hurricane Ike), Amy Poehler proved an invaluable scene partner as a seething, sarcastic Hillary Clinton. Enjoy this sketch while you can, for if Sarah Palin ascends to the White House, both performers will be executed for treason. The video, after the jump:Click to view

He can't type because of his war injuries. But he reads Drudge Report, Politico and sometimes RealClearPolitics. Oh, and he does use a BlackBerry, but not for email. Before you misinterpret Obama's latest ad to mean that the Arizona geezer running to replace Bush doesn't look at the Internet, here's some clarifying reportage from the liberal elites at the Boston Globe and New York Times:From a 2000 Boston Globe article:

No one is going to be talking about how he never mastered Twitter when our 44th president is dead, guys. [National Review]

With its joke-killing April Fool's prank, YouTube took all the fun out of rickrolling forever. But someone has successfully revived the gag, where you trick someone into clicking on a link to Rick Astley's '80s one-hit wonder, "Never Gonna Give You Up." YouTube users Hugh Atkin and Alastair Corrigall edited together excerpts from old Obama speeches to create the illusion that he's actually singing Astley's song to John McCain and the delegates at the Republican National Convention. Rickrolling has always been a dumb, easy prank. Atkin and Corrigall turned it into a smart one. Watch the clip:

John McCain went on The View this morning to talk oversimply about all the typical emotional hot-button issues you'd rather hear Sarah Palin mispronounce stuff while talking about. But shit, Whoopi made it kind of awesome! After getting John McCain to babble off the classic "strict constructionist" platitudes about how the Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution would have definitely wanted all those hypothetical future states it would annex over the next hundred fifty years to be allowed to decide for themselves whether to outlaw a type of surgery that would gain popularity some time after the invention of reliable anesthesia they could have easily forseen would occur sixty years into the future at the time of the signing…Whoopi asked if she should be worried about returning to slavery!And stupid strict constructionist Republicans: how do they not have a comeback for this one? Has John McCain never spoken to a black person? Because that will actually have to change! Anyway, Barbara Walters saves it by imagining herself as some sort of latter-day Harriet Tubman.

Hoping to stop us all from talking about the Palin-McCain ticket anymore, Barack Obama's campaign today released an ad attacking John McCain as an Old who admits he doesn't know how to use a computer or send an email. A campaign official told Politico the commercial is designed to "underscore that John McCain can’t bring about change when he is completely out of touch with the lives of regular Americans." Of course, all of us real 'mericans know computers are just for "glib, articulate, fancy, dancey, prancey" liberal elites.Click to view

Times food writer Kim Severson spends her time these days not with restaurateurs but in Alaska, where her background at the Anchorage Daily News has suddenly become a very valuable asset. Severson today reeled in a tasty scoop: Confirmation, first, that Levi Johnston, the teen father who is marrying into Sarah Palin's family, has in fact dropped out of high school, as rumored, amid slipping grades and unwelcome pressure from his family to play hockey. Severson also delivered the most credible explanation yet for why Track Palin, son of the Republican vice presidential nominee, enlisted in the Army. The rumor mill had him caught up in a drug bust, or perhaps nailed for vandlizing some school buses, and under pressure to join as a corrective. It sounds, for now at least, like the reality is more mundane, if still quite sad. It seems Track, a top Wasilla hockey prospect prone to rink rage, met his fate on the ice:

Former Republican Senator Lincoln Chafee gave a speech today and got a lot of laughs when he said this about Sarah Palin: "People were coming into my office, phone calls were flooding in, e-mails were coming in, 'I just sent money to Obama, I couldn't sleep last night' - from the left. To see this cocky wacko up there." Now, Chafee was never that convincing a Republican, but here's the thing: neither, for the vast majority of his career anyway, was John McCain. And if Palin energizes the Republican base, she's sure as hell alienating a huge portion of the John McCain base. Let's call them "Angry White Men With Working Brain Cells."* My brother is one; he used to have a mild hardon for McCain; this morning I got an email from him about some Palin nightmare he had last night followed an hour later by an email from the Obama campaign informing me he'd donated a hundred bucks. He is part of the niche that gets riled up not over the idea bombing Iran, or even dumfuckedly joking about bombing Iran, but becomes suddenly borderline rabid over stories like this (as told to Bob Woodward.)

In a perfect world, yesterday's conveniently bundled true confessions by both Anne Hathaway and her prison-bound ex Raffaello Follieri would have been enough to put the lurid burden of their doomed relationship behind all of us. But not only is our world spectacularly imperfect, it's also an election year. Thus, right on cue, the phenomena overlap today in the real-life twilight zone where celebrity-smearing, corruption-fighting pillar of GOP rectitude John McCain can now actually be seen boarding Raffello Follieri's rented yacht. The Nation explains — to the extent it (or anybody else) can:

My oh my, look what has "surfaced," as they say: A photo of populist war hero presidential candidate John McCain lumbering his way onto Raffaello Follieri's yacht in Montenegro! And on the day after Follieri pleads guilty to multimillion-dollar fraud! How highly enjoyable. It was already known that McCain spent his 70th birthday, in 2006, aboard the yacht with Follieri and glamorous actress Anne Hathaway. But this is the first photo of the meeting, which drives home the unmissable point: John McCain spends his birthday on foreign yachts with criminals and Hollywood types. There's not enough lipstick in the world to cover this pig. Big version of the photo (found by The Nation)—and the upshot of the meeting—after the jump:

Photos of John McCain on a yacht with imprisoned con man Raffaello Follieri have surfaced. The pics, which were obtained by the Nation, were taken in 2006 when McCain met up with the Italian playboy aboard a yacht in Montenegro. The delicious irony: At the time, Follieri, who pleaded guilty yesterday to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, eight counts of wire fraud and five counts of money laundering, was living high on the hog thanks to billionaire Ron Burkle. So one of the Democratic party's most generous and reliable donors was the one who actually paid for McCain's "evening floating on the Adriatic with one of Hollywood's top actresses and her smooth-talking Italian beau." [The Nation]

Actor Matt Damon has leapt rather unwisely into the political fray. The Bourne Identity star-usually more discreet about his political opinions than hometown friend Ben Affleck-says Sarah Palin's rise is "like a really bad Disney movie." Let's put that provocative comparison to one side and examine the source of the Hollywood star's alarm. "Do the actuary tables and there's a one out of three chance, if not more, that McCain doesn't survive his first term and it'll be President Palin," says Damon. The actor played a math savant in Oscar-winning movie Good Will Hunting-but those skills aren't in evidence here. A cursory glance at the statistics shows that a 72-year-old male has a 3.3% chance of dying within the year-and a relatively modest 15% likelihood he won't last the four years of a presidential term. So, Matt Damon: about half right. Hey, that's not bad for a Hollywood actor! (After the jump, a video of the interview, which won't convert any waverers.)

CBS News may be home to the once-groundbreaking newsmagazine 60 Minutes and even the instigator of an evening-news segment called "free speech," but it'll be damned if it's going to let John McCain use footage of Katie Couric to smear Barack Obama as a sexist. CBS said the ad took Couric's comments out of context, which it apparently did, implying a swipe at Obama that was never taken. But instead of pursuing a lengthy court case that would have to contend with extensive case law protecting political ads, CBS is borrowing a tactic from the Church of Scientology and alleging a copyright infringement, at least according to YouTube's statement on the matter. That got the video removed nice and quick-like, though it still exists on the McCain campaign website. Surely CBS news executives could have taken a a more elitist road than low-grade YouTube censorship. [Politico]

A tipster's discovered Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin's LinkedIn profile and handily pointed out the poor intern who had to put it together's typos. Surprised anyone bothered to find it? Don't be. According to Google Trends, Sarah Palin gets more search queries than either of the two men at the top of the tickets. Probably doesn't hurt that Google counts what Hitwise says are the very many searches for "Sarah Palin Vogue Magazine," "Sarah Palin Photos," "Sarah Palin Bikini Photos," "Sarah Palin Nude," and "Sarah Palin Naked." With his strong cheek bones and steely-eyed stare, John McCain is a very handsome man, but not many of us need to see him naked. The Internet's obsession for Sarah Palin, according to the Google Trends chart below, seems to know no bounds.

To distract voters from their disaffection with Republican policies, the McCain campaign has focussed shamelessly and brilliantly on personality and pedigree. You want a "community organizer" (boo!) or the descendant of a long line of warriors? Now even John McCain's children—like those of his running mate—have been summoned to the cause: daughter Meghan told the Today Show yesterday that only her family could understand war; and wife Cindy trumpeted the family's military tradition in a primetime convention speech last week. "Our son, Jack, will graduate from the United States Naval Academy next year—fourth generation—ready to do his service." But these polished family narratives also draw uncomfortable attention, as the Palins are discovering—and the McCains may also. For that Scots-Irish warrior spirit, somewhat mellowed in the old man, may run a little too undiluted in Jack McCain and his friends. Someone going by the name of the candidate's son called for the killing of "towel heads" on a friend's blog much as John McCain once railed against the gooks in Vietnam, as we'll show below.

"Back in 2000, after John McCain lost his mostly honorable campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, he went about apologizing to journalists—including me—for his most obvious mis-step: his support for keeping the confederate flag on the state house." That is Joe Klein, an exceptionally annoying Time columnist. He sorta gets why that is ridiculous, now, but in case he isn't all the way there, let's try to break it down for him:

Though he's served as an effective political mouthpiece for both Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama, there's one woman in politics who Matt Damon refuses to get behind, and her name is Sarah Palin. In a new interview with the AP, Damon eviscerates the Republican VP candidate, calling her pick "absurd" and a "disaster," and comparing the idea that she could ascend to the presidency to a "really bad Disney movie."Most pressing to Damon, though, is whether Palin believes that dinosaurs actually walked the earth before man, or if their bones were simply littered as surprise gifts for Adam and Eve by a mischievous Supreme Being. Take notes, Charles Gibson! When will someone finally confront Sarah Palin and ask her why she fired all the dinosaurs in Alaska? UPDATE: Gawker overlord Nick Denton ran the numbers, and it turns out that Matt Damon's statement that "there is a 1 out of 3 chance, if not more, that McCain doesn't survive his first term" wasn't quite accurate. The chances are more like 15%. How you like them apples?

Barack Obama has long needed to take his first real swipe at his presidential rival John McCain as the Republican hammers away at Obama's lead in the polls. That makes it all the more tragic that Obama's attack yesterday missed its mark so widely. The Democrat's profoundly careless statement that "You can put lipstick on a pig — it's still a pig" was seized upon by supporters and opponents alike as a brutal attack of McCain's running mate Sarah Palin. It might be clear in context (see video after the jump) that Obama wasn't referring to the VP candidate. But Obama should have known it would be read that way after Palin's famous convention line, "What's the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick." The inevitable backlash and media firestorm will not only consume several precious days of the campaign news cycle — it will make it harder for Obama to take the hard swings he needs to take.

An expanded version of this story about the Republican running mate's son—with details from the National Enquirer's print edition—is here.