John McCain and his running mate are both indeed political outsiders by character. Their record of going against the Republican establishment—McCain in Washington, DC and Sarah Palin in Alaska—is undeniable and the designation of "maverick" has been succesfully affixed by sheer brazen repetition at this week's party convention. The Obama campaign's response—even after Palin's unusual performance last night in St. Paul—has been merely to repeat that the supposedly independent-minded hero at the top of the ticket has in fact voted with George Bush 90% of the time. Wrong answer. McCain's campaign has admitted to the candidate's greatest vulnerability: it's precisely because he's such a maverick that voters shouldn't trust him with power. The Democrats should accept McCain as a maverick—a dangerous maverick—and turn that quality against him.

When we pointed out last week that potential veep candidate Sarah Palin bore a strong resemblance to Tina Fey as Liz Lemon (except for their stances on important social issues), never did we imagine the proof would come in the form of this Life cover from September 2004. Striking a remarkably similar pose to her current Rolling Stone spread (what is it with her and men with ties?), Fey needs little else besides an exotically named brood and a hilarious accent to complete her remarkably accurate Palin impression. In fact, according to Poynter Online, the cover shoot may have given John McCain some ideas:

No plans for 9/11 day yet? Why not enjoy Barack Obama and John McCain at Columbia, one of those Elitist East Coast Ivy League Colleges of The Elite, where they will talk about civic duty for "ServiceNation, an organization that aims to increase public service participation." You know, "public service participation" like "community organizing," which, as we all know, is gay and elitist and not something seriously important like shooting wolves from airplanes. Anyway. We assume Obama will talk on behalf on public service and McCain will become confused and angry and speak against it. [CollegeOTR]

Yesterday we described some of our 2008 campaign fantasies and asked you to do the same. And many of you did! We got stories that ranged from the terrifyingly (and depressingly) believable to the so out-there that only someone who doesn't believe in science could, uh, believe them. Our favorites are after the jump. "Victory is near for Team Obama with a walloping 10-point after Sarah Palin calls John McCain 'McDreamy' during her nomination acceptance. As will.i.am and fergie take the stage at the Obamaluvuyou.com Ice Cream Social, chief consultant David Axelrod starts grinding on the wings with an un-named field office intern. An errant iphone snaps a few frames of the ill-fated hip-swerve-age and erupts on the web within the hour. Axelrod resigns, is replaced by Biden's consultant who quickly shoots a new ad featuring Obama-Biden smoking cigars in the back of a pick-up truck in Scranton, hoping to pick up values-voters turned off by the scandal. Chaos erupts as Sarah Palin's increasingly pregnant daughter and her boyfriend get married in Atlantic City, hoping to court the mid-Atlantic. The wedding is televised with Rev. Rick Warren officiating. McCain seems ripe for upset Obama when he keels over in his home voting poll in AZ. But the eastern states have already cast their votes and amid the confusion and seeming Obama victory, new voters flock to western pollbooths, admittedly, to "fuck shit up," making Sarah Palin the first president to turn the white house into an igloo for a liberal-baiting seal hunt and all moose bbq." —A. Moss "McCain wins election, thanks to Diebold. One week before McCain/Palin are about to take office, there is an attack on the US. America freaks. Two days later, McCain has a heart attack and dies. This means that Sarah Palin is about to take office at a time of war. But that can't happen. So instead, President Bush declares martial law, citing precedent of FDR and suspends the swearing in ceremony. Public breathes sigh of relief. Bush remains in office for another four years. RIP American democracy." —bertyapple "OMG, what if Obama picked as his VP a fella with hair plugs and blindingly white teeth who had been rejected by the American voting public in every national election in which he competed? And then, when the Democrats are all 'aww, man, I totes thought we had a chance this time,' what if McCain picks a crazy high-school-hockey-stud-humping, badger-trapping, wilderness lady with virtually no experience in anything except killin', fuckin' an' eatin' what you kill and/or fuck? Then the Democrats will be all, 'hahahaha, you picked white trash for VP.' And then, what if the huge, mushy center of the country is all, 'fuck all ya'll 'cause she's more like us than ya'll' and elects her and Jesus comes back?" —Nard "Hillary Clinton expresses disgust at the media-driven savaging of Sarah Palin and elects to act as a godmother for a child. After a period of intense negotiations, she declares her intention to run as an independent third-party candidate with Sarah Palin as her running mate, holding a quick convention in a non-denominational church. They decide to call it the Women's Party of America, representing centrist issues like deficit cuts, faith-based care, and medical reform. The race immediately dissolves around sex lines, and the cantankerous combination of Hillary and Sarah become media lightning rods as the likes of Carly Fiorina, Janet Reno, etc. join the cause. Historic women's-rights advocates endorse the platform, Hollywood doesn't know what to do, the media starts counting fat stacks of cash, and the entire race becomes distorted. We go to the polls on Nov. 5 with absolutely no clarity on how the sexual or racial fissures in our country will smash against the system." —ADismalScience And many more...

When she was CEO at eBay, Meg Whitman was known for her speeches. Or at least, she was known for her love of them. Her talent for them, not so much. What happened when she addressed a crowd of people who weren't drawing a paycheck from her? Speaking before prime time during the Republican National Convention last night, Whitman dutifully stuck to the McCain campaign's talking points in a 10-minute-long — long, long, long — speech on prosperity through lowered taxes and offshore drilling. Cameras showed the crowd ignoring her 5 minutes in. From that point on, Whitman was little more than background noise for conversations with other delegates. Now we know why Whitman only made McCain's list of 20 finalists for the VP job he eventually gave to Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who brought down the house with her own flinty partisan jabs later that night.

While waiting for former HP CEO Carly Fiorina to follow former eBay CEO Meg Whitman's speech with her own, MSNBC's Internet-only live video feed of the Republican National Convention caught this footage of Republican square-staters grooving to 1982's rockabilly hit, "Rock This Town," by The Stray Cats. The clip has a cautionary message for Obama's Facebook-generation supporters: When their candidate says he's "postpartisan," potential voters closing in on AARP membership clearly hear "postboomers."

Vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin has reason to be proud of her son Track, 19 of whom she spoke at length at the Republican National Convention. Track will be deployed to Iraq on Sept. 11, Palin informed the crowd (and the press) last night, while her nephew Casey is already serving on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf. But Palin mentioned her family's military service by way of explaining her strong support for her running mate John McCain, and in so doing broke sharply with the presidential candidate and veteran's own, much-acclaimed policy on refusing to discuss, and thus benefit from, his own son's military service in Iraq. She also opened herself up to more discussion of her unwed daughter's pregnancy, heretofore characterized as off-limits because it involved Palin's children.

If you're a teen father thrust into the spotlight because your fiancée's mom is suddenly a vice-presidential candidate, how to cope with the stress? For 18-year-old Levi Johnston, the answer is to chew gum obnoxiously on the stage at the Republican National Convention, even while meeting presidential candidate John McCain. Maybe the father to Bristol Palin's baby was just trying to prove that he really is a "fuckin' redneck" as stated on his MySpace profile. Palin's mom Sarah, who had just finished a well-received speech slamming Barack Obama, would not have appreciated further insolence from the young man who has still not publicly confirmed he will, in fact, marry her daughter as the McCain campaign claims. There's always an outside chance Johnston was merely following orders, the Republicans having gambled that a little cud chewing might play well among the "bitter" working-class whites Hillary Clinton once courted. Click the video icon to watch Levi's jaw in action.

Remember how Sarah Palin wasn't going to attack Barack Obama tonight, according to a front-page Wall Street Journal article? So much for that. Palin railed (as would otherwise have been expected) against the Democratic presidential candidate as a book-writing pansy community organizer who would treat the job of the presidency as a chance for emotional growth, unlike Palin who did actual work leading a metropolis of 6,000 people, firing a chef from the governor's mansion and marrying an actual Eskimo. The applause and laughter from the convention floor sounded ginned up but the pundits approved (as we predicted); CNN was impressed and over on MSNBC Tom Brokaw, who hated liberal colleague Keith Olbermann's kind words at the Democratic convention, said Palin "could not be more commanding or engaging." Probably tomorrow or later tonight everyone will go back to talking about the bridge to nowhere, the love child, the trooper scandal and so forth, but for the moment Palin has successfully changed the subject, which is no small accomplishment. Click the video icon for two of her more effective Obama slams.

Just as Sarah Palin was preparing to speak at the Republican convention in St. Paul (more on that momentarily), word bubbled up that the National Enquirer alleged in its print edition that John McCain's running mate had an affair with a business partner to her husband. With the sensational charge, the supermarket tabloid is gambling the measure of respect it has earned from more buttoned-down media in the wake of its reporting on John Edwards's affair with a campaign staffer, which was partially admitted to be true by Edwards himself. And early signs are that it may lose that gamble: The Enquirer issued a wishy-washy statement to the Huffington Post addressing its charges only in the context of other allegations, rather than backing them head-on:

The Internet campaign strategist who made Howard Dean a frontrunner in 2004 says Democrats who write off Palin as a crazy Bible-thumping prom queen will be in for a surprise: John McCain's presumptive running mate will be the centerpiece of an attack on Barack Obama's record as a change agent. "She isn't Dan Quayle," Joe Trippi writes, "and besides, Dan Quayle was elected vice president." Most of Trippi's opinion piece for CBS rehashes stuff you know, so I've excerpted his talking points:

The attempt by the McCain campaign to deflect criticism of their insane choice of running mate by assailing the media is already ridiculous. Steve Schmidt whined to Howard Kurtz about hypothetical questions asked by journalists that have not resulted in stories printed anywhere. They boycotted Larry King because Campbell Brown dared ask mean questions of Tucker Bounds. Now their surrogates are grasping at the most sublimely ridiculous straw of all: when asked by Chris Matthews to name the major media outlets engaged in character assassination of Sarah Palin, adorable Florida Congressman Adam Putnam named Us Weekly. Us Weekly! Yes we did just reveal their radical secret agenda today but still, this is the best you can do? Chris Matthews then calls it "the U. S. Weekly." Now the McCain campaign will boycott magazines, probably.

I love that asshole Gordon Ramsay. He combines all the best qualities we seek in television chefs: cooking skills, abusive language, a foreign accent. As well as the occasional tender moment! Kitchen Nightmares, the show where Ramsay travels to nice, homely restaurants in the New York area and berates their owners to distraction before showering them with thousands of dollars worth of new kitchen equipment, is coming back to Fox tomorrow night. And not a moment too soon—with the Republican convention wrapping up, where else will America turn for our televised dose of a blond man with an ill-concealed temper demanding that foreigners accept his help or be destroyed? See the parallels there, zing? Yes. Watch the trailer after the jump; the cockroaches represent Islamofascism:

How does an unwed teen mother like Jamie Lynn Spears occupy her free time, now that the father of her baby is out touching tongues with predatory cougars? Why, by taking an interest in politics, of course! In the tradition of amateur pundit Lindsay Lohan and Swiftian theorist Albert Brooks, Jamie Lynn is the latest celeb to weigh in on the Sarah Palin Juneau scandal, but the starlet isn't content to confine her thoughts to a mere blog post. No, according to CelebTV, she's actually sending a gift to fellow teen mother Bristol Palin:

Levi Johnston just arrived in Minneapolis. I feel like this image conjures 13 jokes you can make employing the lyrics of "Come Together" alone but you guys have at it. Image via the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

As if this Ben-Hur-esque election season hadn't already been crazy and exhausting enough, along came Sarah Palin on Friday, Republican John McCain's strangely selected (determined by tea leaves? gleaned from the position of the sun? through phrenology? by listening to whispers on the wind?) pick for running mate. She's the governor of a sprawling and empty Northern wilderness, she's a former beauty queen, and she's got a knocked-up outta wedlock daughter. It doesn't get any better, does it? Or, you know, maybe it could. We have some sorta-believable fantasy campaign stories in mind that would ensure that this batshit insane campaign season could finally be deemed complete and, perhaps, the Best Election Season Ever. What if little Bristol Palin (the pregnant daughter) fled to abortion-happy Canada, causing some sort of international incident? Or wouldn't it be terrific if Scottsdale Retirement Community Barbie Cindy McCain was found to be keeping servants as modern-day slaves, paid next to nothing and sleeping huddled and cold under the stairs? Ohh, and what if an old paper of Barack Obama's from Harvard was discovered, and its topic was an avid defense of Huey Newton? These are all sort of wonderfully plausible (in a silly way), and we're curious to see if you can top them (we're sure you can). Send us your ultimate fantasy campaign plotlines and we'll democratically publish our favorites.

Governor Palin is greeting John McCain at the Minneapolis airport right now! Exciting! She's going to address the Republican National Convention tonight! This is great, because there was a small danger that Vinegar Joe Lieberman and the proper start of the RNC would quiet the nonstop over-the-top Palin coverage that's had the national press in a hilarious tizzy for a week. But this morning brought more front-page stories of McCain campaign incompetence and additional and more insane conspiracy theories, and with a speech from Palin tonight, we can guarantee that Palin coverage will continue unabated for the rest of the week. So what shall we expect from here? Some thoughts and predictions: Unless bloggers and enterprising commenters come up with actual evidence of weird natal misdeeds, their investigations will likely lead to just another MSM crisis about how the "bloggers" are devious and evil. Especially because the conspiracies are getting so dark. As far as we know, the story as it's currently postulated is that a) Palin covered up for her daughter Bristol's first pregnancy, and then Bristol either got knocked up again immediately afterwards or she's faking this pregnancy; or b) that Palin was indeed pregnant and her amniocentesis followed by her insane and inexplicable schedule the day of Trig's birth are proof that Palin was trying to cause a miscarriage. This is weird and horrible stuff and the very act of suggesting it will make respectable people queasy. But hey, it's out there! The "blog conspiracy theories", as cable people are surely already calling them, will make these responsible journalists (pls add own scare quotes) probably less likely to do their own digging into and speculating on the story of Baby Trig. Families: off-limits! (That reductive construction is a facile and childish simplification of issues that are newsworthy and even related to actual policy- and decision-making but whatever. The press doesn't want to look bad beating up supermom.) Soon the "the press is victimizing Sarah Palin" narrative will ramp up even further. Already poor Clarence Page got in trouble for calling Governor Palin a nice "young lady." That is mildly condescending, yes, but sexist? "Lady" is a bit old fashioned, maybe, but Lieberman just referred to the Democratic party nominee for president—a black man, btw—as "an eloquent and gifted young man" in a speech before the Republican National Convention on primetime television last night. And no one but TNR noticeed or cared. But this speech tonight! It was just explicitly spelled out on MSNBC: "the bar is not very high." Everyone will be pleasantly surprised at how well she does, how she's a breath of fresh air, how she is so much better than the terrible old white men of the Republican party. Unless she accidentally makes some huge factual fuck-up, like talking about that damned bridge to nowhere again. But they are probably being careful about that. The media has most likely dug up every salient detail there is to find about Troopergate and her early political career, and now it's up to Obama's people to exploit those, but where it may still get interesting is in the celebrity media. Specifically with Levi Johnston. The campaign will be dragging Levi to the RNC tonight, and presumably this shotgun wedding will go on as planned, but there are rumblings, already, that Levi is a brickheaded young thug who's maybe knocked up girls before, whose parents don't approve of this foolishness, and we've even heard that he had to dry out in rehab before the sham wedding could take place. So we rely on the Enquirer and, to a lesser extent, Us Weekly to pursue these stories. Because honestly the families that relate to a working mother dealing with her oldest daughter's understandable mistake will surely not relate to forcing that poor girl into marrying a local drunken hoodlum, as it is no longer 1910 or something. The McCain campaign knows—and indeed has explicitly stated—that they've been totally successful in making this campaign not about "issues" (even lazily defined "issues" like "the economy" and "Iraq") but about "character" which means personality and hagiography. Palin was the perfect pick in that sense, because she's aggressively blue-collar suburban normal, but she may soon become the sort of "normal" that people can't fucking stand—your uptight god-loving neighbor who makes you look bad but can't keep her own house in order. This, against the adorable nuclear Obama family, is not a good narrative for McCain.

A consolation prize for raising millions of dollars from their Fortune 500 rolodexes: Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman and former HP CEO Carly Fiorina will speak at the Republican National Convention tonight. Both also made Republican presidential candidate John McCain's list of 20 potential vice presidential candidates, aides told the New York Times. Like McCain's real first choice, Connecticut senator Joe Lieberman, neither Whitman nor Fiorina would have satisfied the conservative Christian base quite like McCain's eventual choice, the pro-life, pro-guns governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. Also, neither looks quite so much like the adorable Liz Lemon, am I right? Fiorina has already gone on TV to attack Obama for attacking Palin, but Whitman kind of sounds less jazzed by the Palin pick. "John McCain made the choice that's right for him,'' Whitman told reporters Tuesday.Technically, Whitman and Fiorina's speeches tonight will focus on "prosperity" and McCain's economic plans for the country. But really, each is auditioning for her next job. Fiorina is said to be eying a cabinet post. Whitman may want to run for California governor in 2010. The Mercury News reports Whitman has already hired Steve Schmidt, McCain's campaign strategist and a former adviser to Arnold Schwarzenegger,. (Photo by AP/Dharapak)

• Reporters have been sent to Alaska! "The world arrived here more than a century ago with the gold rush and later the railroad," the New York Times reports from Wasilla. Yet one aspect of American life did not come to town until this week: the national press! William Yardley reports that frontier maverick Sarah Palin introduced culture war "wedge politics" to a sleepy little Northern Exposure town by turning the friendly mayoral race into a Newt Gingrich scorched earth battle for the soul of Wasilla. Then on her way out as mayor she campaigned against her own step-mother! ICE COLD. [NYT]

Us Weekly released its much-anticipated Sarah Palin issue, resurfacing in it a January incident in which the John McCain running mate laughed along with a shock jock who called her Republican rival a "bitch" and a "cancer" on the state. Us got fresh quotes from the woman in question, a cancer survivor who is still quite pissed about the incident despite a halfhearted apology from Palin. The celebrity weekly also questioned whether the father of Palin's forthcoming granddaughter really wants to have kids. As right-wing bloggers are bitterly noting, the coverage scandalizes John McCain's running mate before the magazine's 12 million readers, mostly the very females Palin was recruited to attract. It's not lost on any of them, either, that Us Weekly owner Jann Wenner is a big Barack Obama supporter. With coverage of Palin's various scandals — the love child, the radio thing, troopergate, etc. etc. — still everywhere, Palin's role in the campaign is being severely restricted, the Wall Street Journal reports in a page-one story today: