The failure of imagination that is John McCain's new "Celeb" ad against Obama has yielded unintended results in the form of exaggerated reactions to it. The most salient comes from Obama himself, who, speaking in Rolla, Missouri yesterday, said this: "John McCain right now, he's spending an awful lot of time talking about me. You notice that? I haven't seen an ad yet where he talks about what he's gonna do...And so the only way they figure they're going to win this election is if they make you scared of me. So what they're saying is, ‘Well, we know we're not very good but you can't risk electing Obama. You know, he's new, he's... doesn't look like the other presidents on the currency, you know, he's got a, he's got a funny name.'"

Since it was built in 1931, River House, the swank and secluded Art Deco palace behind wrought-iron gates at the dead end of East 52nd Street, has topped the short list of exclusive (and very expensive) co-ops along the East River waterfront. Home to Henry Kissinger (and Pete Peterson until recently), the building boasts three 20 million+ listings at the moment, including a large tower duplex owned by real estate mogul Francesco Galesi, which was boldly listed for $50 million almost three years ago but has since come down to $35 million. (Other apartments for sale include Laura Pels' terraced third-floor unit for $29 million, and the opulent maisonette of Chicago producer Marty Richards.) Naturally, it's also home to a long list of heavy-hitting political donors. After the jump, a list of what some River House residents have done with their cash in this year's battle for the White House.

• So remember how John McCain tried to somehow make an unflattering association between Paris Hilton and Barack Obama? It turns out Paris Hilton's parents have been funneling money to McCain! Thanks a lot WALNUTS. Did you forget the idle rich are kind of a key Republican constituency or something? [Oh No They Didn't]

In the alternate universe where Chuck Norris is Arnold Schwarzenegger's Secretary of State, White House Chief of Staff Jon Voight is laughing his ass off. How could he not given this otherwise slow news day's insane spate of celebrity politicking? Drudge directs us to a new McCain ad featuring Britney Spears and Paris Hilton—not as endorsements, but pop tarts who evidently want to raise your taxes and dependency on foreign oil like someone we know. Meanwhile, alleged murderer Phil Spector was spotted in LA court wearing a "Barack Obama Rocks" button on his natty suit (just because you can doesn't mean you should!), and Ludacris' new single is called "Politics: Obama Is Here." Guess which "bitch is irrelevant"? And any takers on how long before the GOP makes quick work of this lyric: "McCain don't belong in ANY chair unless he's paralyzed"? Full song after the jump.

The Huffington Post has a major scoop. It seems John McCain is partial to Ferragamo loafers, specifically the Pregiato Moccasin which retails at Neiman-Marcus for $520! They even have a slideshow to prove it, documenting every occasion over the past few weeks when he's worn the footwear on the campaign trail—in the company of his $100 million wife. [HuffPo]

Political journalist Ron Fournier took his lumps recently for an ill-advisedly friendly email he sent to Bush brain Karl Rove back in 2004. Today, the Politico reveals that Fournier was this close to getting a "senior advisory role" in the McCain campaign, probably as some sort of fancy flack. He turned it down and went back to the AP instead, but now this has been reported and it's fueling the anti-AP fire. They're in bed with McCain! It's like there are these two gigantic beds in DC and everyone in the press is lying down on them with a candidate. Or it's like bullshit. This story, and the last one, are pointless except as part of some weird campaign to embarrass Ron Fournier. Fournier quit the Associated Press a couple years back to start something terrible called HotSoup.com, a sort of message board social networking political blog thing that was supposed to revolutionize everything ever. A couple weeks later (at least it felt like a couple weeks) he was back at the AP as their online political editor. (He's now the Washington bureau chief.) He's actually done a little bit of good work at the AP, stripping away some of the obtuse house style and inserting some liveliness into wire reports, but now all the liberals will decide the AP is a den of McCainiacs and boycott them or something. We ask you: why is a job offer from two years ago news? That's all this is. A declined job offer. Politico even twists the knife further:

In the (very near) future, presidential candidates will have national advertising campaign budgets of about $637 or so. They'll just make a few very low-tech ads full of stock photos and slanderous lies about their opponents, run the ad once at 3 a.m. on a small local news channel in the Midwest, and then let the news networks swoop in and show the ad in its entirety hundreds of times for free, repeating all of its slanderous lies each time. That's basically been John McCain's strategy so far, and it's working like a charm!

Remember how sexist media pundits maybe helped Hillary Clinton ruin her shot at the Democratic presidential nomination? "When Hillary Clinton speaks, men hear, 'Take out the garbage,'" loutish author Marc Rudov said on Fox News in January, leading the way for other controversial statements by Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann of MSNBC. Well now the shouting heads are doing the same thing to John McCain. And it's those bastards at MSNBC again! Just listen to Joe Scarborough make fun of McCain for getting cluster-bombed by liberal jars of apple sauce during what should have been a simple grocery store photo-op (via the Observer):

BarackBook is the Republican National Committee's new faux-cial network. As a campaign tool, it's supposed to make clear the connections between Obama and his "questionable" friends, like "60's Radicals!" William Ayers of the Weather Underground and Marilyn Katz of the Students for a Democratic Society. They have cute profile photos, sure, but where are the Last Night's Party-style gossip shots of Obama circa 1968 in a Mao baby tee? Users can send a donation to the GOP; they cannot send John McCain a Friends-for-Sale request.

John McCain! He's hip and with it! He's a rockin' dude with a maverick attitude! To prove how "plugged in" he is, he recently had a mole removed, just like popular Sex and the City actress Sarah Jessica Parker! Then he went on the TV to advise Americans to avoid the sun and talk to their dermatologists at the first sign of discoloration. Then he asked everyone to please purchase life insurance from AARP. Ha ha just kidding with that last bit. But not the sunscreen thing: [Update: There is video!]

This video of John McCain acting like a petulant teenage girl toward a Wall Street Journal reporter is hilarious (best part: Lindsay Graham's "mee-OW" look at the end). And also telling! (TGIF, guys, we'll get through this.) John McCain's always been a favorite of the press, because of his insane availability. (Read Ana Marie Cox in Radar to learn more!) (Alex, call me!) He's affable and genuinely likes reporters. But we've reached a funny moment in their relationship. Because the media is in the tank for Obama. They love him! They cover him all day and all night and ignore McCain. But! The Obama campaign is totally, ridiculously press unfriendly. They're tight with information and generally try to control the message as much as Bush's people did. That's right, in his dealings with the press, Obama resembles President Bush! Some of the Obama faithful see this as a good thing. The media is the enemy. They distort and lie! No one trusts or likes anyone anymore, at all. So McCain is buddy-buddy with all his reporters but is now waging inept war on the media for ignoring him. Obama's beloved by the television people but is pissing off Adam Nagourney. So basically you can bitch about how the media keep painting McCain as a independent lovable American MAVERICK and they all play down his gaffes because they like him, or you can complain that the media are not even bothering to hide their gross man-crush on Barack Obama while ignoring his opponent and both are absolutely correct. So have at it, guys! R.I.P. observable reality!

CNN thought it found the perfect human face to put on MySpace statistics and voter registration numbers it tried to use, in an American Morning segment, to prove that the popularity of Barack Obama had campus conservatives on the run at American colleges. USC's Eric Perlmutter, identified as a member of the College Republicans, was quoted saying "we try to get people out to our college Republican meetings... but we can't seem to get the same amount of support" as Obama. After the president of the USC College Republicans spoke up to say he had never met this guy, CNN issued a fairly damning correction:

Hey, if John McCain, 71, had any hope of becoming the oldest person ever to ascend to the presidency next January, you know what would be important? The identity of the person who would replace the Republican and miracle of modern medical technology upon death. But all news outlets everywhere know McCain cannot possibly win this thing, since voters hate Republican candidates right now and besides Barack Obama is a tender angel of love and hope and also Change. This is why even the rabidly conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page just ran an opinion piece (headline pictured above) arguing that it just doesn't matter who McCain selects as his vice presidential candidate. The writer, senior Ronald Reagan adviser Ken Khachigian, concludes that talking about McCain's VP "is about boredom relief for opinion writers, political junkies and the media. It provides an escape from the fatigue of an 18-month nomination race — a new rabbit to chase" that soon "will be a distant memory." Harsh! [WSJ]

John McCain made a pair of not-bad ads mocking the schoolgirlish moments of pundits talking about Barack Obama. Sure, it was hypocritical since McCain's no stranger to favorable press — he famously joked that reporters constituted his "base." Also politically dangerous for the same reason. But if he gets away with tweaking the Fourth Estate it's because he offers the kind of access other pols don't. This is why Jonathan Chait and Jacob Weisberg may not vote for him but still kind of admire the guy. Obama, however, is the anointed presidential hopeful (if he doesn't say so himself), and he clearly has more to lose if the media's infatuation with him ends. Gabriel Sherman of the New Republic has a good piece explaining how the bloom's already gone off the rose. Obama's press liaison Robert Gibbs is a dick, and his other handlers are prickly and micromanagerial. Key evidence: The Times' Adam Nagourney and Megan Thee wrote a story about how the candidate had failed to bridge the race gap. This precipitated a gentle question to Nagourney from the Obama campaign, which he answered. He then awoke the next morning to find himself attacked in an eight-point press release issued by Obama's team and leaked to Talking Points Memo and Marc Ambinder. "I've never had an experience like this with this campaign or others," Nagourney tells Sherman. "I thought they crossed the line. If you have a problem with a story I write, call me first. I'm a big boy. I can handle it. But they never called. They attacked me like I'm a political opponent." So I guess Nagourney's less of a fan. True, McCain went out of his way to antagonize Elisabeth Bumiller of the Times for probing his red-meat conservative credentials (didn't Kerry offer him the VP slot?). But again, this wasn't schema-altering. Who didn't already know McCain could go from Mogwai to Gremlin when his status as a Maverick was either questioned or affirmed by the wrong inquiring mind? With his wafer-thin lead in the polls (don't email me, Gibbs!), Obama can scarcely afford to keep a reputation like this:

Last month MTV announced that it would finally start accepting political ads in order to better engage the youth of our nation in the political process and also because Barack Obama has a huge multimillion-dollar ad account that's not gonna spend itself. But look, the crafty right wing is getting out ahead of the curve here! Because the first political ad ever is now running on MTV, and it is against Barack Obama! Unfortunately it is incredibly trite and may have been assembled by a middle school child with rudimentary video-editing software and a YouTube account. Watch it after the jump and join the McCain revolution! Don't be a stereotypical youth in bed with Two-Way Barack:

House Republicans "fired off" a strongly-worded letter to the editor of the New York Times today, because that mean and biased newspaper asked John McCain to write a second draft of his stupid editorial. It's hilarious for like ten reasons. Look, regardless of the quality of the work the Times op-ed page prints, you do, as a political candidate, have to aspire to a certain level of pretend-seriousness before you can be printed there. Having a junior staffer throw together old talking points and attack-ad rhetoric is just not acceptable. And so now we have House Republicans crowing about a mythical right of "equal access" to the op-ed page of a privately owned newspaper. Ha ha do they want to bring back the fairness doctrine? Anyway let's all climb the New York Times building and burn it to the ground. Or let's make like the GOP wants to do and buy a full-page ad in the revenue-starved paper. That'll teach 'em! [Politico]

Dude, how much would it suck to be a reporter covering the McCain campaign? I mean they're probably all riding the Straight Talk Express rolling their eyes like "I went to J-school for this? I could be at a school board meeting right now." J-Mac knows he can't win this thing, but he's still hoping to come out of the campaign with enough good will to be able to get at least five or six reporters to join him for his biweekly cribbage games when he moves into The Home. So his campaign is handing out some fakey press passes ribbing the journalists about what a crappy assignment they have being stuck eating Freedom Toast with the red-blooded Americans. Hey, at least they're not covering Obama off in France or wherever he is!:

John McCain's frequently cited gaffes have been a source of amusement or concern, depending on your perspective. Either (ha!) he's a doddering old fool who might be president, or (shit) he's a doddering old fool who might be president. The availability of his many flubs and missteps on the Internet, a medium with which he doesn't even pretend to be acquainted, haven't helped combat McCain's image as a sufferer from Early Onset Reagan Mind Mush. And yet if you want to get technical, his gaffes are like breakups, orgasms and Woody Allen films — some are palpably worse than others. After the jump, a brief catalog with commentary.

Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty just might be our next Vice President! If McCain pulls this thing off. Which would be, wow. Pawlenty holds all the advantages as a running mate of a Charlie Crist—young, inoffensive, kinda popular, governor of a potential swing state—without the "probably gay" thing. He's just possibly gay. Now let's lay out the problems!

You know what's "funny" about John Edwards getting busted (pretty damn convincingly) by the National Enquirer while meeting his mistress and love child in a Los Angeles hotel? Edwards' cover story was that he was in LA to meet with the city's mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa — and Villaraigosa, like John Edwards, cheated on his wife right after a primary election! And also, wouldn't you know it, Villaraigosa's wife Corina was battling thyroid cancer at the time, sort of like how Elizabeth Edwards is now battling breast cancer. Isn't that... awful? Yes, yes it is. But also it's part of a long trend among certain American political candidates to ditch their sick wives. In fact, you might remember this disturbing behavior from such examples as: the current presumptive Republican nominee for president!