Hey, here is a thing John McCain should go to! New York Times Opinion Page Editor David Shipley, the man who politely asked that Senator McCain rewrite his little story and turn it in again, will be at the 92nd Street Y in January to discuss "The Art and Science of Opinion Pieces." Of course, by then, it'll be too late to win the election, but it will still be very useful for every other time McCain feels like writing a cranky letter to the editor, as most senior citizens frequently do. [92StY]

Click to viewThe presidency ages a man. (And hypothetically it would a woman, but we'll never know!) Remember when there was color in Bill Clinton's and George W. Bush's hair? Barely? After two terms in the Oval Office, both men looked twenty years older. This despite the fact that Bush gets 12 hours of sleep a night and Clinton received regular tail! But what will happen to Barack Obama or John McCain? Obama does too many drugs to sleep and old people like McCain just doze off in front of the tv each night for a couple unsatisfying hours. So we had intern Anna Peele work a little photoshop wizardry to age Obama and McCain and help us figure out exactly which terrifying visage we'll be forced to look upon in 2012. Scary results below!

This is great. The McCain campaign is crying bias and went running to Drudge because the New York Times wouldn't print their stupid editorial. See, the Times printed an editoral by Barack Obama called "My Plan for Iraq." So McCain "wrote" an editorial about how Obama's plan for Iraq was to lose just like we lost Vietnam and John McCain's plan was to win the war. So the Times said, hey, why don't you try another draft of this where you articulate what "winning" means? The McCain campaign took this as a rejection and now they're all whining like the embittered nation of recession-imagining whiners they hate.

The media attention being paid to Senator Barack Obama's trip to Afghanistan this week has all the usual wing-nuts crying that the press isn't doing enough to cover Republican Presidential candidate George W. John McCain. "'The question really needs to be posed: Is this type of coverage fair?' said Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va. 'This is nothing but a political stunt.'"

We haven't yet reached the part of the campaign when people accuse Barack Obama of being a Hollywood Liberal or what-have-you and insinuate that he spends far too much time hanging out with godless celebrities, but this year we look forward to it. Because old man John McCain has been a friend of the limousine liberal set for so long! Remember when Arianna Huffington revealed that he told her he didn't vote for George Bush? What she was actually revealing was that John McCain was at a dinner party in Los Angeles with Arianna Huffington. The party was hosted by Candace Bergen. West Wing stars Bradley Whitford and Richard Schiff were there. Since then, McCain's moved hard to the right, and been abandoned by his Hollywood friends. His oddball daughter, though, just had a lovely date with noted Apocalypse harbinger Heidi Montag!

"I never confused him with a genuine progressive leader. Today I don't admire him at all. His collapse on FISA is unforgivable," writes Salon editor-in-chief Joan Walsh, in an essay titled "Betrayed by Obama." Adds Walsh, "I wonder whether I can ultimately vote for Obama in November, given all of his political cave-ins." Gutsy and contrarian, yes, but here's a pop quiz: Calculate the probability of Joan Walsh casting her ballot for John McCain. (Photo by AP/Jason DeCrow)

Cara Carleton "Carly" Fiorina (née Sneed) (thanks Wikipedia!) used to be the most powerful woman in business, back when she was running HP. She ran HP into the ground, btw, forcing a deadly merger with Compaq, laying off 7,000 people, losing market share to Dell and IBM, and finally being forced out by the board. She received a ridiculous $21 million cash severance payment (breaking the company's own severance cap) and she also somehow received a reputation as someone to be taken seriously in matters of business. Now her job is to convince people that John McCain is business-friendly and knowledgeable about money in general. America! Lloyd Grove interviewed her for Portfolio. This is our favorite quote:

John McCain used to totally love hanging out with reporters, back when he drove the Straight Talk Express, a giant party bus where the liberal press corps could smoke their hippie reefer weed and listen to old man MAVERICK tell hilarious stories about being tortured by "gooks." But now all the top journalists have abandoned McCain for the new cool kid, teen pop sensation Barack Obama, and so the Republican presidential candidate bitterly decided to only accept questions from angry people in wheelchairs and craven conservative bloggers. Here are the only two questions allowed during a July 1 campaign conference call, recorded by a reporter for progressive magazine Mother Jones (who will never be allowed to talk to or make eye contact with McCain, ever):

To file under rumors John McCain shouldn't rush to squelch: Man-handling Communists. Republican Sen. Thad Cochran is telling a newspaper in his home state of Mississippi that in 1987 McCain, acting in his capacity as co-chair of Central American working group in the Senate, traveled to Nicaragua to meet with the Sandinistas. He especially didn't like one of them. According to Cochran, "John... reached over and grabbed this guy by the shirt collar and had snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair to tell him what he thought about him or whatever..." That sound you just heard was Oliver North denying he creamed his jeans.

How, we ask you, could someone named "T. Boone Pickens" possibly be bad? T. Boone is, as you have probably guessed, a Texas billionaire. An oil billionaire! But he does not spend his billions on running moonshine or buying the world's largest cement pond. No, instead Pickens-who will be played by Charles Durning for the remainder of this post-funds slanderous attack campaigns against Democratic political candidates. The campaigns feature lies so ridiculous that the only people who regularly take them seriously work at every cable news station and many newspapers.

Young Jeezy, the coke-slinging Atlanta rap star who is close friends with John McCain, will be making his acting debut in the upcoming Ice Cube film Janky Promoters. (Old Republican McCain-hip hop slang joke)! [Reuters]

So, the other day on Fox News, amidst a rant about Obama's support from the liberal Hollywood elite, the decidedly un-elite Stephen Baldwin told Laura Ingram that he'll leave the country if Barack gets elected. Obviously, the knee-jerk reaction here is to say, "Then we'd better do our best to make sure that happens." You can see it on Baldwin's face right after he makes his statement. He knows he's gonna get murdered in the blogsphere. But that's not happening here. Not today. I like Baldwin, and I'd be sad not to have him as a citizen of our country.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain has the affectionate support of a man accused of buying several kilos of cocaine in Atlanta from the vicious Black Mafia Family gang! McCain "was seen embracing" his close friend and confidante Young Jeezy, a rapper also known as "Snowman." Because he loves dealing cocaine! The passionate meeting of like minds occurred on the set of Saturday Night Live last month, when McCain was hosting and Jeezy was the musical guest. Here's what the thug rapper has to say about his soul-stirring connection with the Arizona Republican, who greeted Jeezy "like a god":

One of John McCain's oft-cited attributes is his humor. He says it fortified him as a POW in Vietnam, and who are we to argue with that? It's endeared him to a press corps that can't seem to get enough of his straight talk, especially when it's deep-fried in corniness. The ability to laugh has also blunted the edges of some of McCain's more provocative moments on the stump: The "Bomb Iran" ditty he sang to the tune of the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann" was disturbing, sure. But on the continuum of crazy right-wing uncle behavior, it was more like not knowing when to stop complimenting little Sally on what a finely turned out and healthy young lady she's become, not like shooting the family dog, which Cheney would do before turning the rifle onto the bipeds. McCain's demonstrated a winning way with self-mockery ("Time was I could knock up Cleopatra just by winking at her") and the kind of venom-less satire that's made him the most frequent guest and foil on the Daily Show, as well as the most at-ease pol performer on SNL (remember Steve Forbes as a construction worker?). As against Hillary's robotic attempts at mirth, which only Diane Ladd in a David Lynch film could adequately capture, and Obama's intellectual suavity, which belies his inner law geek, McCain is the knuckle sandwich-giver of this election. And while it's true that voters esteem personality above policy, his humor could well be more of a liability than an asset.

"Several of Congress' most prominent Jewish members are set to go after John McCain on an issue of perceived strength," reports Sam Stein at the HuffPo. That strength? McCain's willingness to nuke anyone who looks at America (or Israel) the wrong way. They're going to pass a resolution criticizing McCain for not being tough enough on Iran. For real! The candidate who sang a happy song about starting a useless, unwinnable war with Iran is now in trouble with the Congressional Jews for being too Iran-friendly. Well, their precise argument is that McCain didn't vote to close a loophole that allows US corporations to do business with sanctioned regimes via shell companies. But the point of highlighting this is to once again stake out a foreign policy position to the right of a proud hawk. Isn't it fun when Democrats do this? Now Barack Obama will surely win Florida, Tel Aviv, and Brighton Beach. [HuffPo]

Creaky old presidential candidate John McCain can't work The Google, so it's kind of amazing he beat his young, internet-savvy rival Barack Obama to the punch in making a videogame for his campaign website. Unfortunately, McCain's game is a sad imitation of Space Invaders, a pixelated smash hit c. 1983, but with pigs in place of the aliens, since it's about how McCain shoots lasers at pork barrel politics, or something. You just know Obama's game will be better, and the Daily Show tonight imagined exactly how. "McCain, you know I love you, but you're f—-ing old," host Jon Stewart said. If the Obama camp picks up this game idea and runs with it, it could do for political videogames what "Yes We Can" did for political YouTube music videos: make them not excruciatingly boring, briefly.

This month's Fortune presents two dueling covers—John McCain and Barack Obama both promising to fix the economy. It's cute! John McCain says the greatest threat to our economy is terrorism, obviously. ("Terrorism" means "secret Muslim president.") But McCain, while he doesn't understand anything about economics, has a cunning plan to fix the current crises: allow Barack Obama to win and inherit a situation so dismal that there's next-to-nothing he can do, then allow McCain's party to reap the benefits of total collapse a few generation later. Cunning! [Animal]

Members of the staffs of John McCain and Barack Obama are holding an official debate on Twitter, presumably to attract the Tech-savvy Urban Early Adopter Influencer Creatives who have been almost entirely committed to Barack Obama since before the primaries. Mike Nelson (an "outside adviser" to Obama) and Liz Mair (the RNC online communications director) are fielding questions about their candidates with 140-character answers. But as one blogger said, "Conducting a debate via Twitter seems like a depressing acknowledgment that the soundbite is now the fundamental unit of American political discourse." CNN reported on the stunt in the clip shown below (though they get the dates wrong and say moderator Ana Marie Cox started Gawker, when in fact she edited the D.C. blog Wonkette).

Tonight, spokesmonkeys from the Barack Obama and John McCain campaigns will debate technology related issues on Twitter in an online event from the Personal Democracy Forum. Former Wonkette and current Time editrix Ana Marie Cox will moderate. Cox once participated in an old HotWired feature called "Brain Tennis," where debaters traded wordy emails. Now, a decade later, progress means candidates will be breaking complex policy arguments down to 140 characters or less. Kind of like the mindless soundbites on television!(Photo from Jimmy Wales)

What with Obama's new national ad featuring his younger, Kansas-influenced years, we thought we'd check in with John McCain. His hair had turned white by the time he finally escaped from 'Nam, but some people think the young version of the shouty, bulldoggish Presidential candidate was actually quite cute. Or as blogger Drew Grant writes, "I want to tap that so hard you guys. I have a totally un-ironic crush on yJM." [236.com]