♦ The Times has the skinny on "Martin Eisenstadt," the supposed McCain consultant who leaked info to the press. (He's an aspiring filmmaker, not surprisingly.) In the meantime, MSNBC's retracted its story. [NYT, AP]
♦ You might be enjoying CW's Stylista, but the ratings thus far haven't been especially encouraging. [NYO]
♦ Two new cast members, Michaela Watkins and Abby Elliott, will join Saturday Night Live beginning this weekend. [NYT]
♦ Showtime is developing an hour-long show by Stan Lee about a gay superhero. [Variety]

♦ NBC chief Jeff Zucker is tightening making another round of cuts. This time it's CNBC, which will see its budget slashed by 10 percent. [NYO]
♦ A group of liberal activists printed up fake copies of the New York Times today to hand out to passerby in Midtown. [NYT]
♦ Gerard Baker has been named deputy editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones. [Romenesko]
♦ Katie Couric's advice for Sarah Palin: "I think she should keep her head down, work really hard and learn about governing." [Page Six]
♦ John McCain's first TV appearance since he lost the election translated into big ratings for Jay Leno's Tonight Show. [THR]
♦ Monday's interview with Sarah Palin was also a winner with Greta Van Susteren's On The Record earning its best ratings of the year. [B&C]

Your National Enquirer newspaper has published photos purporting to show Cindy McCain, fragile, lonely beer heiress wife to Senator John McCain, kissing some guy who isn't Senator John McCain! "Multiple witnesses" caught Cindy and this mystery man "lip locking on several other occasions." The guy is "a long-haired man who resembles 'a washed-up '80s rock musician,'" apparently. Just read the "stunned reaction of an eyewitness":

John McCain wants to be liked again. His unenviable job as the Republican presidential nominee was to derail the campaign of the first black president and to defend an unpopular party, and he only made things worse for himself by getting blatantly underhanded toward the end of everything. His performance last night on the Tonight Show — the jokes, the occasional concession to a mildly pointed question from Jay Leno, the self deprecation — seemed designed, if only subconsciously, to invoke the McCain of the 2000 campaign bus, beloved by the press, or of the October Al Smith dinner, who was seriously funny, or the candidate who made a conciliatory concession speech to an angry crowd.

So the election is over! What good news for us and what terrible news for... um, news. All the CNN and MSNBC and Fox junkies who were glued to the tube while the election Wehrmacht rolled its ruinous iron wheels over the land will now be leaving the news behind and returning to their regularly scheduled shitty programming. Or at least the people in charge of that shitty programming hope so! It's kind of a crock theory because news nets' ratings weren't that high that they seemed to be distracting a huge amount of TV watchers, and regular television was in a decline long before people started caring about politics anyway. But there must be some folks who traded their CSI for their POTUS and would now like an inroad back to the glorious world of primetime entertainment TV, hopefully with a methadone-dash of politics thrown in to add a bit of spice. And we've got a guide to Politics-related television for them, after the jump! How handy!

Today, Newsweek posted the final chapter of their Special Election Project, the annual How He Did It book they've published for each presidential campaign since 1984 (when the answer was much easier: he just ran against Walter Mondale). The reporters assigned to the special project are embargoed from those publishing in the regular magazine, so they get jucier anecdotes, more hilarious quotes, and revealing stories, all of which are then packaged and in such a way as to make the winning campaign look like a well-oiled machine and the losing campaign look like a parade of idiots. Did you read the whole thing? We did! We'll share with you the funniest bits, the important takeaway, and the already solidifying conventional wisdom. In short, this is the story of the 2008 campaign: the Hillary Clinton campaign was a stressful psychodrama, the Obama campaign was an intellectual exercise, and the McCain campaign was a ragtag bunch of misfits who stumbled into an insane family nightmare from Twin Peaks, Alaska. Let's begin with Hillary and co. Hillary The Clinton campaign was beset by the vicious infighting among assholes, basically. The biggest and dumbest asshole was chief pollster/strategist Mark Penn!

"They are all shitting on each other. . Let’s try to make some sense of it." [Wonkette]

"After a minute, Palin sailed into the room wearing nothing but a towel, with another on her wet hair." [Newsweek/Reuters]

Sarah Palin famously claimed she had "absolutely no diva in me," but former McCain aides did their best to demolish that assertion in a super-juicy Thursday Times story. Among their embittered, anonymous and still entirely plausible claims: They budgeted the Republican vice presidential nominee around $25,000 for clothes and were shocked at her $150,000 shopping spree; Palin wrote a concession speech that she desperately wanted to deliver Tuesday night; and she never told McCain about a call she thought she had scheduled with the president of France (really a DJ prank). Now they're talking about sending lawyers to audit her family's closets and just generally trying to destroy her chances of running for anything anywhere, ever. Here's what they told the Times about Palin's clothes shopping:

Failure may be an orphan, but McCain campaign veterans seem to be doing their best to pin blame for defeat on their MAVERICK VP choice Sarah Palin. Fox News Channel political correspondent Carl Cameron today disclosed the first of what he predicts will be an "avalanche" of unflattering stories about the Republican vice presidential nominee: Off-the-record tips from McCain aides that Palin did not know Africa was a continent or the constituent countries in the NAFTA treaty. He later told Bill O'Reilly Palin didn't know the constituent nations of North America, either. More damning, from a campaign perspective?

Dear Trendrr publicist who sent us a data dump on the presidential candidates' social-networking prowess a day after the election: Here's your "hit" on a hot "influencer" site that thinks you're "dumb." Hands up, everyone who still cares how many MySpace friends John McCain has this afternoon. Thought so.

The list of election '08 losers is a long one: There's John McCain, of course, who will die angry and bitter, notwithstanding his rather gracious concession speech last night. Steve Schmidt, McCain's chief strategist, will probably have trouble finding a Little League team to advise, unless he manages to redeem himself somehow. From Republicans on the Hill to GOP strategists to snowmobile and hunting enthusiasts, plenty of people will feel the cold wind of electoral defeat for a long time to come. After the jump, a roundup of New York City's nine biggest losers.

John McCain and Sarah Palin may have lost last night, but there is still plenty of work for Republican strategists to do. Like shift the blame for McCain's embarrassing defeat! There is lots of blame to go around, of course, and the finger-pointing will likely go on for weeks and months (years?) as the GOP struggles to come to terms with the loss. But watching Sarah Palin get pummeled by anonymous GOP insiders and get handed the blame for everything that went wrong in the final weeks of the campaign will certainly be the most entertaining thing to watch. Several former "top advisers" to John McCain, for example, are now speaking with Newsweek about Sarah Palin's spending spree, and they now say her shopping expeditions were actually even more outrageous than previously reported. (Naturally, they go on to share just how upset the McCain team was by her "outrageous profligacy.")

John McCain conceded the 2008 election before a crowd of supporters that sometimes interrupted him with their disappointed shouts. But the Republican presidential nominee offered a genuinely conciliatory speech, emphasizing the historic nature of Obama's win and pledging to work together with the president elect.

Click to viewBig Think, an online-video site backed in part by Facebook investor Peter Thiel, asked Republican candidate John McCain what it would mean if he lost. Here's what he said.

The saddest thing about the scene at John McCain's headquarters "party" in Columbus has to be the "Victory in Ohio" sign, captured in an near-poetic camera pan at the end of this video. The klieg lights probably aren't helping the McCain crew with its depression. Might we suggest bourbon?

The Times wants to know how you're feeling, today. Are you hopeful? Or scared? Type a word, and say who you support in the election, and the word will fly by on the screen, magically. What we learned: McCain supporters are scared, patriotic, worried, determined, tired, depressed, upset, anxious, terrified, and, yes, hopeful. Obama supporters, in calm, soothing blue, are hopeful, happy, ready, tired, relieved, and, of course, nervous and anxious. Everyone in America needs a damn nap. [NYT]

It's over! It's all over! Tomorrow the campaign will be done! No more caring about what crazy things John McCain and his bitchy friend said on the news, no more feeling bad for him despite yourself, no more checking 538 (sorry Nate Silver, you're obsolete now!), no more forwarded YouTube clips from your mom, or your coworker, or some lunatic internet person. Boy, if we were assholes, we'd write something about how this was "the YouTube election." But instead we will just post the YouTubes themselves, from 2004 through the never-ending primaries, through the finally ending general election. All your favorites are here! Come pal around with crying Hillary the Senator, stare deep into Mike Gravel's eyes, and don't look your opponent in the eyes, after the jump. Back in 2004, this guy named Barack Obama gave a really really good speech at the Democratic National Convention. Watch it again, if you haven't lately, because it's really good. Can you believe we're gonna elect this guy?

There's a limited number of ways you can make "election day" a front page, above the fold headline. Because, you know, nothing will be "news" until tomorrow. So you can "report," as many papers do, that people will choose someone (YOU DECIDE, YOU CHOOSE, IT'S UP TO YOU), today, with a big splash featuring both candidates' headshots. You can try to make some actual "news," as the Times and the Wall Street Journal do with stories on how historic everything is and what the winner will inherit. You can report on all the boring campaigning of yesterday, or predict electoral chaos, or, as the New York Post admirably did, just pretend there isn't even an old white Republican in this race. The papers in the attached image chose almost exactly as you might predict. A couple papers across the world went a different direction.