On Katie Couric's website, it's always "Sen. Biden" this and "Sen. Biden" that, but the Democratic VP nominee's Republican counterpart gets the catty treatment. She's just plain "Sarah Palin." Conservative slam book American Spectator even found a CBS News editorial aide saying Couric sought approval to not call her "Governor." Because otherwise, you see, Palin might have looked all executive and so forth in her disastrous interviews. Couric is obviously just scared of a more powerful cougar. When will the jealous media elites stop conspiring to make Sarah Palin look bad? Watch Couric finally give Palin the respect she deserves, after the jump.

(Disclaimer: Spoilers related to the Philip Roth novel Indignation ahead.) Oct. 2, Philip Roth will jump readers to the end of his new novel Indignation. On WNYC, the writer will explain how, if you read to the end of his book, you find that the narrator Marcus Messner is not, in fact, dead, but merely in the midst of a morphine hallucination of his own death. This contradicts both reviews of the book in the Times, one by Michiko Kakutani, the other in the Sunday Book Review. In so doing, it begs the question: Did those reviewers bother to read the book all the way to the end?

Not only did John McCain ditch Late Show host David Letterman for Katie Couric and mislead him about it, it turns out the Republican presidential nominee spent the entire night in New York and didn't fly to DC until the next morning. So, in a reprise of last night, Letterman will spend a good chunk of his show this evening bashing the Arizona senator. "The economy just barely held on long enough for him to get back" to DC, Letterman joked. As theatrical as the Letterman-McCain feud has become, Letterman could probably score more points talking about the $700 billion banking bailout than about the mechanics of late-night TV booking. Here's to hoping that, when the full show airs, he does. (Click the video icon to watch some excerpts.)

So. That Couric interview? Didn't seem to instill much confidence in anyone that we're dealing with anything other than a stunt that's gone horribly awry, like suspending a campaign to fix the economy. Like, people who thought she was dumb are shocked at just how dumb. (Or incurious, whatever you want to call it! You can't be a complete idiot and be a successful politician in Alaska, after all.) (That was a joke.) So would it maybe alarm you to know that her insane answers to Katie's pretty standard-issue questions were based off of pre-written notes? That's the contention, anyway, of some DailyKos diarist, whose proof is that Palin appears to look down a couple times. If she did have notes, she sounds like she got them from the dumbest kid in class. Honestly, what did these notes say? "MAKE NO SENSE"??

♦ Financial news outlets are performing well, not surprisingly. CNBC's Closing Bell saw ratings increase 70% last week. [AdAge]
♦ HBO has optioned the Tom Wolfe novel I Am Charlotte Simmons with Tina Brown producing. [Variety via NYO]
♦ Furniture mogul Eric Villency is teaming up with Cotton (yes, the industry trade group) on a web-based reality TV show. [AdAge]
♦ Sarah Palin got cozy with Rupert Murdoch last night. [Politico]
♦ Thanks to hefty tax breaks, a record 19 primetime series will be filmed in NYC in 2008-9, compared to 12 last year. [NYT]
♦ David Letterman ripped into John McCain last night after the senator cancelled his scheduled appearance. [Gawker]
♦ Should Andrea Mitchell really be covering the financial crisis given her husband is former Fed chair Alan Greenspan? [CJR]

"Someone should tell Taibbi that it's the predictable disgust of people like him that make the culture-war posturing of people like Sarah Palin so resonant with the many, many folks who like pick-up trucks and plasma TVs and aren't ashamed of it." [Portfolio]

"What Ms. Maddow doesn’t do is add a fresh or contrarian perspective to a cable news channel that increasingly positions itself as... a liberal alternative to the high-octane Fox News." [Times]

In July, Aliona Doletskaya looked like just one in a series of baby Vogue editors who might someday replace Anna Wintour atop the American flagship. Then came a buzzy appearance at New York Fashion Week, a writeup in the Times, a Forbes takedown on Wintour, and, now, an embarrassing Wintour loss to Elle. Hachette's fashion title, a longtime also-ran to Vogue, surpassed its rival in October ad pages, Page Six reports. Wintour boss Si Newhouse is supposedly pissed. And Doletskaya was reportedly introduced at a Condé Nast magazine confab in Moscow as "the next editor of American Vogue" — a bit of tongue-in-cheek flattery that now threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophesy. Attached, excerpts from a May Russia Today profile of the telegenic Doletskaya. Click the video icon to watch.

Rupert Murdoch seems to have transferred his politician crush from Barack Obama to Sarah Palin. His tentative support for Palin (and her obscure running mate) on the financial meltdown tonight evolved into a "quite chummy" run-in at a charity gala for the Manhattan media elites Palin claims not to care about. Murdoch gave Palin a pat on the back and said "thank you very much" as Palin left the gala, while Palin wore the "radiant smile" of not caring, according to a media pool report summarized by Politico. And to think that just four months ago Murdoch called Obama a "rock star." What happened?

"After telling the press (his base) that he was going to announce his run in March 1999, he melodramatically 'postponed' the announcement because of the U.S. bombing of the Serbs in Kosovo." [Wonkette]

The first half of Sarah Palin's interview with Katie Couric aired tonight and it's already making the wrong sorts of headlines. This is looking a lot like Palin's train wreck sit-down with ABC News' Charlie Gibson. (Video of the most damaging moments — this time around — after the jump.)

Somehow, YouTube already has a copy of David Letterman tonight lacerating John McCain for skipping the Late Show and suspending his campaign in the midst of the Wall Street meltdown. As reported earlier by Drudge, Letterman became especially upset when he caught the Republican presidential nominee in a live feed from New York being interviewed by his own network's Katie Couric. McCain had personally told Letterman he was canceling because he was headed back to the capital to handle the financial crisis. Whoops.

Yesterday we (and others) pointed out that "magician" David Blaine is a big fat cheater, because his current death-defying stunt—hanging upside-down in Central Park for 60 hours—involves hourly ten-minute breaks. As one commenter put it, "I'm going to eat a thousand hard-boiled eggs, but I'm only going to eat one a day for a thousand days, because otherwise I might get sick." Yes, that about sums it up. Blaine's flack said there was never any claim he would hang for 60 consecutive hours. Really? You couldn't tell that from his fawning media coverage: Today, the half-ass nature of Blaine's stunt is being pointed out across the UK, in India, and domestically. But did America's prestigious media outlets bother to point out the very germane fact of Blaine's hourly breaks when they initially reported on his stunt? Let's see: The AP (no mention of breaks):

Media heiress and urban prose stylist Emily Brill used to be overweight, which is worse than cancer. She heroically slimmed down, and is now compelled to weigh in, ha, on weighty public health issues. So when she saw a week-old Times story about the decline of calorie-counting, she could not conscientiously keep quiet! "Mind if I add my two cents?" she writes. "I did manage to lose some weight over the past year or two..."

Victory! Earlier, we argued that newspapers should stop slumming as blogs and disallow comments on their websites. Now, at least the Maui News has. "Dear readers," the letter from the publisher begins. "Due to flagrant abuse of the privilege—including continual name-calling, crude language, profanity, slander, threats and racism—the Maui News will no longer allow comments to be posted on its Web site... the volume, frequency and vileness of the abusers' postings have grown beyond the newspaper's capacity to remove them in a timely manner." If readers can't handle nice things, they will be taken away! [Maui News via Romenesko]

We're told the New York Sun—the right-leaning pro-Israel daily newspaper that was more or less doomed by the final, complete death of East Coast intellectual conservatism (thanks, Bush administration!)—will cease publication after all, with a final issue running on Monday. Probably. Former and current Sun staffers are invited to confirm/deny.

Once again, the internet is causing humanity to be beaten up. A high school (on Long Island, strangely enough) organized its five-year reunion using dangerous internet site Facebook. But when Adam Lynn, a derivative trader (ha) from Hoboken (ha) arrived at the bar where it was being held, he was attacked by two of his fellow classmates! The dispute was traced back to "a hotly contested gym-class handball game during their junior year." When will the internet stop being so dangerous that the press has to issue ominous warnings whenever anything vaguely internet-related happens? It's not just this latest "PUNCH IN 'FACE BOOK,'" as the Post eloquently puts it. The media has been warning us of internet dangers forever!

Plum TV, the "resort network" founded by Tom Scott (left), is now in talks to raise additional capital or even sell the company entirely, according to today's Post. The paper says the high-end (but lightly-viewed) network is in discussions with "a number of potential suitors [who] have developed a taste for Plum TV." We're hearing a slightly different story from a Plum staffer, however. The company is hemorraging cash, we're told, and has been busy cutting costs as of late: staff has been cut and expensive shoots have been cancelled. So today's news that Plum is talking with potential investors including Barry Diller's IAC, Terry Semel's investment fund, and Teddy Forstmann's IMG may very well signal that a fire sale is taking place.

Andrew Sullivan, wow. Just wow. The gay British conservative who over the course of a decade went from proud publisher of racist pseudo-science just for a larf to virulent Obama supporter has spent a month obsessing over everything Sarah Palin has ever said and done and even maybe done. So. He's written some stuff on the bizarre circumstances of the birth of Trig Palin. He defends it (reasonably in our estimation) by arguing that Palin's pro-life position and the politicization of her familial circumstances (special needs kids, son in Iraq, family on stage at convention) makes inquiry into her pregnancy relevant. Sullivan sent this crazy email to the McCain campaign, asking for comment:

Whenever the media say anything about John McCain that isn't "he is the coolest hero ever and sooo dreamy" his campaign accuses every journalist in the country of being "in the tank" for Barack Obama. And whenever the press goes a day or two without talking exclusively about John McCain, the McCain campaign accuses the media of ignoring him. Kind of a biased-if-you-do, biased-if-you-don't situation. But we'll give the McCain campaign credit: they're consistent. In their attacks on the media, anyway. The enemy seems to shift a bit. Like, this week, apparently the media is ignoring John McCain in favor of... the rapidly growing financial crisis and the government's unprecedented plan to end it. Seriously, the McCain campaign is totally upset that no one will write about his "commission of technicians" but they all find time to talk about Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson! McCain economic advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin—the guy who said McCain invented the BlackBerry and yet somehow retained his position as McCain's least bad economic advisor—sent a snippy email to like a thousand financial reporters yelling at them for not covering John McCain's secret plan to end the war on banks. "I cannot believe the absence of recognition of the policy substance," Holtz-Eakin wrote, followed by a list of all of McCain's fantastic vague ideas that he can't implement until January. Financial reporters who received the email were like, ok? What? Old man, there are more important things to talk about right now, like the end of capitalism!