The plan was for Track to be the good kid in the Palin family. The athletically-named son of VP nominee Sarah Palin—who's set to ship out soon for Iraq—was portrayed as a symbol of patriotism on stage at the Republican Convention. But did he only join the Army to escape a life of drugs and crime back in Alaska? The newly famous enlistee gets the full investigative treatment from the Enquirer —which always saves the best stuff for the print version. Which we now have in hand! The young man has partied with some very talkative people. So: while Track was watching his mom enthrall the nation, was he really daydreaming of mainlining sweet, sweet Oxycontin and playing "master" criminal back home? We quote: Track is portrayed as the biggest bad boy in Wasilla. A serious drug problem, vandalism, theft, and partying are his main pastimes, allegedly. Which really wouldn't be that remarkable if the Republican party wasn't holding him up as, you know, a role model. If true, this would make the Palins a caricature: the country family with a pregnant teen, son on OxyContin, and a mom desperately trying to present a respectable face to the world. And failing. And honestly, everyone: the Enquirer does not represent the media elite. So the liberal media should be safely insulated from the backlash on this one. The best quotes from the Enquirer's story:

"The church is raising holy hell over a new Simon & Schuster book that encourages couples to sneak into church confessional booths and have sex." [Post]

Barack Obama has long needed to take his first real swipe at his presidential rival John McCain as the Republican hammers away at Obama's lead in the polls. That makes it all the more tragic that Obama's attack yesterday missed its mark so widely. The Democrat's profoundly careless statement that "You can put lipstick on a pig — it's still a pig" was seized upon by supporters and opponents alike as a brutal attack of McCain's running mate Sarah Palin. It might be clear in context (see video after the jump) that Obama wasn't referring to the VP candidate. But Obama should have known it would be read that way after Palin's famous convention line, "What's the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick." The inevitable backlash and media firestorm will not only consume several precious days of the campaign news cycle — it will make it harder for Obama to take the hard swings he needs to take.

Yesterday the stock market destruction of United Airlines looked like just another case of bumbling by the Bloomberg news wire. That still appears to be very much correct, but new details tell a larger and more sinister story — a conspiracy of robots to nuke United Airlines by duping one or two humans into acting as pawns. The robot cabal involves aggressive, autonomous bots at Google, Tribune Company and on Wall Street which, despite extensive safeguards, turned swiftly against the wishes of their creators. The whole thing was triggered by some seemingly innocent Google searches and only God knows who it will kill next!

An expanded version of this story about the Republican running mate's son—with details from the National Enquirer's print edition—is here.

Country politicos are still trying to ban salvia! How uncool. And it's all YouTube's fault. We warned you in May that New York was moving to outlaw salvia—the legal drug that really works, if you like falling down—based largely on the impression that hick State Senators got from America's dumbest teenagers posting their tripping experience videos online. Salvia is about fifty times more potent than weed (and "twice as prevalent as LSD," dang!), so it wouldn't be surprising if it was banned, though it would still be stupid. What's the danger? Driving on salvia? You'd be lucky to be able to find your keys. Now, in one of those laughable righteous battles between party stoners and philosophical stoners, the real salvia spiritual journeymen are speaking out against those god damn YouTube posers:

We thought the bizarre GOP attacks against "community organizers" were just commonplace venom against those dumb enough to try to "change the system" with anything other than money and its attendant political power, not necessarily coded messages (the disdain Rudy Giuliani displayed when snarling the words was surely his own ad-lib, as a noted enemy of communities, and ferrets). But one can forgive New York Governor David Paterson for reading a racial element into the odd slurs—"community organizing" does just sound like something the black communities need, right? But in stating as much, Paterson wandered into the national political fray, and now a McCain spokesman is accusing Paterson of "playing the race card" and also this is Obama's fault, because they are desperate, and this is all divisive and shameful. So ok! The "community organizer" thing has nothing to do with race, at all. Sheesh! Poor white guys, always in trouble for saying utterly harmless things, like calling NBC journalist Ron Allen (who is black!) "uppity". As we all know, uppity is just an all-purpose general term for "elitist," which is a post-racial term for fag. Right?

Human fish made of gold Michael "Maikeer Feierpusi" Phelps took his webbed hands and goofy demeanor on Jay Leno's talk show last night. And gave Jay his best ratings in three months! They discussed the usual trite shit, while NBC raked in even more money from this young swimming freak. What they didn't talk about (Tivo confirms): Michael Phelps' recently documented proclivity for aggressive stripper ass-grabbing. Jay, you're leaving so many more viewers on the table here. [Pics at Radar]

Len Downie was executive editor of the Washington Post for years and years and years. Now he is the Vice President At Large. We don't know what that means except that it maybe gave him time to finish his novel, The Rules of the Game, which is a story of political intrigue, of fucking course. Also of fucking course: there is a newspaper editor in it! Uh oh! Time to name the thinly veiled real-life Post figures involved! The problem is there is like one easy-to-identify thinly veiled real person, and it's former Post editor Ben Bradlee, and the Bradlee character is a big brave hero, which is how everyone already publicly idolizes him. Actually it looks like all the journalists involved are big heroic hero types!

We've updated our earlier post with details on tyrannical Bloomberg editor Matt Winkler's plan to "spend more time with the reporters and editors I rarely see."

Fashion tragedy! Halston, the glamorous 70s brand that mogul Harvey Weinstein was planning to revive with relentless sexiness, is not lighting the world on fire just yet. Harvey paid $25 million for Halston last year, but its latest collection got "largely unenthusiastic reviews"—a problem the company decided to solve by reining in its creative director and moving towards design-by-committee. Which always works well in creative endeavors, yes! For Weinstein, Halston so far is just another disappointing investment, along with his "Myspace for Millionaires" and his DVD business. Free solution, Harvey: get them to wear Halston on Project Runway. You can send a check to our office. [WSJ]

Ruh-roh, Kim Jong-Il is sick, what happens when he dies? Hell if we know!! And will we truly know tomorrow or whenever this guy gets back to the executive assistant charged with Explainer-ing it for Slate? Not really! As literary Tumblrer Keith Gessen pointed out while trying to make sense of the whole Ossetia mess, you know there's a redundant "inadequacy" to the international news in our dying newspapers when even bloggers with the attention spans of Piper Palin feel it. But isn't that because our dying newspapers have mostly killed their foreign bureaus because there's no money in it?Yes! Which is why, as readers, we are happy these guys from Boston have founded the Politico of international news. (It is already poaching people from Politico.) And those newsroom cutbacks may enable Global News Enterprises LLC.* to put together a pretty strong team. From an announcement in March:

Uh oh, looks like Vincent Gallo was right—about one thing. Yesterday, the indie actor threatened to "shove [New York magazine's tape recorder] up [our] ass"—and we invited him to do so. Now he has, figuratively.The backstory: our downtown scene tipster, Molly Friedman, reported that the scruffy Republican had made comments asserting how "hot" he found Sarah Palin's teenage daughters. Gallo responded with a long screed denouncing Friedman as an "ugly cunt whore," which is wholly inaccurate. He also mentioned that a New York Magazine reporter had recorded the interview, and that he would gladly shove said microphone up our ass. Well, New York played the tape on their website and it looks like Gallo said nothing untoward during the time he was being recorded. But you're still going to hell for calling Hillary Clinton a "pig" during that same recording, Vince! [Intel]

• Catfight! Marie Claire will be launching a reality show on the Style network called Running in Heels. The show will follow staffers like Nina Garcia and is expected to compete with archrival Anne Slowey's Stylista on the CW. [NYO, AdAge]

Greg Lindsay comes across as an uptight guy. But that doesn't stop him from appearing on television again and again. Indeed, he's the poster boy for go-getters who try on every form of media until they find one that fits best. The former WWD gossip columnist and author of a book about sleeping in airports landed a "memorable" appearance on Martha Stewart's TV show earlier this year. And last night, he was a contestant on Jeopardy! The secret to his publicity, he advised a youngster long ago, is to remember "it's all about the brand called you." And how! Click to watch the clip of Lindsay's, um, uphill battle. And we'll let former Deadspinner Will Leitch finish the story of watching the show with Greg himself:

In nature, introducing an invasive species into an ecosystem has a domino effect. A new insect predator eats all the bugs, which are food for all the birds, which flock elsewhere, forcing the predators of the birds to migrate themselves, etc, etc. Also the beating of a butterfly's wing can cause a hurricane halfway across the world, I hear. So too goes the media industry! That's why you can thank the internet for driving all the rarefied magazines you love straight to the edge of a big big cliff. Why else would there already be an Us Weekly spinoff? The magazine industry is far more insulated from the economic pressures of blogs and news aggregators than newspapers are. But! High-end papers like the NYT and the WSJ, watching the internet eat away at their business model, are desperate to make up some of their revenue loss. So they start fancy weekend magazines—T and WSJ., respectively—to cater to luxury advertisers and bring in money to subsidize their real news operations, which are increasingly unprofitable. Both T and WSJ. have thus far done a good job of drawing in upscale advertisers. But guess who that hurts? Every other magazine that would like to draw in upscale advertisers. Which means all your favorites! So while newspapers are sprawling enough to extend their brands in a different direction, standalone magazines are not always so privileged. (Unless they have no fear of ridicule, like Us). In this way the internet screws newspapers, and newspapers screw magazines. And magazines screw... ?

The lovable left-centrists at The New Republic look upon the middling political coverage of CNN and declare—it's good! It just may be the for-real best political team on television, Greg Veis declares. His primary justification for this claim is their use of technology, which means the stupid wall-of-tvs behind Wolf Blitzer in the situation room and the neat iPhone thing John Roberts manhandles on primary nights. The iPhone thing is a cute if needlessly flashy way of displaying useful information, yes, but in trying to expand those innovations into a claim of CNN's superiority to the hackery of Fox and MSNBC, Veis makes a compelling argument that CNN is basically everything wrong with contemporary political discourse. Join us on a trip into the land of politics as parlour game!

Passion: it's a word. But for Men's Health editor Dave Zinczenko, it's a word! That exclamation point represents passion—Dave's passion for his book, Eat This, Not That! Yesterday we heard the rumor that Dave, Julia Allison's old boyfriend, was looking for a new publicist to get him back on the Today show (he said no, only his magazine is hiring a publicist, not him). And we hinted at the existence of an internal email in which Zinczenko grandiosely compared his ab-centric book to "Barak [sic] Obama." Well now that email, from February, is in hand! "Who had a better last three weeks-Barak Obama, or Eat This, Not That? Crazy, audacious comparison, I know, but stay with me here." Okay, go:

After his comparatively disastrous speech at the Republican National Convention, it wouldn't seem John McCain could teach Sarah Palin much about public relations. But the Republican presidential nominee appears to have imparted an important lesson in one-on-one media manipulation: Sometimes the best response to a skeptical reporter is to draw him in as closely as possible. Politico said Palin will meet with ABC News' Charlie Gibson not only on Sunday, as originally reported, but in multiple interviews Thursday and Friday, as well, including at the prospective vice president's home in Wasilla, Alaska. Much as McCain used to score points with campaign reporters with seemingly chummy off-the-record chats, Palin no doubt hopes to soften Gibson up with a tour of her home state. Gibson, meanwhile, is supposedly racing to become the sort of interviewer who needs softening up:

Samak Sundaravej, the Prime Minister of Thailand, has been forced out of his position by a Thai court for violating the Constitution. Allegations of "gigantic corruption," as the New York Times puts it, "surround other government figures." But it was Samak who got busted, with a nine-judge panel finding him guilty of violating a ban on private employment in office. "His position as prime minister has ended," they said. The private employment that ended Samak's rule? He appeared on a cooking show. Called Tasting and Complaining. This is just like when Nixon was forced to resign after appearing on Laugh-In. [NYT]