• John McCain's relationship with his second wife, in a nutshell: Cindy thought it would be a good idea to appear as a dancer on "Dancing With the Stars," right after the election. He nixed the idea. [P6]
• After initially saying he was totally fine with Jay Leno getting a 10 p.m. weeknight show before his own Tonight Show, Conan O'Brien admitted he was upset for, like, an hour and a half. [Times]
• Everyone is worried about how skinny Lindsay Lohan has become amid rumors she broke up from Samantha Ronson. [Mail]
• Tracy Morgan: "I have a lot of issues. Money, women, fast cars, more money, more women, the right woman. Just issues." Please no one tell him those are only two actual issues. The man has enough on his plate. [P6]
• Courtney Love lashed at "Jew loan offiers" and "Jew private banks." In Heeb. [P6]
• Hearst withdrew an offer to hype a bio of longtime Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurly Brown in its magazines, because the book says the company went to fire Brown for years before she finally left. [P6]
• Sean Combs supposedly broke down at a screening for the movie Notorious, about his friend Notorious B.I.G. [Daily Star]

"I couldn't believe I was watching Cindy McCain passionately kissing and hugging another man!"

That is the Ben Ratliff pull-quote on the movie poster for the documentary of sad that is the Republican party in 2008.

Also this all happened at a Moody Blues show in Tempe, Arizona. A McCain spokesperson declined to comment.

But surely there are lots of brittle-looking 50-year-old blondes in the Phoenix metro area—isn't that where they all go to spawn?

Still, this is shocking news for those who thought the marriage between cruel, borderline-emotionally abusive absentee husband and serial-cheater John McCain and lonely, DC-hating, solitary, formerly drug-addicted Cindy McCain was a strong, healthy bond.

• Is Cindy McCain a Hitchcock Blonde? [Gabe's Declaration of Principles]

She hates Washington, where her husband actually lives. When he's in Arizona on his ranch, she's alone at a beach-side condo. It's easy to hate her Stepford Wife tendencies, her macabre Princess Diana aping, her constant pathological lying, and she did make this wealthy trophy wife bed she confines herself to, but there's no joy in piling on poor Cindy. It's fun to mock angry war hero McCain, and even constantly photographed blonde hipster blogger daughter Meghan, but let's all just let Cindy go back to Arizona to be lying and fragile in peace. Ok?

• MC: Did you get a chill?
  CM: I did. I got a chill, and I also was very poignantly reminded of just how strong my husband is, how tough and determined. -Cindy McCain to Marie Claire on visiting her husbands former hospital in Vietnam.
• "The day that Sen. Obama cast a vote to not to fund my son when he was serving sent a cold chill through my body let me tell you.” -Cindy McCain in Pennsylvania today.

Adopted Wedlock Granddaughter X (Alleged!)

Rumored daughter to McCain's eldest daughter Sidney (pictured). Born September 8, 1987 on Long Island. "Soon after, she was adopted by a couple living in New York at the time," said View Their Views. "The identity of the biological father is unknown."

Cindy McCain's Secret Half Sisters

John McCain's wife likes to say she's an "only child" but — whoops — her Dad had a daughter in his first marriage, Kathleen Hensley Portalski, while her mom had a daughter from a previous relationship, Dixie Burd. The first daughter, at least, didn't like being edited out of Cindy's life story. (Photo via Washington Post)

McCain's Forgotten Bangladeshi Adopted Daughter

McCain's adopted Bangladeshi daughter Bridget hit the campaign trail with her dad in 2000 before being smeared as an "illegitimate black child" in a push poll in the South Carolina primary. This time around, biological daughter Meghan has become by far the most visible McCain child during the primaries, blogging and appearing alone in a People magazine photo with her parents. Granted, none of McCain's six other kids made it into that People spread, and Bridget was introduced to delegates at the Republican National Convention. But she seems to have remained largely in the background. It's almost like she's not there. COINCIDENCE??

McCain's Bank-Failing Adopted Son

McCain adopted the two sons of his first wife, Carol, including Andrew. Unlike McCain's Iraq veteran son and Naval cadet son, neither was mentioned by Cindy in her Republican National Convention speech. That may be because Andrew sat on the board, as well as the audit committee, of a Nevada bank that failed over bad loans and had to be taken over by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

And we're probably forgetting a ton of others. Ha ha, that's kind of the point, you see.

"It is apparent Senator McCain has some disdain for Senator Obama," CNN's Wolf Blitzer said.

The attached video appears to show the snub, at least at first, but then McCain sticks out his hand — his left hand — like maybe he expects Obama to come back. Maybe he wants to exchange a special lefty shake with a fellow southpaw?? Watch the video above, then give your opinion of what happened in the poll below.

John McCain may hate those Tinseltown elites. But that doesn't mean he won't take their money.

A number of prominent Hollywood conservatives, including Jon Voight, Gary Sinise, Kelsey Grammer, Dennis Miller and D.B. Sweeney (but alas no Wilford Brimley) gathered Wednesday night at Los Angeles' Century Plaza Hotel to fill the GOP coffers.

It was the second soiree in as many months organized by Republican A-listers on McCain's behalf.

"What a great event," Voight told E! News.

...McCain, however, was a no-show for the event, opting to remain in D.C. to work on the stalled financial bill. As a result, only about 300 guests of an expected 1,500 turned out.

Yes they can (attract one-fifth of their estimated audience)! Really, though, wouldn't a more populated ballroom have taken something away from the megaton presence of McCain endorser D.B. Sweeney? And where does his Cutting Edge star Moira Kelly stand on this important political issue? Should she break ranks to vote with Bob Barr, will that be political treason — or foreplay?

• Hollywood Conservatives Attend McCain Bash [E!]

For instance, did you know…

• Amy Lumet was briefly of a fixture in Republican Washington social life in the late eighties.
• When she started dating O'Rourke, possibly while still in college at some unspecified school in New Hampshire.
• They married in late 1990 after living in sin for two and a half years, when O'Rourke was 43 and Lumet was 26.
• Because O'Rourke thought that if he died covering the Gulf War, it "would make everything simpler if we had been married. It seemed much simpler to be a widow than a girl with a dead boyfriend."
• In 1991 Lumet began working for John McCain in some unspecified capacity.
• At which point this would have presumably happened.
• By 1992 she was a budding public intellectual herself! (Other dreams would bud later.) She wrote about uniting her generation of "Baby Cons" in the National Review. In an essay that did not appear to make much sense.
• In 1992 John McCain's marriage "of convenience" to Cindy was known to be somewhat less than blissful.
• By 1993 the couple had moved to New York and Lumet was a columnist for Seventeen.
• So Julia Allison of the Right with the career trajectory, yes?
• Okay, by the end of the year they'd split up, in part supposedly because O'Rourke hated New York.
• Fifteen years later she is married to the son of Gregory Peck.
• Sharon Osborne, for what it's worth, has gone on record as liking the boob job.
• And O'Rourke can lavish praise on the Republican presidential candidate in a Weekly Standard essay wherein:
  

  Supposedly the "women's vote" is . . . well, let's not go too far with this. I can speak to John's honor, duty, valor, patriotism, etc., but I'm not sure how well his self-discipline would have fared if he'd been on an aircraft carrier with more than 500 beautiful women sailors the way I was. At least John likes women, which is more than we can say about Hillary's attitude toward, for instance, the women in Bill's life, who at this point may constitute nearly the majority of the "women's vote."

• Whoa.

So if indeed McCain came between O'Rourke and the jailbait first wife he later admitted he married because it seemed like the "honorable" thing to do, he seems to have graciously forgiven the old guy. That, too, shows a kind of honor; if of a starkly different stripe from the sort we commonly associate with the presidential candidate who so famously endured years of torture only to sign up for a few more out of loyalty and honor but can't let go of a two-year-old ethics bill brush-off for long enough to freaking shake his opponent's hand for more than half a second? Sure, John McCain would sooner lose an election than win a war, suspend his campaign than ignore an economic crisis, bomb Iran preemptively than look Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the eye, but it also increasingly seems like he'd sooner hand the reins to Stalin himself than Barack Obama. You know, just out of principle. It it hard, I am saying, to imagine that were the roles reversed, John McCain would prove capable of summoning such sentiments for the man who wrecked his marriage as:

Some say John McCain's character was formed in a North Vietnamese prison. I say those people should take a gander at what John chose to do—voluntarily. Being a carrier pilot requires aptitude, intelligence, skill, knowledge, discernment, and courage of a kind rarely found anywhere but in a poem of Homer's or a half gallon of Dewar's…

Some people say John McCain isn't conservative enough. But there's more to conservatism than low taxes, Jesus, and waterboarding at Gitmo. Conservatism is also a matter of honor, duty, valor, patriotism, self-discipline, responsibility, good order, respect for our national institutions, reverence for the traditions of civilization, and adherence to the political honesty upon which all principles of democracy are based. Given what screw-ups we humans are in these respects, conservatism is also a matter of sense of humor. Heard any good quips lately from Hillary or Barack?

Ha ha, in fact yes! Whereas the charitable, self-deprecating and straight-talking funny guy the media romantics fell for is just not there anymore. He's angry and distant and standing next to Sarah Palin.

And if this scurrilous rumor has no basis in fact, aren't you glad you learned Amy Lumet existed?

We went back and consulted the insane excerpts of the "Diary of a Madwoman" kept by her old employee (and registered — and convincing-looking! — Republican) Tom Gosinski. (Tom marked good days as "on Percocet" or "OP"; not good days were "NOP" but she seemed to enjoy Vicodin as well.) Did you realize Cindy had five doctors writing prescriptions for this shit? (Four of them didn't really know; Cindy just sorta hacked their DEA numbers.)

Experts say she could have faced 20 years in prison if not for the whole centimillionaire heiress Senator's wife thing. But forget prison, how did she not die? Alternet estimates she was taking between 30 and 50 pills a day during the height of her addiction, but only the DEA knows for sure, and the sheer quantity of pills referenced in Gosinski's diary — in one case two prescriptions for 400 or 500-count bottles of painkillers written by the same doctor in two weeks — suggests, per the typical addict's "just-in-time" fulfillment policy, that she was probably up at least into the 70 or 80-a-day range around September 1992. 80 pills a day! Who lives through that? (Much less quits cold turkey, as Cindy allegedly did.) Well, this guy did, but he looks like he might have a somewhat hardier constitution than Cindy McCain.

In any case, we have something newfound — respect? awe? complete bafflement?? — for Cindy McCain, who Gosinski described as a very hard worker in his early days working for her MASH-modeled charity team, before she turned into the Anna Nicole of the NGO community:

August 28, 1992: Work has been crazy—Cindy decided we should take a load of supplies to the Miami area to assist in the Hurricane Andrew relief efforts. It would be simple to complete the task if Cindy would not interfere with the rest of us doing our jobs, however, she is constantly stirring things up.

We are also contemplating a trip to Somalia—Mark Salter in John McCain's Washington office has stated that the State Department and the Department of Defense believe it is not safe to travel to Somalia or the northern regions of Kenya. Cindy insists that we are going to go on the trip and that it may be wise for us to pack guns.

She is absolutely crazy—I don't know how to load a gun let alone shoot one. . .

Ha ha ha, Cindy knows a little lady who can help you with that! But seriously John McCain, to "not notice" your wife is a straight-up junkie is like…not noticing that country that sprouted on the "Iraq-Pakistan border" a couple thousand years ago. Which is to say, apparently not the sort of character flaw that takes any sort of toll on your reputation as an honorable family-oriented foreign policy veteran patriot with the record it takes to run the country!

Opiate For The Mrs.

Now those of us who wear sweaters and wish we could read only by candlelight will be able to annoy our friends even more trying to pretend we know something about the red grape juice we're drinking and that's making me talk too damn much again and somebody just kicked me under the table. In related dinner party fodder news, Amazon plans to sell the biographies of first ladies-in-waiting Cindy McCain and Michelle Obama on the its e-reader the Kindle before they're sold in hard-copy anywhere else. Which makes sense, if only because there's not enough time to rush out these opportunistic political potboilers in paper form. (Photo by paul goyette)

Marc Jacobs is the only designer anyone cares about and, even though his collection was sort of cool this year, his collection has always been sort of a loss-leader funded by his insane diva behavior and that behavior mostly stopped this year. Last September Marc Jacobs started his 9 p.m. show two and a half hours late and everyone had a hissy fit about it, which in turn caused Marc Jacobs to have a hissy fit over how he was an "artist" and people should not be thinking about quotidian details such as whether their dogs had been fed. Then he dyed his hair blue, went insane and maybe also to rehab. Anyway, that is as good as it gets, in fashion. (That should tell you something.) But he is sane this year. It's all about the clothes, and no one really cares about clothes!

Everyone who isn't Russian is poor. Times Thursday Styles regular Stephanie Rosenbloom has a story about the nation's thrift stores. This is hugely significant for two reasons: 1. It is actually a story, and last year around this time Stephanie Rosenbloom was writing about horseback riding in the Hampton's, but it turns out she has been hiding out in the Business section lately, getting down to proverbial business. 2. The story is that the demand for other people's cast-off ill-advised purchases has exceeded the nation's supply of ill-advised purchases.

Cindy McCain is the new Victoria Beckham. Example: last week Us Weekly decreed Michelle Obama to have hands-down better style than Cindy McCain. This week the selfsame magazine has a whole feature on Cindy's supposed "makeover" and how pretty she suddenly supposedly looks! And that is not even to mention the matter of Sarah Palin's disappearing-reappearing beehive, and Michelle Obama's Thakoon dress and the cool shirt pictured above, which we found on Philebrity. Political fashion icons are the new celebrity fashion icons, and that is bad for the industry because unlike worthless celebrities who are allowed to change outfits as fast as they can spill tequila and Sparks on the ones they were wearing, politicians, at least when they are not wearing $300,000 dresses, have to pretend they understand the realities of working-class Americans busy raiding thrift stores/insurgent safe houses.

The must-have item this year is the jumpsuit. Perhaps you heard about the school in Texas that recently decreed that all kids who chose to violate dress code requirements by rolling up their skirts or whatever would risk being forced to don prison jumpsuits for the remainder of the school day. Now, there is always going to be that one group of totally cool high schoolers who make the prison jumpsuits into some sort of "subversive" fashion statement, but bottom line is that high schoolers would not be incurring dress code violations if they did not want to show off their skinny high schooler legs etc. etc. and those high schoolers grow into the adults who consume fashion. So this gives me pause:

Yet designers are willing to risk everything on a gut feeling. The trend-forecasters, fabric mills and color experts can offer all the advice in the world. It's still little more than a crapshoot when a designer says: Jumpsuits! A lot of them have been saying that over the past few days. Apparently that's what we're all supposed to want come spring. And if Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez of Proenza Schouler are right, we'll want jumpsuits to be silver and sparkly and worn with just a frisson of dominatrix attitude.

Lydia Hearst got hospitalized… And the affliction is kidney stones? Is there even a drug you can get those from?

Some critics are calling this characterization of Laura a "liberal fantasy." But why do we cling to the fantasy even when Real First Lady Laura Bush totally hung out with Sarah Palin just the other day? Because she actually has very little in common with Sarah Palin, which is why we're all pondering working on our painkiller addictions right about now! The evidence.

1. Laura Bush is a librarian and Sarah Palin bans books.(Sort of in the way Jesus was a community organizer and Pontius Pilate was a governor!) Which brings me to the funniest thing about the story of how Sarah Palin, upon becoming mayor of Wasilla, called up the local librarian to inquire about banning books: the idea never went anywhere because she didn't seem to know what books she'd ban. Sarah Palin doesn't read! Duh. Neither, probably, does Cindy McCain. Laura Bush's favorite book is The Brothers Karamazov, a fact that I still find sort of mindblowing, but anyway, that is what makes this sort of shit so funny.

2. Laura Bush is pro-choice. When Cindy McCain found herself in that messy conundrum over whether Roe v. Wade ought to be overturned earlier this week, to whom did she turn for guidance? According to Katie Couric, Cindy's spokespeople said that she, like Laura Bush, did not want Roe overturned. Who knows why Laura Bush is pro-choice; maybe she read American Tragedy, maybe it's just because she killed someone herself and the law had gone easy on her; maybe she's just a rational person, but whatever the case, women like Laura Bush — not Northeastern Marxists like me or "I Choose Life For My Daughter And Everyone Else In America" Alaskan prophets like Sarah Palin— are ones who live in those crazy states that are always trying to add little "abortion banning" amendments to transportation bills and such, the ones who actually live in states where this stuff comes up on the ballot every November. And as such, women like Laura Bush are the only reason Roe has yet to go back before the Supreme Court.

3. Laura Bush raised Jenna Bush. Laura Bush's other vocation besides library science was being a mother, and even that Communist organ Us Weekly agrees that Jenna Bush turned out pretty good. Laura Bush raised a fun underage-drinking socially-conscious charter school teacher who spent months in the ghettos of that little country her granddaddy invaded learning about the tragic life of a teenage mom with AIDS for the purpose of writing a cautionary tale of what happens when you don't use condoms. Sarah Palin raised a fun underage-drinking cautionary tale of what happens when you don't use condoms.

4. Laura Bush is a walking living and in some ways tragic symbol of the emotional core of liberalism, which is to say, our bottomless capacity to forgive. She had a tragedy in her early life and for that reason alone most of us will forgive her unwillingness to try and make herself into some sort of internal dissident in the Cheney White House. She reads Russian lit, she knows how it goes for dissidents. She forgives her ignorant husband the way we all forgive our ignorant racist grandmas. She accepts his differences and we preach acceptance. She is from a Red State and married to a red meat Republican but she defies all the usual pithy pollster cartoonology; she has never had big hair even though she's from Texas, she has never been blonde even though that is a major rule for Republicans in DC; she has never seemed Stepfordy, she smokes cigarettes. And like with Laura, said sentimentality can lead us to be forgiving to a fault! Remember how we hated Clinton for his triangulation and his beholdenness to Wall Street and his generalized moral turpitude? Ha ha ha, yeah. Don't let's let this become the election that gets us all misty-eyed for the Bush years in a couple years time, Laura Bushes of the world! (God did you ever think that would even be a possibility? Christ.)

OH AND BONUS EXTRA THING I FORGOT: She defended Michelle Obama against those ridiculous attacks on her patriotism that both Cindy and Sarah Palin have milked well into elementary school at this point. Thanks for pointing out, readers!

Clever tag coined yesterday by Gawker friend Brian Gallagher. Submissions to this category welcome!

Couric: And do you believe Roe V. Wade should be overturned?

McCain: No. no.

Couric: No. Why not? Your husband does.

McCain: No. I don't think he does.

Couric: He believes it should be overturned. That's what he told me, and that it should go to the states.

McCain: Well, in that respect. Yes, yeah, I do. I understand what you're saying now. It's a states issue.

Couric: So, you believe it should be overturned or shouldn't be overturned.

McCain: I believe it's a states issue. That I do believe.

Oh dear. OH, DEAR. The campaign later clarified that Cindy McCain does not believe Roe v. Wade should be overturned, even though, you might know this already but, it was the express purpose of the Roe decision not to let abortion become a "states issue."

Anyway, none of this probably matters because no one watched, CBS is still a pathetic third in the ratings, and most people on Wednesday night were busy watching Sarah Palin was yammering on about all those responsibilities she held as mayor of a town the size of a small community college to process the ignorance of anyone else associated with the McCain campaign. But Couric, ya done good. If the Sarah Palin ratings bonanza doesn't quite make up for your massive salary, at least you've reminded your colleagues in the liberal media that at the end of the world day, we're still in this together.

Before the main event, Ms. Hasselbeck contrasted Mrs. McCain with another wife of a political candidate who “shall remain nameless,” noting, “She didn’t come with a list of topics that we weren’t allowed to touch.” (Oh, snap, Michelle Obama.)

"Oh, snap," indeed, NYT. What an unfair demand for Michelle Obama to make, especially after the hard-hitting Hasselbeck used Cindy McCain's View stint to grill her on the Keating Five scandal, Cindy's history of drug addiction, and the illegally written prescriptions she used to procure those drugs. Oh, wait, our bad: Hasselbeck never asked about any of those things, and we're sure that Cindy never expected her to! Hooray for partisan double standards!

[Photo Credit: AP]

• Cindy McCain Honored at Lunch [New York Times]

We knew McCain was trying to distance himself from Bush, but this is ridiculous! (Ahem.)

So! I'm not entirely convinced that anyone should care — when choosing a president anyway — that John McCain called his wife a cunt. But then again I'm not convinced anyone should care that Obama's pastor said "God damn America," yet that got loads of media play. Is it actually a decent public service, or at least a clever political/entertaining tactic, to bring up this sixteen-year-old outburst after TV media ignore it?

Carol moved out of the beach house because she couldn't really get to it easily without John's help, what with her legs and all. Carol blames herself for the marriage's breakup, and has a McCain bumper sticker on her car, but former presidential candidate Ross Perot is pissed, as are some veterans not unlike the ones who dogged Democratic candidate John Kerry in 2004.

Stateside, the Daily News picked up the story this morning, which begs the question of whether other publications will follow suit. After all, supporters of onetime Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee tried to deploy the Carol issue against McCain in South Carolina earlier this year.

Or perhaps the story will just fizzle out. After all, McCain seems to be doing fine with former Hillary Clinton supporters these days, despite that terrible Chelsea joke he coined.

(Image via Daily Mail)

[AP]