McCain and Obama had their revenge in the end, showing Brokaw to be useless without his teleprompter. That minor embarrassment aside, CBS News' Bob Schieffer should impose similar discipline at the final debate next Wednesday. That would be an excellent way to get the White House press corps off on the right, confrontational note with the future subject of its coverage.

(Click the video at top to watch all the fireworks.)

Some key McCain staffers are content with Palin joking about the "SNL" routines on the campaign trail — as when she scribbled "I'm not Tina Fey" on a supporter's cell phone and said she'd dressed as Fey on Halloween. But others — including the governor herself — think a return punch on the NBC airwaves is what's needed.

I'm hearing some sort of Palin tweak of Fey's American Express commercials is in the works.

While next weekend's ''Saturday Night Live'' will be a rerun, it is possible Palin could appear Thursday on the first of NBC's ''Weekend Update'' specials in prime time.

Otherwise, the next orginal "SNL'' show will be broadcast Oct. 18, a little more than two weeks before the election.

While we're skeptical that Martin Scorsese would return to spoof the famous American Express commercials he made with Fey, at least we know that Palin would be receptive to his pitch for a Boca time share (after all, her two greatest loves are Jews and Cuban food). Perhaps David Zucker is available as a fill-in? Oh, who are we kidding — after this weekend, of course he is!

[Photo Credit: AP]

• Take that, Tina: Palin wants to spoof her spoofer [Chicago Sun-Times]

• Saturday Night Live [NBC]

She's been writing a secret book about him! Well, not just him. It's called The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama and it's about "emerging young African American politicians forging a bold new path to political power." And by "secret" I mean "to no one who read the AP story about it weeks before the McCain campaign approved Ifill as a moderator", and by "bold" they of course mean "actually the total opposite of" because that phrase is code for "emerging young African American politicians who somehow manage not to scare white people." One can only imagine Ifill, as the embodiment of PBS's quiet, sober, studiously inoffensive approach to covering the news, finds this topic personally interesting, because as a black woman she actually has to be significantly more boring than boring Washington establishment white guy pundits like Tom Brokaw or the late Tim Russert to prove that she does not have a chip on her shoulder or a loose cannon or anything remotely suggestive of an overly keen belief that slavery was wrong, and politicians can't be boring all the time. But whatever: now she's been exposed. Writing a book about a politician is practically the same as being on that politician's payroll, just ask Jerome Corsi.

Is the McCain campaign trying to turn the obvious "shoot the moderator" tactics it just pulled on Katie Couric into a full-blown strategy? If so, as Media Matters points out, it's got some holes, not least because recent years have seen debates moderated by the likes of Bob Schieffer, a close personal friend of George W. Bush whose brother was a business partner of Bush's before the Supreme Court voted him president. Also, Tom Brokaw loves John McCain. But at the end of the day, would either of those guys make Sarah Palin sound any readier to navigate the collapse of our banking system or any number of our fragile Middle Eastern frenemy states? Yeah: no.