Sarah Palin won't get to talk about John McCain tonight. (Facebook)

Well, at least she can't claim it was a liberal news bias this time: Fox News contributor Sarah Palin took to Facebook today to kvetch about being bumped from the interviews (plural?) she was slated to give tonight about her BFF, John McCain. Whose birthday it is, apparently.


Okay, let's be honest: it is weird that Sarah Palin isn't going to be on Fox tonight, seeing as it's Paul Ryan's speaking engagement at the RNC. The former VP candidate weighing in on the next conservative to run for the spot?

Either way, one thing we do know is that it's not a good idea to send pouty little messages like that out on Facebook. We expect this to blow up in five ... four ... three ...

Julia Allison, on a date scene from "Miss Advised" (Evans Vestal Ward/Bravo)

Julia Allison is not dead. But you could be forgiven for thinking so, since everyone talks about her in the past tense.

“Julia represented the industrialization of self-promotion,” said Jason Tanz, who profiled Ms. Allison for the cover of Wired’s August 2008 issue. “People were going to start using the Internet as a personal branding platform, and Julia was one of the first to get there.”

“I mean I met her like twice?” said Choire Sicha, editor at Gawker as Ms. Allison emerged as a favorite subject on the gossip blog.

And writing about Ms. Allison’s new reality series, Miss Advised, for the Atlantic Wire, a former Gawker writer noted the nascent TV star “disappeared to the West Coast and has not been heard from since.”

Ms. Allison, the former relationship columnist for Time Out New York, Gawker hobbyhorse, TV talking head, and leader of her would-be business, NonSociety, was once the poster girl for New York bloggers pursuing fame or infamy. She sat—or rather whirled like a dervish—at the nexus of tech-world geekery (as she was nominally a “founder”), good old-fashioned media-baiting (she rose to her sort of fame after wearing a bustier made of condoms to a Gawker party full of journalists), and New York’s fizzy hangover from a decade of Carrie Bradshaw

“I remember the first piece Gawker wrote about me. They criticized me for being ‘too nice,’” Ms. Allison told The Observer. “But that’s who I was! That was the beginning of my tenure in New York. The way I knew I needed to leave was that I wasn’t like that anymore. I was cynical. I was bitter. I saw a couple holding hands and I thought ‘just wait. That won’t last.’”

Nor did her New York celebutante life: her fame, emblematic of the period, had an expiration date.

“The internet felt smaller,” said former Gawker editor Jessica Coen, now at Jezebel. “The social guide of that internet scene in New York was a lot smaller, intimate. There were certainly less blogs then and less prominent blogs then, it felt smaller, individuals who were kind of out there stood out a lot more.”

The post-mortem tone is understandable: one of the pitfalls of constructing your entire existence around being famous is that once you are a nobody, you might as well be dead.

So, Ms. Allison  must now undertake a resurrection, in the form of a reality TV show. (Surprise!)

“I tried being microfamous, she explained to us recently. “That stuff is super empty. It would be really nice to try it in a different way.” Call it macrofamous.

Julia Allison at the height of her web-centric microfame, in 2009. (Andreas Rentz/Getty Images for Burda Media)

Since her days on the New York tech/media scene, Ms. Allison indeed moved to Los Angeles and is in the process of shutting down NonSociety, which never meaningfully distinguished itself from Tumblr. In so doing, she has taken away a favorite spectator sport: following her career (read: her attention-seeking antics). For a while, things were quiet. But with Miss Advised, launching on Bravo on June 18, Ms. Allison is staging what will either be her comeback or, like Lisa Kudrow’s embarrassing fake-reality series, her The Comeback.

The show follows three soi-disant dating experts in three different cities: a high-powered New York matchmaker whose ex calls her just as she’s enjoying a solo glass of Champagne, a San Francisco radio personality who’s willing to shock you with her opposition to monogamy.

And Ms. Allison, the ostensible star of the show.

Only nominally a “dating columnist” since wearing out her welcome at Time Out in 2009, Ms. Allison ends up with the most screen time because she’s the most voluble, the least canny about managing her self-presentation. While the two mating-and-dating professionals onscreen seem in-control, if a bit eager to find their mates, Ms. Allison is unvarnished. At one point, we see her trying on tutus (and strapping one on her dog). Later in the season, she forces herself on one date in the back of a limousine, only to ask another if he’s ready to get married immediately.

In the early going of Miss Advised’s months-long taping process, Ms. Allison says she attempted to construct an America’s-Sweetheart persona, but that the constant presence of cameras broke down her obsession with persona. “At a certain point,” said Ms. Allison on a conference call with her castmates, “I did give up trying to be charming. I failed so miserably, I just gave up. If you call that forgetting about the cameras, that’s forgetting about the cameras.” The other two women had said they forgot about the cameras immediately. “They beat me down. I had no idea I was so self conscious. I found it to be the most nerve-wracking experience.”

Ms. Allison had reason to be wary. She had been the object of derision on Gawker and targeted hate sites. She had also lost faith in love—a troubling turn for a relationship columnist.

“The worst thing that happened was that I was dumped a couple times,” she explained. “I never thought once during my tenure—that I might not find my person. Or my husband. I never expected that I wouldn’t find lasting happiness. In the last year, I thought, Oh, shit. I might have totally fucked this up.”

This realization—that she had aged out of eligibility, and that her Google results are full of her critics mocking her—coincided with allowing Bravo’s cameras into her life. “I felt like the Rodney Dangerfield of journalism, I felt like a victim, and I did the show, and my conclusion after the show was—I have to figure out a way to not say this in a cheesy way: I think I have a message now.” That message, she says, is to show people how to love themselves: “I think moving forward, the irony is that my goal for myself is to be genuinely open and genuinely transparent and not worry about what people think of me.”

It’s an irony in part because Ms. Allison’s extreme, blithe openness—turning up at a party in a condom-covered bustier; spilling the details of her every relationship, including, recently, a dalliance with John McCain’s son Jack—in the exact behavior that engendered criticism from sites devoted to savaging her.

An email exchange with the anonymous proprietor of Ms. Allison’s most prominent (and frequently unhinged) critics, the site Reblogging Donk, yielded some information as to why, exactly, Ms. Allison is such a flashpoint. “She provides a very extreme, contorted glimpse of a generation that's gone right off the rails in terms of narcissism, seeking fame for no reason, the reality show/Facebook generation that wants to to put everything out there and expect to be adored and envied for it. We all have those people in our Facebook feed—she's the Incredible Hulk version of that.”

Indeed, Ms. Allison’s form of extreme openness has long manifested itself in both her outfits (each Time Out New York column came with a glam photoshoot) and in an ethos of sharing when it came to her personal life. One relationship, with Vimeo co-founder Jakob Lodwick, got its own website; the McCain moment was duly chronicled across social media. But Ms. Allison claims that her old brushes with fame saw her acting out a part. “I was still attempting to make a good impression. If you do that you will be devastated by their reactions. “

“I have such mixed feelings about it,” she said of the show. “It was a painful process for me... I feel more free now, though, because it’s like, ‘You’re going to see this shit anyway!’ So that is freeing.”

While Ms. Allison admits she felt somewhat “out of control” when dealing with Gawker, she was able to manage her image to an extent, via her blog. She chose what was out there. Bravo’s editors, who have ended the marriages of many a Real Housewife, are less forgiving.

Ms. Allison certainly seems aware of the pitfalls of ceding control, and also believes this time, this run at fame, will be different. “To be famous for no reason other than your ego is a fool’s game. If you want it for that reason, you will be miserable. It’s not of value in and of itself. It’s only of value if you do something like that. And I’m not saying 'Go work for Charity Water!' I hate fakeness. Maybe Charity Water is your thing. No bashing. It’s not mine. My thing is young women like me who had no self esteem.”

Ms. Rambin, Ms. Allison’s former NonSociety business partner, said that on a recent chance encounter in Austin at South by Southwest, she warned Ms. Allison about reality television. (Ms. Rambin appeared on the short-lived One Ocean View in 2006.) “Emotionally, it’s one of the worst things you can do. That’s what makes it really entertaining!”

PC Peterson, the young villain of Bravo’s departed reality series NYC Prep, told The Observer: “You have no control of the editing process. Any conversation taken out of context sounds ridiculous. You’re there to make yourself look bad. Regardless of what you attempt to do, play with the script, you won’t be able to make your own way.”

Ms. Allison, with her newly found openness and her cause of showing women how to be really, truly honest with themselves, doesn’t seem worried. Asked to compare herself to reality stars of past vintage, Ms. Allison conflated fiction with reality: “People bring up [Real Housewives of New York star] Bethenny [Frankel] for three reasons. She tends to be quite frank, she tends to be intelligent and funny, and an entrepreneur. Honestly I don’t think I’m any of them. I’m much more spiritual, and much raunchier, and I’m a total geek. I love tech guys. I just want to roll around in Silicon Valley. I’m some bizarre combination. It’s not reality television I relate to but a combination of Zooey Deschanel on New Girl combined with Lena Dunham.”

Doubling down on her return to the spotlight, she will be writing about each episode of Miss Advised as it airs, for Elle.com.

“I thought of it myself!” she enthused.

Ricketts. (image via Getty)

Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of New York media darling DNAinfo, commissioned plans for a $10 M. media campaign against President Obama’s re-election, according to a report in The New York Times.

In the proposed plan (one of several Mr. Ricketts’ Super PAC is considering), top G.O.P. strategists promised to “do exactly what John McCain would not let us do.”

That is, show American voters controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright’s purported influence on the president in a “big, attention-arresting way," including a full-page ad in the Times. 

As for how the strategists plan to get around the problem Mr. McCain’s campaign faced—it’s an unpopular, race-baiting position—the proposal suggests hiring an  “extremely literate conservative African-American” as spokesperson.

Mr. Ricketts hasn’t addressed the proposal, but it seems written to reflect his beliefs. He is quoted in the report, called “The Ricketts Plan," saying that if voters had seen a scrapped McCain ad linking President Obama to Rev. Dr. Wright, “they’d never have elected Barack Obama.”

Mr. Ricketts, who made his fortune founding TD Ameritrade, has diverse business interests. In addition to saving local journalism, he co-owns the Chicago Cubs, owns a film production company and ranches bison. Below we've embedded a video of Mr. Ricketts talking about his bison company, High Plains Bison.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsfDFmkJAAQ

Palin.

There may be worse things in life than sitting through a 90-minute movie about Sarah Palin. At the moment, I just can’t think of any.

For a shrill, obnoxious loudmouth spouting more semantic goofs in public than Mrs. Malaprop, she has mangled more facts, misquoted more people and been on the wrong side of so many things that she’s ready for a cinematic firing squad. And for a veteran documentary filmmaker with the credits of British director Nick Broomfield, I expected Sarah Palin—You Betcha! to be a hair-raising exposé. But he didn’t have to put in much overtime. All he had to do was go to Wasilla, Alaska, open his eyes and ears, and keep his cameras rolling. As her family, friends and enemies—including just about everybody she has ever worked with as mayor, governor and vice presidential nominee-—prove in every scene, Sarah Palin defines self-parody.

The result is a balanced job of reporting that drives a stake through the heart of whatever she had left of a political career. Not easy, when a subject speaks only through Facebook and Twitter. But Mr. Broomfield, who wrote and directed the film with Joan Churchill, has profiled difficult subjects before: Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss, Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love, and lesbian serial killer Aileen Wuornos, for starters. This might have been his easiest job yet. She was a pistol-packin’ mama who arrived on the scene after shooting and killing animals from a helicopter just in time to wreck John McCain’s bid for the presidency (although he did plenty to make a fool of himself on his own), stuck around to drive the Tea Party to infamy, and flapped her mouth with notable quotables like “What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.” It’s all in the movie. She does the work. You just shudder.

Driving the wedge even further into America’s partisan political divide, her polarizing effect has pretty much rendered Sarah Palin impotent now, even as she makes veiled giggling threats about the 2012 election. But this movie dips from the trough of her roots to discover how such a phenomenon could have happened in the first place. In Wasilla, with a population of 5,000 served by 77 churches, she was never home, but Mr. Broomfield did interview her parents, Chuck and Sally Heath, who taught her how to hunt and kill. “There’s three common questions to ask us,” says her grinning dad. “Number one—what’s her game plan? We don’t know. Number two—did we see this coming? No. The third question asked frequently is, how has it changed our lives? Well, I still drink the same cheap beer I drank 40 years ago and still run with the same derelicts.” The folksy down-home style Sarah Palin still uses to avoid discussing real issues with her fans and charm her detractors obviously begins at home, and grows instantly transparent.

In 1976 she left the Catholic church, got born again by being dipped in a lake and joined the Assembly of God. That, according to her classmates, is where the superior hunger for power began. Driven by evangelical dogma, she forced her teammates in track and basketball to pray before every game, promising them they would burn in hell if they opposed her. (Alarming footage shows her in church being saved from witchcraft.) The Rev. Howard Bess, known as “the bravest man in Wasilla” because of his constant battles with Ms. Palin’s religious fanaticism, declares, “She has no hesitancy to use violence against all who oppose her, no conscience about triggering a nuclear war. She believes she is God’s anointed one and until you understand that, you don’t understand Sarah Palin.”

Dragging those apocalyptic religious obsessions into the arena of politics, a portrait of a zealot emerges that is about as scary as it gets. Her mayoral campaign embraced the National Rifle Association, defamed the former mayor because his name was “Stein,” and fueled the firing of every department head at City Hall who disagreed with her, including the chief of police who opposed her support for concealed weapons in public places. From 1996 to 2002, she burned and destroyed every book in the public library on the subject of homosexuality under the banner “Pray Away the Gay!” According to her deputy mayor, her rabid, uncompromising hatred of abortion and homosexuality went viral with “disrespect for intelligence, scholarship, science, history and sexual and religious freedoms of every kind.” Her campaign manager when she ran for governor of Alaska presents a picture of a disconnected, gum-chewing flake who lived on her BlackBerry, busily devoting her time to getting even with all of her adversaries, including her own brother-in-law, a state trooper named Mike Wooten, for divorcing her sister. While she was governor, according to eyewitness testimonies, she almost bankrupted the state of Alaska. Vital issues like medical benefits for senior citizens, oil revenues, health insurance and environmental protection legislation all went to hell while she devoted her energy to settling personal grudges. By the time she walked off the job to run for vice president, her approval ratings were the lowest in Alaska’s history. And still she makes noises about a comeback.

In case you think Sarah Palin—You Betcha! is a hit job on an easy subject, see the movie and learn something. It’s terrifying, but in all fairness, no disgrace, no rumor of extramarital affairs in office, no broadside is explored unless it can be substantiated. No need to gild a poison lily. She didn’t know Africa was a continent. She still insists you can see Russia from Alaska. The movie has wry humor and sobering facts, but Mr. Broomfield doesn’t make anything up. By the end, the catalogue of her failures, hypocrisies and lies is still overwhelming. But despite her political irrelevance, her biggest supporter is Rupert Murdoch, who paid her a $3 million salary for Fox and a $7 million advance for her book, Going Rogue. She is currently being offered a cool million to undergo a polygraph test to disprove accusations of immorality in public office in the new Palin biography by Joe McGinnis. Ignorant, self-serving, vengeful, deeply dishonest, power-mad and pathological are just a few of the descriptions in this film, and they do not come from a bunch of sore-headed Democrats either. Both sides get a chance to cast a ballot. One long-time Palin voter says, “When she meets people, they just melt.” Oh, where have I been?

Will she ever go away? All I know is she’s not the person I want to place near the red phone that connects the Pentagon to a nuclear war. Should we worry? You betcha.

rreed@observer.com

SARAH PALIN—YOU BETCHA!

Running Time 90 minutes

Directed by Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill

Starring Sarah Palin, Nick Broomfield and John McCain

2/4

That was Jerry Nadler, the liberal Democratic congressman, in an interview this weekend, referring to President Obama and the military intervention in Libya.

Those concerns were also raised on a conference call Saturday, where other liberals, like Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, raised constitutional questions about Mr. Obama's actions.

The tension is over who has the authority to declare war, the Congress, or the president? Nadler, and his colleagues, say had the president sought congressional approval before taking military action, many of the questions they now have could have been answered.

The split on Libya is also dividing liberal and conservative non-interventionists from liberal and conservative interventionists.

Hence John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, who have been harshly critical of the Obama administration for waiting several days before agreeing to participate in a multilateral military attack on the forces of Mohamar Qaddafi, are on the same side as Hillary Clinton and other Democrats who tend to regard Bill Clinton's decision to intervene in Bosnia as the height of enlightened humanitarianism.

"We did not lead this," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was quoted saying this Sunday in the New York Times and other outlets. "We did not engage in unilateral actions in any way, but we strongly support the international community taking action against governments and leaders who behave as Qaddafi is unfortunately doing so now."

Nadler, who is generally a hawk on Israel, but who was also an early proponent of unilateral withdrawal from Iraq, doesn't buy the argument about multilateralism. "It doesn't matter that the U.S. is not taking the lead," said Nalder. "So what. We are still using U.S. military forces" and "the fact that other countries are doing it to are irrelevant. This act was unconstitutional."

French and British forces led the military assault in support rebel forces in Libya, who seek to depose President Qaddafi, whom President Obama has already said "needs to go." But Nadler said that the decision to pile in against the rebels could set a precedent for American forces taking action all over the place.

"If we're intervening for humanitarian reasons, why not the Ivory Coast or Darfur? Why here ?" he asked. "We cannot intervene at every situation."

"It's hard to see any vital national interest" in Libya, he said, referring to the constitutional powers a president has for using military force without the requisite consent of the congress beforehand.

Rep. Anthony Weiner, who has been broadly supportive of the steps taken in Libya, has warned of uncertainty about the mission.

"I do believe we must be a country that steps in to protect citizens from despotic leaders of their own country," Weiner said at a press conference this Sunday.  When I asked Weiner why there was intervention in Libya, versus other places facing political unrest, he said, "We haven't heard the president articulate that. It's been only a vague articulation from the president's cabinet."

He went on to repeat explanations he said came from the president's administration about why Libya was more suitable for U.S. military action: "that this was an achievable objective, making it different from other places around the world; this is something that there's a ready-made coalition, making it different than places like the Congo," he said.

"But that's a question a lot of members in Congress were asking," he said.

"Who are these rebels?" Mr. Nadler asked, referring to the soldiers on the ground in Libya. "Are they democratic, with a little d? Look at what we did in Afghanistan. We armed anti-Soviet forces, and we got the Taliban."

[Note: This item was slightly expanded from an earlier draft.]

The new anti-bullying message from the NOH8 Campaign highlights an apparent standoff between Arizona Senator John McCain and his wife Cindy McCain.

In the video message pushing for repeal of the military's long-standing "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy, Cindy McCain pushes for the ban to be lifted--a matter currently under consideration for repeal by Congress.

"Our political and religious leaders tell LGBT youth that they have no future," Cindy McCain said in the video, which has more than 22,000 YouTube views since its posting on Wednesday. "They can't serve our country openly. Our government treats the LGBT community like second-class citizens." 

Ironically, her husband has openly supported the preservation of the 17-year-old law, and is reportedly negotiating to have it stripped from the Defense Authorization Bill that's set to come before the lame-duck Congress this month. 

Although experts say the chances of repeal before the end of the year are slim, activists like Ms. McCain, and celebrities like Denise Richards, Dave Navarro, Gene Simmons and Cindy McCain continue to advocate for the ban to be lifted.

In the meantime, we're betting the dinner conversations in the McCain household have become quite heated.

The ad also features footage of one Republican and one Democrat who had previously expressed closing the loophole: John McCain and Barack Obama.

Earlier, Bloomberg sent Obama a letter urging him to address gun control.

But there was this!

And now, inevitably--regardless of whatever ideas are bandied about--President Obama telling John McCain that they're "not campaigning anymore" is going to be the part anyone bothers to remember.

John McCain said this afternoon that he'll probably vote against Mr. Bernanke's confirmation, joining a slew of Republican critics, Oregon Democrat Jeff Merkley, and the Independent, Bernie Sanders.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bernanke is celebrating the award by keeping interest rates at nearly zero.

One is the pride-driven defeated presidential candidate who hopes Americans will compare him to President Obama and realize the error of their ways. Another is a true-believer neoconservative, dedicated to using his Senate perch to push for aggressive military efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. And then there’s the third, an unexpectedly vulnerable incumbent senator who could face a career-threatening Republican primary challenge next year.

All three McCains were on display during his appearance on Sunday’s “Meet the Press.”

Ostensibly, McCain was invited to be on an edition of the show focused exclusively on the Afghanistan game-plan Obama unveiled this week. But host David Gregory’s questions weren’t limited to foreign policy – and McCain’s answers reflected his need to juggle multiple political imperatives.

Consider Gregory’s first question, about McCain’s overall assessment of Obama’s plan to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.

Other national Republicans have dodged praising Obama’s strategy, but McCain led off by declaring, “I support the president’s decision. I think it’s the right decision. I think it can lead to success” – a basic formulation he returned to several times during the interview. He also lauded Obama for delivering “a very effective speech” at West Point last week.

McCain was speaking as a Neocon true-believer. For months, he’s loudly agitated for the White House to grant Stanley McChrystal’s request for 40,000 additional troops. He’s done this because, as with the 2007 troop surge in Iraq, he genuinely believes that the “war on terror” can be won through massive overseas military deployments and nation-building. Obama didn’t give McChrystal and McCain all they wanted, but he gave them much of it.

But his praise was hardly unconditional. On Obama’s plan to begin withdrawing troops in July 2011, McCain asked, “Do you break the enemy's will by saying, ‘We're going to be there,’ or send a message that we're going to be there for a year-and-a-half or so and then we’re going to begin to leave, no matter what the circumstances are?”

He also criticized Obama’s lengthy decision-making process, arguing that it “made our allies very uneasy as to what we were going to do.  And it wasn't just the length of time; the leak of secret cables from our ambassador in Kabul saying we shouldn't send reinforcements, that leads to a certain turmoil.”

With these critiques, McCain assumed the role of armchair commander in chief – a man who prides himself on (what he sees as) his unusual foreign policy wisdom and who would clearly like Americans to conclude that a President McCain would have handled Afghanistan (and all foreign policy matters) better than President Obama.

Toward the end of the segment, Gregory quizzed McCain on domestic issues. Asked if the this year’s stimulus package is working (unemployment actually fell last month), McCain replied, “Of course not” and branded it “an act of generational theft.” He also took shots at Obama’s healthcare effort (this after offering an amendment in the Senate that would have voided Medicare cuts championed by Obama and the Democrats), said that any new jobs bill should be focused on tax cuts, and defended Sarah Palin.

His defense of Palin, obviously, has much to do with legacy protection; he’d be indicting his own judgment if he ever took a shot at her. But McCain is also facing the serious threat of a primary challenge next year. A poll two weeks ago showed him in a statistical dead heat with J.D. Hayworth, the former six-term congressman who lost his seat in the 2006 Democratic tide.

Standing up for Palin certainly won’t hurt McCain with the conservative voters who will hold sway in any McCain-Hayworth showdown. Nor will denouncing Obama’s domestic agenda.

But historically, defeated presidential nominees like McCain have struggled in subsequent campaigns.

George McGovern, for instance, nearly lost his South Dakota Senate seat two years after his 1972 presidential defeat; only the anti-Republican Watergate tide saved him against Leo Thorsness. And six years later, he was soundly beaten by James Abdnor. Walter Mondale was dissuaded from running for the Senate from Minnesota in 1990, in part out of fear that his 49-state loss to Ronald Reagan in 1984 had reduced his standing. And when he did jump back into politics in 2002, as the last-minute replacement for the late Paul Wellstone, Mondale was beaten.  Michael Dukakis has had trouble. His popularity in Massachusetts tanked after his 1988 White House bid so much that he was forced to swear off running for re-election in 1990 – and so profoundly that two decades later his hopes of winning an interim appointment to the U.S. Senate after Ted Kennedy’s death were scotched by Governor Deval Patrick, who was unwilling to closely identify himself with Dukakis.

Favorite-son candidates almost always win their states decisively in presidential elections. But their status as national celebrities can end up breeding fatigue and resentment among home-state voters when the election is over. Criticizing Obama and sounding tough on foreign policy won't hurt McCain's chances in '10, but it won't change the fact that he's no longer Arizona's rising star.