John McCain’s editorial page id, Bill Kristol, has some new advice for the campaign. In so many words, even more of the erratic and impulsive shenanigans that after the last two weeks have many of McCain’s one-time admirers thinking he has a personality disorder that makes him unfit to occupy the Oval Office.

That, “liberate” Sarah Palin and more hyping of the financial markets crisis.

Along the way we learn that McCain’s advisors are “trapped by conventional wisdom, huddled in a defensive crouch and overcome by ideological timidity.” And they’ve “succeeded in importing to the Palin campaign the trademark defensive crouch of the Bush White House.”

The idea seems to be to double down on wooing the always-coveted impulse-control-deficit constituency.

How awkward: John McCain is forced to retract Sarah Palin’s statements on foreign policy. That and other political news in today’s Election Central Sunday Roundup.

I take everything I read about American politics in the British papers with a grain of salt. But giving what we’ve seen so far, I can’t say I’d be surprised if the moral jalopy that is the McCain-Palin Straight Talk Express sunk us even further into farce with something like this. From the Times of London …

In an election campaign notable for its surprises, Sarah Palin, the Republican vice- presidential candidate, may be about to spring a new one — the wedding of her pregnant teenage daughter to her ice-hockey-playing fiancé before the November 4 election.

Inside John McCain’s campaign the expectation is growing that there will be a popularity boosting pre-election wedding in Alaska between Bristol Palin, 17, and Levi Johnston, 18, her schoolmate and father of her baby. “It would be fantastic,” said a McCain insider. “You would have every TV camera there. The entire country would be watching. It would shut down the race for a week.”

In that Newsweek piece (noted below), which details Rick Davis’s continuing financial ties to mega-lobby firm Davis Manafort, Mike Isikoff reveals that in addition to paying Davis’s salary directly to Davis Manafort, the McCain campaign has paid almost a million dollars to 3eDC, a web development company, part owned by Davis.

That’s a decent chunk of change for web development. So TPM Reader UB looked up 3eDC’s website. And as you can see, for a firm in the business of billing $1 million for high-end design work, their own website appears to be one of those off-the-rack professional firm template sites you can by for $19.99.

I’m not saying it’s Jukt Micronics exactly. But 3eDC’s existence as an actual company seems rather thin.

Now, digging around a little, I notice that 3eDC is pretty closely tied to Davis Manafort. Not only, as Newsweek notes, does the company share an address with Davis Manafort. Last year, US News got Davis to admit that the company has two owners — Rick Davis and Paul Manafort.

And there’s a bit more. According to a July 2007 article in the Wall Street Journal, 3eDC was a “start-up … with one customer — the [McCain] campaign.” The Journal further reported that within the campaign it was understood that 3eDC was essentially a pass-through, that it had a series of other ‘partner firms’ that did the actual work.

Perhaps not surprisingly, in June, the Post’s Matthew Mosk reported that shortly after McCain took over the Republican National Committee in his role as de facto nominee, 3eDC resurfaced with its second client to date — the Republican National Committee — with a contract potentially worth as much as $3 million.

So to cycle back, how we got into all this was trying to figure out whether Rick Davis had really cut his ties with Davis Manafort. The question most people have been asking is whether Davis was still drawing a salary. What it seems like now, however, is that Davis has born poring tons of McCain campaign money back into Davis Manafort — either by having his campaign salary paid to the firm or by having huge consulting accounts set up for paper companies owned by Davis and Manafort. In either case, the question seems no longer to be whether Davis still draws a salary from Davis Manafort but whether McCain-Palin 2008 and Davis Manafort are even distinct organizations.

Brad DeLong says it’s a better option than the Paulson model bailout. (And it did seem to work out pretty well for the Swedes when they got into a somewhat similar situation.)

I’m curious what Krugman thinks.

Late Update: This Krugman post from this morning suggests to me that he may think something like the Swedish model makes more sense but that the politics won’t work and that given the severity of the crisis the not-as-terrible Dodd-Frank proposal is likely the way to go.

Jonathan Weisman has a fascinating, even riveting narrative of what went down in Washington on Thursday as John McCain made his play to commandeer the high-level negotiations over the bailout bill. And TPM Reader TW called my attention to a passage that may help to explain the smoldering hostility that made it impossible for McCain even to make eye contact with Barack Obama during last night’s debate.

We pick up Weisman in that big meeting at the White House …

Pelosi said Obama would speak for the Democrats. Though later he would pepper Paulson with questions, according to a Republican in the room, his initial point was brief: “We’ve got to get something done.”

Bush turned to McCain, who joked, “The longer I am around here, the more I respect seniority.” McCain then turned to Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to speak first.

Boehner was blunt. The plan Paulson laid out would not win the support of the vast majority of House Republicans. It had been improved on the edges, with an oversight board and caps on the compensation of participating executives. But it had to be changed at the core. He did not mention the insurance alternative, but Democrats did. Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, pressed Boehner hard, asking him if he really intended to scrap the deal and start again.

No, Boehner replied, he just wanted his members to have a voice. Obama then jumped in to turn the question on his rival: “What do you think of the [insurance] plan, John?” he asked repeatedly. McCain did not answer.

One Republican in the room said it was clear that the Democrats came into the meeting with a “game plan” aimed at forcing McCain to choose between the administration and House Republicans. “They had taken McCain’s request for a meeting and trumped it,” said this source.

Congressional aides from both parties were standing in the lobby of the West Wing, unaware of the discord inside the Cabinet room, when McCain emerged alone, shook the hands of the Marines at the door and left. The aides were baffled. The plan had been for a bipartisan appearance before the media, featuring McCain, Obama and at least a firm statement in favor of intervention. Now, one of the leading men was gone.

Assuming this is an accurate portrayal of events, it may help explain some of what happened last night.

Last week, TPM and other news outlets were looking into whether McCain campaign manager Rick Davis had really cut his ties to the mega-lobby shop, Davis Manafort — of which he is a part owner. Even though Davis insisted he was no longer drawing any salary from the firm, what David Kurtz and I were wondering was whether Davis had somehow redirected his salary to some other entity from which he could later profit from it or draw it back. Well, it seems Newsweek has finally caught up with Davis’s flimflam …

The McCain campaign told reporters the fees were irrelevant because Davis “separated from his consulting firm … in 2006,” according to the campaign’s Web site, and he stopped drawing a salary from it. In fact, however, when Davis joined the campaign in January 2007, he asked that his $20,000-a-month salary be paid directly to Davis Manafort, two sources who asked not to be identified discussing internal campaign business told NEWSWEEK. Federal campaign records show the McCain campaign paid Davis Manafort $90,000 through July 2007, when a cash crunch prompted Davis and other top campaign officials to forgo their salaries and work as volunteers. Separately, another entity created and partly owned by Davis–an Internet firm called 3eDC, whose address was the same office building as Davis Manafort’s–received payments from the McCain campaign for Web services, collecting $971,860 through March 2008.

In an e-mail to NEWSWEEK, a senior McCain official said that when the campaign began last year, it signed a contract with Davis Manafort “in which we purchased all of [Davis’s] time, and he agreed not to work for any other clients.”

Frankly, it’s even more convoluted than I’d imagined. But the McCain campaign’s claim that anything done by Davis Manafort is irrelevant to the campaign since no one at the campaign has any tie to the firm now seems pretty ridiculous.