The pressure seems to be getting to McCain foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann. In response to a Marc Ambinder post suggesting that a faction in McCain’s campaign thinks Palin is going off script to appeal to the base, Randy sent Ambinder this email …

Just read your post. This is on the record. This is cleared by HQ. It is a fact that Barack Obama was palling around with terrorists. It was a fact before Governor Palin said it in a fully vetted speech and it is fact today. It is bullshit to claim or write anything else.

An old pal and handler of Chalabi, a big slime purveyor for McCain through the whole cycle, reputations are hard to repair. These must not be good times for Scheunemann.

With only 11 days to go until Election Day, we take a look at the state of the race through the prism of some telling new polls …

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

A portion of the press conference held this afternoon by Pittsburgh police:

Ashley makes her perp walk.

McCain volunteer Ashley Todd tells the police she’s “upset with the media for blowing this into a political firestorm.”

Looking forward to 2012, it seems Palin ain’t quite the darling of the base some imagine.

If Republicans had to pick for 2012 today, it’d be: Romney 35%, Huckabee 26%, Palin 20%.

TPM Reader SW:

I have been a reader (and meager contributor) since 2002, and hit you several times daily. However, I think more and more of the stories you do (and do and do and do, like the Pittsburgh face carver of limited talent and imagination) are better over-covered by, say, the Huffington Post. (Yes, it’s important to tell how the McCain campaign sleazed its way through this one– that’s the important story, and it must be told, and you did that well.) You have a great platform to educate people who need to be educated, and more importantly, want to be educated (unlike say, the Fox/Drudge clientele). Better, you people have the means and talent to educate your intelligent readers.

I spit out my coffee when I read this story yesterday. I had not heard that the banks who are getting the $250,000,000,000.00 (with twice as much still left to come) Treasury just gave out are not being told by Secretary Treasury Paulson to lend it to Joe Sixpack to buy his boss’s business, but to buy other banks. What an effing outrage!

Joe Nocera’s article details how Treasury has been lying since this crises began, just like an oily subprime lender, selling us something we don’t need or want by telling us it’s something else. If this article is true, our taxes are financing J.P. Morgan’s and Goldman Sachs’ 2008 executive bonus fund.

Can you please get word of this excellent article out?

Keep up the good work.

TPM Reader LP replies …

SW says more education, less anything else.

I say TPM already does a great job of balancing this, with lots and lots of critical info and analysis and measured opinion, with a small bit of relevant but less-deadly-serious articles to help keep me and I’m presuming most readers able to move on to the next deadly-serious article without getting “serious” indigestion. There’s only so much density and mass one can digest at a time.

I think it also helps attract new and keep old visitors coming back. A lot of journalists who come to this site, I’m guessing, wouldn’t have the investigatory dedication or love of inquiry to often visit a more dry and academic site, or a site with a more staid demeanor.

Personally, I work online and TPM helps me stay awake, become much better informed, stay passionate about politics, and laughing each and every day. This is why I visit briefly usually every one to two hours. It’s really quite an informative and serious enough site as is.

A few of the early Palin profiles reported out of Alaska noted her propensity to turn on early mentors or those who gave her key legs up after those people were no longer useful.

Now the latest from The Politico …

Even as John McCain and Sarah Palin scramble to close the gap in the final days of the 2008 election, stirrings of a Palin insurgency are complicating the campaign’s already-tense internal dynamics.

Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain’s camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain’s decline.

“She’s lost confidence in most of the people on the plane,” said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to “go rogue” in some of her public pronouncements and decisions.

“I think she’d like to go more rogue,” he said.

Obviously, Palin is the McCain campaign’s responsibility, his fault, etc. But I must confess to some sympathy for the frustration and heartburn it must cause his staffers to hear Palin and her crew complaining about a “botched rollout and [her] tarnished image.” That’s gratitude for you. Sometimes it’s just the product.

Joe Lieberman tries to patch things up with the Dems, insists he’s been respectful to Barack Obama — whom he’s previously said doesn’t put the country first. That and other political news in today’s Election Central Saturday Roundup.