After numerous head-fakes, the McCain campaign rolled out its VP choice: the surprisingly young and unknown Sarah Palin (via RawStory). A first-term governor of Alaska, Palin is a former beauty queen, an eater of moose and caribou, and has admitted to smoking marijuana (via HuffPo, WSJ, Anchorage Daily News). Reactions were all over the map: DailyKos says, "worse than Quayle;" TPM: "very weak;" NRO's The Corner, "risky but excellent;" Michelle Malkin: "I'm impressed. Very impressed." Hot Air believes Palin will re-energize the base while Thoughts from Kansas thinks Palin is "a vehicle of ... astounding hilarity." And Andrew Sullivan asks, is this McCain's "Harriet Miers moment?" If early reactions are any indication, St. Paul will be rocking, says Capital Commerce.

On a deeper level, Palin has been tied to disgraced Senator Ted "Tubes" Stevens, whose endorsement of Palin has been scrubbed from her Web site, but not before TPM noticed it. MyDD asks, "What happens when the Ted Stevens verdict gets handed down?" As of a month ago, Palin was not yet ready to call for Steven's resignation (via Anchorage Daily News). Palin also has her very own "trooper-gate" scandal, which may lead to her impeachment (via TPM and WSJ). When Alaska's state police commissioner wouldn't fire Palin's ex-brother-in-law, Palin fired the commissioner (via Anchorage Daily News). TPM's Muckraker has the Palin trooper-gate timeline. Also from Anchorage Daily News: Palin wants creationism taught in public schools, along with actual science (via Wired Science).

Plus, what does this say about McCain's attitude towards women? His first wife was a "successful model," and second wife was a "rodeo beauty queen" (via The Daily Mail and HuffPo). He offered to enter Cindy in a topless beauty contest (via TPM). He has found room on his staff for Miss South Carolina 2007 (via TMZ), and a Baptist minister asked McCain if he called his wife the unprintable (via HuffPo).

Then again, says The Corner, Palin did kill the bridge to nowhere, she knocks the legs out from under Obama's monopoly on change, and her nomination cut short the attention the press would have otherwise lavished on Obama all weekend.