All of the week’s partisan bickering and lipstick-related nastiness can’t change the fact that both Barack Obama and John McCain want what’s best for this country, except for Barack Obama. Now we will liveblog the endless string of platitudes and remonstrances to “never forget” that are required of any politician commemorating the day when Rudy Giuliani failed to protect his city from two commercial airliners. CNN informs us that the candidates will not speak together at tonight’s special 9/11 Commemorative Service Forum, which we guess means that one of them will be held in a Silence Cone with a crying bald eagle until the other one is done delivering his canned answers to Judy Woodruff. Let’s roll! MORE »

We are only hours away from John McCain and Barack Obama’s 9/11 Forum at New York City’s Columbia University, and no one cares. But! Our own Intern Juli actually attends this bratty college and has written about the campus atmosphere leading into the event. Juli’s secret dispatch suggests that a bunch of spoiled snobs are whining about nothing. Who could have predicted?

As no one outside Columbia’s three block campus would ever know, today is a very exciting day in Morningside Heights. John McCain and Barack Obama are coming to the student center to talk about the importance of Service, and 9/11, which is today’s date. And the entire student body will watch the thing from a giant flatscreen teevee on the steps of an administration building, because Columbia hates its students. MORE »

Some folks have found a copy the CNN schedule for tonight’s Service Nation Presidential Candidates Forum at Columbia University, on 9/11. Following remarks from the president of Columbia University and the governor of New York and before remarks from 9/11 families, John McCain, and Barack Obama, the famous movie star Tobey Maguire will speak about 9/11 and Service. Sure, why not? Because Tobey Maguire did study physics at Columbia University, in the children’s comic book film Spiderman 2. [Cryptome, Radar]