From time-to-time, advertisers like to splash their ads over the space we call the "skybox" for a few seconds. It's a showy, sometimes pretty, way for advertisers to impress their brand into your cortex. But these are, well, confusing. It's unclear what Showalter and Black have to do with eBay, who's apparently bought the front page today. Separately, though, it's bizarre to see their faces over headlines like "Does Tiger Woods Really Think He Can Wait This One Out?" and "Seven Reasons Why White House Party Crashers are Awesome for America." If an advertiser wants to use the "look" of our skybox, they should also take some time to (ahem, use our crack creative services team to) write their own headlines.

Since editorial and advertising at Gawker Media work independently, I never see ads until they go live on the site. Our overlord Nick Denton is usually the one who approves ads like these and he said he never saw this particular takeover before it went live. So, blame him. The glitch is being fixed, and I apologize for any confusion or unnecessary distraction this may have caused.

Allow alleged extortionist Joe Halderman's attorney to lay it all out for you how it really happened: after Joe discovered Letterman was boning Joe's girlfriend, still, he thought, hey, great idea for a screenplay!

The lawyer says this was not extortion, calling it "a pure commercial transaction." The lawyer says Halderman was merely trying to sell the exclusive screenplay rights to Letterman.

Who would enjoy a screenplay of Letterman's sexual foibles more than the man himself? So, can Joe go now? And also he'd like his job back.
[Pic: Getty]

[Tells some story of this girl in a bar who totally loves him, like, so much, but doesn't know about the movie]. I mean, when someone who identifies themselves as a huge fan, who has read the book and passed it to their friends and self-identifies as this type of person, when the movie is IN THEATERS and they don't even know there is a movie at all…that is a complete failure in the publicity and marketing of the movie...
I don't want to go through it, because it'll just be depressing, but the failures in marketing were just…big. Unrecoverable.

I would have guessed "Because it was awful." But I'm no Tucker Max.
[Pic: Flickr]

Vanity Fair caught up with the freedom fighter himself in London:

What could happen to him if he went back today? "I don't know," he says. "There are enough lawyers working on it. So I let them work." He blames a lot of what happened to him in America on the eight George W. Bush years. "America has always been a country of dreams, and it became a country of hate."

Alberto Gonzales never could get a decent table.
[Pic: Getty]

Asylum gets this heart-rending explanation from the sniveling funnyman's publicist himself:

"When DIRECT TV came to me and the Farley family with this idea about 'Tommy Boy,' we talked and thought it would be a cool way to remind people just how funny Chris was. It is a clever homage to my friend and a movie that we loved doing, " he says.

"Nobody else wants to pay me money for things," he means.

He says, basically: He'd had enough of his country being fucked up and his countrymen being killed. He snapped. And he's not sorry.

The opportunity came, and I took it.

I took it out of loyalty to every drop of innocent blood that has been shed through the occupation or because of it, every scream of a bereaved mother, every moan of an orphan, the sorrow of a rape victim, the teardrop of an orphan.

I say to those who reproach me: do you know how many broken homes that shoe which I threw had entered? How many times it had trodden over the blood of innocent victims? Maybe that shoe was the appropriate response when all values were violated.

So he's a human before he's a reporter. An interesting notion. Not one shared by America's elite press corps. They're more of the "I totally got Bush to autograph a shoe for my kids, isn't that a hoot?" school of professional nihilistic suck-upitude.

So, Muntader explicitly says he's not a hero but I think he is, at least for journalists. You can't go crazy if you don't have a soul.

This is just a god damn classic piece of service journalism. Parents, you can thank ABC 15 in Phoenix for bringing you the latest secrets of the hopped-up youth:

But she said the latest trends include "snorting vodka shots."
More graphic yet, she said teens are doing anal beer bongs and soaking tampons in vodka.

Impossible. Not my teen—he's just studying.

If you think your kid is studying, she said look closer at his or her highlighter.
It too, can pull open and become a pipe.

And don't even get this expert started on the energy drinks kids are consuming these days. "If your 12-year-old is drinking that much caffeine, it begs the question what will they be doing at 15?" The answer is probably drugs. Sucking on that highlighter pipe can lead directly to whoring (for drugs), if you know what we are saying. Do not think your child is "fine," Arizona parents.

"It's hard to recognize," Siete said. "A lot of drug use looks like the everyday common cold, allergies, watery eyes, tired, who isn't tired?"

The kids drinking the energy drinks?
[Related. Pic: Flickr]

Reports the Sun:

A Jacko source said: "Shortly after taking the Demerol he started to experience slow shallow breathing.

"His breathing gradually got slower and slower until it stopped.

"His staff started mouth-to-mouth and an ambulance was called which got there in eight minutes "But found he was in full respiratory arrest, no breathing and no pulse. They started full CPR and rushed him to hospital.

"When he arrived they started resuscitation, giving him heart shocks and inserted a breathing tube and other supportive measures to try and save his life.

"He never regained consciousness. The family was told that he had passed."

The Sun also has a photo of a paramedic's computer screen displaying the information relayed by the dispatcher from the 911 call that came from Jackson's home ("50 year old male Not breathing at all."), along with all sorts of other "Do I really need to know this" information. So very morbid.

Michael Jackson's Last Moments [Sun]

DeVito claimed that his slobbering interview with a Philadelphia newswoman on a morning show was all an act, that he was "in character" playing the pathetic slob her portrays on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Whatever, whether he was really drunk or not, we still want to go out and drink limoncellos all night long with Danny DeVito.

Picture on left: the original. Picture on right: the actual cover of Toronto's "Summer Fun Guide." The juxtaposition is just...yea. The city's spokesman responded to skeptical questioning like so:

"That's an interesting conversation," Mr. Sack said. "This does not look like a nondescript white family, it looks maybe Latino."

Well then.
[National Post via Adrants]

The controversy started when the following 45-word passage appeared in Dowd's column, titled "Cheney, Master of Pain," on Sunday:

"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Bush crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

Now compare that to Marshall's 43-word passage from a Talking Points Memo post on Thursday titled, "Bubbling":

"More and more the timeline is raising the question of why, if the torture was to prevent terrorist attacks, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when we were looking for what was essentially political information to justify the invasion of Iraq."

The similarities were caught by a TPM contributor on Sunday afternoon who pointed out that the only difference between Dowd's words and Marshall's was that Dowd used the phrase "we were" instead of "the Bush crowd was."

On Sunday night, in emails to "The Nytpicker," a blog devoted to covering the goings-on at the New York Times, and the Huffington Post, Dowd admitted that the similarities weren't accidental and that she had indeed plagiarized Marshall, though she placed the blame for the mishap squarely on one of her friends.

josh is right. I didn't read his blog last week, and didn't have any idea he had made that point until you informed me just now. i was talking to a friend of mine Friday about what I was writing who suggested I make this point, expressing it in a cogent — and I assumed spontaneous — way and I wanted to weave the idea into my column. but, clearly, my friend must have read josh marshall without mentioning that to me. we're fixing it on the web, to give josh credit, and will include a note, as well as a formal correction tomorrow.

Having looked at this from every possible angle, would it be completely out of line to state that there's something distinctly bullshit-y about Dowd's explanation? Dowd, who ironically played an integral role in exposing Joe Biden's speech plagiarizing in 1988, needs to explain the "my friend did it" excuse in more detail. Who is this mysterious friend who helps Dowd limp across the finish line of the marathon that is two 750 word columns per week for the Times? Was the conversation in question over the phone, in which Dowd would have written down her friend's words in a note, or was it via email or instant messenger, where perhaps there's an electronic record of the exchange? And finally, why was Dowd needing help expressing the thought contained in the passage in question, a sequence of words which, with no disrespect directed at Josh Marshall, don't seem all that remarkable. It's a point well made with words, for sure, but it's not something that couldn't have been expressed in a number of different ways.

Look, most people who write can sympathize with being "blocked" occasionally, perhaps even spitting out a thought via a sentence or two that was conceived by reading something written by someone else that went on to take root in the subconscious, perhaps then creating the appearance of plagiarism when in reality there was no writerly malfeasance involved, but this, this just doesn't seem to make any sense. At all.

If there's one absolute certainty to come out of this whole fiasco it is this: If Maureen Dowd needs help from friends composing two cohesive 750-word arguments per week, she'd be one hell of a shitty blogger.

NY Times' Maureen Dowd Plagiarizes TPM's Josh Marshall[TPM]
Dowd Admits Plagiarizing to TNYTpicker [The NYTpicker]
Maureen Dowd Admits Inadvertently Lifting Line From TPM's Josh Marshall[HuffPo]
[Trainwreck photo via On The Brink]

It those damn fancy computers! And software! AAGGHH! Those things can be so dang confusing.

Greg Sargent contacted John Solomon, editor of the Times, for an explanation.

Solomon says that no human individual paired the pic with the story, that a technological foul-up was to blame, and that the paper is tweaking its photo selection software to make sure this doesn't happen again.

"The theme engine, through automation, grabbed a photo it thought was relevant, and attached it to the story," Solomon says, acknowledging that the photo had gone up without a person seeing it. "There was no editorial decision to run it. As soon as it was brought to our attention, we pulled it down."

Solomon also conceded that the automated system the paper has in place to pick photos doesn't have a tight enough screening process, and said steps were being taken to fix that.

"We regret that the technology has let us down in this case," he said, "and are working to make sure that the [photo] matches are more relevant in the future."

So apparently it was a computer software program, something probably commonly used within the industry to cut costs by eliminating the need for human labor, that deserves blame in this matter. Normally we'd be more than willing to accept this explanation without much hesitation, but considering that the newspaper committing the gaffe is the most conservative daily broadsheet in the country, it does cause one to question its legitimacy, sadly, if only for a moment. Perhaps some of you Gawker readers have some insight into this sort of photo software program used by newspapers. Please feel free to tell us if we need to call bullshit on the Times' explantion.

WashTimes Editor Solomon Regrets Foul-Up Over Pic Of Obama's Daughters [Greg Sargent]

"Mr. Wolfe admitted that he's not truly a fan of Hip Hop, but he finds its universe fascinating.

'I know that it celebrates that same leisure class at the bottom, that’s what the whole thing is about. You know like, 'Kill cops!' and 'What are women good for?' One thing! It’s all part of the pose,' said Mr. Wolfe. 'But I’ve noticed we’ve backed away a little bit in the last several years from killing cops and making girls lean over and all that.'"

Only missionary position for the rappers these days! When you reminisce on how Tommy absolutely nailed the college kid slang in "I Am Charlotte Simmons," (Example: "Yo, Hoyt! 'Sup?...I saw you upstairs there hittin' on that little tigbiddy! Tell the truth! You really, honestly, think she's hot?") you can only hope that his next novel is all about hip hop. [NYO; pic via]

The Obama family, you'll recall, asked the White House if they could move into Blair House, the official guest house, on January 5, so their kids could "start school." Then some young, probably Liberty University alum White House aides were like, "No, it's booked, or something. Heh." But they had a good reason:

White House officials declined to disclose specifically who is using Blair House during that period, for what purpose or how they could take precedence over the president-elect of the United States when it came to government housing; one White House official would say only that it had been booked for “receptions and gatherings” by members of the departing Bush administration. Those receptions, the official said, “don’t make it suitable for full-time occupancy by the Obamas yet.”

Can't you just hear the liberal media bias seeping out of that paragraph? It's great. So basically they need that space for going-away parties for criminal Neocon bureaucrats. But the real reason here is clear: Do you think W wants a bunch of cops around his place, fucking up the parties?

But the issue goes beyond pique; as president-elect, Mr. Obama receives a level of Secret Service protection that is almost equal to that of a sitting president. Several blocks around his house in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago have been cordoned off with concrete barriers and round-the-clock police protection. Area residents often have to show identification to go home.

Obama: socialist narc. [NYT]

• 'The Today Show' [NBC]

• 'Fox and Friends' [Fox News]

When asked if he had anything to do with the Howard/Cheadle switch, Downey immediately responded, “I had nothing to do with that decision. I love Terrence very very much. That’s all I’ll say because I haven’t talked to him yet.”

Furthermore, the Iron Man star makes it clear that he will not play favorites between the two equally talented actors, so if you’re looking for a juicy “good riddance” quote from Downey [...] you won’t find it here.

“I’ve always admired Don [Cheadle],” said Downey. “It’s one of those situations where I still don’t quite know what happened or why. Here’s what happens too: things happen and you wind up commenting on them before you’ve actually talked to the people and it’s in poor taste.”

Of course we're nothing if not helpful, so here's Howard's account, and here's Marvel's (we think). Please file your response in the comments below; we have a rally to get to!

• EXCLUSIVE: Robert Downey Jr. On Terrence Howard/Don Cheadle ‘Iron Man 2’ Swap [MTV]