• Saturday Night Live is supposedly working to book Sarah Palin. Producers figure she's good at memorizing lines. [Scoop]
• Elitist New Yorkers at a fancy magazine party arrogantly assumed Clint Eastwood was talking about Joe Biden when he said, ""One of the candidates the other night seemed more prone to telling the truth than the other." They were wrong, and almost choked on their Chardonnay and cheese and so forth when he started talking about Palin. [P6]
• George W. Bush: "The moment things began to turn around in Iraq is when the USO deployed Jessica Simpson." It's a funny because it implies all the death over there was due to a lack of Jessica Simpson as opposed to a lack of planning by the Bush administration or the decision to invade in the first place, by Bush. Get it?? [Post]
• David Duchovny is out of sex rehab and ready to start his new movie, which has the word "fornication" in the title. [OK!]

She's been writing a secret book about him! Well, not just him. It's called The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama and it's about "emerging young African American politicians forging a bold new path to political power." And by "secret" I mean "to no one who read the AP story about it weeks before the McCain campaign approved Ifill as a moderator", and by "bold" they of course mean "actually the total opposite of" because that phrase is code for "emerging young African American politicians who somehow manage not to scare white people." One can only imagine Ifill, as the embodiment of PBS's quiet, sober, studiously inoffensive approach to covering the news, finds this topic personally interesting, because as a black woman she actually has to be significantly more boring than boring Washington establishment white guy pundits like Tom Brokaw or the late Tim Russert to prove that she does not have a chip on her shoulder or a loose cannon or anything remotely suggestive of an overly keen belief that slavery was wrong, and politicians can't be boring all the time. But whatever: now she's been exposed. Writing a book about a politician is practically the same as being on that politician's payroll, just ask Jerome Corsi.

Is the McCain campaign trying to turn the obvious "shoot the moderator" tactics it just pulled on Katie Couric into a full-blown strategy? If so, as Media Matters points out, it's got some holes, not least because recent years have seen debates moderated by the likes of Bob Schieffer, a close personal friend of George W. Bush whose brother was a business partner of Bush's before the Supreme Court voted him president. Also, Tom Brokaw loves John McCain. But at the end of the day, would either of those guys make Sarah Palin sound any readier to navigate the collapse of our banking system or any number of our fragile Middle Eastern frenemy states? Yeah: no.

Everyone is covering their asses now that the Senate Armed Services is looking into just who decided to give the CIA authorization to torture the fuck out of people, but Condi released some documents blaming John Ashcroft and Donald Rumsfeld for everything. Except of course that she was in the same goddamn room and her proud stand against the program was to ask Ashcroft to personally review the legal documents that Bush lawyers used to justify violating the Geneva Conventions.

REMEMBER HOW OUR PRESIDENT VIOLATES THE GENEVA CONVENTIONS?? LIKE, REGULARLY, BECAUSE THAT IS HIS POLICY?? WTF!

Anyway. This is fun. Our CIA actually began kinda torturing people weeks before our executive branch drafted a legal memo authorizing them to kinda torture people! The FBI objected to the torturing and "ultimately withdrew from Mr. Zubaydah’s interrogation." It's funny when the FBI is the voice of reason! Funny in a "why did we all agree that the last 8 years didn't happen" way.

Basically we'd like a 9/11 commission thing, here, to figure out what happened when a bunch of career conservative fuckers and their cherry-picked law school moron lackeys ran the country for eight years and basically blew it up, from the inside. Can John McCain race back to Washington and work on that?

• President Bush will retire to Preston Hollow, just outside Dallas, after leaving the White House but prior to being brought to justice. The town has rich people, golf and horsies. Cindy Adams is apparently the first non-conspirator to know. [Post]
• West Village lesbian club Rubyfruit claims it was told by Samantha Ronson's people she doesn't perform in gay and lesbian venues, Lindsay Lohan affair or not. Ronson's rep denied this story, saying the DJ was never even approached. [P6]
• Lohan's estranged, press-hungry father, meanwhile, disparaged Ronson's toilet paper habits and called her a "disgusting representation of humanity." [Sun]
• Longtime flim star Robert Wagner revealed his four-year affair in the 1950s with classic film star Barbara Stanwyck, 23 years older. [AP]
• David Spade flaked on some charity event because he mixed up the Los Angeles Trump National Golf Club with the New Jersey Trump National Golf Club. It's happened to all of us at least once. [P6]
• Director Bennett Miller's girlfriend emailed everyone to ask for a new job because she can't work for Miller now that they're going steady. [P6]

1. "[Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have] gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers." Thanks for sharing, Elle Woods Palin! But ha ha ha, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are supposed to be private companies that have nothing to do with the taxpayers who are only now going to find out how "big" and "expensive" their woeful mismanagement is! Of course, in seizing upon this "gaffe" as Democrats did today they kinda missed the whole supposed reason the bailout was "necessary" to begin with, which is to say, that the government exists to protect the plutocracy but also that taxpayers have essentially "implicitly" guaranteed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bonds throughout their entire 80-year existences. When the Federal government first announced plans to "privatize" Fannie Mae to help balance the budget in January 1968, an economics reporter at the New York Times named Edwin Dale wrote that the whole thing was a budget "gimmick." By September 1968, Lyndon Johnson aides had appropriated the "gimmick" term themselves, in an Edwin Dale story that employed more smug quotation marks than a Tao Lin prospectus:

By 1980, Edwin Dale was working for Ronald Reagan, so it is not like he is some great hero here. But he was right in 1968: the whole privatization of these mortgage companies was a small feat of financial engineering that changed nothing besides the capacity for rich connected people to get obscenely rich off stock options and taxpayer funds at the same time.

2. "Taxpayers will be on the hook for $200 billion — with a “B” — in capital and credit lines to both Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. And that’s just the starting estimate. When do government projections ever get it right? And when do they ever overestimate the cost to taxpayers?"
Hey, good point, Michelle Malkin! Do you think we should contract out the estimate of the taxpayer burden of this bailout to some wizkids in the private sector, such as the ones who accurately projected their banks' exposure to the subprime mortgage market, at least to the closest billion or so, when this whole mess started? Which is to say…oh wait, fucking no one? But no, this brings up another important point: the whole reason the government has to "bail out" its previously-"privatized" mortgage backers is that no one, public sector or private, really does know how expensive it will be, not because they are stupid, but because the whole "freedom" aspect of the "free market" you people love so much allows whoever to unload whatever debt they have whenever they want, meaning that the more all these institutions try to unwind and unload their mortgages onto other institutions, interest rates will rise, the underlying value of the houses the mortgages were underwritten to buy will sink, the risk of foreclosure will increase and more banks will try to unload their debt, which will make everyone's debt actually worse because the underlying assets will be worth so much less, which Paul Krugman explained today is called the Paradox of Deleveraging but I don't think it's really that much of a paradox if you actually learned the concept from It's A Wonderful Life. Anyway, the point is, no, just as Edwin Dale thought it was a "gimmick" that this bullshit was supposed to save the government a billion dollars back when it was "privatized," it's sort of a "gimmick" that it is going to cost taxpayers a quarter trillion dollars now that it is being "nationalized" if you consider what the true cost might be if China started charging real money for all the things we buy from them, which brings me to:

3. "FOR many Americans, Sunday is for church, family lunches or catching a ball game. For the country’s financial authorities, it has become the day of the dramatic announcement…"
On one hand, this is a really dumb lead, especially for the Economist. On the other hand, everyone except the Economist was quick to point out that Sunday is actually Monday in Asia, and did you know our financial markets are totally related to theirs? The Chinese government owns a couple hundred billion dollars worth of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae bonds. The Chinese government buys American bonds because they know we are "good for it," since we have always had so much money for their Pokemon action figures and cerulean sweaters and Apple computers. They buy American bonds so interest rates don't go too high, thus inspiring people to cease buying shit they cannot afford, because they need us to keep buying shit we can't afford, because our ill-advised audio equipment purchase is their college fund, and a small shift in our spending habits can equate a large enough shift in their eating habits to trigger widespread social unrest, and if there is anything China and the US agree on "implicitly" it is that widespread social unrest is overrated! So anyway, China keeps its currency cheap so as to keep its potential unrest-causers in jobs, and on the way it generates a lot of extra American dollars for itself that it invests in the American financial markets because America seems "safe." But Chinese people are not entirely sold on this plan! When the government tried to get fancy and invest in one of our hedge funds Blackstone and it didn't work out Chinese went on the internet and wrote stuff like, The foreign reserves are the product of the sweat and blood of the people of China, please invest them with more care! Ha ha ha, that wouldn't really work here. Anyway, bottom line is that they toil away in their sweatshops on Saturdays so we can do whatever we do in those $150 aerodynamic sneakers they are producing and where we can we try to throw them a bone, as with Freddie and Fannie and that whole "stimulus check" thing.

4. "If Fan and Fred share prices rally this week, we'll know Mr. Paulson didn't demand enough." Ha ha ha, the Wall Street Journal editorial page just got preemptively mad at the market (which solves everything) for potentially responding incorrectly to government intervention (which solves nothing.) Ha ha ha, and look what happened!

5. "Remember that we have highlighted the systemic risk posed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac because of the very large role they play in housing markets and because of their business practices."
That is Bush Administration spokespretty Dana Perino, making the point that everyone might have figured out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were in trouble if they had been listening to Bush. That is bullshit of course, but it is true that no one has ever listened to Bush.*

[Crooks & Liars]

The AP caption reads, "U.S. President George W. Bush stumbles as he and his wife Laura, front, arrive to watch the swimming competitions." So it's not that he's having trouble standing, as some have suggested. It's sitting that's the problem. Totally different.

"This is all you have to show for the past four years of your life?" Note the nose.

"Kidding, heh. Actually I'll take this now." Note the red face.

"Nice flip turn or whatever, dude."

"Seriously, Dad, maybe just..."

"OK, what the hell are you even..."

"Now you've gone and embarrassed yourself in front of both of Mitt's wives. Ugh."



Bush with Chinese president Hu Jintao, looking a bit ruddy....

...and a bit droopy-eyed.

To be fair, she asked him to back-spank her.

Looks like somebody fell!

(Photos: AP and Getty Images)

"Brolin spent countless hours studying the president's speech patterns and body language but said he wasn't trying to concoct a spitting-image impression, which ran the potential of becoming a 'Saturday Night Live' caricature.

"I't's not for me to get the voice down perfectly,' the 40-year-old Brolin said, even though he came close. More important, the actor said, was to unearth Bush's inner voice—'Where is my place in this world? How do I get remembered?'

"Like other actors approached for the film (including Robert Duvall, who was asked but declined to play Vice President Dick Cheney), Brolin had more than vague misgivings about starring in 'W.' He was, in fact, dead set against it. 'When Oliver asked me, I said, 'Are you crazy? Why would I want to do this with my little moment in my career?' Brolin recalled. Then, early one morning during a family ski trip, Brolin read Weiser's original screenplay, which covers Bush from 1967 to 2004. 'It was very different than what I thought it would be," Brolin said, 'which was a far-left hammering of the president.' [...]

"'I love Michael Moore, but I didn't want to make that kind of movie,' Stone said of 'Fahrenheit 9/11.' 'W.,' he said, 'isn't an overly serious movie, but it is a serious subject. It's a Shakespearean story. . . . I see it as the strange unfolding of American democracy as I have lived it.' [...]

"While noting Bush's low approval ratings (23% in a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll released this week), Brolin, like Stone, said 'W.' isn't intended to kick the man while he's down. 'Republicans can look at it and say, "This is why I like this guy," Brolin said. 'It's not a political movie. It's a biography. People will remember that this guy is human, when we are always [outside of the movie] dehumanizing him, calling him an idiot, a puppet, a failed president. We want to know in the movie: How does a guy grow up and become the person that he did?'" [LAT]

Alcohol

The president has always denied being an acoholic, though he's copped to "drinking too much" back in his callow youth (which lasted until his 40s, by the way, when he had his convenient religious reawakening). The alcohol provided a convenient excuse for his being a no-good fuckup for his entire 20s and 30s, and the religious awakening and supposed sobering up helped him gain forgiveness for youthful indiscretions like his disorderly conduct arrest and his 1976 DUI.

Anyway. Billy Graham showed up in 1985. In July of 1986, according to the lies he told in 2000, Bush quit drinking for good.

Here is a video of George W. Bush at a wedding that supposedly took place in 1992:

When the president "choked on a pretzel" in 2002, the White House took the step of having the White House physician announce to the press that "There was absolutely, positively, no suggestion on physical examination that any alcohol was involved." He just choked on a pretzel, during a football game, and lost consciousness.

Graydon Carter sez he knows a guy who sez Bush's blood alcohol level was quite high when he was hospitalized after the pretzel incident.

(Around the same time, a number of nuttier lefty sites began blowing up and enhancing photos of the president's face to point out all the burst capillaries that proved his continued reliance on booze.)

Cocaine

The rumors made the rounds in 1999: George W. Bush did coke! This was before 9/11, when everyone started doing coke again, so it was a big deal. If it was true! Proving it became quite difficult when the person with the most damning-sounding "proof" of drug use turned out to be an unreliable criminal (much like how the people with the best proof that Bush went AWOL from the national guard were using questionable documents, FUNNY HOW THAT WORKS). So. Here are some of the rumors:

• Bush was arrested for drug use in the "late '60s or early '70s" but the arrest was expunged from his record after he performed community service. That community service may have been his stint at Houston's Project P.U.L.L. in 1972.
• But that charge comes from the book by J.H. Hatfield. Hatfield was a convicted felon. The book was pulled from shelves. Hatfield turned up dead of an apparent suicide in 2001. He claimed all along that his sources for the cocaine story included Karl Rove, who's known to talk off the record to journalists of all stripes.
• In 2004, Eric Boehlert floated the theory that Bush ditched the air force because they were instituting random drug tests. This seems like grasping at straws (lol) to us, but whatevs. It's out there.
• Bush has simply never denied using cocaine.
• If you take Scott McClellan's diagnosis at face value, Bush probably did plenty of drugs in his college days and beyond, and then more or less convinced himself that he can't even remember if he did or not. Because he's turned into a simple-minded fool.

Amusingly (to us, perhaps, and probably no one else), we now have a major candidate who's admitted to cocaine use... but that admission itself is suspect. Barack Obama famously admitted to experimenting with coke in his first memoir, Dreams From My Father. "Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though," Obama wrote in the more-than-decade-old book. The New York Times spent god knows how long trying to find anyone from Obama's adolescence who remembered him doing drugs but they came up short. Everyone remembered him as basically a square. He smoked a little weed.

We're forced to ask if Obama didn't exaggerate his drug use for the sake of a compelling narrative!

(We've come so far.)

Bush misled U.S. on Iraq, former aide says in new book [AJC]

So. Speaking before the Iraeli Knesset last week, Bush said "some people" want to "talk" to Iran. He called it appeasement. He brought up the Nazis. This was widely seen by people who listen to things and figure out what they mean as a reference to Barack Obama. Obama, naturally, took offense. No one really wants to be called a Nazi-lover.

Anyway. Richard Engel asked the president if he was referring to Barack Obama. The president did not even deny this. The Nightly News edited two sentences: "People need to read the speech. You didn't get it exactly right, either." Then Bush proceeded to repeat his assertion that talking to Iran is Nazi appeasement.

We're not sure how the interview aired on The Today Show, but reading the full transcript, it's clear that Bush does basically agree with Engel's question, just without mentioning Barack Obama.

The White House letter also includes gratuitous swipes at Chris Matthews and Keith Olbermann—which may be a hint! Olbermann's "shut the hell up, Mr. President" comment swept across the internet last week. It was maybe a bit more upsetting to the White House than a "deceptively edited" interview.

Interview of the President by Richard Engel, NBC News
Hyatt Regency Sharm el Sheikh
Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt
2:02 P.M. (Local)

Q Mr. President, thank you very much for joining us.

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, sir.

Q In front of the Israeli palm at the Knesset you said that negotiating with Iran is pointless — and then you went further, you saying — you said that it was appeasement. Were you referring to Senator Barak Obama? He certainly thought you were.

THE PRESIDENT: You know, my policies haven't changed, but evidently the political calendar has. People need to read the speech. You didn't get it exactly right, either. What I said was is that we need to take the words of people seriously. And when, you know, a leader of Iran says that they want to destroy Israel, you've got to take those words seriously. And if you don't take them seriously, then it harkens back to a day when we didn't take other words seriously. It was fitting that I talked about not taking the words of Adolph Hitler seriously on the floor of the Knesset. But I also talked about the need to defend Israel, the need to not negotiate with the likes of al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas. And the need to make sure Iran doesn't get a nuclear weapon.

But I also talked about a vision of what's possible in the Middle East.

Q Repeatedly you've talked about Iran and that you don't want to see Iran develop a nuclear weapon. How far away do you think Iran is from developing a nuclear capability?

THE PRESIDENT: You know, Richard, I don't want to speculate — and there's a lot of speculation. But one thing is for certain — we need to prevent them from learning how to enrich uranium. And I have made it clear to the Iranians that there is a seat at the table for them if they would verifiably suspend their enrichment. And if not, we'll continue to rally the world to isolate them.

Steve Capus
President, NBC News
30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, N.Y. 10112

Mr. Capus:

This e-mail is to formally request that NBC Nightly News and The Today Show air for their viewers President Bush's actual answer to correspondent Richard Engel's question about Iran policy and "appeasement," rather than the deceptively edited version of the President's answer that was aired last night on the Nightly News and this morning on The Today Show. In the interview, Engel asked the President: "You said that negotiating with Iran is pointless, and then you went further. You said that it was appeasement. Were you referring to Senator Barack Obama?"

The President responded: "You know, my policies haven't changed, but evidently the political calendar has. People need to read the speech. You didn't get it exactly right, either. What I said was is that we need to take the words of people seriously. And when, you know, a leader of Iran says that they want to destroy Israel, you've got to take those words seriously. And if you don't take them seriously, then it harkens back to a day when we didn't take other words seriously. It was fitting that I talked about not taking the words of Adolf Hitler seriously on the floor of the Knesset. But I also talked about the need to defend Israel, the need to not negotiate with the likes of al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas. And the need to make sure Iran doesn't get a nuclear weapon."

This answer makes clear: (1). The President's remarks before the Knesset were not different from past policy statements, but are now being looked at through a political prism, (2). Corrects the inaccurate premise of Engel's question by putting the "appeasement" line in the proper context of taking the words of leaders seriously, not "negotiating with Iran," (3). Restates the U.S.'s long-standing policy positions against negotiating with al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas, and not allowing Iran to obtain a nuclear weapon.

Engel's immediate follow-up question was, "Repeatedly you've talked about Iran and that you don't want to see Iran develop a nuclear weapon. How far away do you think Iran is from developing a nuclear capability?"

The President replied, "You know, Richard, I don't want to speculate - and there's a lot of speculation. But one thing is for certain - we need to prevent them from learning how to enrich uranium. And I have made it clear to the Iranians that there is a seat at the table for them if they would verifiably suspend their enrichment. And if not, we'll continue to rally the world to isolate them."

This response reiterates another long-standing policy, which is that if Iran verifiably suspends its uranium enrichment program the U.S. government would engage in talks with the Iranian government.

NBC's selective editing of the President's response is clearly intended to give viewers the impression that he agreed with Engel's characterization of his remarks when he explicitly challenged it. Furthermore, it omitted the references to al Qaeda, Hezbollah and Hamas and ignored the clarifying point in the President's follow-up response that U.S. policy is to require Iran to suspend its nuclear enrichment program before coming to the table, not that "negotiating with Iran is pointless" and amounts to "appeasement."

This deceitful editing to further a media-manufactured storyline is utterly misleading and irresponsible and I hereby request in the interest of fairness and accuracy that the network air the President's responses to both initial questions in full on the two programs that used the excerpts.

As long as I am making this formal request, please allow me to take this opportunity to ask if your network has reconsidered its position that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war, especially in light of the fact that the unity government in Baghdad recently rooted out illegal, extremist groups in Basra and reclaimed the port there for the people of Iraq, among other significant signs of progress.

On November 27, 2006, NBC News made a decision to no longer just cover the news in Iraq, but to make an analytical and editorial judgment that Iraq was in a civil war. As you know, both the United States government and the Government of Iraq disputed your account at that time. As Matt Lauer said that morning on The Today Show: "We should mention, we didn't just wake up on a Monday morning and say, 'Let's call this a civil war.' This took careful deliberation.'"

I noticed that around September of 2007, your network quietly stopped referring to conditions in Iraq as a "civil war." Is it still NBC News's carefully deliberated opinion that Iraq is in the midst of a civil war? If not, will the network publicly declare that the civil war has ended, or that it was wrong to declare it in the first place?

Lastly, when the Commerce Department on April 30 released the GDP numbers for the first quarter of 2007, Brian Williams reported it this way: "If you go by the government number, the figure that came out today stops just short of the official declaration of a recession."

The GDP estimate was a positive 0.6% for the first quarter. Slow growth, but growth nonetheless. This followed a slow but growing fourth quarter in 2007. Consequently, even if the first quarter GDP estimate had been negative, it still would not have signaled a recession - neither by the unofficial rule-of-thumb of two consecutive quarters of negative growth, nor the more robust definition by the National Bureau of Economic Research (the group that officially marks the beginnings and ends of business cycles).

Furthermore, never in our nation's history have we characterized economic conditions as a "recession" with unemployment so low - in fact, when this rate of unemployment was eventually reached in the 1990s, it was hailed as the sign of a strong economy. This rate of unemployment is lower than the average of the past three decades.

Are there numbers besides the "government number" to go by? Is there reason to believe "the government number" is suspect? How does the release of positive economic growth for two consecutive quarters, albeit limited, stop "just short of the official declaration of a recession"?

Mr. Capus, I'm sure you don't want people to conclude that there is really no distinction between the "news" as reported on NBC and the "opinion" as reported on MSNBC, despite the increasing blurring of those lines. I welcome your response to this letter, and hope it is one that reassures your broadcast network's viewers that blatantly partisan talk show hosts like Christopher Matthews and Keith Olbermann at MSNBC don't hold editorial sway over the NBC network news division.

Sincerely,

Ed Gillespie
Counselor to the President

"There are religious differences," one [source] points out. "Would he expect her to convert to Judaism?"

Lauren's mother, Sharon, is a devout Christian.

The Daily News did find one Bush insider to dispute George and Barbara Bush's disapproval of Lauren, and to point out that even the elder George Bush didn't get to invite siblings.

NB to David: If you do get invited, don't bring up Grandpa Prescott. So awkward.

[Rush & Molloy]

Why can't Bush or any of his would-be successors just act like a president instead of trying to be funny? Because they have to prove they are not "elitist," Alessanda Stanley wrote in the Times:

Elitism is to the 2008 campaign as communism was to 1950s politics: a career-breaker. And pop TV is the antidote, a free platform to rub shoulders with viewers who only glancingly pay attention to the news. Making nice on a cooking program or game show is the macropopulist equivalent of knocking down pins in a bowling alley in Altoona, Pa., or belting down Crown Royal whiskey in a bar in Crown Point, Ind., only better: the setting, be it Rachael Ray’s kitchen or Howie Mandel’s array of suitcases on “Deal or No Deal,” is as familiar as home to millions of viewers. None of the presidential candidates want to be seen as snooty or overeducated, which must be why on Monday, all three provided taped greetings to wrestling fans watching “WWE Raw” on the USA network.

This is, of course, the mediocrity-celebrating, "I-just-want-a-president-I-could-have-a-beer-with" attitude that got Bush elected eight years ago and that voters were supposed to be totally over.

Full scene: [Hollywood Reporter]

It sounds like, not-so-shockingly, Stone may have succeeded in making Bush into something of a caricature. Yes, he gives people nicknames, but did he really call Colin Powell "Baloon Foot?"

Yes, the invasion of Iraq was cavalier and underplanned, but was it really discussed like a football game? Yes, Bush was an alcoholic, but did he really crash his plane under the influence of alcohol?

In many cases, the historians answer, "No, he did not." But Stone needs to make money at a time when political films are not doing well. That means controversy.

It looks like the most controversial scene might have nothing to do with Bush's wild side but with the idea that he can be reflective and regretful:

All four Bush biographers cast doubt on one scene in which a wave crashes on a rocky promontory as Bush reveals: "There's this darkness that follows me ..."

"He doesn't think or talk like that," Weisberg said. "The darkness sounds like they've been listening to too much Springsteen. It doesn't ring psychologically true to me."

[Hollywood Reporter]

• Amy Winehouse will be airlifted away from her crack and into rehab, possibly in Israel or South Africa. A doctor told the Sun the singer's skin damage is common among crack addicts. [Sun]
• Brad Pitt is ninth cousin to Barack Obama while the movie star's wife Angelina Jolie is ninth cousin to Obama presidential rival Hillary Clinton. Also, Obama is distant cousins with George W. Bush and somehow linked to Confederate general Robert E. Lee and Dick Cheney. [OK!]
• Unlike everyone else in Los Angeles, Britney Spears actually becomes more sane when behind the wheel of a car, so Daddy Jamie is letting the singer tool around her gated community. While driving, Britney is contemplating plans for her own dance studio. [OK!]
• An Olsen twin slummed it at a Lower East Side dive. Page Six asked its drunken source which Olsen twin it was: "I think it was the fat one." Apparently that's Mary-Kate. [P6]
• Actress Pamela Anderson annulled her fairy tale eight-week Vegas marriage. [BBC]
• Former Saturday Night Live player Jimmy Fallon: Preggers! [TMZ]
• Singer Sheryl Crow a little too overeager about collaborating with Fleetwood Mac. Stevie Nicks does that to people. [Billboard]
• Heather Mills still on about former hubby and ex-Beatle Paul McCartney's hidden piles of money. [Daily Mail]
• Deceased actor Heath Ledger's estate worth somewhere between $145,000 and $60 million. Thanks, TMZ.

Ted Kennedy endorsed Barack Obama the other day, right after Caroline Kennedy did the same. They made a bunch of not particularly helpful talk about how Barry Hussein was the true heir to their dead relative Jack's legacy of being a young and mildly attractive fellow who was politically successful. They left out the bit with the filthy rich mobbed up dad pulling the strings, but maybe Obama's dad was a major operator among his fellow goat-herds back in Kenya. Stanley finds great psychological significance in all of this, but it's all pretty much the wrong psychological significance, as it involves drunk fool and poor man's Kennedy Patrick.

Representative Patrick J. Kennedy, Democrat of Rhode Island, on the stage but not of the moment, kept standing up during his father's and Mr. Obama's speeches, as if to sneak into the camera's frame. At one point while Ms. Kennedy was speaking, Senator Kennedy leaned toward Mr. Obama, who put both his arms around the senator as the two men shared a joke. Young Mr. Kennedy leaned over to try to hear their conversation, but was ignored.

Because this is Alessandra Stanley, we can't be sure that the scene described above happened in any form whatsoever, but even if it did, it's not hard to imagine that poor Patrick would not quite have been the favored son even before America's First Black Kennedy showed up on the scene. Because he's a drug-addled embarrassment. Sorry!

Oh, and Stanley's lede is "The day began in Camelot and ended in Southfork." Which, if it's trying to be a Dynasty reference, is all sorts of wrong. That was Dallas, Al!

Camelot '08 Overshadows Bush Speech [NYT]

I also want to recognize Bob Woodruff here. He is a — He himself was wounded, severely wounded, and went through the system, to a certain extent. And we welcome you back, and we're glad you're with us. And we would hope that any wounded soldier, any person in uniform would receive the kind of care and the ability to return to work, just like you have done. And so we're glad you're with us, Bob. Congratulations on the will to recover.

Woodruff Questions Bush Over Vets Care [ABC, via]

Do we sound strident? Well, it's hard to watch a nation lead into a complete cock-up of an unnecessary war that has ruined so many lives and diminished our standing in the world and sacrificed the pretense that there's something especially noble about us (My country both performs and outsources torture! I cannot tell you how proud that makes me.) and not sound strident. It's hard to watch the deck reshuffled so that those who have more continue to get more and give back less and not sound strident. It's hard to watch the utter disregard for long-established precedents and rules go unpunished and not sound strident. And still: We can be angry, and we can hope that yesterday's events finally bring things back to "normal," whatever that was, but we're not counting on it. We've seen worse, and nothing has happened.

But remember this: The next time anyone from this administration or its enablers in the media stand up in front of the American people and talk about the "rule of law," they are full of shit. And the other side's not much better. We're sort of screwed.

We're aware that we've strayed a bit from our remit here, so we'll try and put it all in a perspective that skews to the site's format: A man who ended the career of a C.I.A. agent in an attempt to forestall criticism of manipulated and outright false intelligence designed to lead this country into a war it did not need to fight, and then lied about it, will spend less time in prison than Paris Hilton.

Bush Spares Libby 30-Month Jail Term [NYT]

None of this would matter much if Mabry's subject were merely a departing secretary of state. But it's plain, even from the jacket photo of a 9-year-old Rice posing outside the White House, that this is a book about a woman who just might become president. She certainly has the right profile for it: moderate on abortion and gay rights, firm on guns, a Californian, Rice could someday be the Schwarzenegger Republican the party is looking for. There is no doubt that she has the self-discipline and confidence. She has already come so far; who would bet against her going farther?

What's that? All of them? Oh.

Madame Secretary [NYT]

Ali joins Queen Rania of Jordan, Queen Rania is paired with Bono, Bono stares at the back of Condoleezza Rice's neck, Condi is almost edged out of the picture by George W. Bush, Bush observes Bishop Desmond Tutu at prayer, Tutu stands behind a seated Brad Pitt (you'd think the dude would have offered the elderly bishop the chair), Pitt bros it up with Djimon Hounsou, who scopes out Madonna's rack. Madonna whispers something in Maya Angelou's ear, Angelou looks disapprovingly at Chris Rock, Rock tweaks Warren Buffett's ear (Africa=ears, apparently), Warren puts a calm hand on Bill and Melinda Gates, the Gateses flank Oprah, who whispers something to George Clooney (seriously, there's some kind of ear fetish here, because Clooney does the same thing to Jay-Z). Hova stands next to Alicia Keys, Keys poses with Iman, and Iman whispers to Don Cheadle, who you'll remember from his earlier appearance with Barack Obama. Whew! Caring about another continent takes a lot out of you!

Vanity Fair

Is Bush off the Wagon? [Towleroad]
[Image: Getty]

This was the scene at the White House yesterday, as President Bush celebrated Black History Month by honoring subway hero Wesley Autrey, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, New York Rep. Charlie Rangel, and... uh, a bunch of baseball players. Yay progress!

BUSH FETES SUBWAY HERO [NYP] [Image: AP]

Lauren, just few years ago seemed like a rising 10021 queen with sparkling engagement ring from David Lauren and all the designer outfits she could handle. In 2007, she dropped from our rankings completely, downsized her style, still hasn't married [David] Lauren and hasn't booked a major modeling job in more than a year.