• Last time we heard from Mitch Winehouse, he was talking about daughter Amy's hot new rack. Now he's explaining the real reason for Amy's trip to the hospital last weekend: "It wasn't because she had a cold. She's fine, she just had a little [points to his chest] leaky something or other." Does that really happen? Brand new breasts just spring a leak? I was always under the impression you had to be skydiving into ice-cold water or boxing Layla Ali to apply enough force to bust one of those open, but then, Wino has always been somewhat impervious to the laws of physics. [Sun]
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• Demi Moore was totes photoshopped on her ragingly hot W cover. [fig.1] But, despite the overwhelming evidence, she's still denying it! [fig.2] Mrs. Ashton Kutcher retweeted several fans' defenses of her weirdly photoshopped hip, cheering "I have no hips!" and "I love the pic and can only say I wish I had good lighting like that following me around all day!! Haha" and "i am in the skinny side lately." [HuffPo]
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• Levi Johnston went to GQ's Men of the Year party and no one gave a crap about him. Apparently Hollywood isn't as into Ricky Hollywood as ol' New York is, probably because their sense of irony is weaker. [HuffPo]
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• Everyone's still mad at Kate Moss for saying "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels" a couple days ago. Now activists are pulling the mommy card, since Moss has a seven-year-old daughter. Moss' modeling agency stands by her, though they are suddenly reminded why the Kate Moss policy was always "look pretty, don't open mouth." [Us]
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• John Kerry has rushed to daughter Alexandra's defense regarding yesterday's DUI arrest, and seems cautiously optimistic about his daughter's fate, since she was under the legal BAC limit and was pulled over for expired tags. TMZ says "it's unlikely prosecutors will file charges," which probably has nothing to do with My Daddy the Senator, but then again, it probably doesn't hurt. [TMZ]
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• Out editor Aaron Hicklin got pissed at Adam Lambert for faking straight too many times, and Lambert is pissed right back. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, the American Idol star says Hicklin "really crossed a line," took statements "out of context," and unfairly pigeonholed him. "Not every gay man is the same gay man," Lambert said. "It's just sexuality." That's right, nobody can take your sexuality away from you, other than marketing executives with big plans for making your album go platinum with teen girls. Anyway, now that we've entered the "critical discourse on the nature of human sexuality" phase of this story, I'm officially jumping ship. Get back to me when you date someone interesting or make a sex tape, Adam. [EW]
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• Tina Fey's nefarious plot to destroy NBC continues. At an Ad Council gala the 30 Rock star joked, "NBC is sadly the fourth-place network; actually, we're in ninth place if you count the radio stations ahead of us right now." The crowd laughed uproariously and as it slowly dawned on a room full of NBC-Universal executives that they might not be in on the joke any more. [P6]
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• For her seventeenth birthday, Miley Cyrus dressed up as Julia Roberts' character from Pretty Woman, A.K.A., a whore. Jesus Christ, Billy Ray, rein in your daughters. [P6]
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• Top fashion model Daul Kim, a 20-year-old from South Korea, was found dead yesterday in her Paris apartment in an apparent suicide. Kim shot video diaries and had a popular blog. Her last post, dated the day before her death, read "say hi to for ever." [P6]
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Figures 1 & 2

In other people-related-to-politicians-who-also-allegedly-drive-drunk news, Sen. John Kerry's daughter Alexandra was arrested for driving under the influence early this morning in Hollywood. These things come in threes, and we're counting on the Kennedy family to step up to the plate.

In a regulatory filing today, Sinclair executives admitted that they don't have enough cash on hand to meet the company's debt obligations, and that creditors could force the company into bankruptcy. It lost $85 million in the first quarter, owing largely to the cratering in automotive and retail advertising. It's got roughly $11 million in the bank and $1.3 billion in outstanding debt.

Sinclair is run by right-wing ideologues who refused to let the company's stations air a Nightline broadcast that recited the names of the Iraq war dead (there were just 700 at the time), insisted on pre-empting network programming two weeks before the 2004 election to air Stolen Honor, a "documentary" accusing John Kerry of betraying Vietnam POWs, and gave executive Mark Hyman a platform for commentaries that accused NPR of "aiding and abetting the enemy" for reporting on civilian casualties in Afghanistan.

The upside of the total decimation of the broadcast media business is that people like that will lose their jobs. Sinclair has scheduled a conference call with its creditors today at 3 p.m.

In 2004, he was behind the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth," a group that claimed that not only was John Kerry not a war hero, but in fact he had never even been to Vietnam, or even on a boat, as boats made him seasick, because he is French. He actually spent the majority of the 60s and 70s making love to Jane Fonda on a burning American flag.

Now John Kerry did not really respond to these claims very effectively or quickly, but part of that was surely because he did not expect these sort of goofy attack ads to suddenly become serious topics of impassioned debate on the television, giving them exposure far beyond what Mr. Pickens actually paid for.

And the Times reported recently that Pickens is welshing on a million dollar bet he offered to anyone who could disprove the claims of the Swift Boat people. The Times also said: "Extensive media accounts undermined the Swift Boat charges in 2004, pointing out that some of the Swift Boat critics had written statements during Vietnam lauding Mr. Kerry for extraordinary bravery in the incidents they later said he made up." MediaMatters is upset (su-prise, su-prise, su-prise! Charles Durning as T. Boone Pickens might say here) because the extensive undermining thing did not really happen until well after most media outlets simply repeated all the claims without context, 500,000 times. Though to be fair, the Times largely ignored the Swift Boat people, because they, like Kerry, thought they were so ridiculous, so it was more of a sin of omission.

But one man who did publicly criticize and refute the claims of this terrible group of liars is American Hero John McCain! He fought in Vietnam too, you may remember, so he is pretty confident that it actually happened and John Kerry was there.

Now, though, McCain is happily accepting money from the people who funded these terrible lies he denounced in 2004. Because he's a MAVERICK. McCain also brought out Swift Boat member Bud Day for a conference call on Monday. Day was there to respond to the terrible lies Wesley Clark made about McCain's war service, because irony is dead.

But here is some good news: T. Boone Pickens, as a proper old-fashioned evil Texas oil billionaire, still quietly hates John McCain and will not be donating any money to anyone this year.

Young, eager campaign aides are stock characters in movies and on television, but few have quite the élan of Mr. Love, who, at 6-foot-5, is about three inches taller than the tall candidate, fitter than the fit candidate (he can bench press more than 350 pounds) and cooler than the cool candidate.

"There's no doubt that Reggie is cooler than I am," Mr. Obama said, laughing, in a phone interview. "I am living vicariously through Reggie."

The Times basically runs this story (the candidate's shadow who makes sure he never has to make his own sandwiches ever again) every election season. As we read we tried to remember the name of John Kerry's guy but then they conveniently linked to the 2004 story. The New York Times is adapting to the digital age and making our "this story looks like that story" posts so much easier!

John Kerry's "body man" was Marvin Nicholson Jr, which is not as cool of a name as Reggie Love. But Nicholson was "a former bartender and golf caddie," which is almost as cool as former college football player. He spent most of his time making John Kerry peanut butter sandwiches and never introduced Kerry to Jay-Z, which is why John Kerry was such a lousy candidate.

Hello [name redacted],

I don't write to you that often about films, except when they strike a very special chord and cry out for some special attention (think "An Inconvenient Truth," or Leo DiCaprio's "Eleventh Hour.")

A couple weeks ago, Harry Reid handed me a DVD copy of a film that's hitting theaters now — Paul Haggis' "In the Valley of Elah."

I took it home, watched it, and I think this film crosses that same threshold — because it's gutsy and risky and challenging to bring out a movie during a time of war that captures the tragic but very real effects of war on families, friends, and loved ones when they come home.

But you know, in this war— where we're reminded our troops and their families have been asked to sacrifice so much while the rest of America was asked to "go shopping"— I think that a dose of reality is needed.

In every war, the costs are paid by soldiers and their families, whether they are killed, wounded, or have to live with some of the "invisible wounds" of war that are so hard to heal.

I think it's a healthy thing for every American to watch "In the Valley of Elah" — and think about someone you know and love, or someone you may never meet — someone else's son or daughter, brother or sister— as this film traces the mysterious disappearance of a soldier returning from Iraq, and delves into the searing effect of combat on the soldier, his family, and those who love him.

The former top operating officer at the Pentagon, a Marine Lieutenant General, once said of Iraq that "the commitment of our forces to this fight was done with a casualness and swagger that are the special province of those who have never had to execute these missions —or bury the results."

You can't help but remember those words when you watch this movie. It's not an "anti-war" film; those words are too cheap and easy and clichéd.

No, this is a film about soldiers and families — and a family's search for the truth, and a nation's responsibility to be there for our troops not just when they're sent into battle, but when the boots come off and they come home.

Please watch this movie — because I think if you do, it will give other Directors some hope and some motivation to do what Paul Haggis did and make more movies which confront these issues with the unflinching honesty of "In the Valley of Elah."

To learn more about this important new film, please check out its website at:
http://wip.warnerbros.com/inthevalleyofelah.

Thank you,
John Kerry

Or, you get stuck making the same mistake and running the same correction again.

That's what happened today, when the Times was forced to run a correction that was nearly identical to the one they'd originally published in November, after yesterday's article by Adam Nagourney about how Kerry won't run in 08 quoted Zernicke's original, erroneous reporting of the joke word for word. How did this happen? Like most things about real journalism, it's beyond our ken. One thing's still certain, though: Kerry's joke is still kind of funny either way.

NYT Repeats Error on NYT's Botched Joke [Brendan Nyhan]
Corrections: For The Record [NYT]

UPDATE: Times senior editor Greg Brock writes us with an answer to the question:

Because I oversee corrections for The Times, I wanted to drop you a note and set the record straight on the Kerry "botched joke" correction this morning. Despite the item posted on Gawker, Adam Nagourney did not make the error. The quotation was added to the article by an editor — without Adam's knowledge.

Had I known that, the correction would have begun with our standard phrase: "Because of an editing error." The reason I did not know it was an editing error was because the editors preparing the correction did not talk to Adam or check with an editor to see if it had been an editing error — our standard policy. We are never supposed to publish a correction without first talking to the reporter or the editor who made the error. We have slipped a few times. But, in general, no staff member is supposed to be surprised to see a correction about their work in the paper — as Adam was this morning.

Just for the record, Adam covered the original "botched joke" story. His article on Nov. 1, 2006, had the correct quotation as spoken by Mr. Kerry. It was, as the Gawker item correctly points out, a subsequent Political Memo on Nov. 2 that carried the incorrect quotation. And we corrected that on Nov. 3.

· "Chloe Sevigny - Saturday night - 10ish, Sandy Dalal - Saturday night - 10:30" [where?]
· "Helen Hunt crossing Madison Avenue at 88th Street [yesterday] looking tired from a workout. Maura Tierney at Mare Chiaro in Little Italy Friday quietly enjoying a drink."
· "So here in Edinburgh, Scotland, I spot J.K.Rowling of Harry Potter fame the other day. I knew she lived in my area, but didn't expect to see her walking down the street with her newborn. I was just waitin at the bus stop."
· "I just ate lunch at Angelika s Kitchen and Senator John Kerry was there. He had bread with spread and some steamed vegetables and tofu. Took a fig bar to go. That s my third Angelika s Kitchen celeb sighting in the last three months. I saw Casey Affleck there in February and Sam Rockwell in March."
· "I sat next to Mariel Hemingway on the uptown 1 train on Friday. She was with her daughter."
· "1:07 pm saw jonathon van gieson checking himself out in a starbuck's window."
· "I was hanging out near the Bowery—Nolita, as they say—late Saturday night and as I was coming out of that Rice Pudding Palace or whatever it's called with a big heeping bowl of Cinnamon/Vanilla slop ($4.50 for that shit, can you believe it??) and as I'm walking along eating, I bump into Kate Hudson—that chick from Almost Famous—and she's with some long-haired dude
who looks like he'd just come out of rehab or something. So, I get a little bit of pudding on her white shirt and she starts flipping out! I mean, flipping out! And this long-haired guy wants to like fight me or something because I spilled some pudding on her shirt. He pushes me and slaps the pudding out of my hand. I'm like "Dude, it's fucking pudding. Chill the fuck out!" and he gets all "Watch where your going, you fucking idiot!". And then I get a better look at the guy and it looks like that dude from the Counting Crows, the lead singer. He's such a fucking punk. So, then I'm telling my friend this and she tells me she's married to the guy. She's really pretty, so I don't know why she'd be with that loser.
I mean, I love Mr. Johnson too, but dude, that was like 10 years ago. And it's just fucking pudding. Christ."