This is Melodee Hanes, Baucus' state office director. Hanes has worked for Baucus in various capacities since 2003.

We were all set to relentlessly mock Baucus for, whatever, being a douchebag, because we have never liked him, but this is actually a pretty lame little scandal. Baucus separated from his wife in early 2008, and, according to his office, he began dating Hanes that summer. Baucus and his wife divorced this last April, and he now lives with Hanes. So... scandal! Old dude's marriage ends and he takes up with someone age appropriate whom he's been close to for some time!

But then, like an idiot, Baucus sent her name to the White House to be considered as a US Attorney from Montana. That was dumb. No one is going to believe you nominated your fucking girlfriend for a plum gig based on her qualifications.

Baucus says he nominated Hanes for the job because they decided, once their relationship became sexy, that she should no longer work in his office. And she now works at the Justice Department.

Anyway! Now Montana has Rabbis and political sex scandals!

Baucus' office is being pretty aggressive in getting out in front of this story, so unless something terribly embarrassing comes out (text messages? nudez? golf club attack?) we don't think this will change the dynamics of the reform debate too much. In fact, let's watch chummy Senators close ranks around their pal Max. Though Michael Steele is trying to make it a thing, but he is a clown.

[Pic via Joe Weisenthal who, no offense, doesn't seem to have a great grasp of the health care process in the Senate. The Reid bill is basically a reworked Baucus bill, with slightly better subsidies and an incredibly weak public option that will probably be stripped out anyway. And the Democrats are certainly not betting full-on on that weakened opt-in public option. There's your health care reform update of the day!]

*Obligatory bitchy aside: Why don't you ever write anything bad about Democrats wah wah wah etc.

Here is where things stand for Tiger, this morning: His love life is pretty fucked. Although his sex life sounds great! Of the five or so extramarital women everybody thinks he boned, the big news today is about the original Tiger Fling Girl, Rachel Uchitel. Just two days ago she gave a big front-page exclusive interview to the New York Post about how this is all bullshit and she never did anything at all with Tiger and god, this is all bullshit, because of lying whores who hate her.

Well! She's changed her mind. Rachel's having a press conference this afternoon to announce that she did, in fact, do all that sexy stuff, with Tiger Woods. (Update: The press conference was just canceled, but the admission to boning the golf star is now out there.) We assume this is because she read our advice and wants to clear the air as she moves forward with her nightlife career, but, Rachel—not so abrupt next time. The turnaround from total, vehement lie to revelation of truth that everyone already suspected must be a little smoother, so as not to make you appear to be either a psycho or blackmail victim. Although we will consider everything forgiven if you make a point to mock the New York Post's dead-wrong exclusive at your press conference.

Tiger Woods: Your job is simple. Just be Tiger Woods. That means, continue being the most robotic, uninteresting sports megastar of our time. You, sir, are a cipher. Fans and sponsors love you for it, because they can project whatever image they want upon you, and your inscrutable, uninteresting being simply swallows it up.

Golf is the most uninteresting spectator sport in the world. Golf fans are not moralists. They are people who believe that golf shirts in various shades of coral are acceptable outerwear. They are the bland upper crust of Middle America. That, and rich assholes who love to cheat on their wives. Neither of these groups of golf fans cares one bit about your marital infidelity, Tiger. Nor do your sponsors. What they do care about is being forced to think about something other than golf.

People play (and watch) golf to escape the real world. The world of golf is a world of creepy perfectly manicured lawns and rolling greens as far as the eye can see and lots middle-aged white guys. People want to embrace you as the staid, unblinking image of perfection on a golf course, Tiger. They don't want to be forced to consider who you're fucking. The masochistic desire of sports fans for a feeling of inadequacy next to their heroes does not extend into the bedroom.

So just shut the fuck up and play golf, Tiger. You'll be boring the hell out of America again before you know it.

Spencer Morgan is a very good writer for the New York Observer, and another thing about Spencer Morgan is that 100% of his articles are designed to get you mad. Usually they make you mad because he writes about men who are objectionable in one way or another. Then once in a while Spencer Morgan is like "Hey, for a change of pace I think I will play like an objectionable man, myself." This is a pose and it is how he wins, as a journalist. A mad reader is an engaged reader!

So today Spencer Morgan goes and writes a story that is clearly preposterous, on its face, inventing this new made-up term "cheetah" to describe a lady that is not as old as a "cougar" but still likes to "prey" on weak men, and fuck them, for sex, when they are drunk or otherwise vulnerable. He makes sure to say "fuck" and "pussy" a few times, right there in the story, and to quote a bunch of NYC blogger scene guys (AJ Daulerio! John Carney! Lockhart Steele!) breaking down THE GAME, and how Cheetah Women run it on men, just to underscore the very important subtext of this story, which is: "Here is a caricature of the 'Cougar' type of story, which, preposterously, is taken seriously, in the media." Whereas some fake trend stories attempt to get one over on you by making you actually believe a fake trend exists, this story does not. The headline of this story should be, "I Really Hope Many People Get Very Vocally Mad About This Story, And Talk About Sexism, Because Then It Would Be Funny How Seriously They Took This Story." (It's a bit unwieldy, yes).

Rachel Sklar is so mad about this story!

Spencer Morgan: Winning by making people mad.

[Disclosure: I am a male though. Pic via]

The lucky lady: Kathryn "Kate" Rogers. We're not sure where the wedding is taking place, yet, but Rush reads the site, so maybe he'll let us know!

Rush loves the holidays: his last wedding was on Memorial Day, 1994. Prior to that, his second wife left him on Christmas.

Contact him now. Before he becomes a star. [Pic via]

As you can see, the power couple made up a professional My First Contract™, in which Jon agrees to "employ Kate Major as a personal assistant handling some but not all future contracts," and pay her "a percentage," of something. In return, Kate says she will "run any media inquiries past Jon Gosselin," and "not make any negative or disparaging remarks." Just your average run-of-the-mill pre-fucking mutual consent agreement.

Since Jon immediately started/ never stopped fucking other people, and Kate immediately ran off to give teary interviews on national television, I guess they came out even. Are contracts written in crayon legally enforceable?
[Radaronline. Pic via]

Our tipster says she met Janka—who introduced himself as "Connor slash Paul but all my friends call me Connor"—a few months ago. Although they were barely acquainted, he proceeded to buy her a plane ticket to Rome, and invited her to come and stay with him at a friend's villa there, where they would frolic in a paradise of earthly delights. Or, as he put it in an email to her,

I bought your ticket. You should get an email shortly.
Make sure to get a waxing; I'm going to make all your holes very sore.

The young lady had second thoughts about the wisdom of joining this man she barely knew for a week in a secluded villa far away from any human help, so she declined his offer. She says, "to his defense he was upfront about wanting to have sex with me so at least he's honest in that sense, he is just NOT tactful about his approach." For example, he wanted to meet her at the airport and drive straight to the villa, to fuck. When she was wavering, he sent her the sexxxy photos you see here to help persuade her to come. After she decided not to take the trip, she says, he told her, "it's a shame you decided to get clever and fuck it all up for yourself."

But the story has a happy ending! Despite turning down Janka's hospitality, our tipster says "he still periodically contacts me with texts like 'want some coffee and want it up the ass?'" True love overcomes all.

The Africa honeymoon follows Wednesday's private reception for their nearest and dearest friends, relatives and tenants — 1,000 people at the Puck Building. And even then friends may still be discussing the wedding invitations they'd received. It had a flier inside for Donald's other golf properties.

Thanks, dad. You're a real embarrassment.

Plenty of guests must have tons of pics of the wedding. Why let the Kushner-Rubenstein-Post cabal control its entire image? If you have any wedding pics, email us—anonymity guaranteed—and we'll make our own unauthorized wedding album. The people want to see their betters in their full regalia!

Update: The conspiracy deepens! PopSugar just posted a gallery of the photos with the credit line "Photo courtesy of Brian Marcus/Fred Marcus Photography via Getty Images." When we called Fred Marcus Photography to find out who's licensing these photos, the not-very-helpful lady who picked up the phone just repeatedly said "No comment." More: Star appears to have shelled out for the pics, too.

Are these the "Free Love Cookies" in question? Or is that some sort of romantic literary reference that sailed over our heads? In any case: As you would expect, Min and Salman's modern friendship blossomed on the Facebook.

Llongots? We don't even know! And what else of Min herself—one doesn't get into Harvard just by loving models and going out with models and being way attractive, you know. It turns out she wrote quite a readable blog! It was called "Mongol Whored." Its most recent entry is from January of 2008, and it's now set to private, but the Google caches everything, you know.

"How do we know this is really Min's blog?" we asked ourselves. Well: "Here's how I roll: me: half Chinese, half Hungarian." And also, for example:

To: Hot Babe
From: Min
Subject: last night
Text: lovely to meet you last night—i had such a wonderful time. though am being punished for our revelry with a merciless hangover. totally worth it, though :) oh my god, smileys are so not my style (incredibly cheesy, no?), but i can't help smiling at some of the shit we pulled last night. we're quite a pair, don't you think?
love to see you again,
xoxo,
m

Steamy! We are fanning ourself—as, we expect, is Salman—over things like, for example:

In the graph of my (ineffectual) picking up men with lascivious intent, it's plotted with desire as the constant, and availability as the variable. There's no fucking mention of time, which I suppose is tied to ideas of decorum and the other things I missed when being raised at wolf-tit. I've had mixed success with my all-hours tactics...

I don't begrudge odd-hour requests of me, either. 19, taking the Greyhound back from Nova Scotia through New Hampshire I was stretched long in my seat, feet dangling in front of me. I woke, shoes and socks off, to the warm lapping on my toes. There was a guilty smile on the man sitting ahead of me, and I sized him up sleepily, not nasty. I thought briefly of the ripeness of my feet, nasty. And I mumbled, "do them evenly, yo."

We too would like 2 B Facebook friends 2 get 2 no U, gurl. Let's have one more.

I was writing, if you remember, about songs that make me wish I was in college again. The song of my senior year, of course, was Nelly's "Hot in Herre." The next year, the first year of my nostalgia, was "Hey Ya," and this year it's "Promiscuous" and "Buttons." I speak of this with my old college roommates, and we wistfully speak of the days where we mixed Red Bull, vodka, and champagne, and called it a cocktail, of dragging ourselves into an 11am sections and thinking it was early, of when scabies and self-loathing were the most serious STDs floating around campus. My musical tastes usually run to the more, well, good, but not in the case of these particular songs, these songs of if not love, then youthful experimentation and inexperience. And the rare moment when I'm walking past a homeless dude selling some acrylic gloves and pleather cellphone holders and I hear "Promiscuous," I think, damn, wish I were in college. But that I'm moved to undulate, grinding with an imagined partner on W 23rd street, reminds me, hey, maybe it's a good thing you're not in college anymore, maybe it's some sort of silver lining blessing kinda thing, maybe college Min couldn't have handled this kinda shit. Now I hear "Promiscuous," and think, damn, shame that I'm missing making out with 20 year olds to this song, but I probably saved myself an abortion or ten.

We totally like that song, too—and its message. Salman Rushdie, you are one charismatic fella.

• She Loves Models: "My name is Min Lieskovsky, I'm 26, and I'm addicted to male models. I've dated six of the world's top models, as ranked by Models.com," she wrote in Elle Girl. Perhaps her tastes have, ah, changed, a bit? "My secret to dating male models is simple: Tell them they're smart," she writes. Or, date a smart guy, and tell him he's attractive!
• She Is Quite a Hottie, if She Does Say So Herself: Let's pull more from that same Elle Girl story, which is truly a unique window into the psyche of Min Lieskovsky. "Each male model I dated told me he had never met a girl like me: smart, but easy to talk to; nerdy, but still pretty hot." Interesting. Are you in fact pretty hot? "I have long harbored fantasies of being a model," she says, but goes on to clarify, with admirable humility, "At 5'6" and 130 pounds, I consider myself quite a fox, but I'm not model material." Actually, she could have been a model if she weren't such a rebel: "the popular boys in my school who ranked hot girls said they'd have put me at No. 1 if I hadn't shaved my head or worn lederhosen."
• She Went to School, You Know, In Boston: "And while, with a Harvard diploma, I had entrée to a career of my choice, there was something very attractive about the idea of achieving fame with very little effort." Her thesis was about Cambodian genocide: "I'm really interested in human capabilities, which is why I'm interested in poetry, music, stuff like that. Genocide is just another one of those human capabilities, it's how you basically live death."
• She's Finally Listening to Her Mother: "Then I remember that men display identical tastes to mine, preferences that tend toward the young and professionally pulchritudinous. Women my mother's age have told me to find a man who would be a good father and provider, meaning: food, shelter, a steady income-stability. I smile and refrain from telling them that I can afford my own food and rent and that my friends and family give me support and love. About the only thing that I can't give myself is that flush of excitement upon locking eyes (and lips) with a really gorgeous guy." Uh huh.
• She Apparently Made Up Her Own Job Title: According to LinkedIn, Min is a "Writing and Ethnographic Marketing Consultant." Uh huh.
• She Enjoys Traveling: She went to Cambodia once with her writer friend! She had a good time. And took pictures. And that's just the beginning: "Lieskovsky's wanderings have taken her across Europe and to a number of South American countries. Along the way, she has partied at the American embassy in Cambodia, bluffed her way into a maximum security prison and learned bank-robbing tips from Long Beach Crips exiled in Cambodia. Lieskovsky isn't anywhere near done. 'I want to go to as many dangerous places as possible,' she says."
• She Has Goals: "'I want to be Angelina Jolie's assistant in Cambodia,' she exclaims."
• Her Friends Love Her: "'I can't think of anything that make her anything like other people. I don't know if she has any human traits really,' says blockmate Jennifer L. Nelson '03."

And there's more: The Facebook Flirting Salman Rushdie Used to Win Min Lieskovsky's Heart

[Pics: Myspace, Friendster]

On housework, wives spend an average of 42 hours per week, and husbands spend 23. But husbands spend 34 hours on "paid work," and wives spend 20. Plus, "paying bills" counts as housework, so who even knows what's what? Let's get to the sexxxy part!

Couples reported having sex 82.7 times a year on average, or 1.6 times a week, about the same as in other studies.

All that housework just to get laid once a week! Has anyone tried having sex instead of doing housework? Perhaps it is time we moved towards that model, for equality, and love?

Oh and also scientists proved that Viagra works. So.
[Pic via]

Pia Glenn, a ludicrously tall 32-year-old stage actress, started dating Rushdie in September of 2007; Rushdie dumped her via e-mail (well, he is a writer, right?) in June. On Sunday, she told the Daily Mail that he was a coward, and today she tells the Post that he still isn't over Padma:

He would talk about Padma day and night. He felt hurt and betrayed by her. He would talk about her so much I'd ask him to stop.

Glenn tried to keep in touch with Rushdie after he dumped her, but they just ended up fighting all the time. "Its clear that he's not interested in friendship now, which calls into question why he was interested in me in the first place," she told the paper. "If I had thought he only wanted me for sex, I would have gotten out immediately."

Yeah, because who'd have thought that a 62-year-old, four-time married novelist who only dates models who are 25 years younger and a full foot taller than him would want a woman for sex?

Welcome to TrulyMadlyDating.com. British Vogue gave it a shoutout in a clever little advertorial plug yesterday:

TRULYMADLYDATING.COM is Conde Nast International's first dating site, supported by GLAMOUR.COM and GQ.COM, and created to unite glamorous girls with fashion-conscious GQ-reading boys to create matches made in style heaven.

So! Conde Nast setting up Conde Nast fans with Conde Nast fans. And we are nothing if not Conde Nast fans. Some people think there may be a problem with this:

Trying to set up Glamour readers and GQ readers seems like a pretty clever idea. One Fashionista editor, Abby Gardner however, is worried that most of the people in said "style heaven" are gay, so setting them up with a site that seems geared towards heteros will be hard. She also wonders why Condé thinks that entering the online dating business is a good idea: "I simply don't understand this use of resources or what on earth it has to do with your core business. If someone else can explain it to me, please do."

Not being an expert in this field, I can't exactly provide a cost-benefit analysis of how much TRULYMADLYDATING.COM is going to assist the beleaguered media corporation on behalf of the people who still work there that would like to keep their jobs, thank you very much. But! I am a consumer. And as a consumer, I can provide you with a review of my experience on the site! For a site that more or less serves as an advert for the properties it's associated with, it's pretty expensive!

6 months : £9.99/month Invoiced in one payment of £59.94 Save 50% on the normal 1 month rate!

It's filled with lots of Canadian people. Of course it's filled with Canadians. Can't really verify them, can you? [Ed. We have yet to try.]

Since Si's busy these days, we decided we'd test it out on his behalf. This profile basically took about two hours to fill out, and the email confirmation landed squarely in my SPAM box.

Decent, right? Si's assistants, feel free to help me fill in the brackets. Because, as of right now, it's a little lonely out here.

We'll be keeping you updated on our friend-finding progress for Si. Place your bets, ladies and germs. Hopefully, the field will get a little thicker as time goes on. In the mean time, I'm gonna have to give Conde's latest launch a little bit of a downward-titled thumb. It's a pain in the ass to use, it costs money, and it made me feel lonely (on behalf of Si). Also, its competition is the Gentile-friendly J-Date. Enough said.

• That Dude Mostly Blackmailed Letterman Just to Make Him Feel Pain, Allegedly: The New York Post's daily Letterman angle is that Joe Halderman, the guy who tried to extort Dave for $2 mil, didn't even care about the money that much—he wanted to see suffering! "He wants to hurt Letterman as much as he can — and he wanted to hurt the girl, too," said a snitch. Probably because Dave was still boning Stephanie Birkitt, Halderman's girlfriend.
• Grandma Speaks: Stephanie Birkitt's 90 year-old grandmother told the Post, "She said she never had sex with him." Christ. Leave that old lady alone, sex-talking reporters.
• Sexy Letters Exist Maybe: Hello, the Daily News still has some fight in it! New York's slightly less skeevy tabloid gets back in the Letterman Scandal Game with today's story: Stephanie Birkitt wrote (but never mailed) "'trashy' love letters [to Letterman] that will embarrass them both when they become public, sources said Tuesday." One might argue that we cum-hungry tabloid news outlets should be more embarrassed about reading and publicizing the contents of a lady's unsent private love letters. It's a debatable matter!
• Who's Leaking All This?: Yesterday we mused over who might be the source for all this inside info about the case. Letterman's camp? Halderman's lawyer? Birkitt's friends? Judging by what's come out today, we can safely assume: It's the fucking cops.

Pretty much every "fact," including surveillance video, points to a scenario where Hiram—an asshole by nature—came home, found another guy's card in his girlfriend's purse, got angry, and proceeded to slash up her face with a broken glass. It happens, when you go out with Hiram Monserrate. But who are we to say that his girlfriend's version is not the true one?

"He was not dragging me," Ms. Giraldo said of a security video that showed Mr. Monserrate yanking her away from a neighbor's door and through the lobby on the way to a hospital. "He never hurt me or did anything to me. He was pulling me for my own good, and thanks to him I'm all right and my face is all right."

He tripped and smashed the glass in her face accidentally and then he was just trying to help, sez the happy couple. Well. She was the one there who got her face slashed by this guy and if she wants to say he was innocent then there's really no law against that, except, theoretically, the laws against perjury and witness intimidation and maybe some sort of mental fitness standards for testifying witnesses.
[Pic: AP]