Speaking with Larry King stand-in Wolf Blitzer, an absolutely confused Falcon, explaining why he didn't come out of hiding when he heard his parents calling his name, blurted, "You guys said, that, um, we did this for the show." We assume he's referring to Wife Swap, a show upon which the family has appeared twice.

His father's initial response to the apparent confession? A disgraced "man."

Update: Daddy dearest later said he was "appalled" by intimations the family did this all for publicity. Simply appalled!

And the CNN Situation Room host sucked. He didn't know where Jesus was born. He thinks Julia Childs wrote Mastering the Art of French Cooking. He was just not good at Jeopardy.

It doesn't help that he was playing against Jeopardy wizard Andy Richter, who handily won $68,000 for the St. Jude Children's Hospital, but Dana Delany was there too and she didn't end the Double Jeopardy round thousand of dollars in the hole.

Even better: The Tonight Show aired scenes from the show rehearsal, where you can see Wolf being even dumber and also weirdly rude and pretentious. What this guy has to be pretentious about is anybody's guess.

Full Jeopardy episode, at least until it is removed from YouTube:

Singer Jessica Simpson's missing dog might as well be her actual human baby, the baby she inadvertently fed to coyotes.

Kirstie Alley, the actress and Scientologist, has been hoodwinked into spending exorbitant amounts of money to achieve arbitrary nonsensical goals inside a made-up world created expressly for the purpose of separating people from their money. Go figure.

Mark Glaser, PBS' media critic, didn't know the power of his own tweets.

Diablo Cody craved a long-delayed three way with Ben & Jerry.

CNN's Situation Room has finally been hooked up to Twitter, as Wolf Blitzer joins the microblogging service. Finally, someone has brought a rapid, disjointed discussion of the news cycle to Twitter.

Did you witness the media elite tweet something indiscreet? Please email us your favorite tweets - or send us more Twitter usernames.

We are not going to go going into the details of her response to a monologue joke she is purposefully misunderstanding in order to draw attention to herself as an aggrieved victim of the liberal media except to note that she still does the really obvious thing where she gets nervous and stumbles as she tries to remember a line she rehearsed. Hasn't she had any media training since the election or does it just not work with her? Christ.

Also it's amazing that people on the TV are happy to pretend to be the stupidest person in the world in order to take seriously things stupid people say. Or not really that amazing. This is Wolf Blitzer, after all.

Anyway! She is going to run for president. She didn't say she would, but she will.

Also: she still lies, all the time, about everything, because it is basically just the only way she has to communicate.

Oh good, here come Paul Begala and Mary Matalin! ARGH. Who can stand to watch CNN, ever?

Here is a clip of Palin talking about Obama because honestly we refuse to link to the clip of her talking about the other thing.

You can find more terrible clips here.

Bush torture memo-crafter John Yoo thinks that Obama's pick is nothing more than race-pandering for votes:

Obama had some truly outstanding legal intellectuals and judges to choose from-Cass Sunstein, Elena Kagan, and Diane Wood come immediately to mind. The White House chose a judge distinguished from the other members of that list only by her race. Obama may say he wants to put someone on the Court with a rags-to-riches background, but locking in the political support of Hispanics must sit higher in his priorities.

Sotomayor's record on the bench, at first glance, appears undistinguished. She will not bring to the table the firepower that many liberal academics are asking for. There are no opinions that suggest she would change the direction of constitutional law as have Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, or Robert Bork and Richard Posner on the appeals courts. Liberals have missed their chance to put on the Court an intellectual leader who will bring about a progressive revolution in the law.

Matthew Yglesias likes Sotomayor's life story:

The argument is going to be out there that this isn't irrelevant, but I think to a normal person something that immediately leaps out about Sonia Sotomayor is that for someone who has all the usual qualifications to be a Supreme Court Justice, she also has an unusual life story. She's been on the Appeals Court and before that the District Court, and she went to Yale Law School. But she also grew up in a housing project in the Bronx, after her parents moved to New York from Puerto Rico.

It's the kind of story that makes you feel good about America and that still resonates as quintessentially American even though social mobility in the United States isn't quite what we like to think.

Politico's Jonathon Martin is sort of impressed at Obama's lack of risk in the Sotomayor pick:

In picking the candidate whose name surfaced within hours of first leak about Justice David Souter's retirement, Obama is also demonstrating the same profile in caution that has colored previous big decisions, such as who to name as his running mate.

George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr called her "a liberal mirror image of Samuel Alito" - a child of the meritocracy with a resume that is big on credentials and low on controversy.

It's hard to be breathtaking and boring, but Obama somehow finds a way.

TNR's legal analyst Jeffrey Rosen, one of Sotomayor's most vocal critics to date, is throwing her his tepid support while voicing displeasure over conservatives twisting his words to suit their cause:

Conservatives are already citing my initial piece on Sotomayor as a basis for opposing her. This willfully misreads both my piece and the follow-up response. My concern was that she might not make the most effective liberal voice on the Court—not that she didn't have the potential to be a fine justice. Questions of temperament are often overlooked, but history suggests that they are the most relevant in predicting judicial success. (Justice Scalia may be a brilliant bomb-thrower, but has failed in his attempts to build coalitions and bipartisan majorities.) Now is the time to think more broadly about the role Justice Sotomayor is likely to play on the Supreme Court, and I look forward to doing that in the weeks ahead.

The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb sees Sotomayor as Obama's Harriet Myers:

She will, presumably, be a reliable liberal vote — nothing more, nothing less. Conservatives could have done much worse, but we're getting a liberal Harriet Miers instead of a liberal Alito. The real danger for conservatives is that Sotomayor becomes a Hispanic icon who's seen as being unfairly maligned by Republicans. That could further alienate Hispanics from the party and do lasting damage to the conservative revolution in ways that Sotomayor herself never could.

Marc Ambinder says that Obama is sending a clear message with the pick, one that he's been secretly enthused about:

Obama is sending a few different messages to a few different audiences. To liberals, the pick sells itself — a progressive superstar with fantastic academic credentials. Obama is addressing conservatives only because he wants to get his judge confirmed by a wide margin. To the rest of the country, the Sotomayor pick will embody Obama's judicial philosophy — going beyond theory to, as the talking points say, "ensure consistent, fair, common-sense application of the law to real-world facts."

"I strive never to forget he real world consequences of my decisions," Sotomayor said today.

On Thursday, Obama was in a jaunty mood after he interviewed Sotomayor. A few groups of reporters were meeting in the West Wing with senior officials, and the President decided to stop by. He was an in expansive mood and riffed about the direction of the court. He did not tip his hand about the interview or the identity of his pick, and he asked that his musings be shared off the record. But it was clear that he was excited about how his pick would energize the court.

Rush Limbaugh predictably thinks that the Republicans need to "go to the mat" to fight the nomination, which he thinks proves once and for all that Obama is a "reverse racist":

She is the embodiment of the criticism of a judge or a justice who is all wrong for the highest court in the land. So of course the Republican Party should go to the mat on this because in the process of doing so, the American people will find out more about Barack Obama and who he really is; what he really believes in. And her choice, this choice helps to tell the real story of Barack Obama. This is a debate worth having...Obama is the greatest living example of a reverse racist, and now he's appointed one.

Ann Althouse, who likes the pick, thinks that Republicans can learn a lot and in turn do some good for the future of their party by acting like mature adults through the upcoming confirmation process:

If confirmation is about agreeing with the ideology, then Republicans might want to vote against Sotomayor. But confirmation should not be about ideology, and conservatives ought to want to prove that principle by their votes. Use the confirmation hearings to delineate what liberal judicial ideology is and why people ought to reject it. Then get a good presidential candidate for 2012 and make Supreme Court nominations an issue. Is that too hard? Does that take too long? Too bad! You say you want a Justice who will tell the truth about what the Constitution means. But here's something about what the Constitution means: The President has the appointment power.

Former Bush Attorney General Alberto Gonzales sang the pick's praises to CNN's Wolf Blitzer:

This is a powerful message, a powerful message of hope and opportunity through this appointment, just like there's a powerful message sent when an African-American is elected president or an African-American or a Hispanic is appointed as attorney general of the United States. It's a powerful message that a president listens to. And this president obviously did.

Harvard economist Greg Mankiw takes issue with Sotomayor's lack of savings:

Some people with low incomes manage to scrimp and save (I always think of my grandmother), and some people with high incomes spend most everything they earn.

Apparently, the new Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor is an example of the latter. The Washington Post reports that the 54-year-old Sotomayer has a $179,500 yearly salary but

On her financial disclosure report for 2007, she said her only financial holdings were a Citibank checking and savings account, worth $50,000 to $115,000 combined. During the previous four years, the money in the accounts at some points was listed as low as $30,000.

My grandmother would have been shocked and appalled to see someone who makes so much save so little.

Nate Silver takes Greg Mankiw to his statistical woodshed for his comments about Sotomayor's spending habits:

Mankiw's critique is a bizarre on several levels. For one thing, while a $179,000-per-year income is quite a lot wherever one lives, it doesn't go as far in New York City as in almost any other place. State taxes in New York are pretty high for the upper income brackets, and New York City also charges a city tax of 3.648%. As a single filer, Sotomayor's income tax burden, counting her federal nut, is probably something like $65,000.

In addition, New York City is an expensive place to live: particularly on the Island of Manhattan, and even more particularly in the West Village neighborhood where Sotomayor has her apartment. The average price of a two-bedroom rental apartment apartment in a doorman building in Greenwich Villiage is $5,396 per month, or about $65,000 per year. (Sotomayor, from what I can gather, in fact still rents her space). So considering her tax bill and the cost of her apartment, Sotomayor is down to "only" about $50,000 in disposable income per year. A single person can certainly live very well on that sort of income — even in Manhattan — but would probably not live what we'd ordinarily consider an extravagant lifestyle. It would be quite easy to spend a good chunk of that $50,000 on utilities, transport, groceries, and extra medical care (Sotomayor is diabetic); throw in a couple of nice meals out every month, tickets to a dozen Yankees games each year, and maybe a week's worth of vacation, and you're not going to have a whole heck of a lot left over. And of course, if one is generous with one's friends, or gives money to one's extended family or to charity, the money will go even faster. Sure, it's a pretty full life. But it's not likely that Sotomayor is downing bottles of Cristal and snorting coke in the bathroom every Friday at Hotel Gansevoort, or having four-martini lunches with the Sex and the City girls at Bryant Park.

We've been waiting to hear Andrew Sullivan's and Michelle Malkin's thoughts on Sotomayor, but haven't seen any updates from either of them yet. We'll update the post when we do.

What The Sonia Sotomayor Pick Says About Barack Obama [Politico]
Sotomayor: No Threat to the Revolution [Weekly Standard]
Empathy Triumphs Over Excellence [John Yoo]
Rush Limbaugh Advises Republicans to "Take It to the Mat" [Ann Althouse]
GOP Must Go to Mat on Sotomayor to Tell Real Story of Barack Obama [Rush Limbaugh]
Alberto Gonzales: Sotomayor Pick Gives Hope [CNN]
Obama's Pick, From the Start [Marc Ambinder/Atlantic]
The Sotomayor Nomination [TNR]
The Sotomayor Story [Matthew Yglesias]
SCOTUS Appointee is a Spender [Greg Mankiw]
Grandmother of World's 23rd Best Economist Posthumously Offeneded by Sonia Sotomayor's Spending Habits; Will Obama Withdraw Nomination? [FiveThirtyEight]

The White House correspondent writes in a lengthy, melodramatic recap that he started out nervous, about doing his job. "Millions were watching... you might get flustered and screw up."

But Henry had received Jedi training from sage journalism master Wolf Blitzer just this past weekend. And he was determined to stick with the same strategy that worked for him last time around, to BECOME the story and

make news on something unexpected (I won't tell you which topics I was working on cause it would ruin the surprise for a future presser or interview with the president).

It's so kind of Henry to preserve for his readers the future delight of hearing his piercing, unexpected questions FRESH at the next televised White House press conference.

Anyway, Henry could tell his questioning got under the president's skin. Win! Time to press the advantage with a followup.

So I waited patiently and then decided to pounce with a sharp follow-up. From just a few feet away, I could see in his body language that the normally calm and cool president was perturbed.

Then of course came the now-famous Obama rebuke. The president "did slap me down a bit," Henry concedes, by explaining that the White House delayed saying anything about the AIG bonuses "because I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak." BURN.

But Ed Henry doesn't mind, because "I was doing my job" — the job of "making news on something unexpected" and crucial, like calling the president an outrage coward who hates his daughters. At this rate he'll have his own annoying CNN show in no time.

The CNN anchor and Vanderbilt family golden child went on DeGeneres' show today. Having seen Chris Matthews and Wolf Blitzer play along with the daytime talk show host's "dance with me" routine, he knew better: "No one really wants to see a middle-aged guy with silver hair, wriggling.

"I was raised to supress all my emotions — I can't be publicly expressing things."

You don't say!

1. Mark Penn The world's worst pollster delivered Bill Clinton the White House in 1996, you know, when he ran against a literal wooden board in a suit named Bob Dole, so obviously Penn was well-qualified to organize the series of damaging turf wars that was the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, a squabbling joke of smears and slap-dash message reinvention. He charged her a zillion dollars to lose and everyone in the world hates him. Of course he is releasing a book about these little demographic groups he makes up and he is also a columnist at a famous newspaper, the Wall Street Journal.

2. Bill Kristol Bill is also a columnist for a famous newspaper, the New York Times. He invented Sarah Palin. He is a sad pathetic moron whose shame at his own intellectual dishonesty occasionally threatens to break through the surface of his constant lying, to himself and to the nation, about everything. He will probably not be a columnist at the Times for very much longer but he does still have his very own Rupert Murdoch magazine, and his last name.

3. Mark Halperin Mark Halperin used to write a little blog for ABC called "The Note," and it was a terrible thing that was in some part responsible for how bankrupt and idiotic the beltway press was during the late '90s and early 2000s. Then he left to go write a blog for Time and now no one pays attention to him, thank god. But he still writes bad books, like his one a couple years ago about how The Way To Win was to worship Matt Drudge and Karl Rove and Be a Republican. The week John McCain said "the fundamentals of our economy are strong," and finally lost the damn election for good, Halperin blogged that Senator McCain "http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/18/mark-halperin-somehow-con_n_127512.html?page=3">won the week. He will keep his well-paying job at Time forever, or until somewhere else hires him to do the same thing, which is be wrong 100% of the time. Also he'll release a book with someone smarter than him and he'll go on conservative talk radio to fellate Hugh Hewitt as Hewitt bloodies him with a bullwhip, sexily, again.

4. Jeff Jarvis The entertainment journalist who got internet famous for blogging about batteries or something is now the official overpaid consultant of saving the newsmedia, even though he doesn't really know what reporters do (he is pretty sure they should blog about batteries or something). If you give him $1,000 and fly him to Qatar he'll save your newspaper, with a panel discussion.

5. Wolf Blitzer and everyone else at CNN. Wolf basically represents everything wrong with CNN. He just makes noises. Meaningless syllables. He fills up time, so much time, with these nonsense syllables, saying nothing, at all, ever. And CNN this year sucked. Anderson Cooper's show is ratings-grabbing fluff nonsense. The Magic Wall iPhone election map thing is stupid. The fucking holograms! Campbell Brown accepts no bullshit, stop bullshitting Campbell Brown. Oh, and they still let Lou Dobbs fear-monger every day for what seems like three hours of hate. Ugh. Go away, CNN.

6. Steve Schmidt This is kind of a no-brainer, because he lost a presidential election, which is a sure way to make it on one of these lists, but the extent of his failure is still kinda under-appreciated. He destroyed the brand of the Republican party's formerly most sellable asset, Senator Johnny Maverickseed, and hence crippled the party for at least two years. Hah. He is the man on this list most likely to be at least underemployed in 2009, though he won't go hungry.

7. Jimmy Fallon Jimmy can stand in for Jay Leno and Ben Silverman and everyone else at NBC. They have two good scripted sitcoms, and the rest is nonstop garbage. And now this once-forgotten nobody gets Letterman's old show! And national nightmare Jay Leno will be on every day at 10 pm! And Conan will be shipped out to LA in order to become bland and unappealing! 2009 will be a bad year for not wanting to shoot your television set.

8. Robert Rubin and everyone who has ever worked for him. Rubin broke the economy, and trained a new generation of democratic finance-wizards who helped break the pieces of the economy into smaller pieces, and then he went to work for Citigroup, where he still draws a nice fucking salary, after shepherding through legislation that allowed for the creation of Citigroup, a massive financial services conglomerate that also broke the economy, this year. Everyone who worked for him will now fix the economy with their fancy new jobs in Barack Obama's administration.

9. Michael Bloomberg Go away, old man, we're sick of you.

10. Everyone in New York By "everyone in New York" we mean, obviously, the type of people who actually think they represent "everyone in New York," which means people in media, finance, the "arts," publishing, and whatever the hell people who read blogs do all day, for a living. Not the "everyone in New York" that includes people who live in, like Staten Island or whatever. No, the ones who watch Gossip Girl. Basically all of these people should be unemployed, next year.

Special Bonus "Never Ever Get Fired" Award

Tribune Company Innovation Chief Lee Abrams He is an insane person and every dollar spent on him is a dollar wasted, by a bankrupt company, but he is a treat, and we would miss his memos.

CNN had the holograms. What was that? What was the point of that? NBC lost Tim Russert this year, and we missed his whiteboard. It was definitely preferable to Chuck Todd—who we like!—standing on the holodeck with magical 3D graphic map that kept slowly turning from side to side for no reason. John King and his stupid magic map still serve no actual purpose.

Meanwhile CNN refused to call any states too early, because of the 2004 debacle, even though no states were prematurely called in 2004, so to figure out that Obama won Pennsylvania and Ohio and hence the presidency (all before the polls closed on the West Coast!) you had to turn to MSNBC.

And finally, Wolf Blitzer needs to get off of TV. He's everything that's wrong with CNN—a complete inability or unwillingness to ever say anything, just mindless equivalence and hedging and cliche, because CNN is the "unbiased" network. Gah. We're with Jack Shafer on this: Blitzer's infuriating.

In 2012 we'll probably have to watch PBS. And then everyone loses.

Click here to listen to the voice mail.

In the Sheraton's ballroom, the Napoleonic head of CNN, Jonathan Klein, was wearing a tux and chatting with some other old white dude. Bob Schieffer of CBS chatted with Ted Koppel, who was to receive a lifetime achievement award. An unusually and quite frankly scarily tan Mike Wallace spryly circulated from small circle to small circle. We looked for Wolf Blitzer and Brian Williams—they were both "working."

We were sitting at the press table. Because the press talk so much, we heard that it was probably someone from the Business desk that started yesterday's Times fire: "The fire was on the second floor. That's where business is. And Science and Escapes and Sports!"

Matea Gold from the LA Times was there in a smart pearl necklace. She sported a slim ivory shiny digital recorder and didn't eat dessert (chocolate mousse in a chocolate cup). Across the table, looking like a fairy godmother (because she is), was TV Week's Michelle Greppi. Onstage, Tim Russert was giving this "Lock arms, brothers and sisters" speech. He then introduced Dan Rather as "soon to be the star of his own reality TV show on Court TV with Les Moonves." So true!

Dan Rather's most notable quotable: "News matters."

We were right next to a huge television screen that flashed clips of Frontline documentaries (the series was honored) and other news reports—lots of footage of dead and dying people. How is one supposed to enjoy an already rubbery steak while having to watch Marines dying or starving Darfurians?

That said, PBS programs , which swept the awards, are totes replacing "The OC" seasons 1-4 on my Netflix queue.

Then Mike Wallace won an Emmy for his interview with Iran's President Ahmadinejad and took to the stage. He put the Emmy on the ground and rambled on for about 15 minutes, speaking almost exclusively in haiku. "Me. You. This Room/Ahmadinejad./We didn't know."

Huh? What now? Soon enough he was replaced by Soledad O'Brien. She looks and speaks like a Sarah Silverman caricature of herself, drawing out the ends of words like a rabbi.

It was surely time for more white wine. But when I asked for another, the old waiter asked whether I'd like to open a tab.

KING: I've always liked Anna Nicole Smith. I first met her many years ago after the Playmate era, when she was in Playboy, featured in Playboy. She came on the show — I was doing it out of New York that night — and liked her right away. She was bouncy, she— I went through with all the marriage to the elderly gentleman, the weight gains up, the weight gains down. But there was always a special thing about her, even when they spoofed her on Saturday Night Live — she could easily be made fun of. There was also a genuineness about her. She was an extraordinarily pretty girl. An unusual thing, Wolf, is that she did a painting that we have here in the house. She tried — she was kind of an amateur painter. I have an oil painting that she has done here.

BLITZER: It's an amazing story, Larry. I know that you can bring some unique insight because you actually knew this woman, who was born in very, very humble origins down in Texas and becomes a Playmate, a Playboy Playmate of the Year in 1993, and then marries this very fabulously wealthy 89-year-old man.

KING: It's a story for the books. It's a story that will be written about and talked about. I imagine there'll be a major motion picture about it. We still don't know the cause, right?

BLITZER: No. We're waiting for the hospital. They are about —supposedly going to be having a statement, some sort of announcement coming in from authorities at the hospital in Hollywood, Florida. We've got our microphones there, we're going to share that with our viewers as soon as we know some specific details. But we know she was rushed to the hospital from this hotel where she was staying. And we don't know if she was pronounced dead on the scene or any of those specific details, although we have confirmed she is dead. Anything else you want to add, Larry, before I let you go?

KING: We'll do a whole show on her tonight with many guests, Wolf. And thanks for having me with you.

BLITZER: All right, Larry. LARRY KING LIVE airs at 9:00 p.m. Eastern tonight. He is going to be all over this story.

Larry King [CNN]

Ethnic studies specialist David Duke is currently in Tehran attending that super-fun "The Jews Are Ruining Everything, Which Is Odd, Because Nothing Bad Has Ever Happened To Them, Especially Not Six Million Of Them Getting Gassed And Stuffed Into Easy-Bake Ovens" conference, but he took time away from his busy schedule to chat with famous American Jew reporter Wolf Blitzer. We're providing you with this excerpt because we believe that it proves our longstanding belief that David Duke takes all the fun out of Heeb-hating. Stop ruining it for everyone, David!

• Quincy Jones, 73, possibly dating fashion designer Heba Elawadi, 19. We can't even do the math on that age difference. 40-year-olds still looking to poach college chicks rejoice! [Gatecrasher, last item]

• Apparently Wolf Blitzer has never heard of Captain Janks, Crank Yankers, or the Howard Stern show. But he's eager to interview anyone related to the JonBenet Ramsey case. [Lowdown]

• Lindsay Lohan and Jared Leto have officially declared their couplehood. No word on whether 'LoLeto' vehicle Requiem For A Mean Girl II is a go. [Gatecrasher]

• Eva Longoria makes the big move from heels to flip-flops. The world exhales. [Us Weekly]

UPDATE: Ok, ok, just wanted to test you on the Loleto thing. Who knew you guys actually read this? Here's a replacement:

• Usher made his Broadway debut yesterday. Um, Yeah! Let it burn baby.
[Access Hollywood, via Google Video]