It was nothing that we didn't already know: Dave's producer called up Jay's producer and asked if Jay would want to be in the spot. Jay said yes and the two recorded the ad in a super-secret shoot with Oprah last week.

Some have wondered what Leno could possibly have to gain from appearing in a spot for his soon-to-be rival (again). Tonight, Leno spun the ad as a very public move to clear the air of any leftover fog of Late Night War in advance of his move back to The Tonight Show:

I walk in and I see Dave, and he puts out his hand and we shake hands. And you know, whatever happened for the last 18 years disappeared. It was great to see my old friend again. It was wonderful—he was very gracious, we talked about the old days, we told some jokes... you know, it was really good to see him.

But if the Late Night Wars spectacular ratings boost are any guide, Leno should be throwing darts at a picture of Dave's face right about now.

The AP reports that Chavez launched the program—Suddenly, With Chavez—today on state-run Venezuelan National Radio. The show "doesn't have a schedule and can be aired at any moment." Which means you all should tune in right now so you don't miss any of the highly entertaining rhetoric that spills from Chavez's mouth all the time.

Here are some of our favorite funny things Hugo Chavez has said:

• "The devil came here yesterday," Chavez said, referring to Bush, who addressed the world body during its annual meeting Tuesday. "And it smells of sulfur still today." [CNN]
• 
  
• "Hey, Obama has just nationalized nothing more and nothing less than General Motors. Comrade Obama! Fidel, careful or we are going to end up to his right," [Reuters]
• 
  
• "Remember, little girl, I'm like the thorn tree that flowers on the plain. I waft my scent to passers-by and prick he who shakes me. Don't mess with me, Condoleezza. Don't mess with me, girl." [BBC]
• 
  
• "The imperialist, genocidal, fascist attitude of the US president has no limits. I think Hitler would be like a suckling baby next to George W Bush." [BBC]
• 
  

  Can't wait!

Lindsay Lohan tried to imagine a world in which she had no privacy, in which her every move was digitally recorded and transmitted to strangers, and in which everyone else knew she hadn't read the news since 2006. So scary.

The Huffington Post's tech editor wondered whether MacWorld Expo has attracted any technology bloggers eager to sacrifice their own time and money to help enrich an abusive, authoritarian leader who holds them in disdain. Not sure where he's going to find someone like that at an Apple event (*cough*).

New York's Lindsay Robertson decided to have fun with the "David Paterson innuendo" newsmeme. Now somebody just has to tie Furry David Paterson to the sheep-demon ad.

Pro tip for Perez Hilton: Try and find a ghostwriter who has some knowledge of celebrity gossip, and a working memory of some portions of the year 2008. Or maybe write your own tweets? LOL, kidding, LOVEYOUxoxox.

New York Times writer Brian Stelter thinks this might be a parody of "the NYT Coffee Guy" rather than the real thing. We think it might be a sporadic but comforting reminder that there is still some nice things about being a Times writer.

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

On Friday, it looked like writer Gerald Posner had his minor plagiarism scandal under control. Slate's Jack Shafer busted him for one case of copying, but Posner claimed it was accidental and his editors said he would keep working. Now Shafer has three more examples of Posner stealing from the Herald, plus one involving Texas Lawyer, and Posner writes he's been suspended. He blogged: "I now realize that a method of compiling information that I have used successfully since 1984... obviously does not work... at the warp speed of the Net." Or under the bright light of Google.

(Pic: Posner's Facebook)

Steve Jobs is so angry about Twitter and iPads and things. Commenter grubish1 is sort of angry at Steve Jobs:

Apple is completely revolutionizing the way Americans ignore tablet computers.

You know what else everyone hates? Valemtime's Deigh. Except now we're not allowed to hate it anymore. So if we have to do it, at least we can have dirty relations, right BeenGay?

So that's that! Hope you're all happy. See you Tuesday! Which is tomorrow. Sigh.

Orkut, in case you've forgotten, is by far the most interesting person to work for the Mountain View, California internet company, where the technical skills are valued over all else, resulting in a (mostly) boring army of engineer droids. Orkut's the fun exception.

Sure, the Turkish programmer built Google's also-ran social network, Orkut, a.k.a. "The Facebook of Brazil." But more importantly, the San Francisco partyboy also hired strippers for his previous too-hot-for-the-Web birthday party; been gay-married by his Vogue-errific best friend Marissa Mayer; attended the opening of the local Prada; wore a fabulous sheening suit to the ballet; and is good at making everyone get dressed up and disco.

The Silicon Valley tech scene needs more of this sort of acting out, and the Valley scenesters would seem to agree: We hear Orkut's Saturday party was packed with what techies (inaccurately) call "A Listers," including billionaire Google founder Sergey Brin and very very rich person Mayer (who threw a party of her own the following day, of the Superbowl sort). Here's how one attendee put it:

According to public records of Orkut's holdings, that ten-story-high apartment building would be a posh renovated warehouse at 410 Jessie Street, on San Francisco's newly-remade Mint Plaza. That's directly across the street from the San Francisco Chronicle, the newspaper whose misfortunes some have blamed on none other than... Google.

But Orkut's guests didn't come to dance on graves. The disco-lover installed a raised dance floor, complete with poles and special lights, in his two-level penthouse, according to a source with knowledge of the place. There's also some sort of indoor waterfall, we hear. (Orkut declined to discuss his apartment or party on the phone and never sent a promised email reply.)

Pictures from the latest shindig are, alas, few and far between. Despite his direct financial interest in social networking and the free flow of information online, Orkut banned any network distribution of images from his party. we're told. Irony, that. Anyway, in the photo gallery we've mixed in pictures from an apparent pre-party in January as well as of a similar party at a different location last year. Do send us more pics if you have them. We're happy to disseminate the information Googlers refuse to spread themselves.

Apparently from Saturday's event, via friend Jen Liu's Facebook album "house warming & birthday party," uploaded 16 hours ago.

One of the dance poles going up, from a January picture of "orkut's party," again via Liu.

The dance floor again? Again from Liu's "orkut's party" album, January.

Liu and Orkut, ibid.

Orkut at a party in Jan. 2009. Via Facebook.

Orkut, center, with boyfriend Derek Holbrook, right, at a Jan. 2009 party.

Orkut at a Jan. 2009 party.

Quick trip to Brazil via private jet, anyone?

At Burning Man 2009.

• The Lone Scout wonders if it's appropriate to mention how sexxxy a comment avatar looks. Why not discuss over at #crosstalk?
• Dr. Nick posted the news that Michael Jackson's doctor is going to be charged with manslaughter.
• therewillcomesoftrains points to a video of Stephen Fry discussing the Catholic Church. Sounds like it's worth watching.
• Fuzzy Dunlop is exasperated that Drudge won't cut Obama break, including on his Super Bowl pick.
• Solomon Grundy says Ben Whishaw is giving a talk tonight. If you hurry, you might make it!
• momof3wildkids spotted a satellite image of the Snowpocalypse from Space. Click through to her post to see a larger version. Related: in the great Snowmaggedon vs. Snowpocalypse debate, I'm solidly Snowpocalypse.

You can leave us tips, links, news, story ideas, pictures, whatever on the #tips page by using the "Share" box on the front page and including the hashtag #tips. If you'd prefer, you can also send a confidential email to tips@gawker.com or call our tipline at 646-214-8138.

Like remember when a bunch of NYU kids locked themselves in the food court to protest NYU's financial chicanery and also the Israeli occupation of Gaza? And then some more established campus activist groups basically said they didn't have any idea this shit was going to happen and lots of other people who sympathized with them politically found them terribly embarrassing?

That is basically the Teabagger Movement. First they were theoretically against bank bailouts, but now they are opposed to Kenyan Socialists who Hate America. They are not just taking back NYU, they are taking back all of America!

This is a problem with our limited, mediated, comic strip version of "history:" people have decided that the way to seize control of your own life and this crazy world is to go all 1960s, like you have seen in a movie. Many of these Tea Party people are actually old enough to have lived through the '60s, but they weren't on the fun side. Ben McGrath's New Yorker story on the movement had this fascinating little moment with a local Kentucky teabagger:

Don Seely invited me to his house for coffee the day after the rally at the Kentucky fairgrounds, and showed me his Air Force Commendation Medal, awarded for meritorious service from 1967 to 1971. "At this age, I was so ignorant," he said. "Every once in a while, you'd catch a glimpse on TV of Martin Luther King-all that kind of stuff was going on. I graduated college in December of '66. About a year after I left, that's when all the riots happened. I'm thinking, What is going on?" Seely had always wanted to be a pilot, but, because of poor eyesight, he ended up an engineer in a satellite-control facility. The medal was accompanied by a photograph of Seely in his captain's uniform, and he said that Amber, after looking at the image, had proclaimed that he was the only person she knew who'd kept the same hair style for nearly fifty years: short, straight, and parted neatly on the far right.

Yeesh. And guess what: his daughter goes to the New School. The New School!

It is totally fun to be a part of a big movement, and to convince yourself that this big movement you are a part of is not only morally right, but also secretly incredibly popular. You have to be attacked and beset on all sides by shadowy powerful interests—Soros, corporations, the political elite, ACORN—but that just makes you feel even cooler.

And when you're showered with attention for your work, you start to believe your own hype. The ratio of media to tea party convention attendees was like 1 to 3. 200 members of the media arrived to cover a convention half the size of Daily Kos' first convention in 2006. The steep cost of attending made the conventioneers richer, and thus calmer, than the angry folks who showed up for the protests with the crazy signs that we all remember so well.

While some in the movement acknowledge the debt they owe to true '60s radicals (the only reason you hear so much about Obama's supposed affinity for Alinsky on the right is because the activist arm of the movement is explicitly copying his tactics), the majority of the new populist conservstives adopt a '60s protest strategy while claiming to be Tea Partiers (and comparing themselves to the Founders when they are, in fact, a bit more like those white populist Jacksonians)—like a campus activist might compare himself to a Freedom Rider rather than just another sad rich kid.

The great irony is that entitled young Campus Activists tend to "grow up" and get jobs supporting the post-industrial capitalist superstructure, while these are people who've turned to juvenile attention-craving '60s-aping dress-up parties as putative adults.

But let them have their fun! Student protests are always destroyed by forces both outside and, more often, internal. This white populist movement has received far more coverage than its actual size merits (60,000 people on the Mall is, what, the Halloween parade?), and as whatever grassroots, populist elements of the movement that remain are fully co-opted by the actual Republican Party (and the US Chamber of Commerce, the nation's most influential political party) they'll find themselves just as disillusioned with the process as a sophomore who just go this first taste of tear gas.

Update: Aw nuts. They made the video private. But we'll see if we can track it down anywhere else...

The best section of the video begins at 2:50, with two Rumpus editors — nerdy non-sorority types — discussing the beauty of Pi Phi girlz, who are often featured in the humor magazine's 50 Most Beautiful Elis issue. You'll likely scratch your head in confusion at this, having just watched a girl with a Rhys Ifans wig and raccoon eyes gab about her various extra-curriculars in the previous scene. Ah well. Hey Yale! Stop making videos. Any ivy-covered mystique you may have once had is very quickly eroding away to reveal your dorky and not-terribly-attractive insides. Actually, scratch that. Keep making videos.

[via GoaG]

In Undercover Boss, a CEO goes undercover in his own company to get the real scoop on how hard it is...to work for his own company. Last night's premiere featured Larry O'Donnell, COO of the thoroughly unglamorous, dirty, occasionally union-busting multibillion-dollar trash company Waste Management. Larry met many hardworking employees in heartstring-tugging situations, and was able to help them, by vowing to form a committee to address their concerns about their shitty jobs!

CONSIDER: In the olden days of television, companies would sponsor an entire block of programming—The Colgate Variety Hour, or whatever. In return for their name on the show and some in-show plugs, the audience got about an hour of entertainment content. THEN, the 30-second commercial reigned. In return for minutes-long blocks of commercial content, consumers got (more) minutes-long blocks of uninterrupted entertainment. THEN, Tivo came along. Many advertisers moved towards product placement—they paid to have their products and branding messages integrated into the shows themselves. The 30-second ads remained! So, in return for the same lengthy advertising breaks, consumers got a bit of advertorial-type entertainment content.

AND NOW, with the advent of Undercover Boss, we find we have come to a new stage in television: An entire prime-time show that is, in effect, an hour-long corporate public relations message, broadcast to a far larger audience than the corporation could ever hope to reach itself, courtesy of one of our nation's premiere television networks. Can you even begin to imagine the amount of money that an unsexy company like Waste Management, for chrissake, would have had to spend to buy an amount of media exposure equal to a full hour of prime time directly after the Super Bowl? It quite literally could not have been purchased with all the money in Waste Management's coffers! But, in exchange for what was no doubt hand-and-foot service from Waste Management's PR team in setting up logistics and tracking down appropriately engaging employees for the boss to interact with, CBS gives the company an advertainment opportunity unparalleled anywhere else on television. SO, The deal for you, the television viewer is now this: in return for sitting through lengthy blocks of ads, you are treated to one hour of a trash company's employee morale-boosting video, writ large.

Waste Management played it well: they had the boss admit some mistakes and act humble. Future participants should take notes. This is the best deal corporate America's gotten on CBS since the network dropped that 60 Minutes tobacco story. Don't fuck this up, guys.

Apparently Wall Street has long been a bastion of support for Democratic political candidates, but now that Obama has launched a campaign — unprecedented for a Democrat — to enact policies that may cut into corporate profits, some bankers are holding their noses and cutting checks to Republicans:

But this year Chase's political action committee is sending the Democrats a pointed message. While it has contributed to some individual Democrats and state organizations, it has rebuffed solicitations from the national Democratic House and Senate campaign committees. Instead, it gave $30,000 to their Republican counterparts.

The shift reflects the hard political edge to the industry's campaign to thwart Mr. Obama's proposals for tighter financial regulations.

Here's a chart illustrating that "shift" in giving, from the Center for Responsive Politics. It shows political giving from political action committees and individuals associated with commercial banking, going back to 1990. In every year since 1994, Republicans got more money than Democrats.

To make his case, Kirkpatrick cites CRP figures showing that individuals and PACs from the securities and investment business gave $89 million to Democrats in 2008, a 57% to 43% edge over Republicans. That's true. It's also true that, according to the CRP, the securities and investment sector favored Republicans over Democrats in the 2006, 2004, 2002, 2000, 1998, and 1996 election cycles. It's also true that, overall, the wider finance, insurance, and real estate industry has favored Republicans 55% to 45% since 1990. This is because people who care about money want Republicans to win elections, and always have.

But what about Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase and Obama's Chicago pal? Kirkpatrick makes much of the fact that JPMorgan Chase's PAC has "rebuffed solicitations from the national Democratic House and Senate campaign committees" and given "$30,000 to their Republican counterparts."

He calls this a "shift." JPMorgan Chase has two PACs. One of them, it is true, gave 58% of its $130,427 in disbursements in 2008 to Democrats. But the other one, which handed out $797,977 in 2008, gave 53% of it to Republicans. In fact, both PACs have favored Republicans in all but two of the last six election cycles—one being the aforementioned 2008 cycle, and the other being 2002, when one of the PACs split its money 50-50. So Chase's shift to the GOP is more of a return to the way it's always behaved and should always be expected to behave, since "Wealthy Bankers Give Money to Republicans" is sort of axiomatic.

Undercover Boss Is a Combination of Dirty Jobs and Trading Spaces, Only Faker
After the Super Bowl was over, CBS premiered Undercover Boss, a role-reversal "reality" show where a big-wig performs entry-level tasks. Larry O'Donell, COO of a Waste Management Company, performed some nasty jobs, and many (faux) lessons were learned.

Makeup Artist Curses on Air, Nobody Notices
Today on Rachael Ray we see how much producers are paying attention... or not. In the middle of giving tips, the Makeup Artist name-drops Angelina Jolie and curses all in the same breath.

Jason Alexander's Cringe-Worthy Jenny Craig Ad
In case you were wondering, the Seinfeld curse is alive and well. You may have been nominated for an Emmy, Julia-Louis Dreyfus, but Jason Alexander wasn't. He's currently losing weight in the girliest way possible.

Trailer for Stephin Merritt Documentary Strange Powers Looks Phenomenal
f you don't know who Stephin Merritt is, please get acquainted. This documentary follows Merritt, one of the most brilliant songwriters of the past generation, and looks at a side of him his fans have never seen before.

Every Violent Act From Last Night's Super Bowl Commercials
Someone collected every slap, hit, and punch-buggy from all of this year's Super Bowl ads and mashed them up into one, glorious, violent 30-second video. Watch and cringe.

That's right, all you singleton's and "black hearts" are just as responsible for the continuation of this wretched festival as all the happy couples cooing into each others' earlobes after too many expensive oysters and too much cheap champagne.

Sure, Valentine's Day was created to sell candy, flowers, romantic dinners at overpriced restaurants, and frilly panties from Victoria Secret that will be forgotten about as soon as they are flung off an expectant toe into the dark corners of a bedroom. To get all English major-y for a second, it is a despicable propagation of the hetero-normative monogamy fallacy that plagues the world, telling everyone that they have a "soul mate" and one special person to complete them and anyone who isn't in such a relationship is a worthless piece of shit who doesn't deserve to be loved and probably dresses bad and needs more time in the gym.

However, the reaction to these sentiments is just as knee-jerk and trite. Hating Valentine's Day is a sad fucking cliche. On the outside its says, "I hate the corporate structure that built this shitty holiday" and "I'm doing fine on my own, thank you," but what it says on the inside is, "I am so sick of not having the validation of someone in my life that I need to rebel against this thing or I am going to wither away like a dried toe nail clipping in the garbage." These people think that they are going to do something to change the couple-centric world that we live in, but all that they're doing is giving credence to it. It's like scowling at the concept but sneaking handfuls of chalky conversation hearts while all their fellow black-wearers go to change The Smiths record.

Just like every year, alternative Valentine's Day options abound. Jonathan Ames is hosting an anti-romantic poetry reading in Brooklyn and The Village Pourhouse will try to set up single men and women at their black heart's party. There are plenty of events for those without a mate to attend and weep with each other and talk about how disgusting and lonely they all are while bashing their seemingly happier counterparts. Still, we hate you just as much as those making kissy-face and gurgling about how much they love each other.

Instead of getting their non-frilly panties all in a wad, maybe it's time for the haters to just leave this whole mess to those who want to call 1-800-Flowers, order up a chocolate souffle for two, and give each other their thrice-annual dose of oral sex (along with both birthdays). What's so wrong about expressing the love one has for his partner? It's rare and wonderful to find someone to share one's life with, and surviving the daily silent tug of war of a relationship shouldn't go by unnoticed. The protesters don't want it to end entirely either, because you know that the first single girl at the "Heartbreaker's Club" dance party is going to be the one who wants the biggest bouquet once she finally has a man.

For those of us who aren't in a relationship, why don't we take the night off? Let's give it up to all those unlucky enough to have their egos eroded by the will of another in the search for romantic fulfillment. There's no need for hatred, spite, or resistance. Just take a deep breath and relinquish the day with quiet superiority and calm abandonment—and masturbate yourself into a chafey coma.

[Image via A Heart a Day]

Wes Bentley
Bentley came roaring onto the scene as the skull-capped suitor to Kevin Spacey's daughter in American Beauty, Sam Mendes' 1998 popcorn take on suburban ennui. He had a piercing gaze and a wolfish brow and, sure yeah, he could act pretty well. Big leading man roles in duds like the thriller Soul Survivors and the nearly unwatchable epic The Four Feathers (alongside other up-and-comers Kate Hudson and Heath Ledger) followed soon after, but nothing connected and he faded away. The Times profile reveals that he's been dealing with drug abuse problems, so that's too bad.
The Road Back: Bentley is starring in the well-received off-Broadway play Venus in Fur at the moment, so, you know... theatre is good. But movies and TV! That's where it's really at. He's definitely not ready for some big starring film role yet, but what if he joins the cast of Nurse Jackie as some weirdo holistic doctor who confounds Jackie with his hippie-dippy bullshit but draws her in with that yards-long stare of his?

Alison Lohman
Lohman made her first big impression as a dreamy but troubled teen going through the foster care system in the underrated White Oleander, and did solid follow-up work in Ridley Scott's similarly underrated Matchstick Men. And then... well, not a whole hell of a lot. She popped up in kiddie flick Flicka, the drowsy dud Things We Lost in the Fire, and last year's deliberately kitschy horror b-grader Drag Me to Hell. At 30, Lohman is still young enough to play ingenue, especially given her porcelain baby face, and yet the roles haven't come. Maybe it's a personal decision, who knows, but we feel like she could be doing a lot more.
The Road Back: Lohman is such an ethereal, slightly odd presence, which makes her interesting but also a bit hard to cast. She'd be perfect in a Terrence Malick movie — all dazed lyricism and angelic blonde hair. She's also got the kind of melancholy that's perfect for the current spate of bittersweet indie romantic dramadies ((500) Days of summer, the upcoming Blue Valentine), so she'd be smart to do one of those. Paired up with... Oh, let's say the delicious all-American sandwich that is Zach Gilford.

Samantha Mathis
Remember her? The young star of Pump Up the Volume did some big movies in her time — Little Women, Broken Arrow, a small role in The American President — but she never quite hit the way we thought she would. In recent years she's done some stage work, lots of TV guest spots (like Olivia the Dharma teacher on Lost), but nothing to match her early-mid '90s heat. She's an appealing actress, warm and frank, and we'd like to see more of her. Even though she's like 39 or something, and thus ancient.
The Road Back: Theater is good! We like theater. But, again, movies and TV are really what everyone needs. Mathis should aim for juicy smaller parts in classy independents — she has the face, if not always the carriage, for period pieces — and some smart TV work. Maybe she could appear alongside Gretchen Mol in a few episodes of the upcoming Boardwalk Empire. Or we liked her toting a gun well enough in Broken Arrow to think she'd make a good foil for Timothy Olyphant on his new Elmore Leonard series, Justified.

Kip Pardue
The golden boy actor, who played football at Yale and was an Abercrombie & Fitch model, seemed destined for big things when he was cast in that Sylvester Stallone racing movie Driven and in Remember the Titans. But then despite his drive, no one remembered him (get it?). Maybe he was hyped to the point of premature saturation, like a more male but no less blonde Gretchen Mol. The guy really hasn't done anything of note since the well-received 2005 indie Loggerheads (movies called Slightly Single in LA and Stag Night do not count), but we remember him being a reasonably talented fellow in things like The Rules of Attraction, so it might be interesting to see him back on the scene.
The Road Back: He'll need a lot of work, mostly because people don't really remember who he is. So let's get him a nice meaty theater role to up his cred — Joe Pitt in the upcoming Angels in America revival, perhaps (he looks so much like Patrick Wilson!) — and then put him on an established but still-hot show, something like Damages. Or maybe he could be the pretty-boy serial killer on the next season of creatively-soaring Dexter. You know, something like that: a role that, sure, exploits his looks, but also shows off those Ivy League acting chops (he graduated with an Econ degree, but whatever).

Alicia Silverstone
Oh, Cher. After breaking out a bit too big in the 1995 smash Clueless, Silverstone struggled to define herself as a "real" actress. She was also beset with a less-than-emaciated figure, which pretty much nixed her chances at big-time movie stardom. She's done smaller film roles, some theater (she's currently in the twice-extended Broadway production Time Stands Still, opposite Laura Linney), and her own ill-fated comeback TV project, Miss Match. She remains a kind and appealing actress, so let's make her a star again.
The Road Back: Again, the theater is always a good start. It gets you respect, you meet interesting and dedicated actors, and there's a lot more of it to do. To get back on the screen, we think Silverstone ought to go the Mathis route of aiming for smaller parts in prestige pictures, much like she's doing right now sharing the stage with Linney. Silverstone could get hot by association, and before you know it she's starring in her own HBO comedy series about a bored and slightly frumpy fading Midwestern sorority girl who decides one lonely drunken night to move to New York and try her hand at acting school.

There are many other folks who fit the just-slightly-missed-it bill — people like Chris Evans, Barry Pepper, Marley Shelton, Radha Mitchell, Estella Warren (Pardue's costar in Driven) and Derek Luke. Who's an actor you thought was going to hit big but then mysteriously fizzled?

Also, according to WPIX: The story centers on a "woman" from "Buffalo," and the recent explosion in salacious rumors about Paterson's swinging personal life is due to a talkative "estranged wife of 'an aide extremely close to the governor'" who's going through a bitter divorce right now. If you know who that would be, let us know.

Meanwhile, New York magazine's Gabriel Sherman attempts to throw some cold water on the speculation:

According to a source close to the Paterson camp who is familiar with the scope of the Times' reporting, the Times piece will be an in-depth profile of the governor focused on his personal character. There are likely to be new details about his marital infidelities, but the source added that it's not going to be the bombshell the blogs have predicted. "The piece is PG-13, not XXX," the source explained. "Not to say it won't be problematic, but the Aqueduct situation? That's potentially criminal. On his extramarital affairs, the question is who those people are, and what jobs they've held."

See? It's just a few ladies on the side. No big deal. Nothing like that potentially criminal "Aqueduct situation," in which Paterson appears to have handed over a state casino contract in an attempt to win a political endorsement. So there you have it—a Paterson partisan says the story's no big deal and probably won't even go into his potentially criminal activity in too much detail.

We're feeling kind of bad for Danny Hakim, Nick Confessore, and Serge Kovaleski, the Times reporters Sherman says are reporting the story. Because after all this, the bar's pretty high. And we'd hate to see this turn out to be another Vicki Iseman story.

What is the populist Wall Street Journal instructing us to do this week? "Don't Blame Golf for the Economy." Okay! Just because the very sight of fashion-challenged rich motherfuckers milling around a golf course can send you into a murderous revolutionary rage, you must not give in to unreasonability. It's not golf that's the problem. It's the assholes that play golf.

Wait—no! Must...not...blame...Wall Street. Jesus give us strength. Open our hearts to love. The more we "liberal" poors blame Wall Street, the more Wall Street will be tempted to turn around and give all of its money to Republicans. And lord knows the first priority of the Democratic party must always be to represent those who disagree with it, at all costs! As Glenn Greenwald says in his inimitable style, "First, there simply is no more odious faction inside the U.S. than Wall Street bankers — and that's saying quite a bit." Glenn Greenwald, you are the type of guy we would be proud to share a scavenged cigarette butt with, in debtor's prison.

Okay. No. Deep breaths. We do not need a revolution. We need to welcome our golfing Wall Street brethren into the big, dirty, pockmarked tent of populism, in America. All the coupon-clipping is giving us carpal tunnel syndrome. But we're not too proud to shake your hand, Mr. Rich Man. Just put down that golf club first. Hey. No. We're your friend! Ahhhhhhhhhhh don't hit meee.......
[Pic via]

Murtha, the powerful chair of the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee, was a master at bringing pork back home to his district. He was a proud economic populist, often named one of the most corrupt members of congress, and an eventual vocal opponent of the Iraq War.

Murtha was first elected to the House in 1974. He was the first Vietnam veteran ever elected to Congress. Just last Saturday, Murtha had become the longest-serving member of Congress in Pennsylvania history.

In an incredibly long essay that manages to be both wide-ranging and narrow-minded, Allen blames feminism for all the usual things, including my personal favorite, making happily-married women have fewer children ("College-educated women have significantly higher rates of marriage and lower rates of divorce than women without college degrees. The bad news is that such women, who tend to marry late, have far fewer children." ZOMG NO!!). But where she breaks from the pack of ladyvirtue concern-trolls is here:

Some argue, though, that it is actually beta men who are the greatest victims of the current mating chaos: the ones who work hard, act nice, and find themselves searching in vain for potential wives and girlfriends among the hordes of young women besotted by alphas.

Basically, now that women are allowed to roam freely, a notional group of objectively unattractive men who would presumably have been issued mates under the old system are now cruelly deprived their due. Allen quotes F. Roger Devlin, a columnist on "relations between the sexes for the Occidental Quarterly, a paleoconservative publication whose other contributors tend to focus obsessively on the question of which ethnic groups belong to which race." After briefly apologizing for "the dubious nature of the venue," she writes,

Beta men become superfluous until the newly liberated women start double-clutching after years in the serial harems of alphas who won't "commit," lower their standards, and "settle." During this process, monogamy as a stable and civilization-maintaining social institution is shattered. "Monogamy is a form of sexual optimization," Devlin told me. "It allows as many people who want to get married to do so. Under monogamy, 90 percent of men find a mate at least once in their life." This isn't necessarily so anymore in today's chaotic combination of polygamy for lucky alphas, hypergamy in varying degrees for females depending on their sex appeal, and, at least in theory, large numbers of betas left without mates at all-just as it is in baboon packs.

The idea that great numbers of "the short-statured, the homely, the paunchy, the balding, and the sweater-clad" are being left forever unwed is complicated by the fact that, like so many who warn women about the dangers of dating and hooking up, Allen assumes that women become automatically undesirable to men at a certain age (she quotes one "expert" who puts it at about 28). Presumably, when they're dried-up late-twenties hags who can no longer snag alphas, betas should be able to attract them (and in fact, the idea that less assertive, less conventionally attractive men are quickly snapped up by marriage-minded women is a cornerstone of Lori Gottlieb's philosophy). But not only does Allen feel that men, beta or alpha, deserve "access to women," she seems to feel that society owes them young, virginal women as well. Because really, no one wants anything else — "no woman, alpha or beta, seems able to escape the atavistic preference of men both alpha and beta for ladylike and virginal wives."

The New Republic's Isaac Chotiner notes that Allen's answer to pretty much every social ill to be "blame the women's movement," and he's right that the really fascinating thing about her piece is the way in which it brings together two strands of anti-feminism. Allen reiterates the now-familiar notion that women should have fewer choices because they make bad ones (an unsurprising position for someone who once wrote that women were "kind of dim"). But she also advances the not new but somewhat less common argument that we should have fewer choices because, unless forced, we might not yoke ourselves to schlubs at extremely young ages. It's tempting to say that conservative critiques of women's dating and sexual habits are, at bottom, all about men, but the men who can be so easily divided into alpha and beta, who all want the same kind of wife, and who would prefer that she have no other option rather than choosing him freely, bear little resemblance to the actual male half of the species. Rather, I think what Allen illustrates is a socially conservative commitment to a certain system in which women are the stuff men get, no one complains, and society operates like a glorified baby factory. She writes that modern dating culture "discourages the sexual restraint once imposed on both sexes that constituted a firm foundation for both family life and civilization" — but whether this restraint or this firm foundation ever really existed is somewhat beside the point. The real question is why one would want to birth a child into Allen's rigidly circumscribed, choice-free America.

The New Dating Game [Weekly Standard]
Oversexed [The New Republic]

The Journal's online executive editor Alan Murray quickly deleted the Feb. 4 tweet, which, it is now obvious, was issued during Apple CEO Jobs' show-and-tell with select Journal staff. A tipster told us the deletion ultimately traces back to a furious Jobs. We asked Murray for comment, and he wrote back "I would love to talk about this, but can't." In a later email, he added:

I will say that Apple's general paranoia about news coverage is truly extraordinary— but that's not telling you anything you didn't already know.

Indeed, Apple is a notoriously tight-lipped company, particularly under Jobs, and is constantly trying to control the flow of news about its product. Apple sued a teenaged blogger who published scoops about unreleased products; it lied about Jobs' health problems; Jobs called a New York Times columnist a "slime bucket" for writing about said health problems; and an employee of key Apple contractor Foxconn had his apartment illegally searched after losing an iPhone prototype (he later committed suicide amid intense pressure from his employer).

If Jobs did give Murray a tongue lashing — his withering verbal abuse is infamous — the editor can console himself with the knowledge that this is is an especially touchy time of year for the paranoiac. And not just because of the pressures of shepherding and unveiling a new product.

At Jobs' meeting at the Times, the CEO was mostly on point, painting a utopian picture of happy future world awash in iPads. But at one juncture in the meeting, we hear, he took a detour, telling assembled newspaper staff that he gets tons of hate mail from people whenever he launches a new product — people who have never even used it, including angry Apple "fans." Jobs reportedly described the mail as "really nasty stuff... [things] like 'Fuck you and your family.'"

It sounds like Jobs has been fighting this sort of backlash his whole career, judging from this 1994 Rolling Stone interview:

"I've always been attracted to the more revolutionary changes. I don't know why. Because they're harder. They're much more stressful emotionally. And you usually go through a period where everybody tells you that you've completely failed."

Of course, "fuck you and your family" sound less like fanboys than regretful stock speculators. That's the sort of e-note to go ballistic over.

(Updates: Added background on Apple secrecy, Rolling Stone quote.)

Simon Dumenco points out the impolite fact that "much of the best of contemporary journalism has been produced, and continues to get produced, simply because of the largess — and the emotional needs — of a small group of rich people." And where is the next crop of generous, fabulously wealthy media patrons, he wonders? Hmm. Well nothing will dissuade Jared Kushner for at least a few more months, so that's one.


Recipe scandal: Health magazine re-used some recipes from fellow Time Inc. title Real Simple! If consumers cannot be absolutely sure that no subscribers to semi-related magazines have ever prepared this particular chicken dish before us, how are we to live?


David Carr takes a look at robot "journalism" word factory Demand Media, which pays poor freelancers paltry wages to write up stories on computer-generate Google-trending topics like, oh, I don't know, "How to pick the lock of the Jersey Shore house with a Swiss Army brand pocketknife." Carr notes that after spending 20 hours on his story, "At Demand's current pay rate, I'd be making almost a buck an hour." Oh, does the New York Times pay more than that? ZING.


TERRIBLE, DECLARATIVE SPORTS COLUMNIST STEPHEN A. SMITH IS BACK TO WRITING FOR THE PHILLY ENQUIRER. HOLLER AT STEVE—IF YOU MAKE THE CUT.

At the time, I did not have the psychogenic energy to respond to this person and explain my issues with Taylor Swift. Thankfully, Riese from Autostraddle has an in-depth, detailed analysis of why Taylor Swift — the product, not the person — bothers her. And it's the same reason Taylor Swift — the product, not the person — annoys me. Riese sums it up thusly:

Taylor Swift is a feminist's nightmare.

I highly recommend you read Riese's entire piece (and be sure to check out the chart of symbolic motifs), but here's the gist of it: Taylor's favorite storylines involve Virgin/Whore dichotomies. She writes about high school issues, but was home-schooled after the age of 15. Also: Her age is not a big deal, yet people keep bringing it up?

[Taylor] is often celebrated as some kind of child prodigy. Twenty isn't young and her talent, while exceptional, is not unheard of. Grammys have gone to Adele (21), Christina Aguilera (20 in ‘00), LeAnn Rimes (16 in ‘97), Mariah Carey (21 in ‘90) and Alicia Keys (20 in ‘02), among others. When Beyoncè was Swift's age, she was onstage with Destiny's Child, proclaiming: "The house I live in / I've bought it / The car I'm driving / I've bought it / All the women who are independent / Throw your hands up at me!"

What's more, while many pop songs are about love, Riese writes:

Swift's lyrical message to teenage girls is clear: BOYS. That's it. Just boys. Crying over boys and feeling broken and/or completed by boys.

The woman who emailed me, upset at "Jezebel's" "takedowns" (?) of Taylor Swift, wrote:

She's telling her story, and, at the same time, she's telling mine. Go back and relisten to 'Fifteen.' Maybe you won't relate to it, but the first time my boyfriend and I heard it, we were both pretty speechless at how accurately it had captured how we'd felt at that moment in our lives. As a writer, you no doubt have some idea of the difficulty involved in pulling that off. 

Yes, I listened to the song. No, I didn't relate to it. It's not a terrible song, but it is unoriginal. The writing is simplistic, devoid of metaphor or simile. The result is boring; the song feels like a cloying imagining of a the kind of sheltered high school experience you see on "safe" TV. True, I grew up in New York and spent my freshman year going dancing at clubs, flirting my as off in the hallways, spreading gossip, ranking guys at school on hot lists while simultaneously lamenting how lame/dumb/unimaginative and gullible they were. My best friend and I wrote extensive stories for each other, attempting to create the ultimate fantasy; generally, these dreams involved us having jet-set careers in film directing and bar/club-owning, and movie star boyfriends we barely had time for. For Taylor, fifteen means falling for a boy and dreaming of marrying him. My fifteen was more like: Flirt with this one, make out with that one, try a cigarette, get drunk, lie to your parents, read some Anais Nin, wish you lived in France, attempt to adopt Shakespearean euphemisms for sex into casual conversation ("beast with two backs" was very popular in my circle Freshman year), etc. (I love that Riese notes: "[Taylor has] one song that misinterprets Shakespeare and The Scarlet Letter so criminally I'm certain she's never read either.")

The reader who emailed me asserts: "Because she isn't telling your particular story or the story of the people you hang out with on a regular basis, you've written her off." It's absolutely true that she's not telling my story. But I haven't "written off" Taylor Swift. I simply don't believe her work, as an artist, is better than Lady Gaga's. Nor is it, in my opinion, especially good. In addition, her messages irk me. As Riese writes,

In "Fifteen" — really the only song where Taylor has an actual female friend — [she sings that] "Abigail gave everything she had to a boy, who changed his mind, and we both cried." I'll spare you the time of listening to the song and give it to you straight: Abigail had sex with a boy, and later they broke up. That's right. No marriage. She gave him all she had. That's right. All Abigail had was her hymen.

Still, people find Taylor's writing powerful. According to the reader's email, "She's giving a voice to millions of young women who rarely find they have a voice in popular music. And she's doing it essentially unfiltered by her label." But my question is: Is this voice original? (Riese says no, and gives examples.) And an even bigger question: Is she saying anything? Anything that hasn't already been said in Fast Times At Ridgemont High?

It's been printed on T-shirts and postcards and throw pillows: "Well-behaved women seldom make history." Taylor Swift's Grammy threatens to refute this. I don't care about her personal choices, but her image of being good and pure plays right into how much the patriarchy fetishizes virginity, loves purity, and celebrates women who know their place as delicate flowers. Riese puts it this way:

The rush to exalt Swift is (I believe) a desperate attempt to infuse our allegedly apocalypse-bound country with a palatable conservative ideology in the form of a complacent, repressed feminine ideal… Rather than choosing an established/evolved talent (Beyoncé) or a revolutionary (Lady Gaga), the Grammys chose someone who, according to her lyrics, has spent her entire life waiting for phone calls and dreaming about horses and sunsets.

Taylor Swift sings about being an outcast, sitting on the bleachers wearing sneakers. But all the while, she's wearing high heels, boasting a pretty face and perfectly curled hair. How this is new, original or a effort of artistic excellence is beyond me. And since when did the Grammy Award-winning, classically pretty girl whose father is a stockbroker and whose dreams have all come true need defending? Seems like she's doing just fine.

Update: 10:55pm: comments turned off - we'll re-enable them tomorrow when the moderators are up and about (i.e. awake).

Why Taylor Swift Offends Little Monsters, Feminists, and Weirdos [Autostraddle]
Earlier: Lady Gaga Was Robbed

What a year! First Avatar ascends to the top of the box office pile, and now we have a shiny and enormous new television record. The presence of a golden Manning brother on the Colts and the Saints' feel-good, post-Katrina, first-Super-Bowl-ever backstory are surely responsible for the huuuge numbers, not to mention that a bunch of people on the East Coast were snowbound and stuck at home, and pretty much everything else on was a repeat. Because of these special factors, these numbers likely won't be duplicated or topped next year. Mostly all this means for the future is that Tim Tebow's mom is now really, really famous.

The judge ruled today that Andrews should go with a police-appointed private security guard to his safe deposit box and hand the tapes over to the guard. The rent-a-cops will also collect and erase images from the tape off Andrews lap top, get the log book from the safe deposit box, and take "other items" from their home. They will also probably leave muddy tracks all over their nice clean carpets. Jerks. Young is being sued by Hunter, Edwards' mistress and baby momma, for invasion of privacy and return of the tape. A judge originally gave Young until Wednesday to turn it over or else face jail for contempt of court, but now his personal army has been invited to the party as well. This better be one damn good tape!

UPDATE: The Pad Studios sent us this email in response to our questions:

Hamilton,

Hi there! At the end of last month the annual Yoga Journal Conference was here in town at the Hyatt regency. JADE yoga mat, one of the vendors, took it upon themselves to invite attendees to bring old or used yoga mats to be donated to overcrowded hospitals to be used as bedding. We simply acted as a place where people could drop the used mats and we then took the mats to JADE yoga's booth at the conference. From there, they organized sending the mats to Haiti to be used as bedding.

Thank you for your question and hopefully my answer clarifies the intention behind the mat drive.

Warm regards,

Leila Burrows

A Congressional Research Service report released last week (and published by Secrecy News) found that 60% of the members of Congress with Twitter accounts are Republicans, and that fully half of all congressional Twitterers are House GOP members. The study, which was conducted in August of last year is limited to U.S. senators and House members, shows GOP pols out-Twittering Democrats in virtually every category: A whopping 67% of all congressional "Tweets" are written by Republicans.

It certainly looks like things have turned around, Twitter-wise, for the Republican Party. In January 2009, GOP politicians were publicly wringing their hands over the party's failure to embrace social networking, and then-candidate for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee Michael Steele was touting his Twitter followership as a qualification for the post. The Wall Street Journal covered the party's deliberate campaign to infiltrate Twitter:

Within days of the election, a technology consultant in Nashville, Tenn., started a Web site devoted to getting Republicans on Twitter, spotlighting which of the 168 RNC voting-members use the tool (last count: 20). A conservative strategist issued a 10-point action plan for rebuilding the party, declaring the No. 1 priority to be "winning the technology war with the Democrats."

They've already won. This chart, based on data from the CRS report, shows that the median GOP House Twitterer has nearly twice as many followers as her Democratic counterpart. Democrats still have the edge in the Senate, though we're only talking about 18 Senators with Twitter accounts, so it's not much of a victory compared with the 103 House Republicans.

The upshot of all this is that the Republican Party owns Twitter, and will hopefully continue to be too distracted with "Tweeting" stupid short sentences to their "followers" to develop a coherent policy agenda.

From the beginning of the film — which opens with Grandin's visit to her aunt's Arizona ranch — Grandin's connection with animals is obvious. Because of her exceptional powers of visualization — somewhat awkwardly rendered with animations — she's able to understand how horses and cattle perceive the world, and she's disturbed and soothed by many of the same things as they are. The clip above shows her inspiration for the squeeze machine — a device for calming cattle that she later adapts for herself. Grandin identifies with animals to such a degree that she literally puts herself in their position, and so it's a bit of a shock that she decides to aid in the business of slaughtering them.

But Grandin doesn't see this as a contradiction. Near the end of the film, she explains, "Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be. I wouldn't want to have my guts ripped out by a lion. I'd much rather die in a slaughterhouse, if it was done right." She both empathizes with cattle and supports humans killing and eating them. It's a rare combination, but perhaps it shouldn't be. If everyone involved in the business of slaughtering animals actually cared what they thought and felt, then we would probably kill far fewer animals, and in far more humane ways. And the debate over food ethics — often a split between those who don't care what they eat and those who care too much what others eat, with all the people who don't have the time or money to care stuck in the middle — might be far less polarizing.

Ultimately, Temple Grandin ends up being far more about issues like this, and about the unique challenges and joys of Grandin's life, than about autism in general, and this is to its benefit. While the scene in which a doctor blames Grandin's mother for her condition — as the LA Times points out, a practice still common, although now focused on maternal age rather than "refrigerator mothering" — is both instructive and enraging, the film is generally weakest when it offers pat explanations for various features of Grandin's autism. Far better to watch Grandin — played by Claire Danes with surprising skill and with the real Temple Grandin's blessing — in action, sharing her signature brilliance with a world that's eventually forced to pay attention.

The process isn't easy, and while Grandin's challenges are her own, it's easy to sympathize with her when she complains, in the clip below, "I don't understand people." People are various and confusing, as are their brains, and as Grandin's experience illustrates, a diagnosis doesn't necessarily predict what a person can experience or accomplish. Temple Grandin won't make audiences understand autism — the condition is too complex to be fully captured in a two-hour TV movie, if it can be captured at all. But the film may help us understand her, to all of our benefit.

Related: Study: Moms Over 40 Nearly Twice As Likely To Have Autistic Children

Earlier: "A Bunch Of Social 'Yak Yaks'": Temple Grandin And Autism