So Roland Burris, the crazy new Illinois Senator-in-waiting, will be seated! According to the Associated Press! But not according to Harry Reid. But... maybe?

Yesterday Burris, who was selected by criminal Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich as a huge fuck-you to everyone on earth, went to Washington to join the Senate, but they didn't let him in, and he spent the day saying crazy things to the press. They say they can't seat him because his certificate hasn't been signed by the Illinois Secretary of State, but that is apparently just a formality.

So the AP just flat-out said Burris gets to be a Senator, but then that was denied, but now Harry Reid and Dick Durbin are apparently just hammering out the details of some sort of compromise deal.

So now we have this old crazy person, for at least two years, at which point he'll violate his promise to not run for another term, and probably lose.

Will this year's Senate seriously feature Al Franken, Caroline Kennedy, and Roland Burris? Let us hope Barack Obama gets a lot done in two years 'cause come January 2011 there will be like six Democratic Senators left, and they will all be named Kennedy.

If you're waiting anxiously for the Tucker Max movie release, you can look forward to this too: Jersey gossip Chaunce Hayden (pictured) has written a movie about stripper palace Scores. He sent us a summary!

Chaunce found time between feuds with Page Six to sit down with his childhood friend Tony and pen the screenplay for Lapdance. It's the dramatic tale of two high school buddies from Jersey, one of whom goes into gossip and the other into being a doorman at Scores. Chaunce wrote up a summary for us. Highlights:

Like working at Gawker, zing! Minus the sex and celebrities and girls. Chaunce knows how to turn a scoop—and how to turn a phrase:

The dramatic conclusion:

Yes.

Thick-necked celebrity son Luke Russert is having an Inauguration Eve party! For that black guy who won! Would you like to go? Here is the invitation.

The Rookery is a bar/restaurant that is, like 8th grade birthday parties and the marriage certificate line at Sacramento city hall, invite-only. How exclusive. But in the spirit of the White House opening its back door and letting Barack Obama and his lovely family shuffle in, The Rookery is allowing any Joe, Dick, or John-Jane Georgetown party it up at their joint. For 95 Confederate dollars you get a free open bar until 4am (4am!! DC passed a special dispensation allowing bars to stay open, like when they had the Olympics in Salt Lake and people were allowed to drink and touch each other's privates and stuff). Oh, and yeah. Luke, son of late Meet the Press host Tim, will be doing a hosting duty of his own. Hopefully there's a hot tub. A band called Old Man Brown is playing which is... um... unfortunate.

Ah well. So you can get classily shitcanned (jacket required!) all night and then stumble over to watch history happen. Then stumble home and watch the party on HBO, which will feature the old moderate-hippie stylings of Babs and The Boss.

You won't remember any of it, but you'll have participated. Which is all that matters.

As the mobs of newly unemployed people tire of eating squirrel, they determine to do anything necessary to land that next job. Even if it means cheating on the world's easiest "personality test":

If you ever worked at a crappy retail job for some massive corporation, you've probably had the pleasure of filling out one of those tests designed, I assume, to screen out brain damaged serial killers and only brain damaged serial killers. Those "personality" tests, where you rank how much you agree with statements like "Stealing is fun sometimes" or "Violence is a good way to solve work disputes." Well now people are going online to find the right answers to these things, and memorizing them. I don't know if that's a sadder testament to the workers or the workplace:

Statement: "You have to give up on some things that you start." Suggested response from the cheat sheet: "Strongly disagree."

Another statement: "Any trouble you have is your own fault." Suggested response: "Strongly agree."

But also:

Whole Foods Market Inc. dropped the test, partly because applicants for jobs preparing foods "would pass the screening test and then get on the job and did not have the skills to prepare basic sauces," says a spokeswoman. Kronos says its assessments "are personality-based, not skills-based."

The only usefulness of these tests is that if you're not smart enough to pass easily or cheat to pass, you have no business holding a job. Shockingly, people are also gaming Facebook friends in order to look for jobs. Your only true friend now is your online personality test cheat sheet.

Cops are leaking details of their investigation into incoming State Senator Hiram Monserrate's little face-slashing incident.

Monserrate's girlfriend, Karla Giraldo, required 20 stitches for a gash over her left eye, and she initially told a doctor that Monserrate attacked her with a glass after discovering something in her purse (either drugs or "a card belonging to another man"), but then she came to her senses and declared it all an accident. Monserrate says he accidentally tripped while bringing her a glass of water, which you are free to try to work out the logistics of in your mind for a minute or two.

Cops seized the glass in question, and now they're summarizing Monserrate's apartment building security camera footage to the Daily News. It's all pretty gruesome.

"No one can look at the security video and think that this was an accident," said a law enforcement source who saw the footage. "The woman looks scared out of her mind and trying to get away from this guy."

The video shows Giraldo grabbing the apartment's front door as Monserrate tried to drag her out of the building, sources said.

Other video clips show Giraldo clutching a towel to her injured left eye and banging on the door of a neighbor's apartment for help, sources said.

That neighbor, Carolyn Loudon, 46, said Tuesday she heard Giraldo banging on her door but was too scared to open it.

She said she is used to noise coming from Monserrate's unit, but the ruckus was worse than usual on Dec. 19.

"It was frightening," Loudon said. "I heard screaming and then banging on the door."

Yes, sounds like your typical trip to the hospital following an accidental glassing to us.

Still unanswered: what was in Giraldo's purse? Early spin from people familiar with Monserrate's defense say they had a struggle over drugs (as Monserrate is a Scientologist, the drugs could be anything from cocaine to Xanax), but now there is this weird "card," according to these police sources.

Oh, and what a shock that this former cop—who was discharged from the NYPD with a "psychological disability pension" and whose religion forbids him from seeking medical treatment for whatever psychological problem he has—is scaring his neighbors with terrible noises at all hours of the night.

Anyway today Monserrate will be seated as a State Senator. He's "currently slated to chair the Consumer Protection Committee." (Consumers are advised not to date Hiram Monserrate.)

Incoming New York State Senate leader Malcolm Smith is making a remarkable number of deals with a remarkable number of devils before the new Senate has even begun their important work of not getting anything done.

The Democrats finally achieved a majority in the State Senate and Smith was supposed to be the majority leader, but then a couple bigoted old bastards declared that they'd defect from the party unless one of their anti-gay own got to lead the Senate instead. Within days of caving, Smith un-caved, and the Senate leadership was in doubt. Well, he caved again, only a little less so. The dissidents all get to chair committees!

What a wonderful first day of the new Democrat-controlled New York State Senate we are all having.

Movie idea: the daughter of Jewish refugees flees Europe for Wall Street, strikes it rich, gains billionaire mobster clients, but is then forced into hiding by a deal gone wrong. Bonus: it's a true story.

Her name is Sonja Kohn, and her story is told in the NYT today. I'm just ripping it off. She's a 60-year-old Austrian ultra-Orthodox Jew who made most of her money recently by steering international clients into the winning funds of—ta da—Bernie Madoff. Now her clients have lost everything, and Kohn—once known as "Austria's woman on Wall Street"—has gone into hiding. Like a spy novel! She's not at her New York home, or her Vienna apartment, or her Zurich villa. Why? The Russians:

But another theory widely repeated by those who know Mrs. Kohn is that she may be afraid of some particularly displeased investors: Russian oligarchs whose money made up a chunk of the $2.1 billion that Bank Medici invested with Mr. Madoff.

“With Russian oligarchs as clients,” said a Viennese banker who knew Mrs. Kohn and her husband socially, “she might have reason to be afraid.”

I see Julia Roberts as Kohn, Daniel Craig as her dashing husband, and that dude from Transporter as the Russian assassin. And Samuel L. Jackson as the streetwise homeless man with a heart of gold who gets swept up in the adventure! [NYT]

Infallible God that she is, Oprah never makes a mistake. No, what happens is that people make mistakes near her and then her gravitational pull forces them close to her. Like Herman Rosenblat's lying!

Oprah herself still hasn't said anything about why she's so easy to lie to, including this fake Holocaust tale. Rosenblat first lied in a newspaper contest about meeting his beloved wife Roma when he was in a concentration camp and she threw apples over the fence to nourish him and they, after years separated by the post-war diaspora, supposedly met again and fell in love in Brooklyn. It's a sweet story! And it would have probably stopped there, but it was so sweet that Oprah, Master of the Three Realms, bellowed an edict and brought the couple on the show way back in 1996.

Flash forward 12 years and Rosenblat writes a memoir called Angel at the Fence which, before being published, is quickly debunked as cockamamie schmaltzery, he admits it, and then Oprah—who had called this the greatest love story ever told (apparently she hasn't seen What Happens In Vegas)—stays mum. Because, see above, Oprah didn't make a mistake. Rosenblat did. So eventually she has a web site lackey slip out a little admission that maybe this story that she and her website have been touting for so long is maybe a little not so real. How dare Rosenblat make Oprah apologize for him?

The best part? The meek website admission says that everything is lies, "including how he met his wife." Ha! Srsly? Isn't that part the whole story? Ah well. Best not to dwell on it. Now if you'll excuse me I have to get these calves to the dais for sacrifice.

Fox News' Greta Van Susteren is Sarah Palin's close friend and kitchen buddy, and she's not about to stand back and let CNN slanderously accuse Palin of "falling from grace" last year. Huh.

Apparently CNN put Palin on a list with Spitzer and John Edwards and assorted other scandalized political characters and everyone was scandalized by this and then CNN scandalously had to take Palin off this made-up, unimportant list, and apologize to her, for fuck's sake, because this is journalism in America, these days. Greta, who still feels indebted to the Palins for being allowed on the snowmobile, feels their apology efforts fall scandalously short:

1/ why didn’t CNN PUBLICLY apologize for this one? they sure unfairly trashed her publicly on that list….should not exposure of the apology equal the round the world exposure of the unfair trashing? That is what is done in court - you do what is necessary to make the person whole in the damage done to the person…and then it is over.

2/ a producer? why did she get stuck doing the dirty work on this one? why didn’t someone higher up the corporate food chain send the message of apology if CNN really means it? the job stature of the person making the apology can mean much. This IS the Governor of the largest state…a former candidate for VP….and the trashing went world wide and was really lousy….

Yes the CEO of CNN is now responsible for PUBLICLY APOLOGIZING for offending any politician through LISTICLE. Clowns. Everywhere, there are clowns.

We finally learned who Bush booked in the Blair House instead of letting the Obamas stay there. And—surprise!—it's a major-league asshole.

The one accomplishment listed in President Bush's fantasy novel about his "successful presidency" (he battled dragons!) that we can actually all be proud of is "Directed unprecedented preparations for a smooth presidential transition." But of course he had to screw that up in some small way, because that's how he operates, and so he didn't allow the president-elect to stay in the traditional pre-inaguration home of the president-elect, Blair House. The Obamas needed to move in this week to get their kids in school, but Bush's people said Blair House was already booked. Sorry, Obamas!

Well now we know who's staying there: hated former Australian Prime Minister Yahoo Serious John Howard. John Howard, Bush ally, is such an asshole, that when the new Prime Minister finally issued an official federal government apology to the indigenous people of Australia, the only living former Prime Minister who declined to attend the ceremony was, you guessed it, John Howard. That is pretty assholish even for an Australian.

Also he lied Australia into Bush's stupid Iraq War.

He is at the Blair House because Bush is giving him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Fellow hated war liar Tony Blair is getting one too.

[Blake Lively filming that "The Amazing Gossip Brothers Detective Agency" show she's on or whatever in St. Louis or Central Park or something; image via Splash]

Today we just have lots of stuff about hookers. It's sort of sad, really. Oh and something about bad breath.

1) "Which pothead actor is seeking refuge for harder drugs in a NYC rehab center? The toker couldn’t quite kick the nose-candy habit." [NYDN]

2) "Which paunchy Hollywood star, with a taste for eastern European hookers, makes his poor overworked PA book him different girls every day of the week during trips abroad?" [MIrror]

3) "'Hey aren't you?' There have been a rash of sightings and I use the term rash here as a caution to all people to not engage in unprotected sex with workers of the sex industry. Anyway, the rash of sightings took place over a two day period. Who was being seen and what were they doing? Well it turns out this A list country singer might have been enjoying the absence of his wife because for two days there were sightings of our singer picking up women who make their living on the streets. At least three times over a 48 hour period our singer cruised around in his very recognizable car and picked up women for about 20 minutes of fun. Now, I don't know if he was just not getting any at home or if he wanted to give his wife a very special Christmas present that could not be returned." [CDaN]

4) "Which female singer has halitosis bad enough to take the paint off the walls? There were so many complaints about the singer’s bad breath that the choreographer actually had to rearrange the blocking during her performances so that the singer wasn’t face to face or sharing the mic with any other person on stage. Since she doesn’t seem to get the hint when offered breath mints or gum, the singer’s friends and fellow performers are half-joking about staging an intervention." [BlindGossip]

It regrettable quote day! Josh Broslin called Russell Crowe an "asshole;" Lily Allen defended cocaine; Sumner Redstone bragged about sex and 30 Rock's Rip Torn insisted the ground was drunk, not him.

• Don Geiss of 30 Rock?Drunk driving. In the wrong lane. Before insisting "the ground wasn't level enough." [Fox News]
• After some drinking, Josh Broslin told film critics that Russell Crowe is an "asshole" and that the Times' chief theater critic is a "motherfucker." [P6]
• Before his recent divorce, Sumner Redstone loved to overshare about boning his wife, ruining dinner for everyone."If they show up 15 minutes, half an hour late, they might say, 'We had sex four times today!'" [P6]
• Lily Allen on media bias: "I know lots of people who take cocaine three nights a week and get up and go to work, but we never hear that side of the story." [Sun]
• It might seem like Paris Hilton gets around, but she's actually only had sex with "a couple" of guys. (In front of a camera. We're pretty sure she forgot to add that qualifier.) [Sun]
• Brad Pitt clarified that he romanced Jennifer Aniston's replacement Angelina Jolie in a very classy way, during and/or immediately after his divorce. [P6]
• Michael Jackson has six months to live, supposedly. [Enquirer]

Caroline Kennedy is not only close friends with the publisher of the Times, Maureen Dowd "knows" her as well, so the senate hopeful got a love letter from the Times columnist, for sucking.

Dowd's Kennedy column

Dowd wrote that Kennedy has no qualifications, and can't talk properly. When confronted with these deficiencies in Sarah Palin, Dowd referred to the Republican vice presidential nominee's "thin résumé," called her "underqualified," a "bantamweight," and "the two-year governor of an oversized igloo."

Kennedy's government work is far thinner, but, hey, inexperience is a plus these days (four months later):

People complain that the 51-year-old Harvard and Columbia Law School grad and author is not a glib, professional pol who knows how to artfully market herself, and is someone who hasn’t spent her life glad-handing, backstabbing and logrolling. I say, thank God.

But Kennedy sucks just enough at politics: There are senators who sucked worse!.

People are suddenly awfully choosy about who gets to go to the former home of Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond and Robert Torricelli.

Right, probably because New Yorkers would never have voted for those first two guys, or re-elected the third. But, hey, let's have Kennedy, because who cares about the senate, right??

None of this necessarily constitutes institutional bias on the part the paper; Dowd reserves the right to be batshit illogical about basically anyone, anytime, for any reason, such as "I know Caroline Kennedy. She’s smart, cultivated, serious and unpretentious."

Confessore on Kennedy's rival

Moving on to the Times' other Kennedy item today, Nick Confessore found anonymous sources to say an aide of Kennedy rival Andrew Cuomo strongly "suggested" to vaious labor leaders and upstate officials that they not endorse Kennedy. Cuomo isn't officially campaigning for the senate seat even though he totally wants it.

The paper did something similar a few weeks ago on Bloomberg's aide politicking for Kennedy. Balance!

It's pretty amazing that the daughter of slain Pakistani premier Benazir Bhutto recorded and uploaded to YouTube a rap song about her mom, in English. Also amazing: The harsh reviews.

Canada's National Press was quite mean:

But can her daughter, a student at Edinburgh University in Scotland, rap? Well, not really. Her lyrics are so on the nose as to be polemic and the beat, which she apparently made herself, is a simple hand clap, piano loop and cymbal crash with a sped-up soul hook chorus that sounds like 2002 Kanye West....

This makes "Yes We Can" by will.i.am sound like Radiohead.

Snap! That'll teach Bakhtawar Bhutto Zardari to try and sell subpar rap music for her own self-aggrandizement! Or, uh, give away a heartfelt song, for free, to honor her mom.

UK Telegraph: "Dirgelike.... unlikely to secure... a Grammy." Vanity Fair: "Highly unlikely to win any awards." NewTeeVee: "Heavily produced and stylized."

Snap?

To be fair, those last three (especially the last two) also had some positive things to say. In fact, VF said Bakhtawar's video as superior to Puff Daddy's tribute to Notorious B. I. G. Faint praise, but not bad for an 18-year-old!

[via NewTeeVee]

The Brits suddenly love squirrel! And so will we, probably: the critters run $3 each, and the Times concedes they seem perfect for a recession.

Writes the paper:

One might think that because of easy availability, squirrel would be the perfect meal-stretcher for these economically challenged times, but it takes a lot of work to get the meat off even the plumpest squirrel.

Ah, but labor gets cheap fast in a collapsed economy, and squirrels are plentiful. In fact, there are so many American squirrels they've invaded Britain, which is why the locals there so delight in smearing Yank-squirrel patê and gobbling roast Yank-squirrel in jus. (They don't eat the cute red native squirrels.)

Environmentalists will pay extra because the animal is local; less conscientious consumes can take advantage of the fact that squirrel slaughter is likely far less regulated in the U.S. than in the U.K. and thus cheaper.

My Texan great-great grandmother, already middle-aged by the time of the Great Depression, was legendary within the family for her butchery of squirrels and various other small mammals. Who would have imagined I'd need the same skills? (Plus pigeon-plucking tips as well, actually. They tend to be more plentiful in urban environments.)

Jon Stewart humiliated pundit Tucker Carlson with a public deconstruction years ago. But his dissembling of media villain Rupert Murdoch last night was, in a way, more damning.

Sitting across from the News Corp. chairman's moonstruck biographer, Stewart called Murdoch humdrum and hormonal and, worse, a letdown from the Citizen Kane figure he'd been expecting. (See video above.)

Wolff rather vigorously (and ludicrously) countered that Murdoch may be the most powerful man on the planet. But by the end of his segment he hadn't changed the verdict:

Murdoch may run a feisty tabloid, sleep with a trophy wife, dominate Wall Street's news agenda and control a vast array of other media properties, including Stewart's favorite quarry, Fox News. He may want to leave a legacy. But the coolest guy on television just called him boring.

(He'll probably blame Wolff and his biography. Fair enough. The guy was mousy.)

Entertainment Weekly lost a quarter of its staff to layoffs last year, but Time Inc. will continue publishing the magazine, even though it maybe considered axing its print edition. Risky.

Sure, the title made $10 million last year, according to Keith Kelly at the Post. And it has new leadership (Kelly reports) in managing editor Jess Cagle, a People and former Time editor who spent 10 years at EW following its launch. (Fortune vet Rick Tetzeli, the former M.E., was kicked upstairs.)

But the magazine's profits are a fifth of the $50 million they recently were. If 2009 plays out as expected, EW could slide into the red on the cost of printing 1.6 million copies each week.

Time Inc. CEO Ann Moore is betting an editorial turnaround will prevent that, as will lower costs, thanks to the loss of 30 of 120 editorial staff and plans to share staff with other publications. But Moore should be ready to pull the plug quickly if the magazine starts losing money. EW never quite made its mark, and Time Inc.'s last round of 600-or-so layoffs was actually not that deep given the magazine group's 10,000 employees.

If the company has to fire more people, it should not be to sentimentally extend a failed experiment.

Our tipster said it's more heartwarming than the puppy cam , this, the best headline yet in 2009: "Bush starts packing to leave White House." It's true, he can't wait to leave.

Per the Hill:

“The president’s style is always to be one that’s a little bit prepared early, and he and Mrs. Bush have been working to box things up,” [Bush press secretary Dana] Perino said. “They didn’t come with a lot of things; they didn’t bring a lot of furniture here. So mostly what they have are books, obviously their clothes, and then some of the things that they’ve picked up along the way on their travels as they’ve traveled.”

Yes, if there's one word Bush conjures to mind, it's "prepared." Prepared in advance.

To stop working at the White House.

The attached ad, ostensibly raising money to help Israelis, aired during MSNBC's Countdown tonight. As a tipster pointed out, one of the explosions looks totally fake.

Check out that early shot of a presumably Hamas-fired rocket from the Gaza strip hitting Israeli homes. The resulting fireball looks almost painted on — very colorful and well-defined against a more blurry background. (The contrast is a bit harder to see in our small video player.)

At the very least, the ad makes cable news even more melodramatic and pointlessly heart-pounding, adding no new information about an admittedly terrible situation in which Hamas is rocketing Israel. Pointless for the viewer at least; the advertiser, the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, hopes to further link (as it has) Israelis with MSNBC-watching American Christian evangelical donors, many of whom support the Jewish state because they believe it paves the way for an "apocalyptic battle between good and evil in which Jesus returns and Jews either accept him or perish," as AP put it.

If you believe the apocalypse is coming, no alarm is likely to sound over the top.

What did the ex-wife of Google executive Omid Kordestani (net worth: $2.2 billion) do after getting dumped for a younger woman? She hooked up with a doctor and hired Julio Iglesias as her wedding singer.

Iglesias — whose private-performance fee is estimated at $1 million — was only the start of the bills for the wedding, held last weekend at the Marquis Cabo San Lucas hotel.

Kordestani's ex, Bita Daryabari, and her groom, varicose-vein specialist Reza Malek (pictured above, at a charity event in San Francisco), stayed in a $4,000/night presidential suite. Colin Cowie, the celebrity wedding planner who's seen Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Jennifer Lopez, and others to the altar, organized the nuptials. Some of the guests took chartered planes Daryabari and Malek paid for. A tequila party on the beach ended with fireworks; the last fusillade took the form of a heart. A chef was flown in from New York to cater the affair. Paparazzi, in town to lens Jennifer Aniston, stumbled across the event — which, in a way, only added to its gaudy glamour.

It is hard to imagine a worse time to throw an extravagant wedding. But Daryabari surely had other things on her mind.

What turned Daryabari, a telecom executive turned philanthropist, into a towering Bridezilla? Her husband, Kordestani, was Google's 12th employee and its first salesman. He struck a search-licensing deal with the now-forgotten Netscape, then an Internet powerhouse where he previously worked, that made Google viable. Google's IPO made Kordestani wealthy, and as Google's shares soared, his fortune grew into the billions of dollars.

But then Kordestani fell in love with a coworker, Gisel Hiscock (right, and yes, that's really her name, poor dear). A rumored reconciliation after the revelation of his affair never happened. The couple moved to London last summer. Somewhere along the line, Daryabari and Kordestani finalized their divorce.

Which, naturally, gave her a big chunk of Kordestani's Google fortune. And what better way to rub her ex-husband's face in her happiness than by spending his money, a million dollars at a time, on the most extravagant event imaginable? If it weren't a supremely arrogant Googler, the self-crowned king of the new advertising world, getting his comeuppance, we might say her wedding was in poor taste. But is there a sweeter taste than revenge?

(Photo by Drew Altizer via SFLuxe)

Two things apparently distract Jeremy Piven, according to CNET TV host & CBS correspondent Natali Del Conte who was on Fox's Red Eye last night: her breasts and Gawker.

She says this was back in the spring. Perhaps in March, when we asked what the hell he was doing at a Microsoft party and noticed him touching himself a lot during photoshoots. But whenever it was, while Del Conte tried to get an interview with him started, he was furiously checking his BlackBerry mumbling that he'd been on Gawker. He then started looking at her tits.

Natali's tale is in clip form above. And to indulge our number one fan, here's a brief roundup of his post-mercury-poisoning antics.

• Before getting fired from/quitting his Broadway show Speed-the-Plow, he spent a night off sending a mass text message to ladies, telling any/all of them to come to his hotel room. Whoever got there first, won him for the evening. That's how he ended up with his current girlfriend, 23-year-old model Ashley Chontos.
• He also, inexplicably, sent a "six paragraph" text to View prattler Sherri Shepherd.
• E! gossipeuse Ted Casablanca says that Piven was actually fired from Speed-the-Plow, rather than quitting.
• And, finally, he went seeking treatment for his suspicious ailment in Thailand, of all places.

Michael Hirschorn writes the single most insightful and plausible essay yet on the probable coming decline, fall, and (perhaps) rebirth of the New York Times. You reading, Pinch? [The Atlantic]

Graybearded Santa figure Neale Donald Walsch, a writer on spirituality, copied a tale of Christmas cheer and posted it on BeliefNet.

The tale of a winter pageant where a child displays a letter sign upside-down, turning "Christmas Love" into "Christ Was Love," was written by Candy Chand and published in Clarity in 1999, Motoko Rich reports. Walsch's excuse: Someone sent him Chand's story, unattributed, and he put it in his clippings file. He then retold it so many times he forgot it didn't actually happen.

Ah yes, the clippings-file excuse — a variant of the one historian Doris Kearns Goodwin trotted out to explain away her plagiarism. And the sloppiness excuse — the one Ruth Shalit used. Walsch, in short, isn't original even in his outrageous defenses of obvious plagiarism.

Kanye West is planning a puppet show, but he's been beaten to the punch—drowsy, dancing teenage rapper Soulja Boy has just launched an online cartoon show starring Alfonso Riberio. Hip hop is magic:

If Ice-T doesn't at least make an appearance on South Park this month he totally loses. [SouljaBoyTellem.com] [I don't care what you think of Soulja Boy, this intro song is at least better than the Fresh Prince's.]

Martin Eistenstadt, that fake pundit/McCain adviser who supposedly started the whole "Sarah Palin didn't know Africa's a continent" thing, has gotten a real life book deal.

You'll remember that Eisenstadt is, in fact, a fictitious, satirical figure, a character created by two men (Eitan Gorlin and Dan Mirvish) who did a good job of fooling people for a while with his "The Last Republican" YouTube videos and making an ass of David Shuster. People were always so ready to believe in him! Because the election was already a complete work of sci-fi fantasy.

Ultimately Gorlin and Mirvish were aiming for a television show, but now that the election smoke has cleared to all but a wisp, they've been forced to settle for a measly old book deal. We received the tongue-in-cheek press release today, in which the pair addresses America. In the voice, of course, of Martin Eisenstadt:

I’m delighted to have an opportunity to put to rest the disinformation put out by The New York Times that the Palin/Africa claims are a hoax and that I myself am the creation of two opportunistic filmmakers, Eitan Gorlin and Dan Mirvish,” said Eisenstadt. “Even CNN’s ‘Reliable Sources’ perpetuated this ridiculous canard. The story has been picked up around the world. It’s time to clear my name and set the record straight.

So it's more jokey haha's for everyone, with mock-serious punditry and politicking not seen since last night on The Colbert Report. This is why hoaxes suck these days.

Photo from Eisenstadt's blog

[Actor Matthew Broderick out with a bird-flipping friend (wow, it's writer/director Kenneth Lonergan! He looks, um, different!) in New York today; image via Bauer-Griffin]

Barack Obama wants to appoint tee-vee doctor Sanjay Gupta of CNN as our new Surgeon General. What the hell is this, really?

"Gupta has told administration officials that he wants the job, and the final vetting process is under way. He has asked for a few days to figure out the financial and logistical details of moving his family from Atlanta to Washington but is expected to accept the offer...

The offer followed a two-hour Chicago meeting in November with Obama, who said that Gupta could be the highest-profile surgeon general in history and would have an expanded role in providing health policy advice, the sources said."

More info TK, but obviously Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman is the big loser here. [WP]

MORE ON SANJAY!: First keep in mind that there's a chance he might not take the gig, because it would be a huge pay cut for him. Now put that out of your mind immediately and gaze upon these fun facts about our probably new Surgeon General!

—Before he was a talking head, he was a real doctor! A neurosurgeon. One time he went to report from Iraq and did emergency surgery to help save a soldier's life!

—He's a New York Times bestselling author!

—And he won an Emmy award!

—And "He has recently had articles published in the Journal of Neurosurgery and Neurosurgical Focus on percutaneous pedicle screw placement."!

—He was one of People's Sexiest Men Alive in 2003.

And the single most famous moment of his career? Getting into a feud with Michael Moore over the tubby filmmaker's movie Sicko, which, let's face it, did have a fair amount of bullshit propaganda in it:

Does any of this qualify him to be Surgeon General of the US? Obama says yes!

We hear Forbes, the fussily conservative business magazine, is laying off Web and print staff today, and merging the surviving editors and writers into a single newsroom. It only took them a decade.

Peter Kafka, a former Forbes.com editor, reports that 19 have been laid off from both the print and online sides. Other sources give a breakdown: 17 from print, chiefly those with the longest tenure and hence the highest salaries; and 2 from the Web, both recent hires.

Forbes and Forbes.com have been run separately since the late '90s, when the Forbes family hoped to make some quick cash by spinning out the dotcom in an IPO. The public offering never happened, but Forbes Media's split has persisted, exacerbated by turf wars and infighting. (Forbes.com did not want Dan Lyons, the magazine writer who turned into a superstar blogger as Fake Steve Jobs, to write for the website; he left for Newsweek last year.)

Plans to merge the two feuding operations first leaked in October. In November, the company, which is now part owned by the Forbes family and part owned by Elevation Partners, the private equity firm which counts U2 rock star Bono as a member, conceded in a memo to employees that a merger was afoot, and that decisions on cuts would be made in January.

It is a comedown for the magazine, especially. We have heard, but not yet confirmed, that the list-happy title has lost most of its junior reporters who served as factcheckers. And the print team, we're told, may move from its 60 Fifth Avenue headquarters to Forbes.com's dumpier newsroom at 90 Fifth Avenue, perhaps so Forbes Media can unload the more valuable real estate. (Not that it's a good time to sell Manhattan office space, which is likely why the move is still undecided.)

Just in time to solve America's education crisis, the exclusive private Greenwich Village High School backed by Graydon Carter and John Leguizamo is preparing to open its doors. It's worse than you think.

The Observer reports that tuition for the ELITE 45-student freshman class scheduled to start in September will range from $35k for the rich to a mere $1k for the token poor. Besides the Vanity Fair boss and the manic actor, the school is also backed by despised New School president Bob Kerrey! They'll start later, so the kids can sleep in (nice!). And most importantly, the kids can start enjoying the full benefit of string-pulling by their well connected overlords right from day one:

In an English class, students might read a recent piece from The New Yorker about a Shakespeare play studied in class and then meet the play’s director to further explore his or her ideas, work, and life. A chapter from a textbook might begin a study of world history, but students might also meet with a curator at the Museum of the City of New York to understand how artifacts complement the story.

It's the normal nepotism and bald connection-mongering of the New York media and entertainment worlds writ small! No price is too high to pay to secure your child's seat at the table! Their tai chi and yoga teams will be the envy of downtown! They "hire superior teachers"—far superior to the teachers at your kid's school! Because let's face it, if you don't know or haven't slept with one of these people you're not getting in. It's a good lesson for the real world, all around. [NYO]