Spitzer Madame To Sing [Eliot Spitzer]

"Cecil 'Katie' Suwal, 23, agreed yesterday to come clean on her role in the million-dollar Emperor's Club VIP ring." [Post]

Angelina Jolie's Secret $15 Million Birth? [Celebrity-industrial Complex]

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's unborn twins are worshiped by the entertainment press as a sort of double celebrity messiah. Bidding for exclusive first pictures has reportedly reached $15 million and is poised to rise further. So it was with no small measure of elation Friday that Entertainment Tonight delivered news that the twins had just been born in the south of France, a big scoop. But People and Us Weekly soon reported denials from reps for the couple. Brad Pitt attended a Grand Prix event across the border in Italy, which would be an odd decision for a new father. The celebrified Associated Press, which obtained a denial from Pitt's manager, asked, "Was Entertainment Tonight punk'd?" Maybe not. Maybe it is the victim of a MASSIVE ANGELINA JOLIE CONSPIRACY.

The conspiracy goes like this: Entertainment Tonight ran its story past a personal assistant to Jolie and Pitt named Holly Goline, who used to work at CNN with one of its producers. The assistant "said she was there for the deliveries and everyone was doing well," according to AP, which reviewed the emails.

Jolie's attorneys said the emails came from a Goline imposter. But an anonymous Entertainment Tonight executive told the AP they had an email address for Goline dating back to Goline's time at CNN, where the executive worked with her.

If the emails are geniune, why would Jolie's people pretend they were fake? Said the AP:

Millions of dollars could be at stake. After Shiloh was born, Pitt and Jolie were at the forefront of a growing movement by celebrities to auction off exclusive rights to first public pictures of their babies (Pitt and Jolie donated the money to charity). Sometimes exclusive details on the birth come with these rights.

So the possibilities are:

• Brangelina twins actually born; lawyers covering it up to comply with a lucrative exclusive news/photos contract.
• Entertainment Tonight emailed an address that used to belong to Goline (say, on a service like Hotmail or blackberry.net) but now belongs to someone else, who decided to have a bit of fun with the show.
• Entertainment Tonight emailed the right person, but misinterpreted Goline's statement that "she was there for the deliveries and everyone was doing well" (AP's summary) to mean a birth had occurred, when in fact everyone was waiting for the deliveries but they never occurred due to a false alarm or somesuch.

Entertainment Tonight has pulled its story but refuses to issue a retraction. "We are waiting to see how this story plays out," the show's executive producer told AP.

It's good to see the American news media finally investing in some rigorous reporting and internecine fact-checking, and on a story so vital to the national interest.

[AP]

Idiot Internet Commenters Instantly Vindicate Essay About Idiot Internet Commenters [Webtards]

"It doesn't matter at all what I write about," Ken Layne wrote at AOL News this weekend, "because the comments will be an insane half-literate string of racist nonsense and startling ignorance that has nothing to do with the subject of this post." The post got twelve pages of comments. Guess whether the Wonkette editor was right! Here's a sample of the best comments.

you forgot to mention that when the alien archeologist dig up our computers they are also going to find alot of blogs and articles from dumbass reporters that think they absolutely right and everyone else that disagrees is "half-literate". why don't you grown up and realize that if you blog about political news, be prepared to get alot of angry people. don't like it? get a different job and stop sitting on your fat ass, criticizing people that don't agree with you. feel free to retaliate and call me all sorts of names, it's your time to waste. I'll never be back here again.

Yeah, time for a change and with Obama you get 57 states. foflmao!!

You see Ken you idiot As an American I am so fed up with people like yourself trying to push hussein obama on us.

Well, used to like Hillary...but what does God say—about murder??? Let's pray for her and this party. We still need a supernatural intervention to make us one in love and peace. Only Jesus is that power!

Ken, if you are so smart why are bloging? You are too dumb to be a brain surgeon or a rocket scientist. Guess you get your kicks putting other people down.

Here's my concern.... "I WILL STAND WITH THE MUSLIMS SHOULD THE POLITICAL WINDS SHIFT IN AN UGLY DIRECTION." Barack Obama Well I stand with the United States of America and I believe its high time those leaked to terrorist organizations are brought to justice. I don't care who they are or how many.

Ken,

What was the purpose of your commentary?

WAS IT TO DEPRESS THE HELL OUT OF ME.

IT WORKED.

LOL

What T-Pain Sounds Like Without Auto-Tune: Not That Much Better Than Sasha Frere-Jones [Sasha Frere-jones]

While Sasha Frere-Jones sings worse than a season-premiere American Idol reject, the New Yorker music reviewer's voice sounds almost passable after plugging it into Auto-Tune, the standard industry post-production tool. According to Frere-Jones's interview with producer Tom Beaujour, pretty much every recording artist on the radio uses Auto-Tune in the studio. Of course rapper T-Pain cranked up the tuner to create a robotic vocal effect often misdubbed the "Vocoder." But without it he's just another flat-singing rapper, as shown by the YouTube video below.

Rules for staying sane on the Internet [The Internets]

"4. Being bored does not mean you have to check your e-mail." [The Internet vs. The Care of Your Soul]

Scott McClellan Still Defending Bush [Politics]

Like an old, scorned lover, Scott McClellan can't quite fully betray and repudiate the man who made him do awful things, George W. Bush. The former Bush press secretary has written a fairly extensive and blunt tell-all book about his time with the president, but he's still splitting hairs about what happened. So when McClellan found himself on the Daily Show, discussing the administration's hushing of the economic cost of the war in Iraq, he couldn't help but insist the cover-up was not "willful deception" but was the common practice of selective disclosure. Host Jon Stewart wasn't having any of it: "Somebody made a willful decision, 'don't talk about the price [of the war]...'" McClellan: "I don't think it was like that."

One would hope McClellan, given his former position, could make a more definitive statement about the administration's disclosure strategy, one way or the other. That he can't is one of many clues that the former flack is not the best person with whom to have a discussion of modern political ethics, as Stewart attempts to do in the following clip, by way of suggesting the administration may have committed war crimes.