Obama Denies Textual Relations With Scarlett Johansson [Awkward]

Ouch: After starlet Scarlett Johnasson, clearly crushing hard, gushed to Politico earlier this month about her lengthy email dialog with Barack Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate felt obliged to set the record straight about his connection with ScarJo. What's their status? In A Relationship? It's Complicated? Actually, they are JUST FRIENDS OMG WTF, Obama told reporters on his plane:

Obama said the actress doesn't have his personal email address. "She sent one email to Reggie, who forwarded it to me," Obama said, referring to his 26-year-old personal assistant, Reggie Love. "I write saying, 'thank you Scarlett for doing what you do,' and suddenly we have this email relationship"

One day, a hot politician is happy to engage in "thoughtful... back-and-forth correspondence," and the next he's denying that it means anything at all. Johansson's heart is so breaking. Oh, sweetie, this little tactic is called "moving to the center," and all powerful men do it once they've gotten what they want from their "base." By the time the inauguration comes, you'll have turned your heartache into a gratuitously overproduced hit record and forgotten all about this sad little e-incident.

[Washington Post via NYM]

NBC News' Hidden Pedophilia-Suicide Defense [Journalismism]

NBC on Tuesday settled a $105 million lawsuit brought by a woman whose brother committed suicide amid a raid involving the series To Catch A Predator. The man, an assistant county prosecutor, had engaged in a sex chat with someone posing as a 13-year-old boy on behalf of Predator, and an NBC crew accompanied police as they raided the man's home, where he shot himself. Probably as part of settlement, NBC scrubbed nearly all mention of the case from the Predator website. But the news network left copies of key documents scattered around the internet, including a blog post and an ardent defense of the suicide case.

The defense, drawn up in response to an episode of ABC newsmagazine 20/20, can be found intact on non-NBC servers with a Google search. The article, entitled "Setting the record straight," argues forcefully that police were the driving force behind the deadly raid. It reads, in part:

The 20/20 broadcast was seriously flawed. Below are some of the most glaring reasons.

ABC claims the decision to obtain an arrest warrant for Assistant District Attorney William Conradt was made at the suggestion of Chris Hansen.

Fact: Chris Hansen never asked police to take any action.
Fact: Former Murphy police officer Sam Love, whom ABC interviewed, never said Hansen wanted to do anything beyond interviewing Conradt if and when he left his home.
Fact: ABC used NBC video to suggest Hansen influenced Murphy police to obtain an arrest warrant. The video was actually recorded AFTER police had gotten an arrest warrant. The video simply shows Chris Hansen reporting on police actions, not directing them.

A 2006 blog post by correspondent Chris Hansen has also been pulled from NBC's Web servers, but remains in the Internet Archive. Like the 20/20 defense, the blog post emphasizes the role of the police, as opposed to the TV network, in planning the raid. It even hints that the police action, undertaken against a fellow member of the criminal justice community in a neighboring county, may have been carried out irregularly (emphasis added below):

The Murphy police obtained an arrest warrant for Conradt and did something we’ve not seen before: They contacted the local authorities in Conradt’s town and knocked on his door.

Conradt didn’t answer, but police said there were signs he was still inside. So a tactical team was called in. The officers lined up in formation then broke through the back door. But before they could make the arrest the assistant D.A. pulled out a gun and pointed at his head. Lieutenant Adana Barber was there.

“As they made entry they confronted the subject, I believe he was in the hallway... he told them he wasn’t going to hurt them and then shot himself in the head,” says Barber.

Hopefully for NBC News, terms of its settlement require the network only to delete articles about the suicide case from its own Predator site. The many copies floating around elsewhere online would prove legally and technically difficult to erase, particularly given the newsworthy and controversial nature of the episode.

[LA Times]

Post In Tennis-Hottie Mistake Scandal [Anna Kournikova]

The tabloid said semi-retired Anna Kournikova wants to work for Vogue's Anna Wintour, but really it was the other Russian tennis blonde, Maria Sharapova, who does. Easy way to keep them straight: Sharapova calls her blog posts "doodles," while Kournikova calls them "blogs," just like Arianna Huffington. [Observer]

Stripper Porn Will Get You Out Of Iraq [The Cinema]

Five years into the war in Iraq, and I had no idea military guys aren't allowed to have any porn over there. That's perhaps because there don't seem to have been too many soldiers actually thrown out of the country over the stuff, probably because the armed services need every last person they can get. Six-figure private contractor gigs in Iraq, on the other hand, are still somewhat coveted, so ITT small-arms repairman Brian Sayler was pretty bummed to be ejected for possessing some DVDs he got free on a stateside break. A stripper, Cassidey (pictured), in Stoughton, Mass., patriotically donated a free lap dance to Sayler, along with a collection of free porn movies such as "Cassidey's Day Off." Both the military and its contractors have had a lax policy toward enforcing the porn ban, according to an article in Boston magazine, but for some reason Sayler's building in Iraq was searched and he was sent packing. He ended up winning reinstatement on appeal, but that's not the point: If porno freedom for brave troops abroad isn't Change We Can Believe In, then what is? [Boston]

Did Ron Burkle Set Up Rafaello Follieri? [Rumormonger]

There was an interesting line in Wednesday's front-page Wall Street Journal story on alleged Italian con man Rafaello Follieri. Follieri, you'll recall, has been accused, among other things, of squandering $50 million from a partnership involving supermarket billionaire Ron Burkle and former President Bill Clinton, in part on lavish personal luxuries. The Burkle-Clinton swindle is at the heart of the criminal case that got Follieri arrested this week. And yet, the Journal said, Follieri and the partnership "recently settled the [parallel] civil case on undisclosed terms, and Mr. Follieri has begun spending time again with Mr. Burkle, say people familiar with the matter." Wow, Follieri blew millions of dollars of money entrusted to Burkle by his best buddy Clinton, and yet suddenly all was forgiven? I don't suppose Burkle was doing any surreptitious recording during his buddy-buddy time with Rafaello, like he did with Post gossip Jared Paul Stern?

The feds are the ones who charged Follieri, and it was also the feds, working with Burkle, who investigated Stern for allegedly attempting to sell Burkle better treatment in his tabloid. Burkle recorded a meeting with Stern to build the extortion case, but nothing came of it: Though reports of the meeting ended up all over the media, the feds never charged Stern with a crime.

The fact that there's now a federal charge against Follieri would seem to indicate Burkle was not as forgiving as he might have seemed; it's hard to imagine the feds moving forward with a case without the cooperation of the managing partner of the key victim. That makes Burkle's face time with Follieri all the more suspicious.

If Burkle is setting up Follieri, the Italian businessman's attorneys are likely to highlight everything potential embarrassing about Burkle at trial, e.g. his penchant for hanging out with teenaged girls, and anything potentially embarrassing about his relationship with Bill Clinton, whose wife is a sensitive point in her political career. But Burkle seems to like him some revenge, and airing old laundry is, perhaps, a small price to pay, in his eyes.

[WSJ]

Professor Busted For "Pussy" Search [The Internet]

Good news fusspots: The internet has brought everyone a new thing to get offended about! Editor and blogger Maud Newton (pictured) was today shaken up that someone arrived at her personal website by "searching for a colleague’s name + 'pussy.'" In case you don't already know, when you search for something in Google or Yahoo or whatever and click on one of the hits, your browser forwards the search terms to the destination site (by sending the whole referring Web address). Usually this isn't a big deal, because you're searching for something innocent, or sitting at home behind a quasi-anonymous internet connection. But the professor who hit Newton's site was not so careful: his first initial and last name are part of his internet address (let's just assume he's a dude), along with the name of the university where he works. Whoops! Luckily for the prof, Newton has not outed him, at least not yet. But she is all in a snit:

If you are going to troll the Internet for images of or information about someone’s genitals, you might want to do it from someplace other than the university where you work... especially when the proprietor of the site where you land is a big fan of your colleague’s writing.

I’m not sure I’ve ever been more offended by a Google search.

It's understandable that Newton is, at first blush, upset, but are there really guys (or lesbians) out there who think they can just call up pictures of some woman's cooch on demand? That implies, first, an unusually specific type of physical lust. Not just for a naked body, or chest, or for a backside, but for the vag specifically.

But, fine, whatever, there are people out there with all sorts of kinks. But do any of them really have such a bold faith in the power of the internet — a network that any self-respecting perv knows like the palm of his hand — that they think they can just type in someone's name + "pussy" and actually get a picture of exactly that?

Alternate theory: Maybe the offense-giving prof was simply looking for a memorable post in which the lady writer's name was mentioned, for some reason, along with the word "pussy," which is, as keywords go, reasonably rare and especially memorable. The woman writer might have, for example, used a juicy (sorry) quote involving the term in a high-profile piece of writing.

Or maybe not! Perhaps the search was unambiguously offensive. Only Newton has all the clues, and she's being discreet. But everyone else should be installing Google Analytics on their Tumblrs or whatever, because they'll then probably have fuel for at least one outraged Google-search-terms post by Labor Day.

[Maud Newton]

(Photo via MaudNewton.com)

How Will These Blogs Fare as Books? [Books]

Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? The question applies to blogs (free content) that will soon be turned into books (content you pay for), as well as one-night stands! An as-yet-untitled book by blogger Lizzie Skurnick, based on her Jezebel column about classic children's/young adult literature, just sold to HarperCollins. Which got us thinking: how will the most recent blog-to-book deals sell when they are turned into blogs on paper, bound between two covers? From e-mailing moms to cats doing silly things, we round up some of the recent blog-to-book deals and ask ourselves: want, or do not want?

• I Can Has Cheezburger: LOLcats, the Book
  We got ahold of their proposal a couple months ago, in which the authors assured:

  "We don't envision [the book] as a simple recompiling of images from the website, but rather a supplement to the site... Instead of just slapping some lolcats on a page and calling it a book, ICHC proposes a more adademic approach, hosted by Professor Happycat, [who] will show the reader the finer points of ICHC's most popular memes.
  
  Each page will include an official lolcat definition of the meme along with pronunciation and examples of real life lolspeak situations (i.e. iz u reddy for mah lolcat book?)"

  The LOLcats experience is fleeting; the site stuffed with content, and copycat sites abound. While we're glad they're not simply "slapping some LOLcats on a page," Professor Happycat seems to be explaining to the reader (see photo above) just exactly why said LOLcat memes are funny. Which is difficult, because the LOLcat experience is delightfully random—nobody's quite sure why they're funny, just that they are. Verdict: DO NOT WANT
  
  
  
• (Untitled): Jezebel's "Fine Lines" column about classic kid/young adult books
  This blog column by Lizzie Skurnick discusses "in which we give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wizened look at the children's and YA books we loved in our youth." Do not underestimate the power of teen girls, bookish girls, and women who used to be teen girls! They love this stuff. Verdict: WANT
  
  
  
• Stuff White People Like:
  Honestly, this self-explanatory book could go either way in terms of sales. It's the wild card of this bunch. In our opinion, the web site is just not that funny. Also, the idea has been done before with The Preppy Handbook and The Hipster Handbook. The book has been rushed to print (out in July!) so fast that it makes us suspicious. (Hey, you'd rush to print if you shelled out $350,000, too.) Verdict: DO NOT WANT
  
  
  
  
  
• Postcards From Yo Momma
  By the Observer's Doree Shafrir and Jezebel's Jessica Grose. Um, duh. Moms being dumb on e-mail is hilarious, as is any kind of generational e-mail gaffe. It'd be harder to sell a book full of cute-kitten photos. Verdict: WANT
  
  
  
• Passive Aggressive Notes
  A blogfull of—yep—passive-aggressive notes. Maybe if it's sold on a table at Urban Outfitters alonside those "things to do when you're stoned" and sex position joke books. But does anyone want a book full of funny pictures of notes? You can't e-mail those to your friends! Verdict: DO NOT WANT
  
  
  
  
• ONE CAVEAT: The biggest, in actual books sales-to-advance rate, failed blog-to-book of them all: The Gawker Guide to Conquering All Media
  
  
  Advance: reportedly 'round $250,000
  Sales: 'bout 1,000 copies The Lesson: We thought we did everything right—instead of repackaging content from the website (Julia Allison pics), we hired a very funny comedienne, Chelsea Peretti, to write a cheeky, jokey how-to guide to "conquering" the media. Guess what? Nobody wanted. This is the one-night stand theory in action.

  Anywho, if any of the above earn out, we'll take you to lunch at Balthazar!
  
  
  

XXXXL [Fashion]

A Brooklyn rap crew has started a movement against tight clothes in hip hop. Cool! Not so cool: "'It basically boils down to: You are in a homosexual attire, and you are claiming to be something else,' says 28-year-old TSF member Blanco the Don. 'That's what I have a problem with—not the homosexualism.'" [VV. And what about the TIGHT SAG?]

Hated Flack Is Secret Hipster [Stuff White People Like]

So. We were just reminded of something else about Howard Wolfson, the Clinton communications manager who did not get along with the media. He's totally cool because he's into indie music! Seriously, he sends these playlists to his journalist "friends" (of which he has increasingly few!). The Observer mentioned his annual top-ten list of indie groups and added that "Mr. Wolfson says the darker driving hours are when he allots time to listen to music and to clear his head." Sad! He's probably driving around the beltway right now, doing the whole loop with Exile in Guyville on repeat. Does anyone have one of his playlists laying around?

Mario Lopez: The Most Shirtless Man in America [Important Studies]

After seeing actor and Dancing With the Stars champion Mario Lopez's current shirtless TV Guide cover (at left) and recent People magazine spread, we couldn't help but wonder: just how shirtless is Mario Lopez? We decided we'd compare him to other popular be-pec'ed celebrities — perpetually half-nude actor Matthew McConaughey and dancer/romancer Justin Timberlake, for example — by having our esteemed assistant Nicola conduct a Google image search in the hopes of attaining some sort of shirtlessness ratio. Our results proved our suspicions: 13 of the top 20 results for a Google image search for Lopez's name come up with shirtless pics— or 65%. Thus making Mario Lopez the Most Shirtless Man in America. Consult the above Shirtlessness Index to see how other abdominal Adonises measure up to Mr. Lopez, plus find some special shirtless surprises after the jump.