Bill Clinton Made Rosie O’Donnell CryRosie O’Donnell burst into tears after Bill Clinton called her and apologized for being unfaithful to his wife. The guy who won the marathon said he did so by refraining from sex and eating pasta. Katie Holmes said her marathon run was “hard, but good.” (She also wore a velvet Hermès gown to a Museum of the Moving Image event honoring her husband.) Damien Hirst installed a bunch of dead sheep carcasses in formaldehyde tanks at Lever House. Ousted Citigroup chief Chuck Prince didn’t say hi to Sandy Weill at the Four Seasons. Annie Lennox gave a bunch of fans the finger. Governor Spitzer, Governor Corzine, and Nora Ephron went on a triple date to Cafe Boulud.
it just happened
White House Blogs Mysteriously DisappearToday’s Times ponders the already-tired phenomenon of top government officials “blogging”: Homeland Security czar Michael Chertoff has a blog, as does Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt (who started his “in August, having enjoyed reading a pandemic flu blog that his department began this year”). Will their posts provide an inside look into the administration’s workings? Will they betray the authors’ subtle deviations from the party line? Is Chertoff the private man less churlish than Chertoff the public servant? (No, no, and hell no: Chertoff uses his blog primarily to rag on Times editorials, which, one is tempted to imagine, is how the Gray Lady staffers found it to begin with.) Well, at least they’re excited about all this sweet traffic coming in from the Times site, right? Nope: At this time, the provided links to both Leavitt and Chertoff blogs lead to 404 Error messages. Guess we’ll never know what Chertoff’s take on Kid Rock’s arrest is.
Presidential Cabinet Members Start Blogs [NYT]
Update: We are officially conspiracy theorists (Hooray! We’ve always aspired, but never thought we could live the dream). A helpful reader points out that the Times just had the wrong links. Here are the right ones for Leavitt and Chertoff.
it happened this week
When in Rome
For VII days, all roads seemed to lead to Rome. Emperor George Bush suffered an Et tu? moment when Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki stuck a last-minute dagger in his plans for a triumphant triumvirate dinner. The Baker-Hamilton commission recommended pulling the Army legions out of Iraq; the Pentagon’s Cincinnatus, Colin Powell, crossed the rhetorical Rubicon and called the conflict a civil war. (The president declared that the die was cast, and that “we can accept nothing less than victory.”) Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asked Americans to lend him their ears, so that he could explain how the U.S. is too supportive of Zionists. Homeland Security gladiator Michael Chertoff offered a mea culpa for throwing New York City’s anti-terror funding to the lions.