• Welfare workers report that girls in gangs are often raped by the male members of the gang as part of initiation, but many of them accept this as routine. "The girls think they are going to be protected by the gang if they have sex with one person but then they find there are more boys there," said Teresa Pointing, chief executive of In-volve, a charity that works with teen girls. • According to White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, Sasha and Malia Obama have not been vaccinated for swine flu. The vaccine is currently unavailable to the twogirls because they are not at high risk. • Doctor Patrick O'Brian recalls being shocked at the state of pregnant women in Uganda, a country that apparently has some of the worst maternal care in the world. In efforts to address this issue, he started a program with the University College Hospital in London that works to distribute medicine to women in need and offer pre and post-natal care to mothers. • Researchers have found that breast reduction surgery may have unexpected benefits. Through testing the removed tissue, doctors may be able to better identify patients at risk for breast cancer. Another upside to breast reduction? Decreased back pain and increased range of movement. • According to a new study, well-educated older women who live alone report a lower emotional well-being than breast cancer patients who live with a partner. •  A little girl from Brooklyn has made the news for a heartbreaking letter she wrote to Sasha and Malia Obama. Bianca's mother was shot several years ago by an abusive boyfriend, and the 6-year-old and her father are still struggling. In her letter, she begged for help for her family, and readers of the Daily News have been quick to respond. • Researchers have found that sperm itself - and not just the fluid it travels in - may transmit HIV to healthy cells. Doctors previously suspected that sperm could transmit the virus, but they were unable to prove this until recently. • A revealing new poll from the UK shows that 90% of expecting mothers are denied the choice as to where they will give birth. The vast majority of women in Britain are not offered the option to give birth at home or at a birthing center attended by a midwife. • The Daily Beast on sexism in nonprofits: "Charity is not allowed to use the same tools as business because society subconsciously regards it as female, and discriminates against it the same way it has historically discriminated against women." Read the rest of their interesting take on charity here. • Good news: The Saudi king has decided not to flog a female journalist charged with participation in a television show in which a man spoke publicly about his sex life. • Among women with BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, breast cancer is diagnosed six years earlier than in previous generations. Doctors don't know if women are screened better today, or if hormonal and environmental factors are giving women cancer earlier. • Jury selection will begin today in the trial of the first 12 male members of the polygamist sect whose Yearning For Zion ranch was raided last year. Flora Jessop, who escaped the compound 15 years ago, said she's happy to see the men go on trial but, "What I'm upset the most about, I think, is the fact that none of the women have been indicted, as well. ... I think that the women were nothing but pimps on that compound and giving their daughters over to these perverts knowing what was going to happen to them." • A study by the National Center for Voice and Speech found that female teachers used their voices about 10 percent more than males when teaching and 7 percent more when not teaching. Female teachers speak louder than male teachers at work. All teachers spend more time talking than most professionals and are at a greater risk for hurting their voices. • Debbie Davis, 29, of Sunderland, England has been named Britain's top Avon saleswoman. She started selling the cosmetics when she was laid off five years ago and now she's making $408,000 a year. • 14-year-old Dutch girl Laura Dekker says she will wait until the school year is over to begin her attempt to become the youngest sailor to circumnavigate the globe. She had planned to head out in August but was stopped by authorities who said she was too young. The court is expected to rule on her case by Friday. • Elizabeth Edwards told a local news station that John Edwards said of their relationship, "Perhaps [it's] not the great love story that we hoped, but maybe a great love story nonetheless." Well, most great love stories don't involve the man possibly fathering a child with another woman. • After more than 120 years, the Beloit's girls reformatory school in Kansas closed for good in August. Before 1983 the institution often housed girls who hadn't committed criminal offenses, but were considered "incorrigible," "immoral," or had suffered abuse at home. Under some administrations, girls were punished with huge doses of vomit- and diarrhea-inducing castor oil, humiliated with forced hair clipping, or even sterilized. • After a "concerned citizen" in Yulee, Florida tipped the police that the Girls Gone Wild bus was in town, police organized an undercover investigation and arrested seven women who complied with the organizers' request that they "show their breasts so they could be photographed/filmed or so they could have their breasts spray painted. The women were charged with indecent exposure along with the bar's owner and two Girls Gone Wild employees, who were each charged with illegally operating a sexually oriented business. •

The attack on International Islamic University in Islamabad is the latest in a series of militant attacks around the country in recent weeks. Many schools in the area had closed this week because authorities warned that insurgents may be planning attacks. Half of the school's 18,000 students are female and most study secular subjects. • A French man accused of kidnapping and raping a boy after serving 18 years in prison for raping two other children has written to President Nicolas Sarkozy and asked to be castrated. France is currently debating forcing some sex offenders to be chemically castrated, but the man wants his testicles removed. • An Australian primary school has banned hugging and other "inappropriate behavior" between its students because administrators are worried the older students, who are 11 to 13, are setting a bad example for the younger ones. Principal Julie Gale says hugging between friends is not banned "but we do discourage displays of affection in the school yard among students ... who have a boyfriend or girlfriend at the school." • In March, the United Nations will consider 40 proposals to curb the trade of endangered animals including tuna used in sushi, corals that are made into jewelry, and sharks whose fins make soup. If passed, the animal trade would probably be regulated with a government permit system. • Female cat burglar Celeste Ricciardi allegedly looted four New York apartment buildings including her own by crawling into windows from the fire escape. The New York Post calls her "catwoman" and notes that she "has two cats." • Married British doctor Edward Erin has been found guilty of attempting to spike his girlfriend's drinks to induce abortion. Bella Prowse took several suspicious beverages he'd prepared to the police and they determined they were laced with drugs used to cause a miscarriage. Prowse gave birth to a son in September 2008 and Erin is awaiting sentencing. • Adrian Searle writes in The Guardian that with the death of Nancy Spero on Sunday "the art world loses its conscience." He says, "Her art could also be riotously funny and sexy as well as macabre, and she made many works which dealt with female jouissance and eroticism, pleasure and pain. Spero was a spearhead of feminist art in the 1960s, calling for greater recognition of women artists and women in the New York art world." • Prosecutors say they're worried Rod Blagojevich's appearance on The Celebrity Apprentice may prejudice potential jurors for his trial on corruption charges. A judge has ruled that he can appear on the show but prosecutors have asked that the judge limit what he can say on television. • A lock of hair believed to be Amelia Earhart's is actually just thread. A group looking for DNA evidence of Earhart on a Pacific island asked to examine the sample at the International Women's Air and Space Museum in Cleveland, Ohio, but found it was a fake. •

Back in 2008, John Edwards was riding high, having successfully rerouted the national conversation to include a substantial discussion of poverty and holding his own as a contender for the presidency. Less than eighteen months later, Edwards has faded from the limelight in the wake of an extra-marital affair that resulted in a child.

The LA Times' article explores the Edwards' uneasy existence in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Elizabeth Edwards is coping by throwing herself into a furniture business and a quieter life, and John Edwards is struggling with picking up the pieces of his derailed life and career. The voices of the townspeople loom large in this analysis and the general consensus appears to be anger and betrayal.

Interestingly, a lot of the rage seems to stem from politics, and not Edward's moral failings:

The feelings of betrayal are particularly strong here in Chapel Hill, the famously liberal college town where the family moved after Edwards left the Senate in 2005. In some quarters, John and Elizabeth are both being blamed for pressing ahead with his presidential run despite their shared knowledge of the affair: If Edwards had secured the Democratic nomination, such critics say, the revelation might have meant Republican victory.

The article ends with a Freudian slip of sorts, a clear illustration of John Edwards' tarnished reputation:

The dean, who received a divinity degree in 1971, said Edwards' personal tragedy reminded him of a certain passage from the Book of Psalms. He pulled down a Bible from his office shelf, opened it to the 22nd Psalm and pointed out the line: "I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people."

No, no, Boger said. On second thought, that was not the one he was thinking of.

The Dividing Line On John Edwards [LA Times]

Earlier: John Edwards Always Knew He Would Disappoint Women

On Saturday, Neil A. Lewis of the Times wrote that Edwards was considering announcing paternity, that Elizabeth Edwards had yet to come around to the idea, and that — as the National Enquirer reported last month — Hunter was planning to move to North Carolina so that her baby could be near the father. Showbiz411's Roger Friedman, though, says the story is vaporware. He says Hunter is in New Jersey with no plans to move, and that a source told him, "All that story is is regurgitation of old misinformation combined with false light and repackaged with bits of Andrew Young's book, probably leaked by his agent to heighten interest."

That book, by the former Edwards aide who once said he was the father of Hunter's baby, is the subject of a lengthy post by Glynnis MacNicol of Mediaite. MacNicol writes that the book proposal — which has yet to be picked up by publisher — seems like the main source for Lewis's Times story. But as we know from James Frey, just because something's in a book proposal doesn't make it true. Young's words haven't been fact checked by publishers yet, and he may be especially untrustworthy given that he once lied about being the father of the child. MacNicol characterizes the Times story as a quick-and-dirty attempt to get out in front of usually quicker-and-dirtier media outlets: "The New York Times is not going to be scooped by the National Enquirer anymore!"

But is there really even a scoop here? The Dave Matthews stuff is salacious, as is the assertion that Hunter gave her child the middle name Quinn to allude to the fact that she was the fifth of Edwards's children (and not, apparently, because she really liked the sister on Daria). But since Edwards is already totally discredited, the story doesn't really have anywhere to go from here. Lewis wrote in the Times,

Any acknowledgment of paternity would have ramifications for Mr. Edwards, who could suffer a further blow to his credibility but could also be praised for belatedly accepting responsibility. It could also shift Ms. Hunter's image from that of a predatory celebrity stalker (Mrs. Edwards told Oprah Winfrey that Ms. Hunter met her husband after waiting for him to come out of a New York hotel and telling him, "You're so hot.") to that of a mother concerned about her child's rights.

But any praise for Edwards's "belated" acknowledgment of his daughter is going to ring pretty false and hollow, given the lengths he went to in order to avoid acknowledging her. And Rielle Hunter will probably be forgotten in a few years' time, returning only to plague the nightmares of Caitlin Flanagan. At some point, John Edwards may make a public statement about Rielle Hunter and her baby (although she might be a teenager by then), and at least there will be some information to discuss. Until that happens, any face-off between the Times and the Enquirer just seems like a test of who can beat a dead horse the hardest.

For Edwards, Drama Builds Toward A Denouement [NYT]
The New York Times Edwards Story: Scandalous! Newsworthy! Vetted? [Mediaite]
John Edwards' Confession: Not So Fast [Showbiz411]

Of course, Hitchens can't resist injecting himself into the review in various obnoxious ways, from the name-droppy ("Perhaps here is the moment for me to say that I used to see a good deal of them both in Washington, beginning with my writing a profile of him in 2002, and that we have been on friendly social terms in each other's houses. I think I may refer to her as "Elizabeth" rather than "Mrs. Edwards" from now on.") to the intellectually snobby (mocking the book's publishers for inserting an explanation of who Edmund Wilson is, as though we didn't all know). He also indulges in some annoying gender stereotyping when he discusses Edwards's mourning for her son, killed in a car crash at the age of 16. He writes,

As to the other great supposed cure for isolation, the consolation of religion, Elizabeth is at the same time vulnerable and skeptical. In describing the dreams and superstitions and fantasies that assailed her when she lost her boy, she confirms something that I have long thought to be true about the apparent conundrum of female religiosity: Why is it women who keep up the congregations in male-dominated places of worship? That's easy: women do all the childbearing, and they will try anything-anything-to ward off the illness or death of an infant. They will also grieve over and commemorate such a catastrophe long after the menfolk have "moved on."

Does Hitchens really need to make Elizabeth Edwards stand in for all women in opposition to "menfolk," especially when her particular story is so tragic and captivating? To his credit, though, Hitchens's review paints Edwards as a tough-minded woman with a complex view of both grief and human nature. He writes that she "unflinchingly records her mother's conviction that the gallant captain had been unfaithful to her while she was 'buried in babies'" and that she "remarks tenderly" that her father's flirtation with a nurse in his assisted-living center is an expression of his will to live. Hitchens also says,

In the unequal battle between life and death (as she understood in her father's case), Eros has its part in warding off Thanatos, and if this really was-as I believe-her husband's first lapse, it might have been partly because of the death-haunted context in which, for all his money and charm, he found himself.

My first reaction to this was outrage: so John Edwards cheated on his wife because he was afraid of death? What about her? But I don't actually think Hitchens means to excuse Edwards's behavior here. Rather, I think he's putting it in a larger context that Elizabeth Edwards herself establishes — that men are more than the sum of their sins, and that fear of the abyss can manifest itself as prurience just as easily as "religiosity."

That it did so in John Edwards is inexcusable, but Resilience focuses more on Elizabeth Edwards's grief over the deaths of her father and son than on anything her husband did. Hitchens writes of her approach to grieving, the antithesis of "any too-Oprah-like search for comfort or 'closure.'" And he mentions, perhaps surprisingly, "how much the Internet came to her aid, first when her son was killed and second when she discovered that a term had been set on her own life." He adds,

The importance of this medium in bringing about a great unspoken social reform-the abolition of loneliness-has not to my knowledge been better evoked.

Of course, the Internet may add to Elizabeth Edwards's loneliness as well, especially today, when several sites are reporting the results of a paternity test showing John Edwards to be the father of Rielle Hunter's child. Elizabeth Edwards's fame is a mixed blessing — Hitchens calls her "quite a darling of the Democratic rank and file," and perhaps she has benefited from the public outpouring of support during her battle with cancer. But it's hard to imagine — despite widespread sympathy for her — that having to negotiate her husband's infidelity in the public eye has made her life any easier. In her circumstances, a decision to retreat into private life would be more than understandable. But just as the Internet made her less lonely, perhaps her book will do what David Foster Wallace said all good writing should — help people "become less alone inside."

The Pain Of Elizabeth Edwards [The Atlantic]
Report: DNA Test Proves Edwards Fathered Videographer's Daughter [FOX News]
John Edwards Secret DNA Test Proves He's The Daddy [National Enquirer]

Earlier: Sex & The Single Homewrecker: Caitlin Flanagan Slams Rielle Hunter, Helen Gurley Brown

In an essay of epic and varied nastiness in the new Atlantic, Flanagan argues that Brown was no champion of working-class women — she was a champion for home-wreckers. Flanagan quotes Jennifer Scanlon, author of Brown bio Bad Girls Go Everywhere, saying,

As Scanlon aptly notes, Brown "appointed not predatory or non-committal men but married women as the sorry counterpoint to her sexy girls." For the reader with moral qualms? "I'm afraid I have a cavalier attitude about wives," Brown announced from the outset of her public life. To Scanlon-whose besotted encomium may constitute Brown's final caress in this vale of tears-the attitude amounts to "she who keeps the man happy keeps the man," a point of view the biographer hails, several times, as being fundamentally "libertarian." By this, she means that when two women bid for a man, no advantage shall be given to the one who might have children with him, or an economic dependency built upon their marriage. There is only the marketplace of feminine wiles, in which a concubine's feigned interest in a man's workday trumps a wife's quiet plea for help around the house, in which young is better than old and new is more exciting than familiar.

Here Flanagan takes the worst kind of antifeminist rhetoric — the kind that speaks of women in terms of quasi-monetary sexual "value" — and makes it run both ways. Now women are "bidding" on men, using their riches — the "concubine" (!?) her youth and "wiles," the wife her children and "economic dependency." Both men and women are reduced here — men, for a change, are commodities, but women are merely sexual pocketbooks competing in an auction. And wiles win out, but not for long.

Flanagan jumps from Brown to John Edwards's paramour Rielle Hunter, a loose woman perhaps influenced by Brown's celebration of single sluttiness (because, of course, adultery was invented in 1962). Flanagan has some incandescently insulting things to say about Hunter, including this:

Hers is not an intelligence or an ambition difficult to plumb, and her dream is almost certainly to have Elizabeth shuffle off the mortal coil so that she can instate herself in the North Carolina pleasure dome and become the fun, hip, "Being Is Free," bleached-blond, super open-minded, videographing, Power of Now stepmom, a prospect so hideous that it makes Elizabeth Edwards's last-chance book tour look like what it is: a desperate attempt to protect her sweet, sad children from the influence of this erstwhile cokehead and present-day weasel after she has died.

Flanagan (who, as the tabloids say, does not treat Rielle Hunter) knows exactly what Hunter wants, down to the intellectually lightweight cultural references. And she knows she's not going to get it:

Deep within Rielle-this little minx of pleasure and profit-guess what there is? A heart that aches like a woman's but breaks just like a little girl's. [...] I don't imagine that Rielle's decision to have her baby (whoever the father) came from a strongly pro-life position, or from a plan to jack some cash out of the ambulance chaser. It came, surely, from the powerful emotions that accompany all pregnancies, but especially those that occur in women who probably thought they would never get to have a baby, and who find out, at the 11th hour, that the dream might come true after all, and they might have a home and a child, and (please, God) a husband and father to go with that child.

So, to recap, Helen Gurley Brown made it sound like it was okay to steal someone else's man, but it really isn't, not only because marital commitment should override "wiles," but also because a married man will never leave his wife for you. The wages of sin are ... still being single, a prospect Flanagan seems to abhor. She writes of "the desperate, Blanche DuBois tinsel of [Brown's] new creation-the single girl" and "the possible pitfalls and sorrows of life as a sexually liberated, 'all the time in the world' unmarried woman" in such a way as to leave no doubt that she views Hunter as the ultimate loser in the affair — and to imply that unmarried women in general are really kind of sad.

But it's men who fare the worst in Flanagan's moral reckoning. Amy Benfer of Broadsheet offers a smart roundup of Flanagan's many insults (Brown was "pee-on-the-side-of-the-road white trash;" the "ladies of the steno pool" include "Bertha in Accounting, with the hair on her chin;" anyone who hasn't had a kid is "just guessing about love, gesturing toward it, assuming it's the right name for a feeling you've had"), but she doesn't mention Flanagan's implicit denial of male autonomy. Flanagan makes much of Rielle Hunter's pickup line to John Edwards: "you are so hot." She writes,

"You are so hot," Rielle Hunter said to John Edwards 10 years after he and his wife buried their first boy, and after they had started a new family, and after they had given their all to a presidential campaign-with the personal losses and long separations that come with it-and after Elizabeth had been diagnosed with cancer and undergone a disfiguring surgery and chemotherapy and lost her hair and been handed a recalculated set of odds about her life expectancy with two very small children who needed their mother. "You are so hot," Rielle Hunter said, because she turned out to be another woman with a cavalier attitude toward wives.

Interestingly, these words were also the subject of an article in last month's Cosmo, about how to keep your man from cheating. Both Brown's former magazine and her modern-day critic act like Hunter made Edwards sleep with her using these simple words. But Rielle Hunter didn't break John Edwards's vows. She didn't cheat on his wife in her hour of need. He did.

Ultimately, Flanagan and Brown make the same mistake: assuming that women can control men. Sex and the Single Girl wasn't all that far off of the seduction manuals George Sodini read, in that both taught readers that fulfilling relationships with the opposite sex could be had through manipulation. Flanagan might not agree with the "fulfilling" part, but like Brown, she seems to see an adulterous affair not as a choice made by both a man and a woman, but as a competition between wife and "concubine." The man is just the prize.

Of course, they're both wrong. Rielle Hunter may not be a good role model, but ultimately the blame for Elizabeth Edwards's pain rests with her husband. Because women — single or married — can't actually control men. Luckily, it's not our responsibility — it's theirs.

Sex And The Married Man [The Atlantic]

Relate: Who You Calling White Trash? [Broadsheet]

Sometimes, they are accompanied by their wives; other times, the cheese stands alone. Here are the 10 best recent press conferences featuring adulterous politicians, and why they were awesome.


1. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford
He cried, he apologized to his kids, his wife, the state, his best friend and his in-laws. He then proceeded to give a play-by-play of the entire romance, including when he started sleeping with her.

Bonus points: In an effort to avoid using his mistress's name, Sanford went for much of the press conference without using a gender specific pronoun, causing many people to speculate that he was gay.


2. New Jersey Governor Jim McGreevey
"I am a Gay American." What more can you say?

Bonus points: For doping his hysterical wife up so she smiled the entire time.


3. Idaho Senator Larry Craig
After having pled guilty to soliciting a man for foot-tapping bathroom sex, Larry Craig pulled a Shaggy at his press conference.

Bonus points: Even his wife gave him the "WTF?" look during his press conference.


4. Louisiana Senator David Vitter
David Vitter totally didn't pay a prostitute to change his diapers, yo.

Bonus points: He did let his wife take over the press conference that he called to respond to allegations that he'd utilized an escort service.


5. New York Governor Eliot Spitzer
Eliot Spitzer called a press conference to admit that while prosecuting escort services, he wasn't working for his constituents as much as helping eliminate the competition to his escort service of choice. He did have the good sense to resign, though.

Bonus points: No one knows if his balls survived intact long after he and his wife left the podium. From her look, we're guessing not so much.


6. Former North Carolina Senator John Edwards
Appearing alone in a TV interview, Edwards attempted to flirt with interviewer Bob Woodruff, smiled and seemed less than entirely shameful about his conduct, which is the whole point of holding one of these.


7. President Bill Clinton
He totally did have sexual relations with that woman, Monica Lewinsky. And he totally did look like a little kid caught red-handed.


8. New York Governor David Paterson
Paterson confessed to mutual marital infidelity, earning him his look from his wife. He also admitted to conducting it in a Quality Inn.


9. Nevada Senator John Ensign
For all that Ensign's affair involves a campaign staffer married to one of Ensign's own Senate staffers while Ensign was separated and allegations of blackmail, his actual confession was a snore-fest.


10: Speaker-Elect and Louisiana Congressman Bob Livingston
Having spent months inveighing against Bill Clinton's infidelities and how they made him unfit for office, Livingston confessed to all House Republicans that he, too, was a cheat. He was then replaced by notorious philanderer, Newt Gingrich. But it's no fun until someone cries.

Hunter, who originally claimed that former Edwards staffer Andrew Young fathered her child but didn't put his name on the birth certificate, is reportedly about to demand a DNA test from Edwards.

John Edwards' furious mistress is demanding he submit to a DNA test, The ENQUIRER has learned exclusively!

Rielle Hunter - the longtime secret lover of the disgraced 2-time presidential candidate - wants definitive proof that Edwards is the father of her 14-month-old love child Frances and is working with a lawyer to take legal action, say sources.

And why, you might ask, is she furious? Her friends explain!

"But now she can see there's never going to be a future with John - and she feels he's lied about his promise to keep Elizabeth from trashing her in the book," the insider divulged.

"Rielle is so infuriated by his and Elizabeth's actions that she's throwing her loyalty to him out of the window!"

Rielle — though friends, again — threatened to do something in February if the wife of the man whose mistress she was said anything mean about her.

But, as one insider exclaimed yesterday: "What is Elizabeth thinking?" Certainly the minute she does any publicity for "Resilience," the first questions will be about Rielle Hunter and her baby daughter. And don't think for a minute that Hunter is going to allow herself to be portrayed as a groupie, sycophant or gold digger.

Apparently, Rielle preferred that her lover's wife portray her as his soulmate. But Elizabeth Edwards for the former route in the sole passage that she talks about Rielle.

In months of talking with him, I have come to understand his liaison with this woman, if I have, not as a substitute for me. Those with any fame or notoriety or power attract people for good reasons and bad. Some want to contribute and some want to take something away for themselves. They flatter and entreat, and it is engaging, even addictive. They look at our lives, which from the outside in particular are pictures of joy and plenty, and they want it for themselves.

And, thus, apparently, is the battle engaged. Rielle will sue for paternity — a paternity, in fact, that Elizabeth Edwards neither confirmed not denied to Oprah this week. The whole case will get dragged through the mud. Rielle Hunter will look like more of a gold-digger, John Edwards like more of a heel, Elizabeth Edwards like more of a cuckold and Rielle's child — well, who cares about the kid, really, when you can get back at your ex and his wife for her publicly saying she doesn't like you and earn some cash in the process?

John Edwards' Mistress Demands DNA Test For Baby [National Enquirer]

Related: Elizabeth Edwards To Appear On Oprah Winfrey Show [Associated Press]

Earlier: Elizabeth Edwards' Resilience And Rielle Hunter's Revenge
Elizabeth Edwards Talks Directly About John's Affair, Many Lies

The Broadway Books catalog says Edwards has written “an unsentimental and ultimately inspirational meditation on the gifts we can find among life’s biggest challenges.”

The usually private Elizabeth Edwards, I am told, is definitely including her take on the relationship in her new book. Her publicist says she will be addressing John’s “affair and how she experienced it.”

But, as one insider exclaimed yesterday: “What is Elizabeth thinking?” Certainly the minute she does any publicity for “Resilience,” the first questions will be about Rielle Hunter and her baby daughter. And don’t think for a minute that Hunter is going to allow herself to be portrayed as a groupie, sycophant or gold digger. Far from it. I’m told that if “Resilience” minimizes her at all, Hunter will not shy away from showing her own “resilience.” She’s said to be a smart, educated, articulate woman—not at all how she’s been portrayed so far in the supermarket tabloids.

Indeed, how Elizabeth “experienced” may be just as the public did: Edwards suddenly exited the race for the Democratic presidential nomination on January 30, 2008. In early August, after much pressure and a sting by the National Enquirer, he admitted the affair. What he didn’t say: the end of his campaign came exactly one month before Hunter gave birth to baby Frances Quinn.

Corrie Loftin, AKA "Bikini Cory." She's known as "Bikini Cory" because she earned it.


John Edwards. Fake, phony, fraud. Whose wife had cancer.


Dimitri the Lover, Canada's Greatest Lover and Seducer. We wouldn't have thought it possible, but this ludicrous personage makes Mystery look like a catch.


Speidi: took aggressive mediocrity, flesh-colored beards and general asshattery to breath-stealing new heights.


Bernie Madoff. Made some questionable ethical decisions, like bilking charities, the world for decades, billions.


Megan Johnson. This Stylista took us all back to high school, an automatic fail.


Josef Fritzl. Father of the year - and not in the good way.

Vanity Fair’s Hall of Infamy, 2008 [Vanity Fair]

• Barack Obama and John McCain met this afternoon in which they talked about combating government waste and bitter partisanship and took some pretty, pretty pictures for us peons. [Washington Post]
• Vetting Bill Clinton's sketchy dealings in Central Asia and the donor list for his library might well cost Hillary Clinton her SecState job and prove that Obama was right to have been demanding those get released during the primaries. [Politico]
• But Obama is firmly against torture and keeping Guantanamo Bay open, so that's good at least. [Washington Independent]

• Senator Diane Feinstein (D-California) introduced legislation today to make it illegal to sell the free Inauguration tickets (punishable by a $100,000 fine and up to a year in prison) or to forge them. Yipes. Get them legal or watch it on TV, ladies. [CNN]
• Connecticut Senator Joe "Benedict Arnold" Lieberman is now expected to keep his chairmanship but lose his subcommittee chairmanship as his "punishment" for betraying the Democratic party. I guess we know about how hard Harry Reid intends to push back on, like, anything now that he's solidified power. [Huffington Post]
• With that news, former Senator John "The Inseminator" Edwards has decided to stage his own comeback. [Daily Beast]
• Alabama Senator Richard Shelby — who's been the GOP's point person on negging the auto bailout — scolded South Carolina GOP Senator Jim DeMint — who's been gunning for more power in the party — for saying the Republican losses this year were the fault of John McCain's betrayal of the (social) conservative brand of the GOP. Abortion and gay marriage, that's all the GOP should be against, totally. [CNN]
• By the way, New Gingrich says that we are all a part of a "a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it." Yeah, fuck us for being all like "separation of church and state" and trying to take advantage of "equal protection under the law" and exercising our First Amendment rights to assemble and petition the government and shit. What fascists we all are. [Media Matters]

• Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid has decided that the entire Democratic caucus will vote next week whether Independent Senator Joe Lieberman will keep his seat as chairman of the Homeland Security Committee after having back John McCain and gone negative against Obama. [TPM Election Central]
• How negative did Lieberman really go? There's a video to count the ways. [Politico]
• And both the Clintons swear that — despite leaked reports that rather obviously came from Lieberman's camp — they aren't pushing to keep Lieberman at Homeland Security or in the caucus. [Politico]
• Racist Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss, who, according to the Constitution represents all the citizens of Georgia regardless of their race, knows the reason he didn't avoid a run-off election because not enough of "his" people turned out. You know, white people. That always vote for the white guy. Because they're white. [Think Progress]

• In the meantime, the Bushies are mad that the Obama folks leaked that Bush will only support an auto industry bailout if the Dems pass the Colombia FTA, as though that wasn't a legit assumption given that the Bushies already told the Hill that exact thing the day before. [Politico]
• Obama released his guidelines covering lobbyists' activities for his transition team and good government types think he is, like, so cool. [The Hill]
• And if the fact that he was able to outspend John McCain by crazy margins wasn't reason enough, it turns out that skipping public financing means Obama's campaign won't face a crazy audit. Raising tons of money means that if they did get some unlawful contributions, they would be so minor the FEC doesn't really care, either. McCain, though, gets the full accountant treatment, which is not as sexy-dirty as it sounds, sort of like how fucking an accountant isn't. [Politico]
• And Latino groups expect that Obama will appoint Latinos to the Cabinet. They are, apparently, pushing for Governor Bill "McGrabbyhands" Richardson, but I'm throwing my completely inconsiderable weight behind New York Congresswoman (and Small Business Committee Chair) Nydia Velázquez for the top spot at the Small Business Administration. LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is supposedly on the list for something (and is, strangely, one of Obama's economic transition advisers), but I think he's more likely to get a sub-Cabinet appointment than a Cabinet slot. [Washington Post]
• Alaska's verified 50,000 of its early and absentee ballots and will start counting them this week to see if convicted and corrupt Senator Ted Stevens will actually win re-election and thus give Governor Sarah Palin a shiny new Senate feather to add to her political cap. [CNN]
• The GOP has started smearing Minnesota's Democratic Secretary of State Mark Ritchie in a misguided attempt to provoke peals of laughter from every Democrat that ever dealt with Katherine Harris and stop the legally-mandated recount in Minnesota because the margin separating Coleman and Franken is still teeny-tiny. Apparently, since 3 people heard him speak at a non-prime-time spot during the Democratic convention, Minnesotans don't need a recount. [TPM Muckraker]
• Noted cursing afficianado Joe Scarborough has earned himself a 7-second on-air delay for saying "Fuck you" earlier this week. My momma would've washed my mouth out with soap, but I could run faster. Not 7 seconds faster, though. [Politico]
• John Edwards has decided to give make his first public appearance following his admission that he fucked around on his wife. What do you think the odds are that audience members will ask him how he's coping with having cuckolded his wife the way that people seemingly insist on asking Elizabeth how she feels about it? Slim to none? [Time]
• Hopefully, the odds are better that the next Congress really will examine Bush's abuses of power next year. [Washington Independent]

Gwen Ifill moderated the 2004 debate between Vice President Dick Cheney and Senator John Edwards, asking a total of 20 questions. Ten of those questions were specifically about foreign policy — including the first 9 — while Cheney brought up foreign policy in two addition domestic policy questions and Edwards snuck it into one of his domestic policy answers. In the latter three cases, Edwards and Cheney responded to the other's foreign policy forays in kind. That means that foreign policy discussions comprised two-thirds of the last Vice Presidential debate.

Unlike the two Vice Presidential debates (Lieberman-Cheney and Gore-Kemp) before that, in 2008, this country has troops stationed abroad fighting in conflicts that we started — i.e., we're in the midst of two foreign wars— much as it did in 2004. During the Cheney-Edwards debate, the foreign policy questions were about Iraq, Afghanistan, the use of intelligence, Iran and Israel — gosh, it kind of seems like those might be ongoing and relevant issues, right? (Let alone that Sarah Palin has suggested that we go to war with Russia, attack Pakistan and has tried to burnish her foreign policy credentials by getting photo ops with world leaders might be relevant.) But Nancy Pfuckingsucks and Doocy think that it would totally be unfair to ask Sarah Palin too much about it.

Doocy said, "it seems like they're stacking the deck against" Palin by asking too much about foreign policy — not that Gwen Ifill has released her list of questions or anything — and added "the average person is more concerned with domestic stuff than foreign stuff anyway." Presumably he meant "the average person that doesn't have loved ones in imminent danger fighting one of the two wars abroad in which we are currently embroiled." Pfuckingsucks agreed, says " "Exactly! I think the moderator will have some serious questions to answer if they do go so heavily on foreign policy," and defined "heavy" as sixty percent of the questions — which is, as I pointed out, less than the percentage of the Cheney-Edwards debate that centered in foreign policy. I guess it's only fair to focus on foreign policy questions when it's the Democrat without a whole lot of experience.

In much the same way that the Obama-Biden campaign is seeking to lower expectations of Biden by talking Palin up, the McCain-Palin campaign is seeking to mitigate her expected trouncing by blaming Gwen Ifill. They're literally going on the airwaves and trashing Ifill and her journalistic credentials in advance of a single question being asked in the hopes that she won't ask too much about foreign policy and to garner sympathy for Palin if she does. How long do you think until Pfuckingsucks takes to the air again to suggest that Ifill is "in the tank" for Obama because they have so much in common? Tuesday? Wednesday?

McCain Camp to Ifill: Go Easy on Palin [Talking Points Memo]
The Cheney-Edwards Vice Presidential Debate [The Commission on Presidential Debates]
Palin: U.S. Might Have To Go To War With Russia [Chicago Tribune]
McCain Retracts Palin's Pakistan Comments [CNN]
Sarah Palin Meets World Leaders [Huffington Post]
Obama-Biden Camp Hypes Palin’s Debating Skills [CNN]