Although nothing about the truck — which is used to advertise for a strip club — is illegal, some commissioners fear that it could cause accidents. • In 2005, Melanie Dawn Williams went into premature labor and ran a red light on the way to the hospital. Two police officers chased after her, followed her into the hospital, and tackled her in the emergency room. The over-zealous cops then dragged her outside, where they proceeded to handcuff her. Eventually a nurse found her, and brought her back in for medical care. Williams now says she may sue for unlawful arrest. •  A British woman has received a £75 fine for littering after she was caught throwing bread to ducks. "I do not intend to pay the fine," she said. "I'm going to fight this to the end." •  A 56-year-old Oregon man has been charged with making threatening calls to a local Planned Parenthood. Gregory Paul Freeman reportedly threatened to blow up the clinic. They also received a voice message that said: "Uh, please go ahead and dial the, uh, United States of America, because I'm going to burn your abortion clinic down because you are a baby killer and you hate babies." •  In the past year the pay gap between men and women in Britain has fallen - but only by 1%. There still remains a 16.4% gap in the U.K. If improvement continues at this rate, it will be 17 years before women receive equal pay. •  The Maryland university system has opted not to police porn on college campuses. They voted unanimously to reject the policy, on the grounds that it would hinder free speech and suck up too much funding. • Former CIA agent Valerie Plame lost her appeal to declassify part of her memoir Fair Game. Plame and her publisher sued the CIA in 2007 to block the agency from blacking out the dates she worked there, but the appeals court ruled that, "Because Ms. Wilson is obligated by a secrecy agreement with the CIA not to disclose information, the district court correctly ruled." • Weston General Hospital in England has banned pregnant women with a BMI of more than 34 from giving birth at the hospital, forcing them to travel 20 miles to the nearest maternity ward. The hospital claims it's not equipped to handle complicated births. "Our foremost concern is for the safety of mothers who deliver here and their babies," said a spokesman. "Mothers with a high BMI are at increased risk in labour of bleeding, needing an instrumental delivery or complications, such as the baby's shoulder becoming trapped behind the pubic bone." • French art expert Pascal Cotte analyzed the Mona Lisa with a special camera and found she used to have eyebrows and a wider smile. He says da Vinci painted some details on top of a glaze that was meant to make the portrait look 3-D. "That could explain why the eyebrows have disappeared – they have faded because of chemical reactions or they have been cleaned off," said Cotte. • University of Haifa researcher found that the hormone oxytocin, which affects trust, empathy and generosity, also affects opposite behaviors, like jealousy and gloating. "Subsequent to these findings, we assume that the hormone is an overall trigger for social sentiments: when the person's association is positive, oxytocin bolsters pro-social behaviors; when the association is negative, the hormone increases negative sentiments," said lead researcher Simone Shamay-Tsoory. • A British woman saw a suspicious message pop up on her husband's computer so she pretended to be a 14-year-old schoolgirl and contacted him on the internet from another computer in their house. He asked her to meet for sex and "used a webcam to film himself carrying out acts of indecency," which she could see on her screen in the other room. He was found guilty of engaging in sexual activity in the presence of a child and making and possessing illegal images, and his wife left him. •

• Robert Bork gives an interview about Sonia Sotomayor, declares his favorite Justice is Clarence Thomas and basically acts like such a huge douchebag that he makes Scalia look cuddly. • The Supreme Court ruled today that Valerie Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, can sue the whole government for outing her secret spy life, but not the individuals that actually did so. • Elsewhere in the government, women are joining the FBI and making their way up its ranks in ever-greater numbers. • Khadijah Williams spent most of her childhood homeless or nearly-homeless, but worked her ass off in school and is going to Harvard. • U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice recalls her own days as a female athlete and encourages women to send in their athletic pictures in celebration of Title IX's anniversary tomorrow. • Wired imagines that some day we'll be able to inhale our birth control, and not in a scary "the atmosphere is filled with poisonous chemicals" kind of way. • There's a consumer survey in which the characters from Mad Men ask you questions. No one cares what the survey is about. • Sometimes, women are sexually assaulted on cruise ships and there's not much that anybody does about it. • China is finally admitting that it has both an HIV problem and a number of sex workers, so they're trying to educate the latter about the former. • If you pay the site ManBabies $10, they'll swap a baby's face with a man's face and you'll get to be icked out. • It turns out that the most popular ways of measuring BMI actually overestimate the BMI of African-Americans, since it was designed around white people. It's like the SATs, only after you take this test, everyone calls you "fat." • Old married people who still really love each other show brain activity just like young people who just fell in love. As though you couldn't just look at an elderly couple holding hands and tell that. •

• The Bushes spent about $3.7 million dollars on real estate in a pricey Dallas neighborhood, and boy, are you going to seethe with jealousy when you see the house the Presidency can buy you. [Washington Post, The Smoking Gun]
• Italy is struggling with a rise in puppy smuggling due to a love of specific breeds and a declining economy. More than 70,000 puppies are smuggled into Italy every year, despite the fact that nearly a quarter of them die on the way and half die within a few months of arrival. There's a video. [BBC]
• Pastor Rick Warren says the Bible calls us to invade Iran. I don't think it says what he thinks it says, but that might be because I read it for my own edification and not to use it to make zillions of dollars or justify my existence. [Washington Independent]

• The recently-published jury instructions in the Lori Drew case make it more clear why she didn't get convicted of any felony counts. [Wired]
• Fred Thompson recently promised that he was getting out of politics and going back to acting. He lied to you. [Time]
• Conservative scribe and Earl of Minor Despair Bob Novak would totally out Valerie Plame again because the media was mean to him after his did so the first time. [Think Progress]
• Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee doesn't think enough LGBT people have been beaten or killed while seeking equality in this country to qualify as a civil rights movement. Also, he thinks if they would just quit choosing to have teh buttsecks, they could have all the rights they ever wanted. [Think Progress]
• Some wacky Republicans who probably spend a portion of their time bitching about tort reform and vexatious litigation are filing lawsuits upon lawsuits about Barack Obama's birth certificate because blah blah blah crazytown nonsense. [Honolulu Advertiser]
• Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, she of the horror of women who don't always wear stockings, is going to challenge Texas Governor Rick Perry in the 2010 gubernatorial primary because she doesn't think he's Republican-y enough. [Dallas Morning News]
• Sarah Palin is totally snubbing Oprah, because Real Americans would definitely go talk to Larry King first. [Huffington Post]
• Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, with an assist from Governor General Michaëlle Jean, has shut down the Canadian Parliament to keep from being thrown out of office. And here you were all worried that George W. Bush was going to be the one to try to upend the democracy he supposedly serves. [NY Times]

Ha ha! Not Lance! It's about Karl Rove. Remember their creepy confrontation at last year's White House Correspondents Dinner? I'd totally forgotten about it. But Sheryl sure hasn't! Her latest album, Detours, also includes a song for the Chief Turd's old boss inspired by the Valerie Plame thing! She calls the album "urgent, in-your-face, barf-it-out-onto-a-page." It's her first collaboration with producer Bill Bottrell since Tuesday Night Music Club, which featured the last Sheryl Crow song I didn't feel slightly guilty for liking. (The last Sheryl Crow song I do feel guilty for liking: My Favorite Mistake.)

She describes arriving home one day to find 'Vanity Fair' photographers in her kitchen preparing a photo for the magazine's cover."I did not listen to my instincts and threw my extreme caution about public exposure to the wind," she wrote. "In no time, the beauty team had me made up."

5. Because if it was someone who had been victimized by a Democratic administration, we'd think it was vulgar. 6. But no one Clinton ever victimized was ever in the remotest danger of looking she was exploiting her brutal hotness for magazine photo shoots! 7. Oh, so we're going to equate this with Paula Jones, are we? 8. Well there's also the matter of Graydon Carter. 9. Seriously, you are one of those self-hating lefties who wants lefties to behave well at all times and not embarrass us because you know how it plays with the legions of idiots in the country and guess what: Bush is the Face of our Country right now so chew on that. 10. Also: One million pointless deaths and counting...

Plame Criticizes Bush For Leak Scandal [MSNBC]

• Bill Clinton has begun blogging! Just like us! We wonder if he'll do hungover Friday tomorrow too! [Clinton Foundation]
  
• We've always really liked Craig Ferguson. Now we have to like him less: He's dating Sharon Stone. Anna's heart just broke. [The Daily Blabber]
  
• A judge has dismissed Valerie Plame's lawsuit against the White House in regards to leaking her identity while working as an undercover operative for the CIA. [MSNBC]
  
• Go with us on this: Dinosaurs are sorta like Lindsay Lohan. A slow ascent to power in which they knocked out their other, similar, competitors. And then overnight (literally) crashed and burned. [BBC]

• The story about the Chinese dumplings stuffed with cardboard instead of pork? Not so true! And our theories that Bush has it out for China are further confirmed. [CNN]
• Which is maybe because the Chinese economy is booming? [NYT]
• Mijovi is an energy drink. Bon Jovi is a musician. The latter thinks the former stole his name. We laugh at both. [USA Today]
• Do not ever, ever put the words "Kelly Clarkson" and "suicide" in the same sentence, haters. We momentarily stopped breathing. [ABC News]
• Jude Law's a lover not a fighter. Uh yeah, tell us something that his nanny, Sienna Miller, and his ex-wife don't already know. [E!]
• 9 U.S. casualty reports today pending DoD confirmation. [Iraq Coalition Casualties]

Valerie Plame testifies on the Hill today in something Scooter Libby involved, we're not sure what, since the trial already ended and we didn't even pay attention to that. So why did we bother reading this entire non-story about is? Well, because unlike Tim Russert and Bob Woodward and all the other Sunday talk show regulars who testified Valerie is sooooooooo pretty it's like she never even lived in Washington. (Check out this Tribeca Film Festival pic!)

Anyway, we're pretty sure when a woman is hot, her intelligence is either inversely proportional to her hotness, or the beauty has somehow made her a geniushttp://www.villagevoice.com/music/0711,romano,76043,22.html/full, and what a delicious parlor game it is to try and figure out which option is correct! Which brings us to Sarah Lewitinn, the super-cute blogger DJ A&R rep and former Spin intern who, for clinging to her persistently middle-American music tastes and being a hottie was this week dubbed the "most controversial figure in New York's music scene" in a pointless cover non-story in the Village Voice.

But disappointingly, according to the stories, both gals are.. sorta just okay at what they do. So why do they torture us by participating in these preposterously self-aggrandizing photo shoots? And stoke the ire of the "haterati" (Tricia Romano's term, not ours!) by getting screenwriters to write movies about their lives when their lives are not that interesting?

Beats the heck out of us. But hey, it looks like there's some money in it; we'll run the numbers after the jump.

VAL:

So she was kind of a mediocre spy:

One retired former senior CIA officer.. described her as "very competent but not great." Another... said, "It doesn't matter if she was not a great spy. . . . She did her job, and it was difficult." Said a third..: "She was no Mata Hari and probably would not have gone into senior ranks, but she presented herself well."

But haterati in chief Bob Novak and the real estate bubble have turned her into a millionaire anyway:

Over the past year Plame has completed a book, "Fair Game," which netted her a seven-figure sum, although the book remains tied up in a CIA review process. She and her husband have sold the movie rights for their life story to Warner Bros. Earlier this week the couple closed the $1.8 million sale of their Washington house, which they purchased in 1998 for $735,000.

Meanwhile in Ultragrrland:

She ticks off their charges against her: "That I'm talentless. I'm a whore. That I have bad taste in music. I make rash judgments. Mostly, that I have no talent—which is fine. I don't need to have talent. I got this far without it."

As an intern at Spin, Lewitinn was an idea machine, if not exactly a gifted writer, which led some to criticize her behind her back...Her college education is minimal.. She's got a sort of George W. quality to her—she's not particularly eloquent and can come off spacey.

But she's sold books and opened a label at Def Jam!

She's won Paper magazine's People's Choice award for Best Party and Best DJ ...and in 2005 wrote The Pocket DJ, a book of playlists for different genres, moods, and occasions. It sold 38,000 copies—successful enough that she's signed to do a second book, The Pocket Karaoke. She's working with a screenwriter on a movie script partially based on her life.

Oh, we're just jealous.

Valerie Plame: The Spy Who's Ready To Speak For Herself [WPost]
In Defense Of Ultragrrl [Village Voice]