Speaking of Presidents and nightmares...

I had a dream last night that I woke up, looked at my iPhone, and saw a terrible headline in Drudge. I tried really hard to yell it out to Meade, who was asleep. It was impossible to yell, which should have tipped me off that it was a dream, but it was so realistic — the dream of waking up in bed and doing something that you tend to do while still in bed — that later, when I really did wake up, I grabbed my iPhone, went right to Drudge, and I was so relieved to see the same headline that was there when I went to bed Friday night.

It's a particularly cheerful headline — "Stocks Hit 5 Year High" — with a picture of wine glasses splashily clinking, angled together in a position that parallels Oprah's hands in a picture just above and to the left. Oprah looks alarmed/outraged, but only because "He even lied — to Oprah?!" And how reassuring that is. The outrage of the day is Lance Armstrong, doping and lying, the same old thing, and it's something that only vaguely affects us. Thank God.

What was the headline I saw in my dream? I won't tell you. It's not that I'm superstitious, but ideas affect minds, and it's an image I won't put out there.

"Armstrong did not delve into the details of his doping, and Winfrey never asked."

"He did not explain how it was done, who helped him do it or how, exactly, he perpetuated his myth for so long. He said he was not comfortable talking about other people.... Not once did he look into the camera and say, without qualification, 'I’m sorry.'"

Oprah, too, should have looked into the camera and said "I'm sorry." What a terrible interview! The part I watched, anyway, before deciding it was a big waste of time. Oprah looked and sounded tired and uncomfortable, as if she'd forgotten how to be Oprah. Or they'd had some dispute off camera and she knew this was going to be a robotic exercise in nothingness that wasn't going to save her network. She was going to get zero warmth, zero psychodrama, just a dull little man. Little in every way, including the way that made Oprah look huge.

Oh! If only a second Oprah could have been there interviewing Oprah about what she thought and how she felt about the wee interviewee.

There's still Part 2 — and maybe Lance will look right into the camera and say, without qualification, "I'm sorry" — but will anyone watch? Did anyone, other than journalists covering the "story," stick with Part 1 all the way through? Or did you all snap it off, like we did, after about the third time he prefaced an answer with I know I'm not the most believable guy in the world?

"Lance Armstrong will offer more than the sporting world’s most long-awaited confession..."

"He’s expected to counter the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s portrayal of him as the mastermind of what it called the most sophisticated, professional doping program in the history of sports by saying that doping was endemic to cycling...."

"I heard some Indian people eat with their hands still?"

Oprah offends.

"Using our hands to eat is a well-established tradition and a fact none of us are ashamed of," blogged Rituparna Chatterjee of the CNN-IBN news channel...

ADDED: More here: The video is hilarious. Oprah is sitting down to what the Indian family obviously think of as a beautiful feast, and Oprah hardly attempts to conceal her puzzlement and near disgust. "Is there anything here that you recognize," the man asked her, perhaps to give her a prompt to say something nice. He has to give another prompt: "Okra?" Okra... Oprah... maybe he meant to nudge her toward a Lettermanesque joke.

The man shows Oprah how to eat properly using one hand, noting that they don't use the other hand (without being indelicate enough to specify the reason), and Oprah tries it, then says she's going to use 2 hands or they'll be there all night. Which is ridiculous because: 1. After insinuating her distaste for their eating with their hands, she proceeds to do something that must look gross to them, and 2. She's fat and they are thin, so maybe there's a good diet tip there in a technique that slows you down.

"As the person who controlled access to the first couple, Valerie Jarrett saw Oprah as a potential threat to her power."

Writes Edward Klein, author of a new book about Obama:

If Oprah went unchecked, she would bypass Valerie and go directly to the president and first lady. What good was it being the gatekeeper if you couldn’t lock the gate when you wanted? And so Valerie set about turning Michelle against Oprah. Oprah was too close to the president... Oprah was acting like she was the first lady... Oprah didn’t know her place...  Oprah was a bad influence... Valerie advised Michelle to “distance herself” from Oprah and cut her out of the White House inner circle.



It didn’t take much to convince Michelle. As Michelle knew only too well, her husband had a compelling need to win the approval of strong women like Oprah....

“Michelle is very jealous, I would say unusually so,” said someone who was very close to Oprah. “Most people after years of marriage have trust and don’t follow their husbands around and check on them. Michelle doesn’t seem to trust Barack at all. She insists on knowing his every movement and drops in on him at all kinds of odd times. It’s been the buzz of the White House....

“Michelle talked to Gayle King about it, just talking as friends. She has become much closer to Gayle than to Oprah, to Oprah’s anger and surprise. She told Gayle that if she found out her husband was running around, she wouldn’t keep quiet. Gayle was kind of astonished that she would say that.”

Man, people are gossiping! Much more at the link, including the quote, supposedly the real words of Oprah: “Michelle hates fat people and doesn’t want me waddling around the White House!” That was after Oprah tried to get in on Michelle's obesity-fighting action. And here's the corresponding Michelle quote: “Oprah only wants to cash in...."

And Edward Klein has a book to sell. 

On the topic of Obama and his relationship to "strong women," here's a slideshow on the subject chez Wapo.

"Yeah. We have different worldviews on some of these things. I agree with you truth is really important."

Says Mike Daisey to Ira Glass, who responds: "I know but I feel like I have the normal worldview. The normal worldview is somebody stands on stage and says 'this happened to me,' I think it happened to them, unless it's clearly labeled as 'here's a work of fiction.'"

Some artists (and propagandists) will disagree, but I hope Glass is right.

ADDED: You can listen to the new "Retraction" episode of "This American Life" here (where there is also a link to the transcript PDF).

Ira Glass: You put us in this position of going out and vouching for the truth of what you were saying and all along, in all of these ways, you knew that these things weren’t true. Did you ever stop and think, okay these things aren’t true and you have us vouching for their truth?

Mike Daisey: I did, I did. I thought about that a lot.

Ira Glass: And just what did you think?

Mike Daisey: I felt really conflicted. I felt... trapped.

Fascinatingly, it turns out that Daisey had once done a story about that "Million Little Pieces" guy, James Frey, who got into so much trouble for palming off a fictionalized story as a memoir. A big part of the trouble was that Oprah Winfrey had promoted Frey's book. The section of the interview where Glass brings up Frey ends like this:

Ira Glass: I have such a weird mix of feelings about this, because I simultaneously feel terrible, for you, and also, I feel lied to. And also I stuck my neck out for you. You know I feel like, I feel like, like I vouched for you. With our audience. Based on your word.

I was your Oprah!

Mike Daisey: I’m sorry.

Rosie O’Donnell's TV show was just canceled.

Did you even know she had one? Yes, it was on the "little-watched" Oprah Winfrey network. It was little-watched on the little-watched network.

"At the end of another song, Brown shouted 'I love you, Whitney!'..."

"... and blew a kiss to the sky, looking visibly teary."

Despite their volatile relationship, Houston told Oprah Winfrey in 2009, "I loved him so much...He was my drug. I didn't do anything without him."

"I’m a ’60s, West Coast, liberal, radical, artsy, dyed-in-the-wool 99 percenter before there was such a thing."

Said George Lucas, who has $3.2 billion.

Sorry to link a second time to the same article, but I find George Lucas and the NYT article fawning over him just so hilarious. This I-am-the-99% quote comes in the context of talking about Lucas's girlfriend of 5 years, Mellody Hobson. Lucas is 67. The article declines to tell us how old she is, but a quick Google shows she's 42. Lucas has made a movie about black people and Hobson is black "and a friend of the Obamas’ and Oprah Winfrey’s." Lucas is calling himself a 99 percenter in the context of contrasting himself to her:

“And she’s an East Coast, Princeton grad, Wall Street fund manager, knows all the big players, works in the big world. You would never think that we would get together, have anything in common. But when we did, we realized we had everything in common. It was the most unlikely coupling.”

He doesn't know "big players" and work in the "big world"?!  What delusion!

What delusion? It's the delusion of a ’60s lefty who imagines himself at one with some idea he has of the underclass.

IN THE COMMENTS: MayBee said:

It's interesting that his girlfriend is a buddy with all the Obama people. At the time of the AF1 panic-inducing flyover of Manhattan, it was redtails accompanying the plane. That has never been explained. A lot of people speculated it was related to this film.

Thanks for reminding us of that! Here's a NY Post article from April 27, 2009:

A jumbo jet being chased by a F-16 fighter jets buzzed Lower Manhattan this morning, panicking New Yorkers, many of whom were forced to evacuate their office buildings.

President Obama was in Washington at the time, but the low-flying 747 circling the Statue of Liberty was one of the planes used as Air Force One, sources said...

Here's my post reacting to the official story, which was that the flight was for the purpose of taking an inexplicably crappy photograph.

AND: Remember that 2009 Halloween party at the White House that we just found out about: "George Lucas sent the original Chewbacca to mingle with invited guests."

NYT: "Obama Takes Questions From His Tweeps."

Yikes. Yeeps. The NYT deploys a slang word that — at this moment — has fewer than 100 total votes at Urban Dictionary.

1. Tweeps

A user-created conjunction from Twitter and Peeps usually referring to the followers of the person using the word. Part of the various lingo resulting from www.twitter.com

"Oprah: Thanks tweeps for your good thoughts…" - Real quote from Twitter.com

2. tweeps

the words 'tweet' and 'peeps' combined. only used to describe the folks that have a twitter account...

3. Tweeps

Tweeps are tweens or teens that hang out with adults 25 years or older on a regular basis. For the adult, this should be a little creepy, since most people their age would like to hang out and party with real adults. Tweeps usually result in tweeping and the adult usually becomes a tweeper.

Definition #3 is not doing well in the thumbs-up/thumbs-down game. I don't think Obama has that kind of tweeps.

In other Urban Dictionary news, the word of the day today is "fuck." I'm not sure why. You'd think they'd have already gotten around to the famous word. It's no upstart like "tweeps." Maybe the President of the United States tweeting with his tweeps makes you think: fuck.

But I like seeing Obama constrained to 140 letters. He's often verbose and I'm all tr;dl.

It's not Lady Gaga unseating Oprah that disturbs me. It's Elton John and Bon Jovi in the top 10.

"The World's Most Powerful Celebrities"... according to Forbes.

We need better celebrities! It was bad enough back in the 80s when Elton John and Bon Jovi were the celebrities we had to settle for. But here they are. Still "powerful," whatever that means. Growing up in the 50s and 60s, I really got the wrong impression of the speed of the flow of new celebrities into the popular culture.

Maybe this is why time has seemed to go faster as we (Baby Boomers) have gotten older. Or do you think it should be a reason why things should appear to be going slower? When nothing's happening and you're bored, time does seem to go slower. But uneventfulness also makes long stretches of time look shorter. It's a paradox. The paradox of the puzzling persistence of Bon Jovi and Elton John.

Will no one shed a tear for Jerome Corsi?

Corsi wrote the much promoted book: "Where's the Birth Certificate?: The Case that Barack Obama is not Eligible to be President."

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #36 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
#1 in Books > Nonfiction > Law > One-L
#1 in Books > Nonfiction > Government
#1 in Books > Nonfiction > Law > Constitutional Law

#1 in Constitutional Law? Does that hurt, o fellow conlawprofs? Check out the rest of the list? How far down do you have to go before you see a book on constitutional law that you respect? But anyway... who can pity Corsi? He got his #1 book. But no, the book won't be released until May 17, so everyone who's put in an order for the book, everyone who made that book #1, should go right into their Amazon account and delete the book. Or will the publisher find a way to withdraw it and redo it so that it becomes super-timely? Some new chapter espousing some trumped up conspiracy theory about the birth certificate and its release.

James Taranto got me thinking about Corsi:

Jerome Corsi's "Where's the Birth Certificate? The Case That Barack Obama Is Not Eligible to Be President" has an official release date of May 17. Corsi must be wishing he'd pushed the date up to yesterday...

Presumably Obama could have made this request [Hawaii's Department of Health] at any time, so why now?...

It's an amusing thought if an idle one that perhaps Obama did this just to stick it to Corsi, whose book reportedly hit No. 1 on Amazon after Drudge promoted it. John Kerry, the haughty, French-looking former junior senator from Massachusetts who by the way served in Vietnam, is probably smiling. After all, Corsi was co-author, with John O'Neill, of "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry."

But Kerry really was unfit for command, whereas contrary to Corsi's new book, Obama, fit or not, is legally qualified to be president. "We don't have time for such silliness," Obama said at his briefing today. Then, as John Podhoretz notes, the president "flew off to Chicago to be on The Oprah Winfrey Show."

Is anyone watching OWN?

Do you even know what it is?

When I started watching OWN, a couple of days after it began, on January 1st, I truly thought I was watching reruns from other cable channels.... From what I’ve seen so far, it’s numbingly unimaginative and middle of the road. What that road is, and where it’s going, and why we need to be on it remains to be seen. Promoting the channel, [Oprah] Winfrey likes to say that it will air nothing that will keep you from sleeping at night. “The intention of this channel is to bring good energy”...

Oh, but Oprah, the very idea of energy keeps me up at night.

The very first episode of Skeptoid was about the horror that is energy...

Energy is a measurement of something's ability to perform work. Given this context, when spiritualists talk about your body's energy fields, they're really saying nothing that's even remotely meaningful. Yet this kind of talk has become so pervasive in our society that the vast majority of Americans accept that energy exists as a self-contained force, floating around in glowing clouds, and can be commanded by spiritualist adepts to do just about anything....

"Everything you touch turns to gold. Could you touch me?"

Piers Morgan embarrasses himself trying to interview Oprah.

"I'm a female in the entertainment business who has been working 48 years consistently. My stage is my safe place."

"It doesn't scare me, like I guess it scares some people. And I knew that if I didn't get back on stage that I may never get back on stage."

Marie Osmond goes on "Oprah" to talk about her son's suicide and the "calculated decision" she made to go back to work 2 weeks later. It's not that the death didn't have a big impact on her. Please understand. She's "unique," she tells us, and that suicide was "probably the hardest thing I've been through."

USA Today, reporting these quotes, uses that last quote in its headline and sensitively omits the word "probably."

Bush's book is #1.

Buy it!

ADDED: Bush is on "Oprah" today, you know. I've got my DVR set. And he's on Rush Limbaugh right now.

"All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions."

"In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it."

The hostage-takers manifesto.

ADDED: The guy seems pretty clearly crazy, and I hope no one dies and he gets the help he needs, because this manifesto — PDF —  is hilarious, but if anyone dies, it might be wrong to laugh.

Saving the environment and the remaning species diversity of the planet is now your mindset. Nothing is more important than saving them. The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels.

Of course, the Squirrels. That's such a childish list of animals, and not just because of "Froggies." These are the animals in a children's picture book or Noah's Ark toy.

The humans? The planet does not need humans. You MUST KNOW the human population is behind all the pollution and problems in the world....

I disagree. Around my city, geese are crapping everything up. I notice that no birds got on Lee's list of favored creatures.

These are the demands and sayings of Lee.

How religion-y, and yet he hates religion:

Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! 

He hates everything that human beings have produced. It's all filth. Even the ideas. He gets his ideas from a gorilla:

The Discovery Channel and it's affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn's "My Ishmael" pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the Industrial Revolution was done, by people building on each other's inventive ideas.

Here's the book. A gorilla tells us what to do. Example from the pages cited:

We could pension off our teachers, close schools, and open up the city to our children. Let them learn anything they want. We could take that risk....

Quinn has been hyped by Oprah Winfrey: Here's an Oprah interview with  Quinn:

WINFREY: You say that y--hundreds of years from now, children will look back on our society and call us monsters. Why?

Mr. QUINN: I think so. Yeah, because we're g--we're--we continue to take and take and take and consume and consume and consume everything in sight. And in 100 years, if--if there are still people around to think about it, we're going to look back and say, `My God, these were terribly greedy people. What kind of people were they? They were hard to understand, who had no thought for us, for the future of--of the human race.'

WINFREY: How are we monsters? In what ways are we devouring the world?...

ADDED: The man was killed. The hostages all survived.

[T]he suspect had "metalic canisters" strapped to his chest and back. When Lee was struck by police bullets, one of the canisters "popped." Police have not confirmed if the canisters were a bomb, but Manger said the "device may have gone off" when he was shot.

"If Twitter is the new CNN, then @annalthouse is the new Oprah!"

I just retweeted that and then had to admit that I don't really know what it means.

"I followed my heart, and I believe it was the right thing to do, which is weird — I get how weird that is..."

"... because I didn’t make a commitment to Elizabeth. I wasn’t the one lying, like, to her, and I was supporting him in his process, and his intentions never wavered. I knew that he wanted — he just had a really unique way of getting there — to live a life of truth."

Rielle Hunter, being weird, on "Oprah."

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade said:

If she would have, like, made a commitment to Elizabeth, then it wouldn't have been weird.

Like, she could have made a commitment to respect Elizabeth's marriage to John? - it would have been, like, a really unique way of getting there? Getting to, you know, that space of living a life of truth?

But it wouldn't have been weird. It would have been just, you know, like a really really real... process.

Oh! It's Everybody Talk Like Rielle Hunter Day!

"He said one night he looked down and saw his white body next to her black body and couldn't take it anymore."

He was John Tesh. She was Oprah Winfrey. According to the new Kitty Kelley book about Oprah, this happened in the mid-1970s in Tennessee. The quote is (obviously) hearsay. Some other woman who dated Tesh served that up to Kelley. Really untrustworthy, because who is she, and what does she have against Tesh, who didn't stay with her? And even if she was utterly accurate about what Tesh said to her, Tesh could have been lying to her, perhaps bullshitting about how her body was better than Oprah's or some such lover's nonsense.

But let's assume Tesh and Oprah were lovers. Oprah has said they went on a date together, so there is probably some connection. What connection? In the years since the 1970s, both Tesh and Oprah have led the "New Age" movement — Oprah by seducing millions of TV-watchers into believing all manner of pseudo-scientific notions and Tesh by composing that innocuous music. Perhaps the music is not so innocuous. Perhaps Tesh has been softening the very brains into which Oprah has planted her noxious seeds. Conspiracy theory anybody? (Crack?)

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Bonus: a slideshow of unlikely celebrities match-ups.