Barabara Walters had "a bitter parting from Today. She said, 'Unlike Katie, there were no going-away parties for me,' connecting her departure to become the first woman on an evening newscast [at ABC] to the current situation of CBS's Katie Couric." [Times]

The ladies of The View had a lengthy meta-conversation all about the "very beautiful!" and "sexy!" photos of their own Barbara Walters in this month's Vanity Fair. And while they do point out the photo spread's accompanying excerpt from Walters' new memoir Auditions, and Babs does allude to tales of past "lovahs," she fails to mention (until Oprah makes her next week) just how tantalizing some of those pages are. As today's preview in the NY Daily News reveals, Walters was involved in a long-term affair with an African-American senator back in the swingin' 70s. And from the sound of it, the affair was far spicier than all those Adrian Lyne movies about adultery:

When selecting a mate, Barbara Walters did not limit herself to utterly reprehensible closet cases. She also liked Senators! Walters revealed on Oprah today that she carried on a torrid affair with Edward Brooke, the first black man elected to the Senate after Reconstruction (no one ever remembers Hiram Rhodes Revels!), "for several years in the 1970's." It was never revealed publicly because Brooke was in the process of divorce and a re-election campaign (he lost the latter). Brooke is still alive. Fun fact: he had breast cancer! Well, maybe that's not very fun. Still. We certainly are learning a lot about the love lives of our elder ladies of journalism, aren't we? It was just last month that Liz Smith revealed that she's slept with 20 people (divided more or less evenly among ladies and gentlemen) in her 2,000 years on Earth. She didn't reveal if any of them were Senators, though. [AP]

A story in Sunday's LAT did the unthinkable by finally pointing out the big Botoxed elephant in the room: no matter how painfully obvious it is to viewers, many stars who get nipped and tucked insist on denying it. But as the Times argues, just how many episodes of this season's Dancing With The Stars or Desperate Housewives can we sit through before drawing our own conclusions? Have you seen Priscilla Presley lately? And if celebrities are going so far as to undergo actual "head transplants," when will they finally start fessing up? We took a look at a few of the stars in question, such as Teri Hatcher and Carrie Fisher, to innocently throw some visual evidence into the mix.

Because Friday is typically our day to let out a little workweek steam by offering up material just a little more frivolous than the hard news we churn out Monday through Thursday, we offer you this delightful mashup by Defamer videotrix Molly "The Bride of Spindenstein" McAleer. In it, Barbara Walters bids a fond farewell to the shores of her sanity, and sets sail on a large Viking barge for the fabled realm of Dementia: And it's all to a hip-hop beat. Enjoy, everyone! Happy Friday! And Happy Easter!

As we predicted back in January, beautiful CNN anchor Anderson Cooper didn't show up for the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation Media Awards ceremony. He was nominated and won for a touching story on homeless gay teens. Broadcasting legend Barbara Walters did show up to receive what we are assuming was a lifetime achievement award for work as Roy Cohn's beard (or something).

Reality show star and buttocks-haver Kim Kardashian was on The View this morning, prompting Barbara Walters, famous interviewer and the last Civil War widow, to ask the most important question of the modern age: "Why are you famous?" Then, later "But what do you do?" Kardashian sputtered out a response about knowing famous people and about her little fashions while stepfather Bruce Jenner (father of Brody, from The Hills! It's all connected!) sat idly by (and looked like plastic).

While we certainly hope that the ladies of The View are ladylike when it comes to using the ladies' rooms at other lady celebrities' houses [Ed. Note - That's a lot of ladies!], the same can't be said for the men who man Barbara Walters' camera crew. In this clip, Walters politely told the story of how her visit to Casa Cyrus for her (barely watched) Oscar special turned into a literal shitshow, with toilets overflowing and Miley's "very nicely attractive mother" Tish bitterly hissing under her breath that she didn't mind one bit. But the icing on the shitcake is the way in which the Cyrus clan says "Thanks For Visiting, Come Again Soon!", which, in a surprising twist, does not come in the form of a Hallmark card, but rather an engraved tchotchke in the shape of a golden toilet.

When Molly Shannon was four years old, she was in a terrible car accident in her home town of Shaker Heights that took the lives of her mother, her little sister, and her cousin. That left her dad James Shannon, who survived the crash with a crushed leg, to raise Molly and her older sister Mary. Stopping by The View today to chat about upcoming projects (she'll be starring in the U.S. version of Australian sitcom hit Kath and Kim), Shannon veered onto the subject of her dad.

Oh, poor dejected Dan Rather. Dumped by his network, left out of self-congratulatory media parties and solitarily pursuing a vanity lawsuit. Well, at least he has the gab fest of that is the View. Today, he got to pontificate about the election, as well as explain his conspiracy theories about why he was fired from CBS. Joy Behar even called him a "sex god." About four minutes in, Barbara Walters asks Rather about his lawsuit, and Rather gets all Howard Beale-lite. His paranoia got our paranoia going. What personal vendetta is Barbara Walters pursuing by asking Rather about his crazy suit? Did ABC News bigwigs tell her to bring up the case to hurt CBS News? Was 9/11 an inside job? Video after the jump.

Leave it to the ladies of The View to somehow connect the dots between Amy Winehouse, anti-Semitic poets, and something Joy has termed "Restless Arm Syndrome." Following Amy's big night at the Grammys, a spirited debate broke out regarding the age old conundrum of whether or not artists should be publicly lauded if they also happen to be drug addicts. While we are thankful that those questions never get raised about bloggers, Hot Topics such as these are tailor made to bring out the best — and by best, we mean worst — in this Hasselbeck-less stable of bittys.

A fixture on TV since the '60s, Walters is known for her soft-focus interviews, her ability to make grown men and women cry, and one of the most famous speech impediments of the 20th century. She's currently the resident den mother, referee, and part owner (ca-ching!) on The View.

Wesley Snipes, the world's surliest vampire hunter, is about to go to trial on some SERIOUS tax evasion charges. Whoopsy daisy, seems that Blade forgot to declare and pay taxes on the $38 million that he made between 1999 and 2004 (we're thinking he made about $38 from 2005 until the present). But The Smoking Gun, being the document sleuths that they are, got their rubber-gloved hands on a document that Wesley filed with an Orange County (FLA, not CA) comptroller back in 2005. We used our computer's highly advanced Ctrl+Alt+Print Screen functionality to grab the image you see above, an image so confusing that it provokes more questions than it could ever possibly answer. First off, is that a hand-drawn self-portrait? It's like Van Gogh meets Rothko meets Rorshach! And second of all, that blood type! Does that mix with AB Negative? We must know. Lastly, that penmanship! We haven't seen so many swirls in a signature since Peggy Sue got married. But wait, there's more!

We can think of no better way to cap off this splendiferous Monday than with a ribald discussion among the ladies of The View on a topic the French might call a ménage à trois, but Americans more commonly refer to as a delicious McThreeWay. Things quickly get ugly, as family values traditionalist Elisabeth Hasselbeck declares a threesome witchhunt, fingering audience members she suspects of concealing group-sex-tainted pasts.

Preferring to keep to herself the naughty Yuletide tales of how a couple of glasses of brandy-infused apple cider and a tantalizing proximity to some dangling mistletoe release her Rent-A-Santa-craving, hot-flashing office party freak, The View's Barbara Walters decided to celebrate the season by sharing with America the Christmas cards her famous friends have recently sent her.

You might be surprised to learn that MySpace is bigger than Google. This, according to Barbara Walters, or at least the notes MySpace PR flack Dani Dudeck handed her before she interviewed Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson. Don't miss the tough questions like, "If I were a Martian. I come down from outer space. I hear about something called My Space. What is it?"

Since her first 10 Most Fascinating People special, a hodgepodge of politicos, celebrities, and persons of note that included everyone from the Archduke Ferdinand to Sarah Bernhardt, Barbara Walters annual compendium of the year's most spellbinding personalities has only grown more essential and, dare we say it, fascinating.

Your guess is as good as ours as to what might have possessed a rapidly unraveling Barbara Walters to don a batskin raincoat from The Dominatrix Barn and precious else on The View, then reveal her purely nonlesbian impulse to gawk at any unclothed female bodies she might encounter while lingering in the dimly lit corners of her favorite spas and ladies clubs. We're certain there's some logical explanation for all this that can be directly tied to estrogen-therapy-induced dementia, but we think just this once we'll simply choose not to look a gift horse in the mouth. Are we right, fellas?

So the token nice blond conservative on "The View," Elisabeth Hasselbeck, who recently popped out a baby named Taylor Thomas, has been replaced by guest host and token uber-bitch blond conservative ABC Radio talk show host, Laura Ingraham. Come now, ABC, cross-promotion aside: Surely there are other voices that could also use representation in your little femme-medley. Say, oh, maybe an Asian-American woman, a college-aged student, a Southeast Asian woman, a senior citizen or a dude? Sigh. Instead, we must resign ourselves to listening to Ingraham, who, while not an idiot (unless you're speaking to Eric Alterman, who thinks she so totally is), is so distasteful that their seething rage at her is probably one of the few things "The View" ladies can agree on.

So reenergized was The View's headmistress Barbara Walters by the politically incorrect musings of Damon Wayans on yesterday's broadcast, she's already taken it upon herself to incorporate some of the controversy-courting changes herself: