As George and his A-list Clooneyites take a step back from electioneering, the resulting vacuum has found an unlikely demographic with which to fill the celebrity-grandstanding void: Hollywood's young starlets, whom, inspired by their patron saint Angelina Jolie's willingness to get her hands dirty with some face-to-face human suffering along her far-flung orphan-collecting travels, have now taken it upon themselves to do more for their own pet causes. The LAT reports:

Alec Baldwin recently took the time to send a personal letter to Hillary Clinton and her fellow senators, imploring them to vote no on a proposed $10 billion farm subsidies bill before that could potentially turn already overweight children into a generation of cream-cheese-and-donut gobbling gluttons with an upper-range life expectancy of 14. From the NY Daily News:

Like a fine, snout-sprayed cognac mist, Paris Hilton's plea on behalf of drunken elephants appears to have evaporated into thin air, as the AP has issued the following kill-order on the story: "AP-KILL ADVISORY Stations: The separate slugged Hilton-Drunk Elephants sent as V3374 at 12:17 p.m. Eastern time has been KILLED. Lori Berk, a publicist for Hilton, says she never made any comments about helping drunken elephants in India. A kill is mandatory. Make certain the item is not aired. No sub will be filed. AP Broadcast News Center - Washington."

We're not entirely sure when the AP started running ridiculous-sounding quotes taken from Celebrity Hearsay Wire Service WENN, but we'll just have to assume all the fact-checking legwork has been done on this particular tale of celebutard altruism in the widely ignored realm of animal substance abuse. In Tokyo, where she was judging a local beauty pageant, Paris Hilton allegedly made the following statement in response to a story about wild Indian pachyderms having gone on a rice-beer-fueled rampage:

A generation of panty-eschewing shock-starlets owe a giant debt of gratitude to Basic Instinct star Sharon Stone, whose early advances in the vagina-flashing sciences are the stuff of legend. Still, someone who's been in the game as long as Stone has knows that as effective a statement can be made using nothing more than a little modesty and timeless elegance. Case in point: the actress's choice of ensemble for the 13th Annual Make-A-Wish Ball in Miami over the weekend, which kept her fabulous-at-50 body almost completely covered, save perhaps for an alluring glimpse of bare shoulder. And for at least one 13-year-old boy with leukemia who fantasized about experiencing "a faceful of Sharon Stone cameltoe just once," it was a night in which dreams really did come true.

Paris's historic journey to Rwanda to break ground on the Kigali Hilton has been delayed, for now, due to a "restructuring" at the Playing for Good Foundation (formerly Totally Rockin' Reality TV Ventures LLC). We're certain her philanthropic efforts will get back on track just as soon as they can find a line producer willing to work for under $5000 a week. [People]

Despite David Letterman's best efforts to the contrary, Paris Hilton is fully committed to looking ahead since a recent incarceration threw everything into perspective for the multihyphenated heiress: There are B-movies to shoot, Folies Bergères-themed fragrances to promote, and, of course, the matter of her ongoing charity campaigns, including her oft-mentioned sojourn to Rwanda, where she hopes to spend some celebrity capital in order to raise awareness about whatever it is that's going on over there. Newsweek reports:

In what has evolved into an unofficial Hollywood Woman's Week of sorts—to culminate in a massive bra-burning protest staged around The Grove's dancing waters tonight at 8 (trashing of the Nike Goddess store to follow)—we now turn to arguably the most formidable strata of showbiz vagina-havers: the wives. The LAT chugs along in a cooking-oil-powered pickup with green warrior Kelly Meyer, wife of Universal's Ron, learning much about what Hollywood wives are doing to help save the world along the way:

What better way to ring in T.R. Knight-endorsed National Coming Out Day than with this TMZ TV tribute to hinge-jawed songbird, actress, and gay icon, Bette Midler. In it, she's first called a "tree murderer"—we're offered several scintillating details about a scandal involving Hawaiian zoning laws and driveway construction—only to have the accusations of arborcide retracted seconds later, in a touching endorsement of Midler's ahead-of-their-time "tree hugging" efforts, strikingly depicted by Midler humping one like a lemur in heat. Thankfully, however, the crack-filled IV drips to which the TMZ editors are permanently hooked had fully drained before they could accomplish an animation depicting the star of The Rose fertilizing her park-revitalization project using nothing more than what Gaia gave her.

Perhaps not as obviously stirring as Angelina Jolie's kneebuckling tale of a disadvantaged child caregiver she'd encountered on her recent orphan-collecting travels, something about the quiet urgency with which the apple of Tony Micelli's eye entreats HuffPo readers to join her in a fight against a variety of little-known but easily curable Third World diseases moved us in equal measure. We urge the time-pressed to at the very least skim the Read More section, where they'll quickly get the crux of her arguments by scanning a grab bag of tags covering essential talking points "Charmed," "elephantiasis," "river blindness," and "Who's the Boss?"

Released from the burden of having to count paycheck zeros, Carrey now has time to concentrate on matters more weighty, like campaigning on behalf of Burmese political prisoners:

Sole survivor of the Baldwin Family Career Curse Alec has always been an actor with a conscience, as demonstrated recently by his reaction to a NY Times article about a young female soldier from Phoenix soon headed off to combat. So touched was he by Pvt. Resha Kane's story, Baldwin himself (no, that's no typo—we said himself) tracked down Kane's family to tell them he'd like to contribute to Kane's college tuition fund:

In what could point towards a slackening of the once-rigorous standards for recruitment into their Celebrity Goodwill Ambassadorship grooming programing, American Idol survivor and recent Oscar-winner Jennifer Hudson was invited to address the U.N. yesterday. She wasn't there to tattle to the Committee on Human Rights Violations about Simon Cowell's Geneva Convention-violating treatment of fellow Idol contestants, however, but rather to represent ladies' face-painting giant Avon (she's their new spokesmodel!) on International Women's Day:

• Sharon Stone Speaks at University Event [AP]

As we mentioned earlier, vying for the attentions of sauced celebrities piling out of the Beverly Hilton ballroom after the Golden Globes ceremony is a new event on the block: The "Golden Green" party, in the Hilton-adjacent former Robinsons-May retail space, is being co-presented by E! Network and the Environmental Media Association, and it plans on eschewing the wasteful extravagances of your typical Hollywood awards show bash for more eco-friendly party favors:

As little David Banda continues to adapt to his charmed, new life at an English manor, where he's getting into all sorts of adorable trouble crawling into his mom's closets and delighting in her secret stash of recreational riding crops and chainmail panties, Madonna's swelling heart is now set on giving David the sister he never had (not counting Lourdes, who has the disadvantage of being a less-desirable, biological child). But as with her first Malawian adoption, the follow-up tour is set to meet with much resistance and negative publicity, as 18-month-old Jessica has already been promised to an Australian missionary couple whose charity work in the impoverished African nation predates Madonna-come-lately's by seven years:

One day we will all be able to look back with a smile on the maelstrom of controversy that surrounded little David Banda, Malawi's most adorable demi-orphan, and the strange, leather-bodiced witch-lady who swooped in suddenly to spirit him away. (Perhaps it will require the part-time children's author adapting the entire series of unfortunate events into yet another whimsically illustrated bedtime story.) But as in all classic fairy tales, things tend to get darkest right before the "happily ever after" part, so it's somewhat befitting that the child's very much alive and increasingly media-friendly father has distressingly announced that he had never intended to give his son up permanently. From the NY Post:

Far be it from Madonna to accept delivery of her new child in tight-lipped quietude. On her way to getting David Banda fitted for his very own red-string bracelet, the singer paused long enough to deliver a stiffly worded written statement, bursting with cautious legal flavor, in which she claims the adoption was many months in the making and insisting that she followed all the appropriate procedures in expanding her brood.

The one-year old boy Madonna has been trying to adopt from Malawi — despite laws that prohibit the nation's young from being clutched to the ample bosoms of foreign women with proven conic-bra proclivities — officially arrived today in England, where he will soon take up his role sitting quietly in a playpen while Madonna spends eight hours hotboxed in a yoga class. The pop star's newest youngling, David Banda (whose full name semi-aptly anagrams to "Diva, and bad"), apparently survived his baptism by paparazzi, which came after the eager photogs failed to be fooled by his lack of conspicuously oversized sunglasses.

We're not sure if it's her recent penchant for flaunting the quality of her bikini wax in unitards and fishnet tights, or the people of Malawi's collective disapproval of the way her name and Guy Ritchie's can't be adorably bastardized into a single noun. (Maguy? Gadonna? Madochie? No.) Either way, though, the denizens of the African nation still have their knickers in a toddler-sized wad over the Material Girl's so-far successful attempts to thwart local laws and adopt a one-year old — a fiery panty-fervor that's been exacerbated by news that Baby David's departure from Malawi coincided with a conveniently timed $3 million donation to help HIV-infected kids: