Seriously, what's going on with these Bonnie Fuller columns in Ad Age? The deposed Star chief must still be desperate for cash. And Ad Age must be desperate for amusement, because the main thing these columns do is expose the fact that Bonnie Fuller-despite being paid astronomical amounts of money by several media moguls-is not all that bright. At least when it comes to writing about and/ or analyzing things. Her last column blew the big A-Rod-and-Madonna conspiracy wide open; and today, she reveals what's really going on with Barack Obama's "celebrity" strategy. The twisted truth must come out! You see, Barack Obama didn't just stumble onto the cover of People magazine by chance. Oh no. It's all part of a big PR strategy! That's how things work in the high-level circles to which Bonnie Fuller is privy:

The New York Times, ever ranged against the perpetuation of conspiracy theories, hosted a fascinating symposium in May called "Jews and Power." If this is how the Sulzberger clan distances itself against nasty but enduring rumors, then Times, Inc. stockholders might consider now a good time to sell. Bad PR! The event — sort of like the New Yorker Festival, except way more open about who's in charge — borrowed its provocative title from Ruth Wisse's well-regarded intellectual history of the subject, published by Shocken Books a year ago as part of its series of volumes dealing with explicitly Jewish themes. (Also not to be missed: David Mamet on why anti-Semites are limp-dicked liberals who can't close). Some of the conversational pairings were rather inspired: Shalom Auslander, the smashmouth Spinoza of upstate New York, kibitzed with Rebecca Goldstein, author of Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, on what it's like to give up Orthodoxy and any chance of not being hounded to an early grave by your parents. Also, Washington Post journalist Warren Bass, reconstructed lefty Paul Berman, and Mideast analyst Aaron David Miller partake in this fruitful discussion:

So. The bad Countrywide-related guy who just 'resigned' from the Obama campaign? He was at the Bilderberg conference, that fun meeting of the secret shadow government. And he's connected to sooo many other organizations that plot the global food crisis and control the churches, like the Brookings Institute and the University of Minnesota. We learned so much from this informative widget, courtesy Animal. We've embedded it after the jump.

What do Thrillist, New York Magazine, HuffPo, Nikki Finke, Time Out, satirist Andy Borowitz, the New York Observer, Elizabeth Spiers, MediaBistro, NBC, Jossip, The Economist, and Jared Paul Stern all have in common? They are all afraid to cover the Bilderberg/NWO meeting in D.C.! This according to the emails received by those people (and many, many more!) admonishing all involved for failing to report on the secret shadow super-government currently meeting to plot terrible things in D.C. Thankfully, one media outlet wasn't afraid of these powerful kingmakers: Slate. Oh, wait, but what is Bilderberg and why is it evil?

On Wednesday night's finale on the CW, Whitney Thompson became the first plus-size model to win the ANTM competition, a result met with tepid politically correct applause. But not from Gawker's readers: "Are you seriously not gonna say anything about the fact that some fat girl won ANTM over the one who got an excision?" one asks. "It's sooo unfair I don't even now why to make myself puke anymore!" Well, the outcome may indeed have been unfair. Some mean-spirited critics have noted that show creator and host Tyra Banks, a former supermodel, is above her fighting weight. And a friend of a friend of blogger Rich Juzwiak says the show's makers may have-shockingly!-planned on a plus-size victory from this season's very start.

Prodigy, the Mobb Deep rapper currently taking advantage of his incarceration to hone his blogging skills, is concerned about quite a few things: ritualistic murders, the 9/11 conspiracy, secret societies, missing children, and "NATURAL ENERGY LINES THAT CRISS-CROSS THE ENTIRE PLANET." How do these things all tie together? Allow Prodigy explain at length [Vibe], like a man with plenty of time to type and type and type and go crazier and crazier and crazier:

Federal agents secretly removed 67 bodies from a patch of New Mexico desert not terribly far from UFO crash zone Roswell. Clearly these are alien remains, but the Feds insist they are the skeletons of black Civil War soldiers, and needed protection from a crazy historian in an airplane, who is now dead. The Associated Press did not bother to dig for the Truth, which Is Out There. [AP]

Boy is the Times ever surprised to hear that Richard Mellon Scaife likes Hillary Clinton now! Background: Scaife underwrote the vast right-wing conspiracy against the Clintons that made the 90s so much fun. He gave The American Spectator two million bucks to create something called "The Arkansas Project," a fishing expedition that sought to uncover and publicize everything bad the Clintons ever did, ever, even the things they didn't do, and the things that weren't actually that bad. Then Bill Clinton was impeached for killing Vince Foster after their torrid sex affair, or something. But yesterday, Scaife announced that now he likes Hillary Clinton, quite a bit, because she sat down for an inverview with him and his Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. The Times notes how well this meeting went and how much of a surprise it is to hear Scaife say nice things about Hillary Clinton, but they don't note that they wrote this same story in February of 2007, the last time Scaife claimed to have totally come around on this Hillary Clinton character after a full decade of doing everything in his power to destroy her life. [Via Radosh, who suspects vast right-wring trickery.]

No matter how scandalous the situations that public figures find themselves in, it seems that there will always be some people willing to rise to their defense. Groups have sprung up to save the careers of both scandalized hooker patron/ Governor Eliot Spitzer, and disgraced former Food Network celebrity chef Robert Irvine, who was outed as a big fat liar and subsequently fired. Both those guys can use all the help they can get. Unfortunately for them, the types of people who form ad hoc online groups in support of fallen idols always seem to be non-influential nutcases (like Democrats!).

The US government would maybe like to spruce up the network of existing interstates that runs from Texas to our Canadian border. The state of Texas, meanwhile, is looking into constructing a multi-lane freeway that would stretch from Laredo, on the Mexican border, to Arkansas. Naturally, this means that the American government has sold us out to foreign interests, dissolved our sovereignty, and allowed the shadowy "North American Union" to begin work on a vast "NAFTA Superhighway"—several football fields wide!—that would destroy our borders, and our rights, for good. This conspiracy theory, quite popular among the more extreme cranks of the far-right and libertarian movements, was brought to our attention by the tireless work promoting it done by respected economic commentator Lou Dobbs, of CNN.

"Exactly how many women have there been in Gene Simmons' life?" That's the teaser in an ad for the old KISS frontman's reality show, Family Jewels. The new season of the show debuts March 11 on A&E, and the promo campaign for it is in full effect. Which has some people asking: Was that sex tape all a big publicity stunt?

Did you know that seemingly harmless job listings site and blog network MediaBistro is a tool of the FBI? It's all true. FishbowlLA editor Kate Coe wrote an item about the Clintons' secret CIA plot to destory former POW John McCain. Which led one intrepid blogger to uncover the secrets behind the CIA control of the entirety of MediaBistro and Kate Coe's connection to the political assassinations of artists Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake.

So sure, Willie Nelson just told a radio station in Palm Beach Florida that he "can't go along with" the idea of airplanes taking down the World Trade Center towers on Sept. 11, 2001, and that the fall of the buildings was too "symmetrical" and looked just like this implosion he saw of a building in Las Vegas this one time when he was sober. Maybe 9/11 denial seems like a particularly insane and counterfactual conspiracy theory for a crooner like Nelson. But, hey, don't forget how the government took almost all his possessions for back taxes in 1990, and then they took his marijuana and 'shrooms 17 months ago even though he could have lost his professional musicians' license for not getting high on that stuff on his tour bus. Also, he already warned us he would turn out this way, though song lyrics, presented along with audio of Nelson's rant after the jump.

Bill O'Reilly's crusade against NBC (the result of his feud with MSNBC runner Keith Olbermann) reached a dramatic and hilarious peak recently when he sent his correspondents to ambush GE Chairman Jeffrey Immelt. Because they used to sell airplane parts to Iran, you see! This is a target far greater in power and influence than O'Reilly's usual liberal bugbears, but it's certainly not unprecedented for certain TV rebels to attack the giant conglomerate. It's just that it usually happens on programs broadcast on GE's own network. Join us for a few entertaining examples, won't you?

Feeling, perhaps, that a single, lesbian-authored petition that lumped him in the same ABC discard pile as Star Jones would hardly be sufficient to clear his good name, Isaiah Washington has finally taken the business of salvaging his reputation into his own hands—and in the process, shed some light on what exactly it was he was referring to in his now-legendary, post-axing battle cry, "I'm mad as hell and not going to take anymore." In an interview yesterday with the Houston Chronicle, Washington outlined his side of the story, describing the actions of an ambitious young actor, who leaped upon an offensive word regrettably uttered during a set dispute and rode the six-letter missile to new heights of stardom:

New York had nine pages this week on 9/11 conspiracy theories, and, truth be told, a lot of them sounded not entirely ridiculous. (The temperature of a jet-fuel fire is lower that the temp at which steel melts? Not even the experts can explain why 7 WTC fell? Bush's black-sheep brother Marvin worked at the security company that protected the World Trade Center and United and American airlines? Interesting.) But, still, it also seemed to be coming from the usual, if well-intentioned, wackos — you know, overearnest Starbucks-bashing punks and overearnest Birks-wearing old hippies and that East Village priest with a soul patch — and so it was easy, as you sat reading Mark Jacobson's piece, to assume that these people were just a little nuts.

A suspect? A suspect? We knew there was a second shooter.