Forget her husband's ex-gay therapy clinics, her cutesy gaffes about John Wayne Gacy, and all the other nutty little stories about Michele Bachmann. You only need one reason to determine that Michele Bachmann's campaign is a sick joke: The way she brags about how she would never raise the debt ceiling, and her claim that S&P only downgraded U.S. debt because the debt ceiling was eventually raised.

All of the candidates, except soon-to-be candidate Rick Perry, are in Ames, Iowa for tonight's Republican debate! Oh wait, neither are Gary Johnson or Thaddeus McCotter or the other loser, Buddy something, or the gay guy. But the others, they're there! So grab your Iowa State Fair fried butter stick and turn on America's channel, Fox News. The future starts below.

If you are a woman and come within smelling-distance of him, magic secret-sharing gnome Julian Assange will hit on you in excruciatingly awkward fashion. A new eBook offers another prime example of Assange's Casanova act.

Steve Jobs's uniform of jeans and a black turtleneck has heretofore seemed less like a sophisticated sartorial choice than a savvy exercise in personal branding, a symbol of ascetic devotion to technology, and perhaps, once, a bit of marketing for the Gap, where Jobs was a director. But if acclaimed couturier Ralph Rucci is to be believed, the Apple CEO might be so far ahead of the fashionistas that he's been severely underappreciated.

George Soros, Al Gore's favorite billionaire, was sued for $50 million in Manhattan yesterday by his ex-girlfriend, Brazilian soap star Adriana Ferreyr. She claims that Soros reneged on his promise to give her a $1.9 million New York apartment and that he beat her.

An alarm brought firefighters to Blue Heron Farm — the $50,000-a-week, 28.5 acre property on Martha's Vineyard where the Obamas have spent their summer vacations since 2009 — early Tuesday morning.

AOL shares closed down 26 percent today, despite posting its first ad sales increase since the company was spun out from Time Warner. The problem? The disastrous AOL-HuffPo merger seems to be catching up to the internet conglomerate.

As night approaches in England, the riots raging in London spread to other UK cities, police flood the streets, residents clean up, and a man dies from riot-related violence. Welcome to day four of the London riots.

In your simmering Thursday media column: Rick Sanchez pipes up again, CNBC's bizarre PR scandal, James Risen's judicial defender speaks, News Corp is flooded with lawsuits, and the WaPo's punchy editor is retired.

Baggy-eyed, battered and desperately in need of a cigarette, President Barack Obama limped across the birthday finish line today, making it to a round half-century: Our Commander-in-Chief is now 50 years old.

Chocolate workout! Smaller gyms! Drummer warrior! Fast pushups! Helen Mirren! Tween athletes! Vegetarian benefits! Heart exercise! And Americans are still fat, all of us! It's your Wednesday Health Watch, where we watch your health—plyometrixplosively!

Piers Morgan has repeatedly claimed—falsely!—that he never countenanced or encountered voicemail hacking during his tenure as editor of the Daily Mirror. Now Heather Mills has come forward to claim that a reporter for the Mirror's parent company confessed to her in 2001 that the paper had surreptitiously gained access to a voicemail message Paul McCartney left for her after the couple had a fight. The trouble for Morgan is that he openly admitted to having listened to that very voicemail message—recounting it in detail—in 2007. Whoops.

The family of British singer Amy Winehouse, who died this weekend at the age of 27, believes that the singer's decision to quit drinking cold turkey may have led to her death.

Because it loses tons of money, Groupon is promoting its IPO using an inflated income number that excludes marketing and customer acquisition costs. Why would you do that? Well, that's exactly what the SEC is now asking.

The Murdoch phone-hacking scandal has crested; the parliamentary hearing was nothing compared to this. Now there are Murdoch-blocking browser add-ons! Never again accidentally visit a Murdoch-owned website!

The Richard Nixon Presidential Library released 500,000 documents today, and among them is an operatically abject and desperate letter of apology from a then-25-year-old young press aide named Diane Sawyer.

Wendi Deng deserves credit for containing husband Rupert Murdoch's worst impulses. Not only did her fearsome bodyguarding distract the world from hubby's hacking scandal, it's now clear that she preserved a friendship with Google that Murdoch tried to explode.

Puffy British game-show presenter Piers Morgan, who also hosts a show on CNN about Twitter, is in the spotlight these days because he formerly edited Rupert Murdoch's News of the World and a competitor called the Daily Mirror, and as such is prima facie guilty of hacking into everyone's voicemails all the time.

They weren't offering a job, but when Apple board members discussed CEO succession with the head of a "high profile technology company," as the Wall Street Journal reported, they surely knew they were planting a seductive thought: "I could replace the most famous business executive in the world."

The hacking group LulzSec appears to be back, with a very timely hack of Rupert Murdoch's British tabloid The Sun—the sister publication of the dead News of the World. And they warn, ominously, that they've got emails, too.