If we're dragging politicians' families through the mud it seems only fair to do some digging into the distant past of the mysterious Barack Obama. His ancestors came, of course, from an exotic foreign land: a mysterious, magical island called "Ireland." According to an Irish genealogy site: "Obama's earliest known relative, his 6th great grandfather, was a member of a family of wealthy wig makers who included an Irish politician, Michael Kearney." This Michael "Hussein" Kearney was apparently exactly like his distant descendant Barack Obama. A contemporary scurrilous pamphlet said of him: "No man alive was equally fired with ambition." Zing...?

George W. Bush agrees with Newsweek: he was not so bad! Actually, what he said at a July 29 fundraiser was even dumber: "Our insider reports that the prez gave a breezy 40-minute tour of his time in office, calling it a 'cool experience for Laura and I.'" Well. We're glad someone enjoyed it! Bush has become Reagan except instead of Alzheimer's it will be revealed that he is aging backwards like Benjamin Button. [Washington Whispers]

Bill Ayers was a founding member of the Weather Underground, a patently ridiculous white radical organization that specialized in being dumb hippies. They liked to blow up symbolic things like statues. Once they put a bomb in the Pentagon! No one was hurt except for some files. Anyway. This was years ago and since then, Bill has become so goddamn respectable that Mayor Richard Daley tapped him to head a "public-private partnership" dedicated to improving Chicago public schools. Barack Obama was on the board of a philanthropic foundation with Bill in 1999 which means, according to this fantastic attack ad, that Barack Obama wanted to blow up the Pentagon just like the terrorists of 9/11. Except worse! Ha ha this ad is ridiculous and you won't see it on TV because no one will air it, except for an obscure little company that owns local stations covering a quarter of the country. (And us. And we cover the world! Except for China probably.) A McCain fundraiser named Harold Simmons funded the ad through one of those shadowy nonprofits the kids are so into these days called the "American Issues Project." Simmons was, you may be shocked to learn, also a Swift Boat Veterans for Truth funder. This particular ad is so distorted that CNN and even Fox News have refused to run it! Which leaves, of course, the local channels owned by Sinclair Communications. The Sinclair Broadcast Group owns the largest number of local TV stations in the country, mostly throughout the South and Midwest. They last made headlines in 2004, when the company refused to allow its stations to air the Nightline segment that named American casualties in Iraq (they hate the troops!), and then six months later when they made all their stations broadcast a crazy Swift Boat documentary about how John Kerry committed treason in Vietnam. Oh, and then they were the ones behind the Armstrong Williams debacle, in which Williams was revealed to be a White House-paid propagandist while hosting a syndicated show as an ostensibly independent commentator. The show was produced out of Sinclair's "New Central" office, which produced much of the insane "news" content Sinclair feeds to its many stations. (Sinclair received a $36,000 FCC fine for their trouble.) But besides a GQ story on Sinclair back in '05, no one really pays any attention to the work of Sinclair. They reach nearly as many homes as an actual television network and purposefully exert more control over the message they broadcast than any 24-hour news network, but because they own podunk affiliates in flyover country, no one notices. Per Wikipedia:

Congratulations to Barack Obama for finally running a no-holds-barred attack ad against John McCain. It's a masterpiece of the genre (the "more in sorrow than in fearmongering" attack), taking one odd biographical detail as proof of mendacity, with a touch of underhanded smear thrown in. You are poor and broke and the bank is taking away your house, but John McCain? He is so old he doesn't remember how many houses he has! (Narrator: "It's seven. Seven houses.") It's a fun little number. But as you watch our above compilation of some of our favorite attack ads of the last forty-odd years, well, you may notice that no modern candidate can touch the '60s for mean-spirited spite. LBJ will cut you to win reelection. Click to see the compilation, and Obama's modern attempt at the genre is below.

You know how John McCain knew his captors were gay? The guards that bound him with ropes and beat him nightly for hours were wearing sweaters. Ha ha ha. No, seriously though, the actual funny new joke about John McCain is that he was not even tortured! Andrew Sullivan argues that all the shit that happened to McCain—"sleep deprivation, the withholding of medical treatment, stress positions, long-time standing, and beating"—now falls under the category of perfectly legal enhanced interrogation, as practiced by the United States across the world. With McCain's approval! Hooray! (Of course U.S. law requires that detainees are treated to one night of a guard quietly scratching a crescent into the sand every year on a holy day of their choosing.) Oh, and no one yet knows when McCain first remembered the guard that drew the cross in the ground with a stick or why he did not mention this fact until 1999, but the story is not from Solzhenitsyn at all but rather from Watergate crook turned evangelical wingnut Chuck Colson, who claimed he heard it from Jesse Helms, who said he heard it from Billy Graham in 1977. John McCain seems to have a habit of making up his own biography to fit whatever his circumstances require and then seeming like he believes his own nonsense. Maybe it relates to those years of torture, during which he'd only give up useless information to his captors, like the starting defensive line of the Pittsburgh Steelers (sorry, wait... that was the Packers.).

It looks like the smart money is on Delaware Senator Joe Biden for Obama's running mate. Mark Halperin's already announced it in his typical cryptic way (after erasing his "if I don't know the selection it hasn't happened yet" post from last night): "Bo knows," he says, which probably refers to Biden's son, Beau, though why Beau would know is unknown. Why would Obama choose Biden? Our theory is that Obama just likes Biden. He's a funny guy. But is it a terrible choice? We think it is! But we'd love to be wrong! Pros and cons (mostly cons), below. The official line is age, experience, and foreign policy expertise-Biden matches up well against McCain by outdoing him on most of his strengths besides the "tortured for five years by homos" thing. But with Biden comes the history of saying insane and inappropriate things and, you know, the plagiarism. (We said he matched up well with McCain!) And hey, let's look at some of our favorite moments of Biden saying something insane-taken entirely from his recent run for the presidency! July, 2006:

Back in 1973, when young John McCain had just been released from his five hellish years of torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese, he became a media sensation back home. His tale of heroism inspired the nation, and his refusal to back down and give in to his captors demands was thrilling stuff. Queerty tracked down what may be McCain's first personal account of his captivity and torture, for US News & World Report in May of 1973. They posted it online in January, but maybe it's because we're all so familiar with his tale at this point that no one noticed, until now, the bit where he says all his captors were homosexuals who got off on whipping him. No, that is not made up.

Former Hillary Clinton spokeshipster Howard Wolfson says Hillary Clinton totally would be president right now if the John Edwards scandal had gone public last year. "I believe we would have won Iowa, and Clinton today would therefore have been the nominee," he told ABC. And furthermore: Wolfson says the Clintons knew the story but didn't push it. "Any of the campaigns that would have tried to push that would have been burned by it." Ha. Bullshit. If they had the story, they would've planted it without getting their hands dirty. And furthermore, Edwards would've had to drop out right before Iowa, and not after. And furthermore, their Iowa ground game sucked and Obama's didn't. And frankly their campaign didn't kick into gear until they were losing and started taking shit seriously; being the frontrunner was a liability. But all that aside, playing alternative history is totally fun! So let's all pretend the Edwards revelations broke close enough to the Iowa caucus to force Edwards to drop out but not so far from them that everyone had already forgotten or stopped caring. What would our world look like now?

Wow. So remember the story of how Representative Charlie Rengel had those rent-stabilized apartments? And that led to this expose on how the Rudin family keeps renting out its luxury apartments at ridiculously low cost to connected insiders? Now that story has led to the amazing tale of how Richard Nixon was blackballed by a co-op board and taken in by the Rudins in the late-'70s. See, no one in New York liked him or wanted him, because of the criminality and Cambodia-bombing, but those kind-hearted Rudins offered Dick his choice of any Rudin-managed apartment he wished. Hah. Nowadays Nixon would surely have been publicly rehabilitated ten seconds after leaving office with a well-timed apology and maybe a stint in rehab for Pat. Also he'd be on Dancing With the Stars. [NYT]

So, what the heck's been happening in the Middle East since the dawn of civilization five thousand years ago? Well, I don't have the time-or the knowledge-to explain it all, so watch this handy video illustrating who ruled what, and when, in just 90 war-filled seconds!

With all the billions of dollars that pour into the Olympics, you'd think that the least the host committee could do would be to come up with a decent mascot. But no! In a classic case of overthinking something into oblivion, cities obsess over the stupid mascots for years, until they create some sort of awful mutant-by-committee. This year is no different: the WSJ reports that the Beijing mascot (five assorted weird animal-like creatures, pictured) is disliked even by the artist who created them. Throughout the 70s and 80s, mascots were fairly normal: a tiger, an eagle, a bear, a beaver, a gay dachsund. But in 1992 abstraction took over, and the whole enterprise went off the rails. After the jump, pictures of the Olympic mascots from '92 onwards. They suck:

Michael Savage, the fag-hating radio host who thinks autism is the parents' fault, may seem like your typical blustery foaming-at-the-mouth neocon bigoted piece of shit. But Radar suggests that that's not necessarily so. I mean, yes, he's a neocon bigoted piece of shit, but one with a hippie past. Well, enough of a hippie/beatnik past to have been friends with Howl scribe and confirmed sodomite Allen Ginsberg. They wrote letters, long ago in the animal soup of time when Savage was Michael Weiner:

You know that prayer that begins "God grant me the serenity" etc. etc. (surely it rings a bell among the alkies in our audience)? It was composed in the 1940s by theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Everyone knows this! Except some Yale librarian has found records of people (all ladies!) quoting the prayer back in the 1930s! So now there's this argument about it, because Niebuhr's daughter has apparently been eating out on this Serenity Prayer thing for years (she wrote a memoir and everything). That daughter is editor and publisher Elisabeth Sifton, as today's Times story on the controversy notes. What the Times story does not note is that Elisabeth is the mother of New York Times culture editor Sam Sifton. [NYT via Doree]

Hillary Clinton aide Howard Wolfson is now a regular contributor to Fox News, but in his heart of hearts, he'd like to be a contributing editor at Spin. As we've mentioned, he regularly sends out indie-heavy playlists of what he's listening to to friends, fellow flacks, and journalists. And we finally found his 2004 end-of-year list! Complete with blurbs! Wolfson's top ten, and other assored bits of music criticism from the be-sweatered communications consultant, after the jump.

How, we ask you, could someone named "T. Boone Pickens" possibly be bad? T. Boone is, as you have probably guessed, a Texas billionaire. An oil billionaire! But he does not spend his billions on running moonshine or buying the world's largest cement pond. No, instead Pickens-who will be played by Charles Durning for the remainder of this post-funds slanderous attack campaigns against Democratic political candidates. The campaigns feature lies so ridiculous that the only people who regularly take them seriously work at every cable news station and many newspapers.

CBS war correspondent Lara Logan was recently promoted to "Chief Foriegn Affairs Correspondent," but no one noticed because OMG SEX SCANDAL! The Enquirer broke it, the Post semi-legitimized it, and it's been mentioned now in, like, real newspapers and everything. She slept with some people in Iraq! One of them was married! Some wonder if there is maybe a double standard. Would we hear about the dalliences of male journalists in the war zone? Well... sort of?

It's Anna Wintour's 20th anniversary as editor of Vogue, and the be-bobbed one has certainly earned her title as one of the most feared figures in fashion. But it's worth remembering that she hasn't had a smooth ride. In fact, Wintour was beset by a salacious—and probably false—sex scandal rumor as soon as she took her job. Here, from the pages of Jerry Oppenheimer's biography Front Row, is the story of the alleged Wintour love connection with her boss, Si Newhouse—and how Wintour's reaction became a rare and fleeting moment of feminist pride inside Conde Nast:

Raffaello Follieri always looked the part of the Italian aristocrat. Impeccably dressed and permanently tanned—like a more attractive version of Zach Braff—he arrived in New York as a dashing young business tycoon with inside connections to the Vatican and a plan to use those connections to make millions. In short order he landed stunning actress Anne Hathaway as a girlfriend and drew attention from some of the most powerful financial figures in America. His father was Pasquale Follieri, an Italian businessman and his son's partner in the Follieri Group, an shady concern that promised investors big returns from real estate dealings with the Catholic Church. But that's not all that Pasquale was; just two years after he helped establish his son in New York, he would be a convicted financial criminal, in an eerie foreshadowing of Raffaello's own fate:

Portfolio media reporter Jeff Bercovici cornered blogstress Arianna Huffington at a party and interviewed her. He asked, awkwardly, about Tim Russert. As you may recall, Arianna did not like the deceased newsman. She devoted a great deal of time and energy to criticizing his interview style, guests, questions, and status. To be fair, her points were often cogent and correct! But the other thing is that Tim's wife Maureen Orth wrote a terribly nasty story about Arianna back in the '90s and also called her then-husband gay (he was, and is). Then Arianna was accused of hiring a private investigator to tail Maureen and Tim. Which she denies. Still, she says, Russert Watch was nothing personal.

Pixar, the computer animation company and digital film studio, was undervalued by everyone in Hollywood, from George Lucas who formed the original team at Skywalker Ranch to Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg at Disney. Steve Jobs, however, understood the potential for the company — and how to milk it for every penny. After buying the company for a mere $5 million, after Katzenberg balked on a $15 million price tag, Jobs hovered over the company like an "ominous cloud," according to Michael Hirschorn's review of David Price's new book detailing the company's history. At one point, Jobs squeezed more stock out the company so that the company could stay afloat — shortly before production on breakout hit Toy Story started production. "I’m sitting around here trying to make Steve Jobs richer in ways he doesn’t even appreciate," one employee quips. (Photo by AP/Eric Risberg)