Us Weekly's lead story right now is a rather substance-free bit on Dallas Cowboy quarterback Tony Romo shopping for a birthday present for his girlfriend, pop tart Jessica Simpson. But Us is doing its best to drum up something better; a reporter sent a vaguely ominous letter to Romo's dad encouraging him to talk, because "Jessica Simpson's side is controlling the media right now." Which is actually very good reporting! Any journalist worth his paltry salary knows how to use veiled threats, scary insinuations, and bluffs (lies) to get reluctant sources to speak up. We've compiled a handy translation guide; how to decode the most common threatening reporter doublespeak, after the jump:

Our own Alex Pareene was so money when he called bullshit on that supposedly unknown tribe photographed in the Amazon. It was all a ruse by a concerned environmentalist! "[I]t has now emerged that, far from being unknown, the tribe's existence has been noted since 1910 and the mission to photograph them was undertaken in order to prove that 'uncontacted' tribes still existed in an area endangered by the menace of the logging industry. The disclosures have been made by the man behind the pictures, José Carlos Meirelles, 61, one of the handful of sertanistas- experts on indigenous tribes-working for the Brazilian Indian Protection Agency, Funai, which is dedicated to searching out remote tribes and protecting them."

Obama's newest flack is former journalist! It's cute when journos move to politicians' press offices and pretend they'll still give a shit about The People's Right To Know. "The thing that really made me feel at peace with the decision is this conversation we had about telling the truth," Linda Douglass says. (Obama's DIFFERENT he cares about CHANGE and TRUTHS.) And so, it begins. [WP]

What's the word on the street these days? "Word on the street is that Brian Anthony is also fighting hard to open for Madonna on her upcoming "Hard Candy" tour." This Brian Anthony, who is some type of music maker, did a mashup of his music with Madonna's and put it on his Myspace page. Now, "The 'Worked Up!' mash-up is being passed around the Madonna camp and the buzz is BIG on it." How can we be so sure? Because we got the information firsthand, in a hilariously inept press release from Jim Strzalkowski, fantabulous PR man—and fan—to the D-list stars!

Yesterday, Arianna Huffington revealed that John McCain told her in 2000 that he didn't vote for George W. Bush. Which we believe. We believe that he told her this, anyway. Who knows if it was true then, or now. But McCain denied it, right away. Which leads Arianna to list all the documented times he's blatantly lied about saying something so far this campaign season. A fun little list! Of course it shows why McCain felt comfortable telling Arianna Huffington that he didn't vote for Bush in 2000. And also why he's the most popular guest in Daily Show history!

Times are tough for journalists. Sure, there are humorous t-shirts, but that's probably not enough to save the industry. The McClatchy Company, which owns The Sacramento Bee and The Miami Herald, put up a video of their CEO Gary Pruitt to encourage and dupe their employees. In the clip, Pruitt says that no company won more than their two Pulitzer prizes. The Washington Post's six apparently don't count. He also claimed that no organization won as many George Polk awards as their two, when The Nation Institute won as many. But surely Pruitt wouldn't lie about the future of the McClatchy. Everything's going great there.

The prospect of having the Internet suddenly disappear, leaving us in a wasteland of masturbating to our own lame imaginations, isn't just the basis for a hilarious South Park episode. It's coming! So says one biased goon for the horrible, horrible AT&T. "U.S. telecommunications giant AT&T has claimed that, without investment, the Internet's current network architecture will reach the limits of its capacity by 2010. Speaking at a Westminster eForum on Web 2.0 this week in London, Jim Cicconi, vice president of legislative affairs for AT&T, warned that the current systems that constitute the Internet will not be able to cope with the increasing amounts of video and user-generated content being uploaded."

Even at a quarter, the New York Sun is tough sell. The paper is such a joke we don't even make it fun of it. At best, it's like an animal shelter for unemployed New York writers. But even if it's a bizarre Zionist vanity project, someone needs to move that paper. So it falls to the telemarketers to sell the paper's lies. A tipster sent a recording of the pitch. We've dutifully transcribed the absurd stuff, after the jump.

CNN anchor Anderson Cooper and his team unearthed a video of Hillary Clinton casually strolling off a military transport plane after landing in Bosnia in 1996, the clearest proof yet against Clinton's prior claims her plane faced sniper fire during the landing. Said Cooper: "You'll notice the absence of any ducking — or any running — or any shooting for that matter... it was apparently safe enough for a little child to a read a poem to the senator on the tarmac." The silver-haired anchor advanced CBS News' earlier coverage not only with impressively-packaged background footage and quotes but also with that patented concerned-crinkly-face thing he does so well. Thank you for emoting on behalf of the entire country, Anderson, we appreciate it. Video after the jump.

So Hillary Clinton has been going around saying that she is qualified to be president of everyone in part because she was shot at in Bosnia once, in 1996. CBS News dug up their original story from that Bosnia trip, and it turns out the "sniper fire" was actually a little girl, with a flower. Some card spliced the report with the recent Clinton speech about how dangerous that trip was, what with all the "evasive maneuvers" and such. Busted! New York compares Hillary to memoir-faker Margaret Seltzer, but that's unfair: Hillary went to Bosnia with Sinbad so she's still got cred that no one can touch. Full clip attached below.

First, the media implants an unattainable idea in our heads about what a human body should look like. Then, on top of that, popular publications give confusing advice about how to achieve that impossibly cut look! In the last couple of days, the lying liberal media has published several articles on various fitness techniques. You don't need to read any of them, because we're about to round them all up and drop some serious knowledge on you about the phony, media-driven fitness fantasy. After the jump, how to save money and kick ass in this shallow, workout-obsessed world.

Peter Daou, the respected political blogger originally behind Salon's Daou Report, online guru for the Kerry/Edwards campaign, and now internet director for Hillary Clinton, has reached the phase of the campaign where you cannot for the life of you figure out how anyone could believe a word your opponent says, even when it is basically the same thing your candidate is saying. This is called living in "the bubble," after the popular television show The Prisoner. Daou wrote an open letter to liberal bloggers this weekend asking them to please point out that Barack Obama has been very mean to Hillary Clinton, even though Obama says he hasn't been. It's totally unfair because everyone thinks Hillary is mean to Barack all the time, what with her calling him inexperienced and saying McCain would make a better candidate, but the fact is, Daou asserts, Barack Obama's campaign has called Hillary "divisive" and "calculating" and "polarizing." Also they altered photos of her to make her look even more woman-y. (J/k!) Daou's full memo (which is quite reasonable while also liberally employing that uncomfortable tone of abject defensiveness that most of Ms. Clinton's surrogates can't help but share these days), after the jump.

Reporter Michael Isikoff's story of John McCain's unethical relationship with lobbyist Vicki Iseman is up at Newsweek! It's been speculated that news that Isikoff was working on the story is one of the many factors that prompted the New York Times to "rush" their version into print earlier this week. Isikoff's story comes with a nice little mini-bombshell: proof that McCain already lied in his "sweeping denial" of the Times story!

In response to our call for lying flack stories, a tipster who works as "a high level advertising and marketing executive" brings us a story about Edelman, the huge PR firm that reps clients like Wal-Mart and Shell, and talks a lot about ethics in its marketing materials. So this little tale, while perhaps not surprising to those of you who have ever thought about the true meaning of "media training," is still pretty blatant:

Flacks are allowed to hedge, prevaricate, stall, mumble, disappear, and spin, as the case warrants. But no matter how much of a scumbag their client is, they're not allowed to actually lie. It's just bad for business. The definition of a lie has to be loose, or PR wouldn't exist. But sometimes they just pop right out. Like when Kirsten Dunst's rep told Page Six "Kirsten is fine," less than a week before she went to rehab. Sometimes a "technical" truth is still a lie, like when that Interview flack assured us that editor Ingrid Sischy had definitely not left the mag. Although she did two weeks later. And sometimes flacks just rotely lie like robots, like Time Warner's "Don't look behind the curtain" Danielle Perissi. So what we want are your experiences: Which flacks have lied to you? Or, which have told the biggest lies you've ever heard, excluding White House spokespeople? Send tips here. And after the jump, the five most common lies flacks tell reporters. They almost don't even COUNT by now.

Al Gore's Current TV, a "youth-oriented news company," is filing for a $100 million dollar public offering. Which means we all get to find out that apparently Gore's little tv station has been lying about its profitability for three solid years. Fast Company, NewTeeVee, the New York Times, and BusinessWeek all repeated claims by Current reps that the company was profitable. Turns out, not so much. "The youth-oriented news company had a net loss of $9.8 million in 2007, based on revenue of $63.8 million. It lost $7.6 million in 2006 and $14.3 million in 2005. Altogether, Current had $36.5 million in debts as of the end of last year." Why, Al? Why do you continue to lie to us? The wind chill is 30 below back where we're from, we can all see right through your deceptions! [NewTeeVee]

Did Lizzie Grubman... lie? The celebrity publicist is a convicted felon, and New York doesn't allow incarcerated felons or parolees to vote. After parole, though, they're fine! They can vote any time they like! And according to a cursory Google search, Grubman received five years' probation for running over those people in the Hamptons. She was sentenced in 2002. It's 2008. So it seems like she could vote this year, if she really wanted to! Someone tell us if we're wrong here, we can't bear to imagine the possibility that Lizzie and Page Six misled us. [People] [Previously]

Rudy Giuliani, the Mayor of 9/11, began running a radio ad in New Hampshire this week that's all about how he survived his prostrate cancer without any help from the government. "I had prostate cancer five, six years ago. My chance of surviving cancer, and thank God I was cured of it, in the United States, 82 percent. My chances of surviving prostate cancer in England, only 44 percent under socialized medicine." Of course, because Rudy Giuliani is saying those things, each sentence contains its own egregious lie. Even the first one!

OH MY GOD MTV'S HIT SHOW "THE HILLS" IS FAKE!!! "Brody would talk all this sh*t, then be like, 'Sorry about that, we're just trying to make good television.' Like at one point, some other dude walked up to us while we were talking, and Brody goes, 'We're trying to film a scene here. Do you mind?', like he's interrupting our lines. Haha, it was some of the best acting I've ever done." [Best Week Ever]

In the wee hours, those wizards over in Sweden announced they were giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and the U.N. global warming crew. And now everyone is soooo excited that he'll be our next president! The Times (as they have done before) notes that Gore's supporters want him to join the "crowed [sic] field of Democrats" and that though he "lost" the 2000 election (THAT IS A LIE!) he "has said he is not interesting [sic] in running but has not flatly rejected the notion." Right, except when he said, "I have no intention to run for president." And when his spokesperson said "I think he's said it many times, that he has no plans or intention to run for president." Give it up, people! He's the president of the polar bears now!