Madonna carrying son David into the Kabbalah Center on East 48th Street ... Whitney Port walking in SoHo ... Blake Lively shooting a scene for Gossip Girl in Times Square ... Pete Wentz leaving the SoHo Grand with a coffee in hand ... Denzel Washington and wife Pauletta leaving lunch at Nello's ... Clay Aiken leaving the Shubert Theater ... Jennifer Hudson posing for photos outside MTV in Times Square ... Anne Hathaway standing outside outside the Letterman show ... Katie Holmes leaving her apartment en route to the Schoenfeld Theatre ... and Britney Spears making her way into the Fragment jewelry store on Prince Street, then checking out In The Heights on Broadway later that night.

With Guy Ritchie's 2008 vintage RocknRolla a relatively encouraging return to form, word on the street is that this year's Madonna Household movie misstep might have fallen to the singer herself. Indeed, while her directorial debut Filth and Wisdom stirred notice and a sort of rubbernecking curiosity last winter among filmgoers at the Berlin Film Festival, the new trailer touches pretty much all the thematic bases we'd come to predict from A Film By Madonna. Striving ballet dancer turned stripper? Check! Pharmacy worker stealing drugs for ill African children? Check! Internationally renowned musician turned self-aware actor? Check! (But let's be fair: Eugene Hutz is constitutionally incapable of anything but scene-stealing on stage and screen.) But hey — a trailer is a trailer is a trailer. We have a standing invitation to see all 84 minutes before it opens Oct. 17, which we think we'll accept; as far as we're concerned, the woman still has Gay Football Olympics goodwill to spare. [Apple]

♦ Britney Spears' former boyfriend, paparazzo Adnan Ghalib, says he has a sex video featuring him and Britney which he's willing to part with for the right price. And you thought you were done buying sex tapes after the Verne Troyer masterpiece this summer. [NYDN, E!]
♦ Heath Ledger's life insurance company is calling his death "suspicious" and says it won't pay out his $10 mil. policy until it interviews everyone involved, including Mary-Kate Olsen. [NYP]
♦ Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie just had twins. But it's Tuesday, which means they're already thinking of adopting another kid. [Daily Mail]
♦ DJ AM and Travis Barker are both out of the hospital. [NYDN, People, P6]
♦ Janet Jackson checked into the hospital in Canada yesterday. [People]

Madonna is always reliable for causing some sort of furor with her live performances, and so it went with her Sticky & Sweet Tour, in which a video-collage backdrop had aligned images of John McCain and Mike Huckabee with Adolph Hitler, Ayatollah Khamenei, Robert Mugabe, and Kim Jong Il; later on, Barack Obama appeared in a grouping which included the Dalai Lama, Al Gore, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and (cough) Michael Moore. Now you can watch the video that McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds called "outrageous, unacceptable and crudely divisive all at the same time," and judge for yourself, as a copy of the disco-agitprop has emerged on YouTube. Obviously, this was thrown together well before Sarah Palin was even a blip on the national radar; we can only imagine the kinds of fun Madonna could have throwing a cone-bra into the Palin impression ring, voguing her way through a choreographed moose-slaying accompanied by two shirtless and well-muscled background dancers representing Todd and Track. The video is after the jump:

In a world where everything old is new again, the latest cultural relic to get its return to the spotlight is that staple of 80's cheese: the exercise instructional video. First resurrected by noted Americana anthropologist Heidi Montag, the fitness tape is set to receive its most high-profile update yet, says Marie Claire. Filling Jane Fonda's leotard this time will be none other than Oscar winner Gwyneth Paltrow, who will share the secrets of how to attain a body worth baring in the pages of GQ and gams that could transfix even the most jaded talk show host:

• It's no fun living near Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. Neighbors in the West Village say the two are "spoiled brats" since they have bodyguards posted outside their apartment on West 13th Street who make neighbors get off the stoop whenever the twins are arriving home, and the twins keep SUVs idling in front of the building for hours at a time. [P6]

• Gordon Ramsay says he's partnering with Victoria Beckham to open a restaurant in LA. Yes, a restaurant. Whether she'll actually taste any of the food served there is anybody's guess. [P6]

• Katie Holmes got a visit from concerned ex-boyfriend and former Dawson's Creek co-star Joshua Jackson at rehearsals for her Broadway play, a British magazine reported. Jackson had this crazy idea that Holmes has been sucked into an isolating Scientology vortex, but Holmes was still thrilled to see and de-Thetanize him. [Showbiz Spy]

• More on NBC's decision to drop Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews from covering the election on MSNBC: Olbermann got a raise out of the deal, Matthews didn't, and NBC chief Jeff Immelt may or may not have be behind the move. [P6]

After foolishly losing hold of megastar editor and Project Runway judge Nina Garcia, Elle has been scrambling to recreate its TV buzz with a reality fashion show called Stylista, in which contestants vie to become a fashion editor. The presumptive star of this effort, Anne Slowey, starts with several strikes against her. She did an unconvincing Miranda Priestly imitation in an embarrassing trailer for Stylista; looked like the loopy hippie to Garcia's polished fashion plate in a New York magazine profile and some Web videos; and came up through the ghettoized editorial side of Elle rather than the fashion side. Enter Sunday's Page Six Magazine profile of Elle creative director Joe Zee, "the celeb whisperer" who, face it, is poised to be Elle's real breakout TV star, Slowey be damned. There are any number of reasons, but you can start with the fact that Zee got Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley to pose naked together in Vanity Fair:

Nobu—the sushi restaurant chain co-owned by Robert Deniro that caters to celebrities like Madonna, Leo DiCaprio and Sean Combs—has been busted in an undercover sting for selling critically endangered Atlantic bluefin tuna while concealing it from customers. Greenpeace sent spies to three London Nobu franchises, where they specifically ordered the near-extinction fish, and were told that the restaurants didn't stock it. But the cunning Greenies took their sushi back to the lab, where DNA tests revealed that the restaurants were indeed serving bluefin to moneyed gourmands. It's legal to serve bluefin, but people who claim to care about the environment—like Deniro, DiCaprio, Combs and Madonna—would supposedly never knowingly touch the stuff, preferring instead the less endangered, but less delicious, yellowfin. Which explains Nobu's sneakiness.

• It's not that Kevin Spacey wanted to pull down his friend's boxer shorts so much as that Croatian nightclub tradition basically required him to do so. [LA Rag Mag]

• The war between News Corp. and NBC rages on. Today Page Six reports that Keith Olbermann is so concerned about being "assassinated," he's refusing to cover the Republican National Convention unless MSNBC springs for a more secure location. They also claim none of Luke Russert's new colleagues at NBC News like him, especially since he got to ride around the convention in golf carts while they had to walk. [P6, P6]

• Fresh off a breakup with Drew Barrymore, Justin Long made out with Kirsten Dunst. He likes them (barely) sober! [R&M]

• Alessandra Ambrosio just gave birth, but she isn't wasting any time. She's reportedly already looking to sell pictures of her newborn daughter Anja to the tabloids. [P6]

Actually, that's not the case at all. (Besides, everyone knows her event is javelin.) No, this was a photograph taken from the opening night of her Sticky & Sweet Tour in Cardiff, Wales. While there existed in it no single sacred-cow-buggering money shot like her last tour's disco ball crucifixion sequence—and the tour before that when she was lowered via loop-and-pulley system onto an engorged Dalai Lama—there was an eyebrow-elevating video installation in which images of John McCain were juxtaposed alongside "photos of Hitler and brutal Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe," while later in the show a similar montage featured Barack Obama spliced with pictures of John Lennon, Mahatma Ghandi, and Ron Popeil Al Gore. Needless to say, the McCain camp was outraged, as much over her heavy-metal bastardization of "Borderline" as they were the ugly comparisons to the Third Reich:

• Madonna probably helped John McCain a bit by showing a video of him alongside images of Hitler, Robert Mugabe, starving children and global warming. Obama was depicted as Gandhi and John Lennon. Luckily for Obama this video has not yet been shown in the U.S. [Times]

• Madonna gave a 30-minute speech at her 50th birthday party. And frankly she was kind of sad that mainly nobodies showed up and not her celebrity friends. Also, the singer may not be able to get the Malawian "orphan" of her choosing. Madonna consoled herself by going to a strip club.

• Ellen DeGeneres and Portia De Rossi officially tied the knot in front of 20 guests at their Beverly Hills home on Saturday, exchanging handwritten vows and Neil Lane rings. Ellen wore a pants suit; De Rossi opted for a Zac Posen gown. [NYP]

It's Madonna's 50th birthday today! And not 36 like her whacky religion says. Anywho, just to ensure that this event doesn't encroach upon some perfectly innocent item, please feel free to celebrate-or bash-the most famous woman on earth on her B-day to your heart's content in the comments. And if you come across other pics of her from back when she was adorable, that would be awesome too!