Witness this, the talking-head equivalent of a reverse suplex from the top rope followed by a folding chair to the head. Pop some popcorn and watch as Matthews not only pins right-wing radio pundit Kevin James to the wall over his tenuous grasp of history, but also draws out the key flaw in President Bush's recent poor-taste remarks to Israel's Knesset that compared Obama's statements about Iran to Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler. We don't typically enjoy seeing helpless animals get mauled by predators, but in this case we'll make an exception (the drubbing begins around the two-minute mark).

By day she is a painter of surreal, vaguely erotic colorful works who also writes art analyses for Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art online. By night, well, we can only dream. “How I adore written masturbation,” she says about writing her thesis “Posing for Playboy from a Feminist Perspective: How Media Images Impact Women’s Empowerment,” which she is currently expanding into a book. “The first time I worked for Playboy was for the Girls of the Pac 10 issue in 2005, followed by Special Editions and Coed of the Month in 2006. I used my thesis to sort of analyze women’s empowerment in the context of Playboy. I made a case that objectification is not necessarily a bad thing. Objectivity and subjectivity exist in the world, and it’s more about reciprocity to me. I found that it’s not horrible to be an object of beauty as long as you have a sort of mobility to be both a subject and an object. If you look at it within relationships, you change roles between the aggressor and the submissive person. My identity, our identities, can be as fluid as we wish them to be.”

For Juliette, this has meant reexamining the definition of “feminist” and tossing away the tired clichés. “In truth, a real feminist is anything but a man hater,” she says. “I am definitely a man lover. A lot more feminists are open-minded to the fact that celebrating sexuality is empowering. I’m just embracing this celebration of beauty and different manifestations of myself. I consider myself sexually liberated, but I think I still have a lot to unleash!”

Years ago, I was in Miami covering Super Bowl XXIX for the Village Voice. I remember my press credential read “New York Village Voice” instead of just Village Voice, and so alphabetically, I sat in the press section next to a really nice young reporter from the New York Times. I introduced myself, and when he saw for whom I was writing, he looked at me and said, “The Voice! That’s great. You guys can write ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’.” The Times’ profanity policy is fucking weak-kneed bullshit and they can print that. Oh wait, they can’t.

-The most notable is Robyn (pictured), a pop dynamo who recently collaborated with Snoop Dogg on the single “Sexual Eruption.” Her own tracks, “Be Mine!” and “Konichiwa Bitches” are explosively catchy too.

-El Perro Del Mar is the pseudonym of Sarah Assbring (please, no jokes). Her new album “From the Valley to the Stars” merges Wall of Sound arrangements with a sweet, subtle melancholy.  

Curiously, our gourmet sushi restaurant, historic home district, and “South Denton” shopping haven, complete with such bourgeois trappings as a Barnes and Noble bookstore, Starbucks and multiplex theater, went unreported.   

No matter what he does, James Frey will always be remembered as that guy who lied, that guy who really duped Oprah.

And Oprah and her legion of best-selling-maker fans probably won’t ever pick up another one of his books after that A Million Little Pieces debacle. Whatever.

Janet Maslin of the New York Times is ready to forgive and forget. "[Fitzgerald] says there are no second acts in American lives. He turns out to be wrong," Maslin writes in her glowing (and damn entertaining) review of Bright Shiny Morning, Frey's novel that hit stores yesterday. Others, meanwhile, aren’t so flattering.

Watch the man himself make his case after the jump...  

Duh. The likelihood is that the next president is going to appoint one or more justices to the Court. Justice Stevens is 88, Justice Ginsburg is 75, and Justices Scalia and Kennedy are 72, ages when people sometimes, like, die. The appointments of Justices Roberts and Alito put conservatives one vote away from overturning Roe v. Wade. If McCain got to appoint the next justice, that would assure two things: first, that the states will create a hodgepodge of abortion laws, meaning that in many states, there will be a return to back-alley abortions; and second, arguing about abortion will assert itself as one of the most intense issues on the political agenda, coloring our politics and eclipsing the many 21st century questions we now think as vital. 

This was the other shoe. The first shoe came in March, when the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff testified before Congress that the U.S military did not have adequate manpower to maintain our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan as presently constituted. The only way McCain could fulfill his pledge to maintain the present mission in Iraq ad infinitum would be to restore the draft.

Restoring the draft and restricting abortion rights. For years Grover Norquist and other GOP activists have expressed the desire to take America back to pre-New Deal days. Electing McCain would travel half the distance--a return to those ugly, contentious, rancorous days of the late sixties and early seventies, when the draft and abortion split the nation. 

The reason he was so uniquely qualified to do so was because he’d been harnessing the rage and resentments of those around him ever since he won his first election, for student body president at Whittier College. As a youth, he always felt looked-down-upon, despised for being too unpolished, too uncool. So he made people who felt like him his political constituency, which was a smart move, because, after all, those who feel themselves unpolished and uncool are everywhere in the majority.