Paris Hilton has taken to her MySpace blog with a plea to fans to support an online petition calling for her release from the unjust claws of the American justice system:

We, the American public who support Paris, are shocked, dismayed and appalled by how Paris has been the person to be used as an example that Drunk Driving is wrong. We do not support drunk driving or DUI charges. Paris should have been sober. But she shouldn’t go to jail, either.

…

Please sign to tell The Honorable Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of the State of California, to think about the welfare of this young woman who has made a mortal error and deserves a second chance like so many others in our great nation have been served with after a mistake they have made. If the late Former President Gerald Ford could find it in his heart to pardon the late Former President Richard Nixon after his mistake(s), we undeniably support Paris Hilton being pardoned for her honest mistake as well, and we hope and expect The Governor will understand and grant this unusual but important request in good faith to Ms. Paris Whitney Hilton.

She is not a crook!

Jonathan Chait has a great profile up on TNR of the Republican tough-guy mystique, the popularity contest that appears to be propelling Rudy Giuliani to the front of the ‘08 Republican field:

Giuliani isn’t really saying he has the most expertise fighting terrorism. (After all, he has never held office beyond the municipal level.) Rather, he’s trying to conjure the glow that Bush himself had in the days after September 11. Bush, his adoring fans used to say, “got it.” To “get it” meant you had some metaphysical understanding of the war that transcended—indeed, was largely incompatible with—any actual knowledge.

…

So, while Giuliani’s boast may be absurd by my standards—he thinks he understands the war on terrorism better than, say, Joe Biden?—by Republican standards, it’s simply obvious. Giuliani may not have any expertise as a war leader, but he excels at acting like one.

Ditto for Fred Thompson, whose large appeal over the Republican base stems not from his record as a mediocre one-and-a-third term Senator, as Bob Novak recently pointed out, but from his reputation as a tough talking, take-no-shit prosecutor, a role he is currently playing on television.

The prospects of a Rudy Giuliani nomination, something that once seemed so far fetched, is now feasible enough to be fundamentally depressing. Up until Rudy’s rise I’ve been able to console myself with the understanding that, no matter who wins in ‘08, at least the following four years will be better than the previous eight. Then comes the shit-kicking juggernaught of Rudy Giuliani, a man every bit as corrupt, uncurious and blindly hyper-masculine as the current disaster inhabiting the oval office.

Who could have ever thought the current presidential castrophe could be prolonged another four years?

Kind of brings you back to this again:

(Via Ross Douthat) In the wake of the Girls Gone Wild bonanza (a party which looks to have recently come to an end) Garance Franke-Ruta thinks the age of porn-star consent should be raised to 21:

It is time to raise the age of consent from 18 to 21—”consent,” in this case, referring not to sexual relations but to providing erotic content on film.

This is silly. To borrow a mantra from the fight for the 26th Amendment: if you’re old enough to fight a war and die for your country, you’re certainly old enough to show that same country your beaver.

The real problem with the sweet sweet degeneracy that is Girls Gone Wild lies with the parents who somehow think it’s ok for their 17 year old daughters to go off to Panama City in March, unsupervised, with nine of their friends, an assortment of fake IDs, and incredibly low self-esteem.

CNN checks in on the still-to-come R Kelly child porn trial, now five years in the making. It’s like the Chinese Democracy of sex crimes litigation.

Apparently there have been some road blocks:

A series of sometimes bizarre events, including a judge’s tumble from a ladder and a case of appendicitis, have delayed the 40-year-old R&B superstar’s trial far longer than the norm.

It’s clear someone upstairs has been willing to do whatever it takes to ensure the full-scale fruition of Trapped in the Closet.

UPDATE: It’s strangely inspiring to me that the man behind The Wire’s Omar Little, perhaps the greatest character in the history of television, is also responsible for James the Policeman.

This strikes me as a somewhat reasonable explanation of the scary “I don’t believe in evolution” hand raising at the Republican debate the other night:

“I believe that the Creation has a creator. I believe there is a God. And I believe God put this whole creative process in motion. How he did it and the time frame in which he did it, I honestly don’t know. Nor do I think it’s relevant to being president of the United States…I’m going to leave the scientists to debate the intricacies of how it happened and when it happened because I simply don’t know. But I believe that rather than all this being just some accident that happened, there was a design, and a designer in the design.”

I’d feel comfortable with a creationist as president (don’t we have one now?) so long as his creationism remained separate from his public policy, particularly in education. I have a hunch Huckabee’s opposition to a nationalized school curriculum would preclude him from advancing Intelligent Design into our biology classrooms.

3 of the 10 Republicans running for president in 2008 do not believe in evolution.

Kind of makes you feel this way:

Foxy Brown was once a cashier at my grocery store.

In response to Mitt Romney’s bizarrely amazing assertion that L. Ron Hubbard’s Battlefield Earth is his favorite book, Ken Jennings offers up a good primer for politicians likely to face the same question.

Best advice…If the questioner doesn’t say “favorite novel”, go non-fiction:

Because, in a way, talking to America about your novel-reading is a no-win scenario. Reading Barbara Tuchman in the Oval Office seems presidential. Barbara Kingsolver, not so much. You might as well be telling Jim Lehrer about your quilting circle.

Best Blogger Alive.

Earlier this week we got two (two!) Newsweek articles detailing the latest Obama campaign flap, a potentially damaging gaffe concerning the unethical use of a fax machine. Turns out the secretly secret contents of the unethically unethical fax included…well, nothing really that scandalous. But politics of the nitty-gritty is FUN!

And now comes MySpaceGate, perhaps the greatest net “flap” of the netroots era. Ben Smith has a series of posts up at Politico painstakingly detailing what went down:

Barack Obama has apparently convinced MySpace (owned by News Corp.) to shut down his own unofficial MySpace page — without the consent of its creator — and re-direct its traffic to a new official page.

The dispute, according to the creator of the unofficial page, was in large part about money. He wanted to get paid for his work.

Smith goes on to clarify that MySpace routinely drops fan sites from their main URL if the artists/band/actor/politician asks them to do so, and that the creator of the page was looking for roughly $50,000 for the domain squatting blood, sweat and tears that went into his MySpacing.

So MySpaceGate: nothing more than a petty social networking non-issue? Or a dangerously illuminating political scandal requiring full campaign damage control?

As one commenter offers up:

MySpaceGate is just the latest in a series of rookie mistakes by Obama…if these blunders are any indication, his decision making process doesn’t seem to rise to the level that is required of a President.

There you have it: if you can’t maintain your official MySpace presence without offending fellow MySpace denizens then, well, you just aren’t fit to lead this country.

Which provokes a thought: With every presidential candidate now creating MySpace profiles, will our next president, like, totally be on MySpace?

Thanks for the add, Mr. Leader of the Free World! Check out my new track; it’s the metaphysical cosmic introspection of OK Computer meets the wanton isolation of Joss Stone going down on The Gulag Orkestar. FOUR MORE YEARS!