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Comedian Amy Schumer said her starring role in “I Feel Pretty” should have gone to a minority actress with a “harder” life story. [snip] “It’s not about an ugly, vile troll getting beautiful,” the actress said in response to critics of the movie’s premise. “It’s about a girl who really struggles with self-esteem, which is something we can all relate to. So, it just made me excited for people to see the movie. But also, I think it is fair to say that, you know, that it’s a lot harder for other people … and I recognize that I am...

“Hey, girls, college won’t just make you smarter… it will also make you prettier, richer and even whiter!” Chinese Internet users have been saying, making fun of a university in Beijing that published "before" and "after" photos of one of its students. In what appears to be a bid to attract prospective students, Tsinghua University reposted photos of a student taken before and after her university years on its Weibo (a site similar to Twitter) page. In the “after” photos, the student is dressed more fashionably and seems to have lighter skin. After her years of study, her appearance fits...

Web video and social networks are two of the hottest technologies for Campaign '08. Video is ready for prime time, social networking is a relative unknown. Video arrived in 2006, when George Allen, then a Republican Virginia senator, called a rival staffer the crypto-racist slur "macaca." The clip of the incident helped tip the Senate to the Democrats. The Web can be liberating. "It's about bypassing the sieve of the mainstream media," says Elizabeth Edwards, wife and confidant of Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards. "The idea that you have people standing between you and the voter is diminished, and the...

John Edwards fixing his hair before an interview. With appropriate music! LOL! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AE847UXu3Q&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ewtam%2Ecom%2Fpages%2Fbfrantz%2Ehtml

Michael Ramirez has apparently had about enough of John Edwards. His cartoon commentary is here.

Yesterday we noted that the lovely and talented John Edwards, in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, had repudiated the "global war on terror," disparaging the entire enterprise as "a slogan designed only for politics" and "a bumper sticker, not a plan." But in 2004, when Edwards was the sunny No. 2 of Kedwards, he sang quite a different tune, as Greg Sargent of TPMCafe.com notes: On CNN on October 21, 2004, he said that stopping terrorists before they harm us is "by far the most effective way to win this war on terrorism." A few days earlier he said...

WASHINGTON - Looking pretty is costing John Edwards' presidential campaign a lot of pennies. The Democrat's campaign committee picked up the tab for two haircuts at $400 each by celebrity stylist Joseph Torrenueva of Beverly Hills, Calif., according to a financial report filed with the Federal Election Commission. FEC records show Edwards also availed himself of $250 in services from a trendy salon and spa in Dubuque, Iowa, and $225 in services from the Pink Sapphire in Manchester, N.H., which is described on its Web site as "a unique boutique for the mind, body and face" that caters mostly to...

John Edwards Says He's Running for President in 2008 Wednesday, December 27, 2006 E-MAIL STORY PRINTER FRIENDLY VERSION WASHINGTON — Former Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards' campaign says he's running for president for a second time.

Police: Camera catches prosecutor naked Tue Oct 10, 5:10 PM ET HAMILTON, Ohio - A security camera caught a city prosecutor walking around naked in a government building after business hours, authorities said. Scott Blauvelt, 35, was arrested Monday and charged with two counts of public indecency. He was released from the Butler County jail and is awaiting a hearing in Hamilton Municipal Court, where he usually works, sheriff's Maj. Anthony Dwyer said. A guard monitoring a security camera spotted a nude man investigators identified as Blauvelt in a building that houses county offices Thursday night, Dwyer said. The night...

When all the fanatical Christians disappear, will traffic finally improve? Wait, did I miss it? Did it happen three days ago, on 6-6-06, a.k.a. Tea Time with the Beast, a.k.a. the Great Day of Reckoning, a.k.a. the National Day of Slayer, all the world crashing down in a heap of hissing steam and belching smoke and balmy gusty breezes sometime around noon just after lunch but not before rush hour and hitting right around siesta? I might have been napping. Did the Apocalypse finally hit? Did the deep wish of roughly a half-billion zealous believers come to pass and were...

No wait, not six. To hell with that. Make it 10. Ten bucks a gallon, no matter what the going rate for a barrel of light sweet crude. That would so completely, violently, brilliantly do it. Revolutionize the country. Firebomb our pungent stasis. Change everything. Don't you agree? Here's what we could do: Give gas discounts to cab drivers (at least initially) and metro transit systems and low-income folks, those who have to drive their busted-up '78 Honda Civics to their jobs scrubbing restaurant toilets and flipping burgers and vacuuming the residual cocaine from the seat cushions of numb SUV...

Think sex and drugs destroy America? Try naive chastity. Oh, and "Purity Balls" There are these things. These unholy events called "Purity Balls" and you should probably fall to your knees right this minute and thank a merciful and lubricious and happily polyamorous God that you do not know what they are and that you have access right this minute to vast quantities of wine to deflect their nasty karmic arrows because, you know, oh my God. But hey, free country. Purity Balls. No, not some sort of newfangled spherical chastity device to be inserted using vacuum tubes and pulleys,...

It's a shockingly eco-friendly plan from the world's most toxic retailer. Did hell just freeze over? Sometimes you just have to let the possibility breathe. Sometimes you just have to allow that something grand and good and healthy might actually be born from the bowels of the dank and ravenous megacorporate world, like flowers from a dung heap, like vodka from old potatoes, even if it comes right alongside the nastiest, most abusive federal environmental policy you will see in your lifetime. Take Wal-Mart, the most famously offensive, town-destroying, junk-purveying, labor-abusing, sweatshop-supporting, American-job-killing, soul-numbing, seizure-inducing, hope-curdling retailer in the known...

How to address a bitter, war-torn but still somehow giddy and deeply horny nation. My fellow Americans, we're not as royally screwed as everything Bush has done during his miserable term in office would have you believe.

What do the bitter neocon nominee and the amazing Oscar-bound film have in common? There is this theory, more of a truism really, tossed about like a fuzzy beach ball by the gurus and the masters and the mystics since Jesus was but a lint ball of possibility in the Great Belly Button of Time. . . .

Center fielder Johnny Damon gets a new Yankees look at Manhattan's posh Ishi Salon. (AP [2])

Yes, I know you were drunk. Must've been. Either drunk or on serious meds and/or you just didn't give much of a damn about anything anyway because you're just one of those people, one of those types who comes lurching around the city like a chunk of numbed pain in your big-ass mid-'80s burgundy car with the white top and chrome bumpers -- an old Cadillac? Monte Carlo? -- early last Sunday morning to wreak casual havoc. Is that about right? Do you remember any of it? Here is what I'm guessing: probably not. Let me tell you what happened,...

Arkansas mom gives birth to a whole freakin' baseball team. How deeply should you cringe? Who are you to judge? Who are you to say that the more than slightly creepy 39-year-old woman from Arkansas who just gave birth to her 16th child yes that's right 16 kids and try not to cringe in phantom vaginal pain when you say it, who are you to say Michelle Duggar is not more than a little unhinged and sad and lost? And furthermore, who are you to suggest that her equally troubling husband -- whose name is, of course, Jim Bob...