And now, for some news of the day:
A CARAVAN of car-crazy celebs roared away from the Plaza Hotel last night bound for L.A.'s Playboy Mansion in a "Cannonball Run"-style race to raise money for families of 9/11 victims. Nicolas Cage, Matthew McConaughey, Donna Karan, Johnny Knoxville, Stephen and Billy Baldwin and models Jodie Kidd and Amy Wesson are among the 400 racers revving their engines for charity in the "Gumball 3000" race. ....
"We're doing this to raise money for the Twin Towers fund. All of the celebrities are donating something to auction off on eBay, and we're going to auction off two Ferraris after we're done," Cooper told PAGE SIX. "We're hoping to raise at least $1 million."
The caravan's first stop is at Washington's Union Station tonight, where Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.) will greet the group behind the wheel of his red pick-up truck. page six
Also from Page Six:
We hear . . . THAT Michael Jackson - who performed at the Democratic Party fund-raiser at the Apollo on Wednesday night only after Bill Clinton personally asked him to[WHY??] - was all set to do a fourth song, "Thriller," when organizers asked him to stop because the show was running late
And from Neal Travis, more news of little George Stepalloverus:
YOU can pick your friends but you're stuck with your family, so little George Stephanopoulos is just going to have to go on putting up with the nutty nun who is his sister. George has gotten rich and famous from once being a loyal aide to Bill Clinton, but Maria Stephanopoulos has access to the Internet, which reaches even more people than George does in his ABC-TV commentary role.
Sister Maria, who is a Russian Orthodox nun at a convent in Jerusalem, has just jumped into cyberspace again with a bitter diatribe against Israeli troops and their efforts to quell Palestinian terrorism.
Maria has been heard from in the past ranting against what she thinks is Israeli imperialism, but now she has plunged back into the fray at a time when tensions in the region are at their highest. If Maria was just another person with strong views one way or the other, it wouldn't matter. But given her brother's highly visible position in both American politics and media, her comments could serve the Palestinian cause well.
"I'm not spreading propaganda," Maria insists in her current posting, before going on to claim that Israeli soldiers defecated on the floor of the West Bank medical center they had raided.
She charges the troops have been looting Palestinians' homes and appeals to American priests of all denominations to "get on the phone and ask your congressman and senator why the U.S. government is backing Israeli invasion into sovereign Palestinian areas, and why so many innocent civilians are being terrorized." (It's worth noting that WorldNewsDaily.com last week discounted one of Maria's reports it carried, to the effect that Israeli troops were raping Palestinian girls. That one turned out to be a hoax spread by a Palestinian schoolboy who also has access to a computer.)
I spoke with the newly married, soon-to-be daddy Stephanopolous yesterday. "She's committed and concerned - beyond that, there's nothing I can say," he offered. Maybe he'll have Maria on the show when he takes over (as I've tipped) as the host of the network's morning "This Week" show.
WHILE THE rest of America said "Aww!" fondly, upon hearing that President Bush's aide Karen Hughes was resigning from her position of power in order to "spend more time with her family," the Washington Post cast a jaundiced eye. [QUELLE SURPRISE]
Reporter Mark Leibovich noted that many people, including executives from Enron and Arthur Andersen, the embattled NASA administrator Daniel Goldin and the GOP's James Gilmore "were all afflicted with family longings that coincided with searingly difficult job circumstances." But in the end, Ms. Hughes, her 15-year-old son, Robert, and her husband, Jerry, homesick for Texas, won the benefit of the doubt, via "The Double Standard Excuse." In other words, a woman's concern for the men in her life, makes more sense than a man's concern for his family.