Campbell Brown Returns, But Where Does That Leave My Dear Rolly Rolls? (Old News)

In case you missed all this "Roland Martin related drama" last week, like I did, CNN anchor Campbell Brown returned to No Bias, No Bull last week. (Now no longer called "No Bias, No Bull.")

The show is in a horrifying fourth place slot getting beat (again) by friggin' Headline News. For those not watching, CNN contributor Roland Martin sat in for Brown while she was on maternity leave. Some wondered if the babysitting gig was a trial balloon for Martin finally getting his own show. But because CNN's ratings are trè crappè right now, everything is up in the air.

As long time readers may know, I love Roland Martin even if he does not love me. I so enjoy it when he pops up on the blog to set me straight about something or other. It's hilarious and wonderful. I don't know if he finds it hilarious and wonderful. HE SHOULD. But I doubt it.

Someone who I know Roland doesn't find "hilarious" or "wonderful" right now is The Root's Jimi Izrael, who incurred the wrath of Roland over some anecdote where he claimed my fair Rolly Rolls was some sort of incense and beef jerky peddler back in the day. In the biggest backhanded compliment of a blog posting ever, Jimi quite amazingly praises Roland while repeatedly kicking him in the gonads.

More after the jump.

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What? Who? Me? (The "Rush Is Your Leader" Meme Traced To Chirpy, Lovable Hacks & Other News)

Screencap from Gawker.Paul Begala TOTALLY doesn't know what people are talking about when they ask if he and James Carville started this whole "Rush Limbaugh is the leader of the Republican Party" meme, then, like a pair of Chatty Cathies called Obama Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emmanuel, like, everyday to say "You know, Rush totally has leadership cooties, right? Cootie Queen! Total Cootie Queen."

OK. I know one's a chirpy partisan and the other is the Marine version of Foghorn Leghorn, so they probably didn't use the word "Cootie Queen." It was probably something involving "lard" and "ass," but Paul still won't answer the question everyone already knows the answer too.

Gawker was nice enough to cover Anderson Cooper getting all kind of dickish over this "conspiracy" of no one.

(More after the jump!)

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Obama a no show, but Tina "Palin" Fey appears on SNL; Anderson Cooper loves tight black shirts and more

Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin's ultimate doppelganger popped up on Saturday Night Live Saturday and she was even better than I could have ever imagined.

Tina Fey, I take back anything bad I've ever said about you and I salute you. Good show, madame. Good show.

I couldn’t have been more pleased.

So many of us who saw this were right. Fey and Sarah Palin could be long lost siblings. With the stupid bouffant hair and the right pair of glasses, she was the epitome of Palin perfection, even her northern Midwestern accent was on point and Chicago Tribune writer Maureen Ryan concurred.

As the program came on, there was Fey in a bright red blazer. She was the spitting image of Palin (or wait, is Palin the spitting image of Fey?). Even Fey's flat Palin-esque accent was perfect; Fey had obviously closely studied the interviews that Palin gave to ABC on Thursday and Friday ...

As (Amy Poehler as Clinton) spoke, Fey-as-Palin struck sexy poses and pretended to fire a shotgun. "What an amazing time we live in," she said. "To think that just two years ago, I was a small town mayor of Alaska's crystal meth capitol."

I loved the route SNL took with it, contrasting Palin’s relative newness, inexperience and fraudulent yet “Manchurian Candidate” feeling with a scorned Hillary Clinton who viewed as an undeserving profiteer of her tough loss in the Democratic Primaries. (A pregnant Amy Poheler looked way more like Clinton than usual because of her puffy face and additional poundage.)

My favorite part was when they compared their battles with sexism, where Hillary had to deal with a lot of negativity and vilifying because of who she was and what she represented (I believe the terms “bitch” and “grating” were thrown around a lot), while Palin is being objectified for her sexuality and good looks, with the bulk of her criticism coming from tangible, suspect issues demonstrating she was not vetted by the McCain campaign.

As for Barack Obama’s scheduled appearance, it was canceled at the last minute due to the campaign’s sensitivity over the Galveston/Houston area being battered by Hurricane Ike. And was that a freaky hurricane to watch? I mostly watched CNN’s coverage reporters getting beat up by wind, rain and the ocean and, oddly, of Anderson Cooper removing, then putting back on then removing then putting back on his red CNN parka.

Per usual, Andy was wearing a fitted-to-obscenely-tight black shirt.

And it was surreal with Houston being a ghost town with the exception of crazy folk who showed up in a chicken costume or pretending to swim behind Anderson as he attempted to report the news.

The way CNN and Cooper himself handle his causal, metrosexual, withholding, but nervous newsman style, I have to say, Anderson seems to be the only anchor on TV who actually displays sex appeal overtly on television. (Rick Sanchez tries, but he’s the Rob Riggle of CNN.) This critique doesn’t mean Cooper’s the only sexy person. Gosh, no. As readers may have noticed, I dubbed Sir TJ Holmes of CNN Weekend the sexiest teleprompter reader, but TJ never wears a muscle shirt when he’s covering some flood or tornado in northern Arkansas.

Although I wouldn’t mind that. Not at all.

Seeing Anderson Cooper in a black muscle shirt is almost the equivalent of a hot news woman baring cleavage or wearing tighter, more alluring outfits while reporting, like the women who do the news on Univision and Telemundo. The Spanish speaking airwaves are filled with voluptuous figures with huge chi-chis, sometimes baring cleavage and oozing sex appeal. FOX News does a lesser, slightly more buttoned up version of this, but CNN and MSNBC are all complicit in hiring young hot people to deliver the news (as chronicled in one of my favorite “The Daily Show” sketches of 2008, “NILF: News I’d Like to Fuck.”)

If those shirts get any tighter during natural disasters I fear CNN will start playing Scorpions' "Rock You Like A Hurricane" when AC360 comes on.

The weirdness was further contrasted when Dan Rather was brought on via satellite for an interview about storm coverage (since Rather pioneered live hurricane reporting). Rather, of whom I’ve never seen as “sexy,” still has that perfect anchor man voice and devil-may-care panache. Despite being the crappiest of the three major network anchors in the 80s and 90s (he was always coming in third to Peter Jennings and the iconic Tom Brokaw), I love Rather, largely because of his “Ratherisms,” notoriety for spitting out some crazy Texas turn of phrase and his occasional loss of composure, often like he was breaking the “fourth wall” of reporting by going into something bizarre, like ending his newscasts with the word “courage” or saying “somewhere in the Bible it says … keep hope alive” when the Coast Guard was out trying to find John F. Kennedy Jr. after he flew off and got himself killed, further fueling my speculation that his uncle, Sen. Ted Kennedy, is the highlander.

Well … it’s either him or West Virginia Sen. Robert Byrd, newsman Mike Wallace, news satirist and columnist Andy Rooney or talk show host Larry King.

I’m still betting it’s either Byrd or Wallace.

There can only be one!

Lanny Davis, Terrry McAuliffe Star In: "Never Say Die"

Never give up! Never surrender!

Oh, Lanny and Terry, you make me laugh. It's so cute how you want to play dead-enders to Clinton's quixotic campaign. Perhaps there are some windmills you can go fight as well. May I suggest you select Bill Clinton as Sancho Panza?

After talking over the race with Papa Snob last night we surmised that maybe Clinton would suspend her campaign but would hold on to her delegates. After all, this was the closest race ever for the Democratic nomination. She has more than 1,900 delegates, so we're betting she's going to hide out in the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan, hold tight to her delegates and wait for a stage five campaign collapse in Obama Land.

She can't do much to cause the collapse (see: blow back), but she can "wait and see." The spotlight will be off her (thank God) and on the new fight, Obama v. John McCain. I still don't think she wants to be vice president and I don't think Obama wants her to be his vice president. I think he wants her to tell her people to stop chanting "Denver" and unite to defeat the Republicans in November. But Clinton is channeling her inner LBJ and wants Obama to need her more than she needs him. She knows he needs all those jaded women voters who feel their historic year was usurped by Obama's historic year.

Analysts on CNN were aghast that Clinton was "defiant" while Obama gushed praise for her, but this was one of those "well, duh" moments for me. When is Clinton not defiant? I realize everyone wants to see her get humbled (or embarrassed), but I wouldn't lose any sleep waiting for that. Besides, she lost. To the victor goes the spoils ... and the praising of the loser.

Everyone's lovable once they're not a threat anymore. It's like Kobe Bryant saying how great Tim Duncan and the Spurs were the whole time they beat them down. They were just so honored to go 3-1 against the aging champs. When Lamar Odom dunked in their faces that was a tribute to their body of work. When you're on top you don't need to jab the loser in the eye. That would make you the childish asshole. Obama was a gracious and humble winner. I didn't expect him to be anything less than that.

And if anyone was watching CNN last night, did you see Jeffrey Toobin lose his shit over Hillary Clinton not conceding. Oddly, CNN does not have that video uploaded on their site. (But you can see it on The Huffington Post here.) I wish they had put it up there because it was friggin' hilarious. Instead you'll have to settle for this clip of Donna Brazile pulling that same "boo" mess on Anderson Cooper she pulled on Stephen Colbert last week. There's something a little uncomfortable about watching Donna flirt with people, but it's still funny.

Incognegro Part III: Wentworth Miller

Actor. Nerd. English major. Korean fashion superstar. Ivy league man. Star of TV's "Prison Break."

That's my oddly sexy, raspy-voiced, thin as a rail, look like a white guy while not actually being a white guy, Wentworth Miller.

I didn't discover Miller until I read the initial press on "Prison Break" when it debuted in 2005 on Fox and even then I didn't pay much attention to him. I mean, the whole concept of "Prison Break" was ludicrous and, dude, Brett Ratner was the producer. I mean, Brett "I love Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan and, oh, by the way I'm a hack movie director " Ratner. I wasn't taking it seriously, then, in one of my more obsessive movie watching weekends I rented the film that was supposed to put Wentworth Miller on the map - The Human Stain.

It was one of those flicks that was supposed to be an Oscar contender but just turned out to be uneven and too flat to make it out the gate. Sure it starred Sir Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman, but all most people could talk about at the time was how could Hopkins play an American black man passing for white when he was white British man. I always thought this was a little silly, as to pass for white you DO have to actually look like a white person. And if you're trying to give your movie Oscar buzz the director isn't going to cast the 60+ year old lead with some largely unknown biracial actor OR with a known black actor who is light, but would never pass for a white person (a la James Earl Jones.) So ... pointless argument. The real argument was despite everyone's efforts -- and MAN was everyone trying hard in that movie -- it was just an uneven film.

But it had one bright spot.

The guy playing the young version of Anthony Hopkins. As, not only could he act he had a sort of quiet anger, a smoldering lethality of edgy, intelligent sexiness. And he was pretty. Pretty like a woman. Like Prince.

Not that I'm into that sort of thing.

Anyway. He charmed me off the screen and he had the ridiculous name of "Wentworth." And I could remember reading about the film in 2003 and how Wentworth was half black, although interviewers repeatedly kept assuming he was white and beating him down with the race questions they'd been smacking Hopkins up with.

After watching him charm the pants off Jacinda Bartlett in "The Human Stain" I was a fan. And when I learned he was a nerd my fan heart only beat stronger. And then I watched "Prison Break," which delightfully was the direct opposite of sucking.

Nicely played, Ratner. Nicely played.

As a celebrity, Miller plays the unaware act, pretending to not acknowledge that he's gorgeous and he dresses like crap when he's not posing in fashion ads. He makes a great effort (or perhaps not) to sound utterly boring and never manages to get wasted or pull a classic Robert Downy Jr. in public.

I'm amongst Wentworth Miller's large, kind of psycho fan base that's a nice mix of women between the ages of 16 and 60, Koreans and gay men. Of his fan base there's a segment of those two groups (but largely consisting of the gay man group) who partake in constant Miller sexual orientation speculation. Miller has repeatedly said he is not gay. Reams of sexual orientation speculators say otherwise.

I, personally, don't give a rat's ass. I'm a fan of Wentworth the actor. As in, "Wentworth, the Not-Black-Black-Man Fantasy Set Piece." I only want to know the most superficial things about an actor. Like, where are you from? Are you a not-black-black person? Will you be making any films where your love interest is one of black America's many attractive, underemployed black and not-black-black-actresses? Like I don't know shit about Allen Payne and I'm rapturously in love with Allen (but I'm still not watching that show.) But in my head he is forever 1/2 his character from "CB4" and 1/2 Jason from "Jason's Lyric" and in my mind, him and Jada Pinkett, aka "Lyric" are somewhere in far, far from the fifth ward with, like, kids and stuff. All happy black family, all the time.

But you get my point. I don't care what Wentworth's sexual orientation is. But, if he is gay, for the record, I think he and Anderson Cooper would make a cute couple. Anderson allegedly likes his men with a little black in them. They both went to Ivy League schools. Anderson's a better dresser, but Wentworth looks like a skinny fashion model. They're both intense, private, weird little nerd people. I think we should fix them up.

But if I you are gay and I see you with someone horrifying, like say Taye Diggs or Perez Hilton, we're going to have some issues. (I know you'd never date Perez, Went. But I had to think of someone as equally irritating to me as Taye. Eeeew, Taye.) That said, if you're not gay, surprise me and date a black woman. You know, just for shits and giggles. Don't do me like Tiger Woods.

They just all had to be blondes, huh, Tiger? That's OK. That's cool. Congratulations on the daughter that you strangely named Sam, not Samantha, but Sam. She's very cute.