To: Paris Hilton (skank@parishilton.com)
From: Britney Spears (Hasbeen@washedup.com)
Subject: Publicity

Dear Paris,

What’s up girl? You remember me right? I mean, it’s been awhile since I’ve had an album or done anything worthwhile but I was big about 5 years ago and maybe you heard I had two kids and all? I also got married to this loser who kept using my ATM card even though I said “Kevin I already gave you an allowance and this is the last time!” but now I got a new attitude and I’ve filed for divorce from that freeloader who can’t even rap that well despite me telling him how to work the music business because I know because I did that song “Hit me baby one more time” and maybe I don’t have that body anymore but hey ya’ll I HAVE had two kids!

Anyway. I wanted to ask you how I get back into the media and known for something other than being married to a CERTAIN freeloader who kept stealing my AMEX Black card and for driving with my baby on my lap and having bad skin and maybe gaining a few pounds even though I DID have two babies in two years! Back to the main issue- I see you all the time going into all those fancy nightclubs and even though I heard you’re been banned from Bungalow 8 and the Gramercy Park Hotel who cares about those places anyway right? Let’s get together because now that I got rid of that has-been FORMER husband of mine I think we could have a lot of fun and you and I could really make a great team. So hit me back ya’ll!! Love - Brit-Brit

To: Britney Spears (hasbeen@washedup.com)
From: Paris Hilton (Skank@ParisHilton.com)
Subject: Re: Publicity

Hay Britney,

Im so so glad u reeched out to me. I am nown as the “iconic blond” (those are my wrds by the way) of this millenia or decade or whatevr u call it. First let me say that I am the iconic blond of the year and if u want to hang with me u need to understand that Paris is always numero uno (I speak Spanish two!) But if your ok with that then we can hangout sometime and I would love that because even though we are not real blondes I think we could maybe have a lot of fun and so I will give you sum tips for how to look GOOD to the press:

1. Nevr ware underwear and always make sure you’re cootch is shaved. Always get into ur car with ur skurt shoved way up so the pazaratti can see your privates. They love that!
2. Keep loosing your phone and then act all sad when it keeps gettin stolen or loost or whatever.
3. Call Page Six with blind things about yourself like “Paris Hilton is so smart - she is always menshoned as the new “iconic” blond of the millenium!”
4. Have the pazaratti take accidental pictures of you with a bag of weed or maybe with a little Coke (not the kind in the CAN) and then be sad when they come out and say “I don’t have any privacy anymore.”
5. Keep Perez Hilton on ur speeddyle and don’t forget to make weekly cash payments to him, or give him gift cards to Lane Bryant. Hes annoying and fat i know but he’ll trash you all over the INTERNET if you don’t.

OK grrrl. We shood def hang out sum time cause I think we could reely have sum fun and show the pazaratti some CRAZY things. Love - Paris

I’m off to San Francisco tomorrow and then to my mom’s in Arizona. Back to New York next Monday. Have a great Thanksgiving!

So the directors of MADD along with representatives of the alcohol and automobile industry and various assorted DAs have banded together to try and convince us that installing MANDATORY alcohol detection devices in all new automobiles is a good idea.

Are they serious?

Imagine this scenario: you exit a restaurant after having one glass of wine with dinner and your car won’t start because the “mandatory alcohol detection” device inside has detected alcohol on the driver’s breath. Too bad that you’re not violating the law - the device makes the decision and the neo-prohibitionists at MADD smile in approval.

Here another: you take Nyquil the night before so you can sleep better. In the morning you go out to drive to work and the car refuses to start. The “mandatory alcohol detector” has indicated that with the alcohol in your system you’re not allowed to drive. Too bad that you’re not drunk or that you weren’t even drinking alcohol - the device makes the decision and the neo-prohibitionists from MADD smile in approval.

I find this kind of interference in everyday life to be an affront to my dignity and my right to privacy. By agreeing to install these devices in cars automobile manufacturers are abandoning the “innocent until proven guilty” foundation of our law and adopting a Napoleonic “guilty until proven innocent” code from French law. What if the device malfunctions and you can’t drive your car - property which you own, have paid for and are entitled to use anyway you want?

The answer is - nothing. In the quest to create a danger-free society people are indicating, by their passive approval of these kinds of intrusions into free choice, that they’re OK with allowing every choice, no matter how insignificant, to be monitored, recorded and ultimately - made for them.

If this kind of big-brother nanny-state surveillance gains approval we’re in for one hell of an explosion in all kinds of devices to monitor our behaviors, allegedly for our own “well being” and the “safety of society.” Imagine a device you have to blow into before you can order food at a restaurant. This device measures blood sugar and cholesterol levels and if yours are out of line with what is “medically desirable” then the device vetoes your food choices.

Why not? In the never-ending quest for societal maintenance and well-being I see no reason why machines shouldn’t have the right to decide what you put into your body.

I had a great time last night. I went to the opening of a new lounge in Soho in which my friend Nick is a managing partner. Afterward we went to a birthday party for Sarah Moonves at Dirty Disco.

I’ve not been to Dirty Disco before but the door scene was a little harsh. I heard more than one group of people ask to buy a table and were told there was a “three bottle minimum.”

Now I understand and support the concept of bottle service, I’m a frequent patron of it myself. I also understand that bottle service has been abused, mainly by badly behaved club goers from New Jersey so I see the need to introduce a higher bottle minimum. But three? I never go out with enough people to require that many bottles, the most we’ve ever drunk was two and that was pushing it.

Anyway, the party was in the VIP room downstairs with an open bar and nice booths. The music was cool eighties music, which Sarah claims is her favorite. She’s a sweet girl, really friendly and a lot of fun. I had a good time hanging out with all the bright shiny people and dancing a bit and after ending the night with a bad food fest at Papaya King I parted ways with my friend and headed home to bed.

I had the strangest dream about my ex-boyfriend in Seattle: Jim Burke. What makes the dream weird is that I haven’t thought about him for years and all of a sudden this dream pops up.

In it he was living in Colorado (where I’m from) with his boyfriend and I ran into him. I remember thinking how strange it was that I’d run into him, in Colorado of all places, and how I hoped he was doing well and he had gotten his life in order. Hopefully the dream is a harbinger of good things for this particular ex.

A story I wrote about Darfur on my diary on Daily Kos was picked up and featured as one of the recommended diaries on Friday. It’s the same story below but features a poll and comments. Read it here.

And to lighten everything up I saw the new Bond movie Casino Royale. Yum. Daniel Craig is coiled like a snake throughout the movie, you can feel the subtle menace always right below the surface. He’s created a Bond that is liberated from the lame stereotypes bred into the series by actors like Pierce Brosnan. I really enjoyed seeing this film and would highly recommend it, but get there early. I went 30 minutes before the movie began and it was already almost sold out.

Guess which celebrity gossip blogger is about to be named in a class-action lawsuit as well as a criminal indictment for hacking into and stealing photos from paparazzi photo agencies.

Fame is a fickle thing.

It is a known but rarely discussed fact that the practice of genocide releases terribly destructive waves of instability and death that rapidly subsume nation-states clustered around the place where the original genocide occurred. Examples of this are so numerous it’s surprising people aren’t more aware of the consequences of not immediately stopping genocide when it occurs. The Bosnian genocide and civil war in 1992 unleashed waves of instability that brought down Croatia and then later Kosova followed closely by the near eclipse of Macedonia, Rwanda’s 1994 genocide unleashed a devastating regional war in central Africa that some estimate my have killed more than 4 million people and whose consequences today are still being felt throughout the region more than 12 years after the original genocide..

To watch the same thing occurring in Sudan’s Darfur region today is inexplicable. Sudan’s campaign of genocide in Darfur is expanding into Chad and the Central African Republic and is drawing in arms and fighters from Ethiopia, Eritrea and Uganda. The monster has been unleashed and once it’s out of its cage there is no way of putting it back in again.

Part of the reason I am so opposed to allowing genocide to continue is because of the moral component involved: it’s wrong and immoral to allow an entire people to be destroyed. Another is that it is illegal: the United States is a signatory to the treaty outlawing genocide and has a legal obligation to halt it when it occurs. But the main reason is practical: states that practice genocide have indicated that they will abrogate the most basic of laws protecting human beings by their carrying out genocidal campaigns, so one cannot expect them to follow laws governing the support of terrorism or nuclear proliferation either.

Sudan is a prime example of all three. Sudan’s genocide in Darfur is creating regional and continent-wide instability in Africa. Sudan is exporting its genocide to Chad and the Central African Republic and is exporting arms to enemies of the governments of both states. Sudan, along with its regional ally Eritrea, has turned into a regional menace.

The United States, preferably with the help of NATO or under the cover of the UN, should immediately dispatch arms and advisors to Chad and the Central African Republic to help those nations fight the genocide and instability within their borders. France already has troops and equipment in place in both countries, it should immediately offer air support to protect refugees in the region and begin a concerted effort to protect the borders of both nations.

Not doing so is going to have severe consequences for the United States and its allies. This area differs from Central Africa in one major aspect: political Islam. The US can make a huge difference by acting now to protect the defenseless in Chad, Darfur and the Central African Republic now or it can do nothing and watch this madness radiate outwards until it eventually destroys more innocent people and then threatens the regional and worldwide interests of the United States.

I just watched James Carville, the man who hasn’t run a winning campaign for over 16 years, savage DNC chairman Howard Dean on CNN for his refusal to mortgage the future of the Democratic party in order to fund Carville’s dream of adding 10-20 seats to the Democratic haul in the House. Using absolutely no facts other than conjecture Carville went on and on about how Dean needed to be replaced and how not adding $10 million to the total cost Democrats seats in Florida, in Texas etc… Nodding wisely and agreeing with everything he said was his constant CNN companion Bay Buchanan, sister of head American fascist Pat Buchanan. If the fact that Bay Buchanan was agreeing with him doesn’t give Democrats pause then I don’t know what will.

Carville simply won’t admit he’s wrong. I pointed out back in October that Carville’s risky scheme was foolish and wrong-headed and that Democrats probably would do just as well without it. I was correct. Democrats took back the House and Senate and did so in a spectacular fashion. We increased our vote everywhere and threatened Republican seats all over the country and in particular in the Midwest, Northeast and the Mountain West.

Carville is wedded to the doomed “Southern Strategy” which the Democratic party pursued to its peril for 20 years, pouring money into unwinnable races in the foolishly misguided belief that we had to win the South to either win the presidency or take control of Congress. That strategy was a failure and last Tuesday proved it to be so. Yet Carville just will not let it go. Now he’s trumpeting Harold Ford as the next head of the DNC, who despite his Jesus-quotin’, camouflage-hat-wearin’, anti-gay-marriage-trumpetin’ ways couldn’t win a senate seat in Tennessee! A failed candidate for a failed strategy - sounds like Carville has the perfect match.

Howard Dean’s strategy of building up all 50-state strategy of building up the Democratic party has reinvigorated the party everywhere across the country and is one of the major reasons we had such success last Tuesday. What we do not need is a return to the failed ideas of the past. A past laden with defeat after defeat and with our party wedded to a doomed “stay the course” strategy that clearly was not working. If it sounds like George Bush’s Iraq policy that’s because the parallels between his ideas and Carville’s are eerily similar. Except instead of George Bush trumpeting his failed Iraq policy we have James Carville trumpeting his failed Southern strategy and trying to turn victory into defeat. We can’t let him succeed.