We understand the insatiable need for the media to compare Obama to Lincoln, we really do. There's no need to rehash the potential similarities all over again, because Newsweek is devoting their cover story this week to doing exactly that. On one hand, comparing a president-elect to a another guy from Illinois who did the job well makes all the sense in the world. And above all else, Lincoln was a good man. On the other hand, there are elements of this comparison that are wildly not suggestive of BO:
Towering over his generals, someone of Lincoln's background would have a real hard time getting elected today. Rising from manual laborer (he was once a rail-splitter) to the highest office in the land, Lincoln had no formal education. As Paul Johnson suggests in his book Heroes (even better than the TV series!), the only reason Lincoln was able to enter politics at all was because it was so easy to become a lawyer in America.
And though he undoubtedly was a great president, he did have one blind spot worth noting, as Johnson writes in the book:
Lincoln did not regard blacks as equals. Or rather, they might be morally equal but in other respects they were fundamentally different and unacceptable as citizens without qualification. He said bluntly that it was impossible just to free the slaves and make them "political and socially our equals." He freely admitted an attitude to blacks which would now be classified as racist: "My own feelings will not admit [of equality." The same was true, he added, of a majority of whites, North and South. "Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment is not the sole question. A universal feeling, whether well- or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded." It is such statements, and many other of a similar nature, which make Lincoln's speeches and writings so riveting. They show that his salient characteristic was candor, a willingness to admit and articulate truth, however inconvenient or unheroic or distateful or inconsistent it might be.
Barack's attitude towards people of color is surely different, but the more interesting question is whether Obama sees himself as Lincoln does — as a democrat "who reacts to events rather than directing them," as Johnson puts it. To some extent, President Obama will have no choice but to respond to the evident truth of the country's economic problem. But from the aggressive policy proposals we've seen so far, we shouldn't expect that to last long.
Obama's Lincoln [Newsweek]
The urge to draw, literally, a link between Abraham Lincoln and Barack Obama would have been irresistible to editorial cartoonists even if both men were not Illinois legislators, outspoken against a foreign military adventure and exploitive of their hardscrabble upbringings in the national hinterlands. Who better to juxtapose with the country's first black president than the commander-in-chief who emancipated American slaves (even if Obama's ancestors were not among them)?
This here website (among many others) has been asking the same question for years. 
It took years and years and the attention of a new movie, but someone finally uncovered a smidge of plagiarism in the fired Vanity Fair Brit's How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. Daily Intel 
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Actresses always think they're so smart after they've read a book or two—usually on spirituality or something. We think the annoyingly sunny Jennifer Love Hewitt must be reading Nora Ephron right now, because she's (unconsciously?) passing off Ephron's wit and wisdom as her own. Check out their lookalike quotes: Hewitt 
The untimely death of Heath Ledger left a void in the acting community. In terms of his actual person, yes, but also in what he represented. A subdued, thoughtful actor who shied away from the press, who made a quiet regular guy life for himself when he wasn't emoting really well for lots and lots of money. So, for useless speculation's sake, who will fill that role now, where is our next, uh, sorta-dark knight? Ledger's Brokeback Mountain costar Jake Gyllenhaal is too splashy. Other broody types like Josh Hartnett haven't quite got that leading-man-with-gravitas movie star thing down. So we think it might be James Franco, who is, like Ledger before he died, just beginning the second act of his career. 
Franco is an Intellectual who doggedly studied at UCLA after he became a movie star and is attending an MFA writing program in New York this fall. Like Ledger, he got praise early in his career (winning a Golden Globe for doing his best James Dean) and then sorta fizzled. Ledger had movies like The Brothers Grimm and The Order, Franco was saddled with the a terrible triumvirate of shitty, embarrassing movies Annapolis, Fly Boys, and Tristan & Isolde. 
What put a new polish in Ledger's career was his "brave" (pah) decision to go gay in Brokeback, and oho, Franco is doing the same as Sean Penn's homosexual lover in this fall's Harvey Milk biopic. Franco is known to be intense and deeply focused, doing tons of research on his roles. Ledger had a very similar reputation, holing himself up in a hotel room for months to work on his Joker. Oh, and Franco's the druggie lead in Pineapple Express, just like Ledger was the druggie lead (around the same time as Brokeback) in the Australian dirge Candy. OK so Franco's character is a lighthearted stoner and Ledger's was a depressed and self-destructive heroin junkie, but still! 
In his personal life, Ledger made his quiet way in Brooklyn for a few years, settling down and mating with fellow actor Michelle Williams. Though I obsessively stroll the streets peering in windows, I still don't know where Franco will be living, but it seems likely that he won't be hitting the club scene too hard. Not on school nights, at least. 
Kinda spooky crane shots through futuristic windfarms are the new 
Alan Ball's new HBO vampire series True Blood looks a bit campy in an annoying way (also, Anna Paquin?), and Jennifer's Body, a movie about a possessed killer teen, was written by irksome Juno wordsmith Diablo Cody, so I think it's funny that they've both bumbled and created exactly the same poster (seen above). My biggie b, tween twitterers. Honest to blog, it would be the mac in my cheese if you didn't mention it again! [via 
Oh hey, beloved humorist Joel Stein wrote a fantastic column for the Los Angeles Times newspaper called 
Good news and bad news. The bad news: The 
Lawyer Arin Greenwood 
When Caroline Tell, the Accessories Market Editor for Women's Wear Daily, was arranging an interview Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen to talk about their new jewelery line for their Elizabeth and James label, she was surprised to hear, from their publicist, that she was not to refer to the famous acting and entrepreneuring twins as, well, twins. Or even as sisters. 
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