Cheat Sheet

ESPN’s Rick Reilly got together with Barack Obama on the campaign trail to…pick a fantasy football team. Seems the candidate wasn’t in a deferential mood. "Now, you're the expert," Obama told Reilly. "And I'll gladly be the junior partner in this, but I really think we should take Drew Brees. He could have a big week. Oakland's secondary is a wreck." Obama and his partner took 30 minutes to pick their team, with the senator opting for the likes of Clinton Portis and Brandon Marshall. Informed that his odds of winning the one-week league were low, Obama snapped, “You think we’re just messing around?”

What’s it they say about one rotten apple again? Someone may want to tell AT&T. For every $199 iPhone the company sells (and it sold 2.4 million in the last quarter), AT&T shells out $375 in upfront costs. As the exclusive carrier of the iPhone, AT&T’s losses come in the form of subsidies to Apple and marketing costs. The company insists that these investments will turn a profit in the long run. Either way, Apple is not complaining about the arrangement—its shares have risen while AT&T’s have plummeted. AT&T, according to one analyst, is “transferring shareholder wealth to Apple.”

Well, that didn’t take long. Heather Mills, known sneeringly in the UK as "Mucca," has spent almost $15 million of her divorce settlement from Paul McCartney in just seven months, The Sun reports. She has burned through the millions on property, vacations, and servants after receiving the nearly $40 million in March from the former Beatle, who divorced her after six years of marriage. "Heather's been moaning her money isn't going as far as she thought, but she's just burning her way through it," a source tells the paper. It hasn't all gone to waste, however: Mills donated $1 million in vegetarian food to homeless children in the Bronx.

What do George W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Idi Amin, and Adolf Hitler have in common? Calm down, Michelle Malkin. According to Kevin Maher in the London Times, they're all political "villains" (of varying degrees) who have recently received biopic treatment. Oliver Stone's W. is the latest, and it is "nothing less than the modern political biopic par excellence, a film that grabs its notorious subject matter by the throat and, instead of throttling it, as the world expects, simply looks deeply into its eyes." The problem is that these films, in a way, exonerate their subjects by humanizing them. "Movies," Maher writes, "are increasingly ignoring any responsibility to address the political issues surrounding the politicians."

It’s easy to miss, but according to Michael Tomasky at The Guardian, “a serious debate is actually taking place in this presidential campaign.” The country is discussing taxation and “the concept of the good society” for the first time in years. While it’s nothing new for the Republican to warn that the Democrat will raise your taxes, the counterargument that maybe new taxes aren’t such a bad thing hasn’t been heard in decades. Tomasky flags a recent speech by Michael Dukakis (admittedly, not the Democrats’ ideal adviser), where he points out that a taxpayer is likely to spend a tax rebate paying down credit-card debt or buying goods made in Asia, while governments could spend that same money on infrastructure and fiscal relief here at home. “For the first time in 30 years,” Tomasky writes, “the Democrat appears to be poised to win the argument.”

The recession is hitting even Google, and its employees are feeling the squeeze in their stomachs. According to Valleywag, Google, which prides itself on the quality of its cafeterias, will be closing one of its headquarters’ eateries. It is expected to be the first of several cuts at the internet giant, and comes on the heels of the devastating removal of Glacéau SmartWater from the company refrigerators. One need not worry too much about the pending starvation of Google employees, however—there are 17 other eateries on campus.

The New York City Council has voted 29 to 22 to give Mayor Michael Bloomberg the chance to seek a third term next year. Bloomberg had sought four more years because of the city's instability in the wake of the financial crisis. The New York Times reports that after the vote tally was announced, hecklers yelled "The city's for sale!" and "Shame on you!" And Councilman Bill de Blasio, an opponent, provided some harsh words: "The people of the city will long remember what we have done here today, and the people will be unforgiving. We are stealing like a thief in the night their right to shape our democracy."

After barely a year of slumming it in Major League Soccer with the LA Galaxy, David Beckham has taken a deal to play for AC Milan. He’ll appear on the Italian pitch (“on loan for a few months,” he says) in spring 2009. The question, though, is whether he will settle in Italy and bid arrividercci to his adopted home. The Guardian reports that Beckham’s wife Posh is settled in LA and has become “part of the local show business aristocracy.” But given the last time they tried a long-distance relationship it ended with accusations of an affair, Posh might just want to check out Italy.

“Will white people riot if Barack Obama wins?” wonders Wendi C. Thomas at The Root. She’s been asked whether black people will riot if Obama doesn’t win, but gauging the ugly anger (shouts of “Kill him!”) cropping up in the presidential campaign, she sees an alternate possibility: “Will the dream of a perfect streak of white men in the White House, if deferred, cause white people to explode?” The idea, she argues, is no more absurd than black people rioting—and it could be scarier.

We all know about Barack Obama’s legendary cool—what Time’s Joe Klein calls “the steadiness of his temperament and the judicious quality of his decision-making." But what about his gut instincts? Well, Klein says, Obama's "strongest—and most telling—moments have been those when he followed his natural no-drama instincts." Examples include his race speech in Philadelphia and his amiable debate with General Petraeus over the course of the war in Iraq. "His has been a remarkable campaign," Klein writes, "as smoothly run as any I've seen in nine presidential cycles."

Life, we all know, sometimes mirrors art, but here's an example of life mirroring porn. A month after far-right Austrian politician Jorg Haider died in a car crash, his appointed successor, Stefan Petzner, has been dismissed as party leader after revealing that the two men had an affair. "He was the man of my life," Haider told an Austrian tabloid. "I would spend nights with him and his family and that was important for me because I often was afraid to be alone in the dark." Haider, by the way, died after speeding home drunk from a gay night club. It might all be rather touching and tragic if they weren't, you know, reprehensible.

We usually save this kind of thing for November 5, but why not? Salon’s Mike Madden and Walter Shapiro look back on the wildly inaccurate prognostications of pundits this election season. Among the greatest hits: that Sarah Palin would boost McCain’s candidacy rather than sink it; that Steve Schmidt’s win-the-news-cycle approach was a sign of his strategic genius; that gas prices would be voters’ biggest worry; and that Hillary voters wouldn’t come home to the Democratic ticket. All sound fairly ridiculous now, but stay tuned on Election Day just in case.

Today's New York Times features a newsy interview with Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who defends his recent actions—most notably, his controversial decision to let Lehman Brothers fail. "If someone thinks Hank Paulson could have made the Fed save Lehman Brothers, the answer is, 'No way,' " Paulson says. Paulson insists he did not have the legal authority to rescue Lehman as he did Bear Stearns and AIG, since its balance sheet was in worse shape. He also defends his original $700 billion bailout plan to buy up bad securities, rather than inject capital into the system, as he later decided to do. "If we had felt going in that the right way to deal with the problem was to put equity in, we would have taken some time and developed a program," he said. His biggest regret so far is one of salesmanship: "I could have made a better case to the public."