Cheat Sheet

Automakers won't be able to name "federal bailout" as something they're grateful for this Thanksgiving. Congress failed to reach an agreement today on an auto industry bailout, and won't revive their efforts until after the holiday. They will require the Big Three automakers to submit a plan to Congress by December 2 outlining how they would use federal money. "Until they show us a plan," said Nancy Pelosi, "we cannot show them the money." Also not seeing the money today: Wall Street. For the second straight day the Dow has shed more than 400 points, falling to 7552.29. The sharp decline came in the afternoon as it became clear that the bailout would fail. Of the tumultuous day on Wall Street, David Evans, an analyst at BetOnMarkets.com, said "Any remaining confidence in global markets has been well and truly trampled on today as investors throw in the towel."

Free advice may be worth what you pay for it, but Karl Rove’s opinion on strategy and tactics is worth hearing at any time. In his appraisal of what Obama should do in his first 100 days, he warns against getting bogged down in the closure of Guantanamo Bay. “Where in America should he put suspected terrorists? What should be done with released suspects whose home country doesn’t want them back? Mr. Obama could spend his first 100 days explaining why enemy combatants picked up on battlefields abroad should be released here,” he writes in The Wall Street Journal. And he thinks Obama has painted himself into a corner with Hillary at State. “Any other selection now would embitter her supporters, even if she publicly declines the appointment.” And he also points out “a thorny local controversy”: “Should the new president replace U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who prosecuted Mr. Obama's fund-raising patron, Tony Rezko, and is investigating high-profile Democrats?”

Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska may be leaving the chamber in a cloud of ignominy—he was recently convicted on federal charges of corruption, before losing his reelection bid to Mark Begich—but Senate Republicans had nothing but love today for the longest serving senator in their party’s history. “Ted, I believe this cloud will be lifted from you and it should be,” said Orrin Hatch, apparently disagreeing with Stevens’ jury of his peers. “I have found Ted Stevens to be the most straightforward, honest senator that I have ever dealt with," Jim Bunning said of the man who was indicted for lying. Stevens himself was optimistic, saying “I still see the day when I can remove the cloud that currently surrounds me.” Read The Daily Beast’s piece for the full-on Stevens swooning.

Wall Street may be feeling shaky, but at least the rich and famous can still let their hair down. Hollywood’s finest are gathering tonight in Dubai for a $23 million party—said to be the priciest private shindig ever staged—to launch the world’s most expensive resort, the $1.5 billion Atlantis. The 1,539-room hotel, on the emirate’s man-made Palm Jumeirah island, is playing host to 2,000 celebrities, The Daily Mail reports, including Robert De Niro, Oprah Winfrey, Charlize Theron, and Kylie Minogue, who’s being paid $3 million for a one-hour set. Oh, and there’s a fireworks display, the world’s largest ever. Sol Kerzner, the South African billionaire who owns Atlantis, said the lavish to-do was the only way to promote his $1.5 billion investment: “If I had it all over again and I understood that the timing was what it was, one might modify a couple of the things...but not significantly.”

Madonna and Guy Ritchie have settled their divorce—if not their tabloid wars—with Madonna keeping the majority of her $300 million fortune, reports The Times of London. Their sons, Rocco and David, will live in London and the United States, while 12-year-old daughter Lourdes will continue to live in New York with her mother. Under divorce laws, Ritchie could have claimed nearly half of Madonna's fortune, but a friend of the couple speculates: "He could have hugely boosted his bank balance and set himself up for life, but he already feels he has enough money." With Madonna reportedly earning $6.5 million to model for Louis Vuitton, she's expected to manage just fine on her own.

Clive Barnes, the most influential theater critic of his generation, began reviewing dance in Britain, encouraging readers of the Times of London to see dazzling new works by George Balanchine and Martha Graham that other critics ignored. And he continued his evangelical work in New York from the ’60s onward, lending his enthusiasm and erudition to both The New York Times and The New York Post. He wrote defining biographies of Rudolf Nureyev and Frederick Ashton. “Barnes made a point of writing in a conversational manner and of being accessible to readers, always keeping his home telephone number listed in the phone book. He was unafraid of admitting that a work of political or avant-garde dance or drama simply eluded his understanding, rather than simply attacking it for being bad art,” writes Bloomberg’s Jeremy Gerard. He was famous for his pithy put downs. Of the recent Broadway production of To Be or Not to Be, he wrote, "Not. Definitely not."

Tijuana, the Mexican border town where Americans go to do things they couldn’t get away with in California, has a new government that might not take so kindly to their visitations: the Mexican army. Drug wars in the city, which have killed an astounding 650 people since January, have caused President Felipe Calderón to hand the city over to the Mexican army, marines, and state police in the city. Tijuana’s proximity to the United States makes it a profitable drug hub. The military took over after purges of corrupt local policemen left the force in disarray.

Bad news for Barack Obama: Iran has produced enough nuclear material to make a single nuclear bomb, according to weapons inspectors. Experts cautioned that the news is mostly symbolic, as Iran will need to take additional steps to actually build a bomb, including kicking out inspectors and further purifying fuel. But the country has solved many of the difficulties of enriching uranium, which is the most difficult part of building a weapon. Should Iran’s talks with the United States and Europe break down, it might prove a troubling development.

Trig Palin, who has Down syndrome, earned his mother plaudits from the pro-life crowd. The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg points to a pro-Palin blog post at National Review Online: “Some estimated 90 percent of Americans faced with the knowledge that they might give birth to a child with Down Syndrome wouldn’t have made the choice she and her husband, Todd, did to let the child live.” According to Hertzberg, this shows that pro-lifers have implicitly accepted a basic premise of the other side: Palin carrying Trig to term was a choice—and the choice was hers to make, not God’s or the government’s. But if Palin truly believes that abortion is murder, Hertzberg writes, then for her it wasn’t a choice, since it wasn’t an option—and she no more deserves praise "than I deserve praise for not having lately gunned down any friends, colleagues, or strangers." Hertzberg’s conclusion: "Even in the minds of anti-abortion zealots, abortion is now implicitly viewed in the same light as divorce: an unfortunate choice, a reprehensible choice, a choice that may even contravene the will of God, but still a choice.”

It was written by Abraham Lincoln to Lydia Bixby, who had lost two sons in the Civil War, with a third taken prisoner, a fourth missing as a deserter, and a fifth discharged from the army, his fate unknown. And its eloquence has gone down in history as evidence of Honest Abe’s deep humanity. “I feel how weak and fruitless must be any word of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming,” he wrote. “But I cannot refrain from tendering you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the republic they died to save.” The text of the letter is well-known, but the original went missing. Its sentiment—that no mother should have to lose more than one son—was the basis of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. Now the Dallas Historical Society thinks it has found the real thing buried in a file. Is the letter genuine or a forgery? Forensic testing will soon provide the answer.

Next stop, Jurassic Park. Scientists at Penn State have sequenced the genome of the woolly mammoth using hair found on two specimens, one 20,000 and one 60,000 years old—the first time the genome of an extinct species has been sequenced. The team is studying the genome for clues about the mammoth’s extinction. They’ve discovered that mammoths had very low genetic diversity, meaning the species would be particularly susceptible to pandemic, climate change, and humans. They hope their discoveries can help other species threatened with extinction, like the Tasmanian Devil, which is currently being made extinct by a facial cancer. So could a mammoth be resurrected, as Michael Crichton predicted? “A lot of what would be needed is already on hand,” said Stephan Schuster, professor of microbial ecology at Penn State. “There’s only this gap in the knowledge of the mammoth genome that’s missing.”

Mike Huckabee is saying what a lot of people are thinking about the danger of Obama tangling with the Clintons. “If he’s floating that balloon it better fly, because I think that to float the idea, and then to pull it away, I just think it would be disastrous for him from a public relations standpoint,” the former Arkansas governor told The New Yorker’s Lauren Collins. “It would be twice having rung the doorbell and not taken her to the dance.” The Obama camp is playing with fire, he suggests. “Surely they did know that she was married, and that her husband is named Bill, and that he used to be President. It wasn’t like they woke up and said, ‘Oh my, you know, I forgot all about him.’ You don’t open the door when you’re pretty sure there’s fire on the other side of it that’s going to come in and scorch the room.” Hot stuff.

Will Hugh Jackman’s “sexiest man alive” status cost him an Oscar? His starring role in Baz Luhrman’s Australia opposite Nicole Kidman, which just premiered in Sydney, puts the Aussie hunk firmly in the frame. And as if his ego weren’t already boosted to capacity, People magazine has just named him “Sexist Man Alive.” But the L.A. Times’ Tom O’Neill thinks older male Academy members have a habit of ignoring the stud of the moment when it comes to voting. “Old-timers who have been put out to pasture still love the young fillies, but they resent these handsome bucks,” he writes. “Their message to Hollywood heartthrobs: ‘You already have it all—fame, fortune and females aplenty. So, sorry, pal, no Oscar for you just yet.’”

The California Supreme Court has voted six to one to review legal challenges to Proposition 8, which bans same-sex marriage. Gay rights advocates are arguing that the measure is a constitutional revision, which can be placed to the voters only after a two-thirds vote in the Legislature or a constitutional convention, as opposed to a more limited revision. The Court will review the measure as early as March, but refused to allow gay marriages to resume in the interim. The dissenting judge is a reliable advocate of gay rights, who voted to allow gay marriage in the court’s original four to three decision. Her dissent is troubling for those hoping to overturn the measure.

Barack Obama has not yet begun breaking his promises to the American people, but he has already run afoul of his wife. In February 2007, Obama said he promised Michelle he would quit smoking, but this June he admitted he hadn’t. "If Obama actually has accomplished the miracle of giving up cigarettes at the apogee of a presidential race," Michael Kinsley writes in The Washington Post, "he should be happy to let us know this and add to his superman image." And if he hasn’t? For all the attention John McCain’s melanoma received, Obama’s smoking was covered very little. The death rate for smokers age 45 over the next decade is twice that of non-smokers. But that risk may carry large returns. "Obama’s steely calm is now one of our country’s major assets," Kinsley writes. "If he needs an occasional cigarette to preserve it, let’s hand him an ashtray, offer him a light, and look the other way."

Vladimir Nabokov’s last novel, The Original of Laura, which the author wished burned on his death, is to be published by his son, Dmitri. “He would have reacted in a sober and less dramatic way if he didn’t see death staring him in the face,” says Dmitri. “He certainly would not have wanted it destroyed. He would have finished it…My father told me what his most important books were. He named Laura as one of them. One doesn’t name a book one intends to destroy.” The plot concerns Philip Wild, a brilliant neurologist, but a fat and unappealing man, who is oppressed to the point of suicide by his much younger wife, the “wildly promiscuous” Flora. The thought of reading a lost Nabokov novel does not appeal to everyone, including the playwright Tom Stoppard. “It’s perfectly straightforward. Nabokov wanted it burnt, so burn it,” he said.

The Obama transition team keeps on leaking: word has it that the president-elect will appoint Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano to head the Department of Homeland Security, replacing the controversial Michael Chertoff. The move puts the border governor in charge of immigration and border security. Arizona has a large number of undocumented immigrants. Napolitano, 50, endorsed Obama in early January and became one of his most visible supporters. Sources told Politico the offer is likely to be made, and that Napolitano is expected to accept.

Religious violence in the state of Orissa, India, has reached a new level as extremist Hindu groups have put a price on the head of leading Christian aid workers, with a $250 bounty for the murder of a pastor. "People are being offered rewards to kill, and to destroy churches and Christian properties. They are being offered foreign liquor, chicken, mutton, and weapons," said a spokesman for the All-India Christian Council. A spokesman for the largest hard-line Hindu group denied the claims. The recent violence comes on the heels of calming tensions between Hindus and Christians, who have been fighting since the murder of Swami Lakshmanananda Saraswati, a prominent extremest Hindu leader, last August.

The House's longstanding tradition of seniority took a big hit today when California Rep. Henry Waxman dethroned Michigan Rep. John Dingell from his seat atop the Energy and Commerce Committee. Waxman, a youthful 69, knocked off Dingell, 82, by a 137-122 vote. Ever since Dingell started chairing the committee in 1981, it has taken a sympathetic stance toward Detroit, and focused less on environmental and health care issues. Waxman's challenge to Dingell has created a rift in the Democratic caucus, forcing members to choose between the two House vets. Waxman's victory was also a win for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who helped him with his behind-the-scenes campaign to take over the post.