Cheat Sheet

Was she cleaning out stacks of old newspapers? Washington lobbyist Vicki Iseman has filed a lawsuit against The New York Times over a much-disputed article it published…last February. The $27 million defamation suit, whose defendants include the newspaper, executive editor, the Washington bureau chief, and four reporters, alleges an “unprofessional relationship” was implied between the lobbyist and then-presidential candidate John McCain. The suit states: “In their attack on Senator McCain, the [defendants] were willing to sacrifice Ms. Iseman as acceptable collateral damage, recklessly indifferent to the avalanche of scorn, derision and ridicule Ms. Iseman would suffer.” While the original Times article was vague, the lawsuit argues that commentators assumed the two had an alleged affair and as a result Iseman suffered mental, emotional, and physical damage to her health.

After the auto industry had to fight tooth and nail to secure the $17 billion it needed to save itself from collapse, the federal government has kindly kicked in another $6 billion. The beneficiary: GMAC, the auto financing company that provides financing for most GM dealers and many of its customers. GMAC has struggled in recent months to borrow the money it needs to make loans, and last week the Fed approved the company's request to become a bank holding company. The change in structure opened it up to new sources of funding, like the billions it's receiving from the $700 billion of TARP funds, but also made it subject to additional regulations, including a requirement to convert 75 percent of its $38 billion in debt into stock. As part of the $6 billion infusion, the Treasury will invest $5 billion, on which it will receive an 8 percent dividend, and loan $1 billion to GM for it to invest in GMAC. GM has a 49 percent ownership of GMAC.

Just when you thought it couldn't get much worse for Republicans, the Republican National Committee comes along sponsoring a resolution opposing "socialist" solutions to save capitalism. Those would be the same socialist measures favored by the president. "We can't be a party of small government, free markets and low taxes while supporting bailouts and nationalizing industries, which lead to big government, socialism and high taxes at the expense of individual liberty and freedoms," said a co-sponsor of a resolution. Typically the RNC's job is to raise money for candidates and surface every four years to write up the party platform. But not anymore. "It is now time for the RNC to assert itself in terms of ideas and political philosophy," Arizona GOP Chairman Randy Pullen said. "If we don't do it now, when will we?"

For years Tim Russert and Meet the Press ruled Sunday mornings. Now, if his first few shows are any indication, David Gregory will rule Sunday mornings. On December 21, Meet the Press outdrew ABC’s This Week by more than a million viewers; Face the Nation and Fox News Sunday were third and fourth, respectively. The Hollywood Reporter points out that even the MTP re-airing on MSNBC beat a live Late Edition on CNN.

While Caroline Kennedy is making headlines with her bid for Hillary Clinton's Senate seat, a steady stream of applicants is lining up to interview for the position. The New York Times reports on Assemblyman Daniel J. O’Donnell, an openly gay Democrat from Manhattan's Upper West Side, who spent 45 minutes with the governor Monday afternoon. O'Donnell doesn't think his chances are great (he figures about 1 in 10), but he didn't feel he was getting the brush-off, either. "I didn’t get the impression that a decision was coming anytime soon,” O’Donnell said. “I have the sense that [David Paterson] was really weighing what people were saying." Along with big names like Caroline Kennedy and Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, about a half dozen others have expressed interest in the position. “There was no one in the waiting room,” O'Donnell added. “But that doesn’t mean there aren’t other patients.”

Is a picture of a baby suckling its mother's breast obscene? If there's any areola showing it is. That's the stance Facebook is taking, and it's not going over well with users. A group on the website called "Hey, Facebook, breastfeeding is not obscene!" has picked up more than 82,000 members after mothers reported having pictures of themselves and their children removed from the site. Facebook claims the only pictures removed were those that violated its terms of service, which stipulate that photos showing a fully exposed breast constitute sexually explicit material. Angry mothers have staged an online nurse-in by posting thousands of breastfeeding pictures to the site. A Facebook spokesman says: "We agree that breast-feeding is natural and beautiful and we're very glad to know that it is so important to some mothers to share this experience with others on Facebook."

Prediction: half-face masks will be the “It” accessory for the New Year. Andrew Lloyd Webber told the Times of London recently that his Phantom of the Opera is returning to Broadway with an all-new sequel to the original smash musical. The composer plans to open the Coney Island-set [!] Phantom: Love Never Dies at the end of 2009 in New York, in London’s West End, and possibly in Shanghai. “I don’t think you could do this [simultaneous opening] if it wasn’t the sequel to Phantom,” said Webber. “The one which really interests me [in the Far East] would be China … I think to open Love Never Dies in Shanghai would be an enormous thing.” He added, “We are pretty clear who our Phantom is going to be—I can’t say who.” Robert Pattinson, call your agent.

Ann Savage, a ferocious femme fatale and pinup who was never quite able to rise above B-movie status, died at 87 last week. Best known for her portrayal of a ruthless villain in 1945's Detour, Savage starred in more than 30 movies in the '40s and '50s, often playing bad girls. Born Bernice Maxine Lyon in Columbia, S.C., Savage left acting in the '60s but made a return to the silver screen last year in the acclaimed pseudo-documentary My Winnipeg. Savage had suffered a series of recent strokes.

In a bit of sad news from the ski slopes, 15 skiers and snowmobilers in the U.S. and Canada have been killed by avalanches in the past two weeks. Strange weather patterns have brought in unstable layers of snow—essentially, a huge layer of snow that started falling a couple weeks ago is sitting on top of a thin layer that fell in November. "It's like a brick on top of potato chips. And the potato chips can't hold the brick up," said the director of the U.S. Forest Service's National Avalanche Center. He added that while the deaths of snowmobilers exploring the backcountry weren't that unusual, it's the deaths of vacationing skiers that are alarming. From January 2005 to November 2008, four people died in avalanches on U.S. ski slopes. That number is three in the first four weeks of December.

The New York Times has a fascinating feature story on two 50ish photographers who took pictures of the Mumbai massacre. The Mumbai Mirror’s Sebastian D’souza hid in train cars to take his now famous photo of Muhammad Ajmal Kasab, the only terrorist to be captured alive. (The Times says another, unpublished photo of Kasab makes him look like “a college student, with a slightly floppy haircut, cargo pants and what appears to be a sweatshirt.”) Photographer Vasant Prabhu, of The Indian Express, wound up photographing the grisly aftermath. He got into the Taj Hotel with police officers and found shots like “a Western couple clad in white…sprawled lifelessly near an ice bucket and some wineglasses.” Both men could easily have been killed themselves; Prabhu says he prayed to a Hindu god when he was forced to use a flash.

Where do you take that Movado Fiero watch if you come up a little short this month? Try the pawnshop! Though the income of a typical pawnshop customer is $29,000, The Wall Street Journal reports that middle- and upper-class customers are now streaming into pawnshops in search of cash. Several pawnbrokers tell the paper of an uptick in luxury cars pulling up outside their doors. An Evanston, Ill., pawnbroker says he had one woman who arrived with a $9,000 fur coat from Saks: She said “she needed a loan to help buy private-school uniforms for her child.”