Have the Democrats' warring health-care factions finally found a middle road? Talking Point Memo reports that conservative and liberal Democrats are warming to the public option—as long as it has an "opt out" clause that would allow individual states to decline to participate in the public health-care option should they so choose. Proposed by Democratic Senators Chuck Schumer and Tom Carper, the opt-out option has public-option-wary Ben Nelson’s support, and Finance Chairman and Blue Dog leader Max Baucus is willing to listen. Though Baucus has been skeptical of the public option so far, an aide says he "will look closely at this proposal... and could consider supporting them as part of an overall package as long as it achieved his health-care reform goals while getting 60 votes." TPM notes that "the idea is still very young," but "seems to be finding friends very quickly."

President Obama meets with his Afghan war council Friday to discuss not only strategy, but the mission itself in Afghanistan—and how many troops are needed to accomplish it. As the council has been preparing to debate the request of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, top commander in Kabul, for more troops in the war zone, several potentially major problems have materialized: The American military currently does not have nearly enough helicopters to move troops around Afghanistan, according to Army officers, and a recent study showed the military could have trouble pulling enough troops from other bases to deploy the 40,000 troops McChrystal wants. The Obama administration appears to be preparing to narrow the Afghan mission to one of only preventing al Qaeda's reestablishment there, instead of stopping the Taliban or another Islamist group from gaining ground. That’s in part due to an emerging belief among officials involved in the deliberations is that destroying the Taliban is not necessary to countering the threat from al Qaeda, because many Taliban members are more interested in the local politics and than supporting the terror group. Refocusing the mission could make it politically easier for Obama to grant McChrystal fewer troops—or reject the request completely.

Anthony D. Marshall, the son of legendary socialite Brooke Astor, was convicted on Thursday of trying to steal from his mother as she suffered from Alzheimer’s at the end of her life, and could face between one and 25 years in prison. Marshall was convicted on two first-degree grand larceny charges in part for giving himself an unauthorized raise of about $1 million for managing his mother’s finances. The 19-week trial included testimony from Henry Kissinger, Barbara Walters, and Annette de la Renta. Astor died two years ago at 108, with an estimated fortune of $180 million to her name.

Barack Obama’s communications director, Anita Dunn, recently told Time’s Michael Scherer that the White House likes one “legitimate reporter” at Fox News. Who is it? Shepard Smith? Chris Wallace? Nope: It’s Major Garrett, the network’s White House correspondent. About the rest of Fox News, Dunn said, “It's opinion journalism masquerading as news.” One more vociferous critic in the adminstration said, "They are the paid political programming for a party, and occasionally a couple of news stories break out in the midst of 23 hours and 45 minutes of political rantings and opinion.”

In a 281-146 vote, the House voted to expand federal hate-crime laws to include crimes based on gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, and disability. The measure, attached to a defense policy bill, is expected to pass the Senate and would allow federal prosecutors to intercede in assault cases motivated by anti-gay sentiment as well as provide federal grants to assist in those crimes’ prosecution. The original hate-crimes law, passed after Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968, covered crimes committed based on race, color, religion, or national origin, and civil-rights groups and their congressional allies have been trying to expand it for more than a decade. By attaching the measure to a necessary defense bill, Democrats—with the strong support of the president—appear to have succeeded, much to Republicans’ annoyance: “This is radical social policy that is being put… on the backs of our soldiers,” said House Republican leader John Boehner. The FBI says some 16 percent of the 8,000 hate crimes committed in the U.S. each year are motivated by sexual orientation.

Rep. Charles Rangel of New York survived attempts by Republicans this week to oust him from the chairmanship of the Ways and Means Committee, but he has more trouble headed his way: The House Ethics Committee voted Thursday to expand its investigation into Rangel, whose alleged misdeeds include his use of rent-stabilized apartments in a luxury apartment building in Harlem, his fundraising on behalf of a center named for him at City College, a tax provision for a million-dollar donor to the center, and his failure to pay taxes on his vacation home on the Dominican Republic. Democrats on the committee who were initially reluctant to investigate Rangel appear to have relented.

Oscar-nominated actress Ellen Page has teamed up with HBO to write and executive produce a new project Stitch N’ Bitch, alongside Alia Shawkat of Arrested Development fame and singer Sean Tillmann. The trio starred together in Drew Barrymore’s recent directorial debut Whip It!, but has yet to make a decision about whether or not they will act in the single-camera comedy. At 22 and 20, respectively, Page and Shawkat seemingly fit the mold—the show is set to follow two hipster girls relocating from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to Silver Lake, California, in an effort to become artists.

Just four years ago, Larry Summers—then the president of Harvard—suggested that women were innately inferior to men at science. Three Nobel prizes for women scientists this week should be a nail in Summers’ theory’s coffin. “In the late 1960s there were essentially no women on the science faculties of places like Harvard, Cal Tech and MIT (where I now work as a professor of molecular biology),” Nancy Hopkins, a molecular biologist at MIT, writes. “Things began to change dramatically in the early 1970s, thanks to affirmative-action measures taken under Richard Nixon. Those included the “Shultz regs” (George Shultz was Nixon's Secretary of Labor), which required universities to hire women onto their faculties or risk losing their federal funding. The Nobel Prizes in medicine this week are the end result of those laws.”

If you tweet it, he will come: Tracy Morgan has joined Twitter after a campaign by OMGICU, a celebrity-sighting Web site, to get him to join. Morgan fans can visit Twacy.org and make automatic status updates to their Twitter and Facebook accounts in support of the campaign. Hugh Dornbush, founder of OMGICU, started the Twacy movement after noticing the eccentric and funny nature of the Morgan sightings reported on his site: One user saw Morgan “walking around soho eating blueberries looking confused,” while another saw him “driving a yellow Lamborghini with a blond woman listening to Sade.” Several apparently fake Twitter accounts already exist under the name of the comedian, whose show 30 Rock starts a new season next week. “Our cause may not seem vital today,” says Dornbush in a videotaped appeal, “but envision the world our children will inherit: one in which they will not know everything Tracy Morgan does all day.”

Intra-Gosselin conflict escalated Thursday when Jon Gosselin, formerly of Jon and Kate Plus Eight, told Entertainment Tonight “it could be WWIII when I get home.” The embattled father, whose protracted separation from his wife created a tense summer tabloid-news cycle, claims that his wife Kate is trying to prevent him from attending the ninth birthday party of his two older daughters, Cara and Mady, by changing their joint custody arrangement so that he can only visit between 4 and 6 p.m. “She’s basically saying it would be too stressful to the kids to have both of us here,” a defiant Gosselin told ET. “I own the house, so I can do what I want.” Cara and Mady did not comment on the situation.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rolled her eyes and flinched on Tuesday as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid put an arm around her and insisted that "everyone" would support "whatever" Obama's Afghanistan policy turned out to be. Now there's speculation that the two are feuding over the war. Whatever her actual level of annoyance, Politico suggests that if Obama decides to send more troops to Afghanistan, in accordance with Gen. Stanley McChrystal's wishes, the move could set off an internal party struggle. Pelosi seems to favor a small force focused on anti-terrorism on the Pakistan border, reflecting the views of the anti-war voters who swept Democrats to power. For his part, Reid is waiting for a cue from Obama, but his precarious 2010 reelection campaign could benefit from a hawkish approach to the war that would bring in moderate and conservative voters from Nevada.

Perhaps he forgot to change Hank Paulson’s speed dial? The Associated Press obtained seven months of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s appointment calendars and says that the CEOs of Citigroup, J.P. Morgan, and Goldman Sachs appear to have a direct line to his office—during those seven months, he spoke to these men at least 80 times. Sometimes, he spoke to the CEOs several times a day. When faced with the imminent bankruptcy of G.M. in May, Geithner wrapped up his day with calls to Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein, J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, President Obama, and then another call to Dimon.

Fans of Dallas will soon have more than their fill: A film version and a new television series are in the works. Twentieth-Century Fox is still working on a big-screen adaptation of the '80s soap-style series, but Warner Brothers is reportedly working faster at series remake for TNT. The show would allegedly focus on the next generation of Ewings—John Ross (son of J.R. and Sue Ellen) and Christopher (the adopted son of Bobby and Pam). There’s no saying if this remake will float like 90210 or flounder like Melrose Place, but original cast members, including Larry Hagman, Linda Gray, and Patrick Duffy, have reportedly been approached to join the television show.

Talk about heavy-hitting campaign spots. Television ads and web videos in support of New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine appear to be taunting his challenger Christopher Christie about his weight. One such spot shows the Republican exiting his S.U.V. in slow motion and asserts that the former U.S. attorney “threw his weight around” to dodge traffic tickets. While Corzine—who has been conspicuously running 5k and 10k races almost every weekend—denies that the phrasing and imagery is deliberately calling attention to Christie’s weight, the ad has drawn criticism from Jersey Republicans, who have called it “purposeful” and “offensive.” Nonetheless, a recent Monmouth University survey found that when voters were asked to say the first word that came to mind when discussing Christie, “fat” was among the most frequent responses. Christie, who has struggled with his weight since his late teens, said he is “numb” to fat jokes, and that working with a personal trainer has allowed him to drop 25 pounds since June, but the nominee would not reveal his current weight to the New York Times.

Obama's presidency just got a little more historic. On Saturday, he plans to appoint his administration’s first openly gay ambassador, lawyer David Huebner, who currently serves as the general counsel for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Discrimination. If confirmed, Huebner would serve as U.S. ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa. The nomination comes as Obama faces criticism from gay leaders who believe that he is not following up on campaign promises, including repealing the military's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. The president has timed the official nomination to a speech he's giving on Saturday night to the Human Rights Campaign, a proponent of equal rights for gays.

In an age when people post their shower schedules on Twitter, the website IJustMadeLove.com is, perhaps, a historic inevitability. The site uses a Google map to let users pinpoint the exact address where they had sex, along with whether the act was indoors or outdoors, and any positions used. Once a user has added an act, he or she must wait 20 minutes before posting another. So far, 11,195 matings (real or imagined) have been posted, including a surprising number of mid-Atlantic trysts.

For millions of people across the nation, it's ridiculously hard to find a job. In September, 35.6 percent of America's jobless had been unemployed for six months or longer—a record 5.4 million people. The longer these people remain out of work, USA Today writes, the harder it will be to get a job as skills fade and resume gaps widen. Many of the long-term unemployed, particularly the elderly, won't ever go back to work, or will have to accept pay cuts and lower-level jobs. Not to mention that the continuous need for aid is taxing the nation's social services and charities. Large numbers of long-term unemployed can reduce productivity and consumer spending even after economic recovery. Nationwide reluctance to hire until the economy is on firm footing has intensified the problem, as have low housing prices, which discourage the long-term unemployed from selling their homes and moving to areas with more jobs.

Israeli novelist Amos Oz may have been the frontrunner, but this year's Nobel Prize for literature went to Romanian-born German writer Herta Müller. According to the press release Thursday morning, Müller won because "with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose," her writing "depicts the landscape of the dispossessed." A novelist, poet, and short story writer, she has written about corruption, intolerance, and repression in Romania, and was prohibited from publishing in Romania thanks to her public criticism of the dictator.

If Democrats were tired of one Cheney, they may be alarmed to learn that there may be three to contend with. The Washington Post reports that Mary Cheney, daughter of the former vice president and sister of Obama critic Liz, is leaving her current political consulting firm, Navigators Global, to start an independent strategic consulting firm. Despite denials from the Cheney family spokesperson, a friend of Mary's and a couple of her Navigator colleagues insist that Liz and Dick will be a part of the new firm. Not everyone is happy about Dick's involvement. As a senior Republican consultant put it: "Why can't he learn to play golf? It was good enough for Agnew. Why is it not good enough for Dick Cheney? Seriously, he should be working the Jackson Hole/Palm Springs circuit."

What’s the secret to Michele Bachmann’s magic? Bill O’Reilly has a theory: “Both you and Sarah Palin are good-looking women,” he told the incendiary congresswoman from Minnesota on Wednesday night. “I think that the success of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann drive the far left crazy because you don’t fit—they don’t like what you believe in, but you can attract others to listen to you.” Bachmann agreed, saying that she and Sarah Palin were creating “a woman block—a middle America woman block.”

With viewers fleeing in droves, sources are saying that NBC is pushing 10 p.m. comic Jay Leno to have an affair to boost ratings, reports humorist Andy Borowitz in a spoof news item. NBC chairman Jeff Zucker, according to the source, "wants Jay to be up to his neck in sexual monkey business by the end of sweeps." Leno, who has watched as longtime rival Dave Letterman's intern sex scandal increase ratings for the Late Show, has been ratings challenged in his new time slot. "If Jay had an affair he'd probably get away with it," cautioned the source. "Nobody's watching."

The war on terror is heating up. The Pakistani army is about to attack the Taliban and al Qaeda stronghold of South Waziristan in what may be Pakistan's most important battle since it fought with India in the mountains of Kashmir a decade ago. The operation will target Uzbek fighters holed up in the tribal belt since 2001, as well as the Taliban network of Baitullah Mehsud, killed by U.S. drones last August. The assault is expected to take six months, including a pause of several months for winter. However, the operation comes as Pakistan's military leadership said it had "serious concern" over the Kerry-Lugar bill, which triples U.S. non-military assistance to $1.5 billion, but puts a tight reign on the Pakistani army. The bill would force Pakistan to help dismantle illegal nuclear proliferation networks, and forbid the army from interfering with the judicial process. It also includes safeguards designed to prevent the military from diverting civilian aid.

A suicide bomb planted in a Toyota Corolla parked near the Indian embassy in Kabul exploded Thursday morning killing at least 12 civilians, many of them workers cleaning the streets, and wounding at least 67 people. Indian foreign secretary Nirupama Rao said that the embassy was the target of the attack, and it's not the first time. In July of last year, 58 people, including two senior Indian diplomats, were killed and 141 were injured in a bombing that U.S. intelligence officials blamed on elements of Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence agency. While the size of  Thursday's explosion was comparable to that attack, security measures implemented in the intervening time appear to have protected staff.

Things keep heating up between the U.S. and Iran. On Wednesday, Iran's foreign minister blamed the United States for the disappearance of an Iranian scientist allegedly involved in the country's nuclear program. The scientist, Shahram Amiri, disappeared while making a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia four months ago. "We hold Saudi Arabia responsible for Shahram Amiri's situation and consider the U.S. to be involved in his arrest," the Iranian minister said. An American official denied any knowledge of Amiri or his disappearance.

Israel's foreign minister said Thursday that he has a message for the U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell who is visiting Jerusalem this week: there's no hope for a peace deal with the Palestinians for many years. "I will tell him clearly, there are many conflicts in the world that haven't reached a comprehensive solution and people learned to live with it," the minister Avigdor Lieberman said on Israeli radio. Mitchell heads to the Middle East hoping to jump start talks that have been stalled since Israel's war in the Gaza Strip in January.

After speaking out in defense of film maker Roman Polanski, France's Culture Minister, Frédéric Mitterand is struggling to keep his job, dogged by his own past claims of paying "boys" for sex. Mitterand, the openly gay nephew of the former president, is under attack from opposition politicians who are calling attention to his account of visits to brothels in Bangkok, published in a 2005 memoir. “I got into the habit of paying for boys...The profusion of young, very attractive and immediately available boys put me in a state of desire that I no longer needed to restrain or hide,” Mitterand wrote. One far right politician read excerpts from Mitterand's book on television and is demanding his resignation. The spotlight centered on Mitterand after he became a loud defendant of Polanski.

Regulators asked a House panel on Wednesday to increase oversight over derivatives, the financial instruments blamed by many for accelerating the financial crisis, while companies said such efforts would eliminate jobs and straight-jacket risk management. Representative Barney Frank, Democrat from Massachusetts, said the solution he put forward is a "work in progress." A bill for greater regulation probably won't reach President Barack Obama until December at the earliest, Frank said. There will be plenty of wrangling between Democrats and Republicans between now and then.

"Whatever" is officially the most annoying saying, according to a nationwide poll by Marist. Nearly half of Americans (47 percent) object to the saying, and even more Midwesterners (55 percent) dislike it. Only 19 percent of them feel the same way about "you know," which is the phrase that gets under 32 percent of Northeasterners' skin.

Harvard University has maintained its top ranking in London magazine Times Higher Education's annual QS World University Rankings. American predominance is fading: last year, there were 37 American schools in the survey's top 100 global rankings, but this year only 32 make an appearance. Asian schools are moving up the ladder, putting pressure on their American and British peers. Yale University, Princeton University, M.I.T., and the California Institute of Technology join Harvard in the top ten.

In 1850, the master of a South Carolina estate sold a 6-year-old slave girl named Melvinia for $475 and shipped her to a three-slave estate in Georgia. When she was a teenager, she had a child with a white man—an unremarkable event in the sad history of slavery, except that Melvinia and her child’s father are the great-great-great-grandparents of Michelle Obama. The New York Times has uncovered this unknown portion of Michelle’s family history. Melvinia’s son, Dolphus, migrated to Birmingham, Alabama, in 1888 and co-founded the Trinity Baptist Church, which helped lead the civil-rights movement and still exists today. He died at the age of 91 in 1950, and his obituary appeared in the same issue of The Birmingham World as an article with the historic headline, “U.S. Court Bans Segregation in Diners and Higher Education.”

Will fiscal conservatives rejoice? The Congressional Budget Office has completed a preliminary analysis of the Senate health-care reform package and says the bill could cut federal deficits by $81 billion over the decade and would cover 94 percent of eligible people. The cost over 10 years would be $829 billion. Blue Dog Dem Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee and the man who steered this moderate-yet-controversial version of the bill, celebrated the analysis: “This legislation, I believe, is a smart investment on our federal balance sheet. It’s an even smarter investment for American families, businesses, and our economy.” His committee could vote as early as Friday on the legislation.

Everyone can hold off comparing the upcoming 2010 midterms to those of 1994 when the Republican Revolution swept the country, upturning Congress and handing the majority over to the GOP. Here's why: back in 1994, 29 House Democrat incumbents retired, but next year, only 9 members won't defend their seats. President Obama's popularity will likely be higher than Bill Clinton's was fifteen years ago. Finally, with the ghost of the 1994 midterms, Democratic Congressman say they're at the ready, preparing for the election far earlier than their predecessors did.

Guy Ritchie says he still loves Madonna—but he’s got a funny way of showing it. In a revealing interview in the November issue of Esquire, Madge’s movie-director ex calls her “retarded” in between rambling descriptions of the queen of pop’s staying power: “She’s a manifester, if there ever was one. First-rate manifester. Put Madonna up against any 23-year-old, she’ll outwork them, outdance them, outperform them. The woman is broad.” The foul-mouthed Ritchie, who has two children with Madonna, goes on to sing the praises of Brazilian jujitsu, his son’s Xbox skills, and Richoux marmalade. His movie Sherlock Holmes comes out in December.