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Republican South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford became a household name for his affair with an Argentine woman. Then, Monday, we heard that his Lieutenant Andre Bauer does dudes. Now the GOP may have a new, sexy, erotica-writing star: Kristin Maguire.

So, who’s Kristin Maguire? She’s South Carolina’s former Board of Education Chairwoman and a big wig in the state’s Republican party. She resigned from the board earlier today to deal with “family matters,” a term that’s long been a disgraced politico’s go-to excuse. It used to work, but now people are hip to it and realize that something scintillating, perhaps even sinister, remains unseen. And, according to the admittedly biased FITSNews, that’s precisely the case with Maguire. They claim that the mother of four home-schooled children vacated her seat because of her super-secret hobby: writing erotic fiction.

Yes, apparently there are some similarities between Maguire and a virtual alter ego, Bridget Keeney. Like what? Well, like age, number of children and their background in engineering. That’s not much to go on, of course, but FITS claims to have seen documents proving Maguire discussed the matter with Sanford ahead of her resignation and that his administration helped her cover her trail. This wouldn’t be a big deal, of course, except for the fact that — surprise! — Maguire was thick as thieves with the “family values” set. She even donated $1,300 to failed presidential candidate and rabid bigot Mike Huckabee last year.

Maguire wouldn’t talk to the site, but made no effort to deny the claims. Nor did she address allegations that she and Sanford’s chief of staff tried, together, like a family, to scrub the skin stories from the Internet. She did, however, tell FITS that she had been to some of the sites where Ms. Keeney’s work was archived.

Of course, none of this comes as a surprise: it’s part and parcel for the Republican party, a clan that once included Larry Craig, Mark Foley and, by way of ideological network, Ted Haggard. The Republicans have an unparalleled ability to bounce back from sex scandals. People forget. We, like, have the collective memory of a gold fish, but we wonder if, should the Maguire story gain traction and end up being absolutely, positively confirmed, the GOP can dust itself off from this sort of story.

First and foremost, Maguire’s a woman. The most prominent Republican sex scandals involve men, who, we all know, are dogs and are at least forgiven for their sexual appetites, like that prostitute-hiring Senator, David Vitter. As for the gays, like Foley, they’re quietly and quickly dropped in the political dust bin, like some long-lost uncle no one can quite remember.

But Maguire’s femininity, coupled with her post as head of the state’s education board, could force the GOP and its followers to confront two things at once: one, women’s sexuality, a topic we’re sure the right-wing does not want to discuss and, two, children. She long touted teaching abstinence and intelligent design in schools, a stance that made her popular with the right-wing set. Those same family values groups, one of the GOP’s most loyal constituents, also have a long history of using children to induce panic when it comes to the gays, because homos can’t control their rampant sexuality and then seduce and transform the nation’s children.

It would be hard for those groups to ignore Maguire’s alleged prose, like a tale entitled “Continental Cuisine,” which features a woman blowing a man while his pal wanks one off. (Sample line: “The rhythmic sway of the train car added to the bobbing of my head as I sucked deeply.”)

Another tale goes by the name, “Lauren’s Masturbatory Musings.” You can only imagine what that one concerns. Both are available at FITSNews’ site and are quite tawdry, trashy and downright raunchy, which means they’re great.

As much as we may love them, it will be interesting to see how the GOP and, more immediately, Sanford himself react to claims that he knew about this rubbish months ago. It’s a bit sad, really: the Republicans have been trying with all their might to remake their image. This doesn’t do them any favors, even if it’s just an unfounded reminder of the party’s previous carnal sins.

Image via stewf’s flickr.

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Ugh. What a terrible cover. “JACKIE: HER LONELIEST BATTLE,” really? Was she furious that Audrina sided with Heidi? Did Brad stop calling her? Oh, but wait! Levi Johnston wrote a piece for the issue? Double really?

Sure. Sure he did. The story is not online, so we don’t know how long it is or what form it takes but it does explain why Levi was at Monkey Bar. Because now he’s a Vanity Fair contributor! Si will probably lend him money to buy some real estate in Wasilla.

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Once in a great while a mystery will come along and captivate the world. Who shot JFK? Who shot Mr. Burns? And now, who shot it to make Michael Jackson’s youngest child, “Blanket?”

While the late pop-star’s dermatologist allegedly believes he’s the father of Paris and Prince Michael, there are still rumors swirling around Blanket. And, of course, those rumors are wild, titillating and just plain wacky. Some believed that restrauteur Al Malnik fathered the long-haired 7-year old, but Malnik denied that claim.

Now, in an apparent grab for even more outlandish hearsay, British tabloid The Sun — and others — are citing sources who claim Macaulay Culkin shot his wad for the king of pop.

Thankfully, these sources are well aware that the nonsense their spouting sounds like bullshit:

So many names have been mentioned as prospective dads, and this is probably the wackiest yet. But Jackson and Culkin were best friends. He was one of the few people Jackson really trusted and Mack never let him down. Really, Jackson idolized him - that’s why he asked Mack to donate sperm. Deep down, I think he always wished Mack was his son. Creating Blanket was the next best thing.

Actually, the more we think about this, the more it’s feasible that Culkin did the deed for his buddy Jackson. As the source said, they were best friends. And what’s more best friendly than donating your sperm so that your pal can create the illusion that you’re actually his son? Nothing, really.

Really, this must stop. Marlon Jackson came out this weekend said perhaps the most sensible thing any of the family has said since Jackson’s death: “Those were Michael’s kids - regardless of where they came from.” Here, here! These kids are going to be messed up. That’s a fact. They hardly need the media circling like vultures, questioning from whence they came. But perhaps this is simply a sad example of supply and demand.

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Anna Wintour apparently couldn’t get enough of The September Issue, for she was snapped waiting in line to see the fashionable documentary this weekend. How pedestrian! The girl behind Wintour obviously recognizes the Vogue editrix and looks appropriately fearful.

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DJ AM - né Adam Goldstein - was the Kevin Bacon of LA’s music-celebrity scene, except he was connected to everyone by two degrees. His death gets more tragic as it unfolds. The outpouring for him out there’s large.

AM and his girlfriend, Hayley Wood, broke up a little over a week ago, as it turned out. AM had still been experiencing PTSD from the plane crash he and Travis Barker survived a year ago.

Tributes from exes, his music-making partner Travis Barker, and celebrities of all stripes poured out for him over the last few days. And yeah, that’s the Palms in Vegas, where he had a residency, dimming their lights for him. 

AM had been working on a show for MTV about drug addiction, something he’d dealt with his entire life. He grew up with it—his father was a drug addict—had been to rehab for it, and finally, was thought to have escaped its grasp. Initial reports are noting that he was indeed found with drugs on him: crack, Xanax, Vicodin and oxycodone. AM had tried to commit suicide once in his life already.

The guy was mostly known for his collaboration with Blink 182 drummer Travis Barker—TRV$ AM—for which they put out mixtapes for free together and went on tour.

AM also made a name for himself mixing rock tracks, earning himself a bit of a cross-over from the pop scene. Here he is, mixing Oasis’ “Wonderwall” with M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes.”

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The NYT Magazine’s cover story about a euthanizing, beleaguered hospital during and after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans dropped today. It’s estimated to have cost around $400,000. What kind of reporting does that buy? The expensive, endangered type.

That $400,000 number comes straight from Times Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati estimating what it would’ve cost…had the Times paid for it in its entirety. But the bill for it was heavily footed by ProPublica, a independent non-profit “newsroom” doing investigative journalism.

The story’s being published and can be read at both ProPublica and in The New York Times Magazine, and can be reprinted by anyone, anywhere beginning September 29th. Sheri Fink, the reporter, began working on the story in 2007, for four months, with her own money. ProPublica started picking up the tab, Fink stayed with the story full-time, and two years later, we have it in our hands. And what is it?

“The Deadly Choices at Memorial” details, in 13,000 words, the goings on at Memorial Medical center in New Orleans during and after Katrina’s hit. Some of the major points:

• The Doctors’ Perspective: Much of the story focuses around Dr. Anna Pou, who made the call to euthanize patients, resulting in her subsequent arrest and grand jury investigation. Fink interviewed Pou extensively. “Pou would later say she was trying to do the most good with a limited pool of resources. The decision that certain sicker patients should go last has its risks.”
• Triage: It’s a system of categorizing patients according to health in situations like this, where resources outnumber patients. Apparently, nine recognized systems of Triage exist. Not one of them were well understood by Pou and her staff. “Pou and her colleagues had little if any training in triage systems and were not guided by any particular triage protocol.” Things that weren’t known that are now: the number of patients, and what they went through/were injected with.
• The Patients’ Perspective: Vera LeBlanc was one of the DNR patient at Lifecare, the hospital-within-a-hospital at memorial. Her son, Mark, wanted to save her when a staffer at Memorial stopped her. “Several doctors told them they couldn’t leave with Vera. ‘The hell we can’t,’ Sandra said. The couple ignored the doctors, and Vera smiled and chatted as Mark and several others picked her up and carried her onto an airboat.”
• Dr. Frank Minyard, The Orleans Parish Coroner: Minyard investigated Pou. After Pou went on TV to defend herself, Minyard—a devout Catholic—met with Pou to suss out her character: “They talked for about an hour. She told him that she had been trying to alleviate pain and suffering. Given that Pou’s lawyer was there, Minyard was careful not to put her on the spot with direct questions about what she had done. The conditions she described at Memorial took him back to the days he spent trapped in the courthouse after Katrina. How precious food and water had seemed. How impossible it was to sleep at night with gunshots echoing all around. Minyard told me that his feelings were less sympathetic than he let Pou know.“
• Photojournalism: The Times sent photographers down there to get a photo essay on what it’s like at Memorial now. And it still looks like the war zone it became. The pictures are, while unsurprising, pretty stunning.

And then there’s the kicker: the shill for laws protecting health care workers in disasters from Pou. And the conversation about the lines of communication between patients and doctors, when obscured, becoming third-rail ordeals.

Much of the discussion that’s going to dominate this article in the media, sadly, is that it maybe costs $400,000 to produce a piece of thorough, lengthy investigative journalism, the kind that sites like this one are going to maybe kill one bullet point at a time by summarizing them, as I did above. The fact that a non-profit had to foot the bill’s only going to fan the flames even further.

What’s going to happen to investigative journalism because of blogs? Important question with hard answers nobody’s sure of yet (except for blogs doing their own investigative journalism, maybe). Just as important, however, are the number of readers who are going to click through to Fink’s story. Bringing into question a $400,000 story’s costs misses the larger point of how much the actual information contained within the story’s worth to readers, and who’s going to capitalize on it. Again: it took a non-profit to get a story of this size out there. Who’s going to pay for the next Watergate? Or the next Torture Memos? And what kind of models are going to emerge from it?

Whoever foots the bill, if it comes out anything like this, good on ‘em.

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There’s a line in a song: “All the freaky people make the beauty of the world.” And then there’s this: a blog taking photos of Wal-Mart patrons. Cruel? Yes. Hysterical? Absolutely. But fascinating. And somehow, art.

The site doesn’t claim to take any kind of political stance on the globalizing, capitalist behemoth, and Adbusters’ nightmare that is Wal-Mart, other than that as purely sociological entertainment. They even say so in their, uh, manifesto:

People of Walmart was founded in August of 2009 by three friends and roommates after an inspirational trip to WalMart. Let’s face it; we all have seen the people who obviously don’t have mirrors and/or family and friends to lock them in a basement, and they all seem to congregate at Walmart. It’s not everywhere that you can shop for milk at 10 a.m. next to a 400lb mother of 6 wearing a pink tube top, leopard tights, and hooker heels.

And again: this is, on a very real level, needlessly mean. Cintra Wilson would approve.

But it’s also completely fascinating to see the “all stripes” crowd that comes to Wal-Mart for their psychotically competitive, mom-and-pop murdering prices. The composite picture that’s coming together could be one of the great photo essays of our time. I’m gonna go ahead and call this art. It’s Andreas Gursky meets the social voyeurism of Party Crash photog Nikola Tamindzic, mixed in with the strange loneliness of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. Here’re some of my favorites of what you’re going to see. Like I said: art.

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Journalism continues staggering pushes forward on an otherwise ordinary Sunday! In the great “tradition” of mixing up people like Matt Lauer and Meredith Viera with public drunks like Hoda and Kathy Lee, The Today Show’s newest hire? Jenna Bush. Whee!

Absolutely, completely, 100% true. Here’s looking at you, NBC, via the AP report:

…a 27-year-old teacher in Baltimore, [Bush] will contribute stories about once a month on issues like education to television’s top-rated morning news show, said Jim Bell, its executive producer.

“It wasn’t something I’d always dreamed to do,” she said. “But I think one of the most important things in life is to be open-minded and to be open-minded for change.”

Hopefully, she’ll end up hanging around post-segment, get shitty with Kathy Lee and Hoda, and enlighten them with the story of Chandarella. Must See TV, right there. Jim Bell, Today’s executive producer is already giving quotes about how he’s not using it as political grease for a future shot at trying to Frost/Nixon old Daddy Dubya. Watch that D:

Bell said Hager won’t be covering politics. He said he didn’t consider the job as a down payment for a future interview with her father, who has been living quietly in Texas since leaving office earlier this year. Attacks on NBC News by conservatives for the liberal bent of MSNBC also had nothing to do with it, he said. “I hope to focus on what I’m passionate about because I think I’d do them best job on them - education, urban education, women and children’s issues and literacy,” Hager said.

Jenna Bush is nice, and fun! And know what? This is actually somewhat likable in its complete and utter boldfaced stunt-casting nature. And while this might not exactly be a ratings boon—at all—educational it shall be: all you aspiring TV anchors, look to the stars! You apparently have a better chance of getting there than on Today.

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While America’s medical debates rage on, many of its significant members, of all colors and sizes, limply, quietly weep to themselves: penises. But! This is one health care package making serious progress: flaccid penises demand innovation, as the Times discovered.

In tomorrow’s Health section will be an article by one Ms. Lesley Alderman, whose wide, circumspect research deeply penetrates one of the key mysteries of the universe: how to further solve the problem of a limp dick. Those Viagra pills are too expensive! At $15 a pop, we learn, science has been forced to come up with alternatives. Like a so-called “penis pump”, or a “vacuum erection device,” Alderman writes. Behold the future:

It works like this: you place a tube on the penis and then pump the air out of the tube, which pulls blood into the penis. When the penis is erect, you then put a snug ring around the base to maintain the erection, which lasts long enough to have sex. The cost for the device, which requires a prescription, can run from $300 to $600, but most insurers and Medicare will cover part of the cost and the device should last for years. Even if you spend $300 out of pocket and use the device once a week, you’ll be spending much less per year than on pills or injections. You can also buy a nonprescription pump online (even Amazon carries some) for as little as $30, Dr. McCullough said.

A non-prescription penis pump, you say? Available for your average consumer? Science is incredible.

When you’re not inflating your penis with a Medicare-purchased vacuum erection device - which, it should be noted, is different than an average house vacuum, sans attachment - you can give “self-administered injections of alprostadil” a shot. Literally. It’s a drug that helps blood vessels expand, and you mainline it straight into your procreation device with a hypodermic needle. Let’s face it: there’s no greater turn-on than a penis shot right before some good, sweet loving. Especially if you’re high on Meth. The New York Times neglects to inform you that this innovation was preceded by AC/DC almost 20 years ago in the 1990 classic, “Shot of Love.”

But the best way to regard upkeep of penises (or the keeping up of) is, as always, living a healthy lifestyle:

“Erectile problems may show up about three years before a cardiovascular event such as a heart attack or stroke,” says Dr. Ira Sharlip, clinical professor of urology at the University of California, San Francisco…”There is increasing evidence that we can reverse erectile dysfunction with lifestyle changes,” says Dr. Drogo K. Montague, director of the Center for Genitourinary Reconstruction in the Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute at Cleveland Clinic.

Great news for everyone but AC/DC, whose engorged testicles could get in the way of hopping on the treadmill. Otherwise, you, too, can begin your firm commitment to your penis, today. As with everything, exercise is tragically, sadly the final answer.

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Calling Glenn Beck an easy target’s calling a spade out by its raw materials. Duck tests of his M.O. are so painfully obvious, even he’s openly talking about it now. Contained herein: Psychiatrists, bullies, his Heavenly Father, and attackers!

Consider this particular segment Glenn Beck’s victory lap. Via Media Matters, Beck, who’s kicking ass in the ratings, whether he’s gearing up to be canned or not, took out his infamous whiteboard, went over all the things everyone’s ever called him, and talked to a psychiatrist friend of his about it. Yes: Glenn Beck has a friend, who is a shrink, who can stand to be around him without suggesting inpatient help. Wonder what his hourly rate is. Notably, the names Beck has been called have probably helped his rise to infamy. He’s built a career on being an easy target, so why stop here? But when he gets to the last name on his list, there’s a sigh of exasperation, a sound of disturbed relief to get the words out.

In 1972, two other shrinks named Shelly Duval and Robert A. Wicklund put forth a self-awareness theory in which they argue that people adhere to their own conceptions of themselves. It still rings true today. In other words: buckle in. Beck’s a guy who clearly sees himself as a martyr. His high ratings paired with his perceived all-ends criticism, recent loss of ad sales, and possible position in front of Fox’s firing squad, is about to get a shitton crazier. The legacies of Howard Beale and maybe even—but let’s hope not—Budd Dwyer ring frighteningly true. They could eventually have someone new amongst their ranks, and above all others, that guy could be Glenn Beck. Once he learns how to spell, he may be unstoppable:

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