'Barack Obama to Suddenly Care About NASCAR'

Here's a little chuckle for a Tuesday morning.

The funny folks over at Comedy Central have apparently become loyal Ticket readers too. Especially the ones on that website's wonderfully insightful Indecision 2008 News Desk -- "Something Approximating Election News with Something Approximating Honesty."

Last night the website's blogger took one of our recent items -- "Barack Obama may campaign at a NASCAR event" -- and had a little more fun with it. (See the headline on this morning's Ticket item.)

The Ticket had reported Thursday that Obama was considering attending a NASCAR event in coming months because, well, that's where white working-class votes are.

And the Democrat can use some. A whole bunch, in fact. We noted that Bill Clinton went to a NASCAR event in 1992 and got booed and boycotted, while George W. Bush received a friendlier reception in more recent years.

Comedy Central's CubbyChaser linked to our item about Obama's plans with the comment: "Why does this not surprise me in the least?"

And he provides a doctored photo of the Democratic nominee that should become a poster. We're not going to ruin his sight gag. You can click here to see it for yourself.

And be sure to note Obama's sponsor.

--Andrew Malcolm

Ashley Alexandra Dupre is back! And thankful, thank you

In case you've been worried, you should know that Ashley Alexandra Dupre, a.k.a. Kristen, of the Spitzer scandal is back. She's fine. Apparently happy. And her mood is "thankful."

That according to her restored MySpace page.

Alexandra's photo here became very famous overnight because she has this huge pair of sunglasses. In fact, she was so famous so suddenly, we feel like we've known her a long time.

You probably remember her as the high-priced prostitute who traveled all the way from New York City to Washington, D.C., to a high-priced hotel for a high-priced night with a high-ranking government official, who turned out to be New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who happened to have been an outspoken prosecutor who prosecuted illegal things like, well, prostitution.

So, with his wife by his side, Spitzer was forced to resign from the governor's office. (Which cost Hillary Clinton yet another superdelegate, btw.)

The jut-jawed Spitzer was replaced by his lieutenant governor, David Paterson, who is well liked in New York's capital, is legally blind and, although no one remembers asking, took the opportunity of his first weekend in office to reveal along with his wife Michelle that they both had had extramarital affairs during their marriage. Is there something in the Albany water?

But that's another story.

Anyway, Alexandra kind of dropped out of sight. But she's back now and busy updating her page. She had so many Friend requests that she got behind and MySpace deleted a whole bunch because they timed out.

So if yours was among them, she asks you to file another one please.

She also wants to thank everyone for their support and publishes some inspirational letters she received. Here's one: "hey i just wanted to say to you, that you truely are the most beautiful women i have ever seen. i am just a nobody in this world and knowing that you might just read this has really made my day."

If you want, you can go to her music page and join the 5-million-plus others who have sampled some. She says she is all about music.

You can also go to her regular page and read some of the comments or leave one of your own. Or not.

We now resume our normal programming.

--Andrew Malcolm

Photo credit: MySpace via AFP/Getty Images

P.S. Here's a bonus for people who read the photo credits. The New York Daily News took a bunch of photos of Alexandra on the beach recently and the big news is she has a tattoo down there.

Top of the Ticket, the start of Year Two

On this, the first anniversary of our Top of the Ticket blog, we are reminded of the mercurial, unpredictable nature of U.S. politics -- part of what makes what we do so fascinating.

Our goal -- one of us on the East Coast and the other on the far more important or at least less humid West Coast -- was to write about Campaign '08 virtually around the clock.

Our second-ever posting, 12 months ago today, previewed an upcoming L.A. Times/Bloomberg Poll; later in the day, we detailed the results of the nationwide survey. The findings were in line with other polls of the time.

In the Republican presidential race, which then seemed the most likely to last deep into the primary season, Rudy Giuliani was perched in first place. His lead wasn't overwhelming, but it was strong enough that he appeared certain to remain a major contender.

His liberal record on social issues loomed as an obvious liability within his party, but his tough-on-terrorism message was attracting substantial support from moderates and GOP-leaning independents.

His major headache among rivals last June was an as-yet-undeclared candidate who was riding a wave as the great conservative hope -- Fred Thompson. He ran a strong second in the poll.

Lagging far behind were John McCain and Mitt Romney, each barely with double-digit support. In our preview posting, we were especially scornful of McCain, noting sarcastically (and foolishly, as it turned out) that in the poll, he found himself "in heated competition with the 'Don't Know' category."

Meriting no mention from us was Mike Huckabee, one of several back-of-the-pack candidates barely earning any support across the country.

The Democratic race, at that point, seemed so much more cut-and-dried.

Hillary Clinton was the clear front-runner; Barack Obama was just as clearly ...

Patriotic Barack Obama lapel pins unveiled honoring all 57 states

Yesterday The Ticket broke the stunning news of America's acquisition of seven, maybe eight, new states, according to future president Barack Obama.

He was speaking at the start of a two-day swoop through Oregon, which is already a state.

In Beaverton, which is not a state yet, the Democrat let it slip that during this marathon 16-month party presidential nomination struggle against a bunch of dropouts and this female political zombie from New York who won't surrender short of a silver stake, he had already visited 57 states with one more to go.

That's not counting the existing states of Alaska and Hawaii, he said, which his staff decided aren't important enough to visit. Unless maybe you're Mike Gravel or Dennis Kucinich, who weren't very important either, come to think of it.

Here's the spoof-proof Obama video as evidence:

Has this aging freshman senator -- he'll be almost 60 in 13 years -- lost his bearings? Are the eight new states caucus or primary? And will Howard Dean bar them from the convention too?

Obama's gaffe caused a noticeable stir online during the day and even the respected Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic anticipated that the political media would kindly write the Democrat's mis-statement off to fatigue. But he wrote if, say, the Republican nominee-to-be had uttered the same silly fatigue flub, it would surely be added to eager suspicions of senility.

Besides trying to noodle out what the new states are, some clever campaign folks over at the phenomenal Suitably Flip blog got to thinking right away.

And they've now unveiled a new patriotic lapel pin that anyone can wear with pride even, say, a Harvard-educated senator from Illinois who's been trying to make a point about opposing a war before it even started.

Here is the new pin replete with all 57 stars:

You'll probably want to order several for friends and family. And any Chablis-sipping senators you might know.

--Andrew Malcolm

President Bush to attend daughter Jenna's wedding despite no pizza

President Bush left the White House Thursday. Laura Bush was already in Texas. Virtually everyone in one of the most pervasive political clans in modern American times is gathering in Crawford at this hour for the very private wedding Saturday evening of Henry Hager and Jenna Bush (the blond one).

As The Ticket noted not long ago, unless they're hawking a book or something, the Bush twins (each named for one grandmother) have an aversion to the public political life.

The couple haven't even announced their secret honeymoon location. So hundreds of photographers with long lenses and squadrons of rented helicopters have no idea where to hover. We do know the about-to-be newlyweds have purchased a townhouse in Baltimore.

So there will be virtually no news coverage of the outdoor evening wedding (timed to avoid the central Texas heat, even in May).

White House officials hinted there may be a few ...

New poll: John McCain/Condi Rice ticket wins N.Y. vs Clinton/Obama or Obama/Clinton

Oh, those folks at the Marist Poll in New York are too much. The trouble is there's not much happening on the political surface on the Republican side of the spectrum these days.

Sen. John McCain is quietly fundraising, as much as he hates that part, and organizing his fall election strategy, which will change about 1,000 times before Nov. 4. He's already started defining himself and his life story again for those Americans who haven't been paying attention for a quarter-century.

And Sen. Barack Obama is closing in on or close to Sen. Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, where he's spent enough TV ad money in recent days to buy the eastern half of the state. But those folks don't vote until the 22nd. So there's a lull with, shall we say, sniper fire going back and forth between the Democratic camps.

So why not poll a hypothetical Republican ticket just for fun? Never mind any political realities, who says what they won't do right now because it always changes anyway.

How about pairing up, say, McCain and Condoleezza Rice, who's....

The politics of nipple rings: Where do Clinton and Obama really stand?

Here's one thing that the two remaining Democratic candidates for president have not yet argued over -- nipple rings.

We haven't heard a peep out of either Sen. Hillary Clinton or Sen. Barack Obama about this pointed issue that's been all over the news in recent days. Maybe then, the nation can move along in this seemingly endless political stalemate over their party's nomination.

(By the way, have you voted yet on whether Clinton should just give up and get out of the race? Click here to cast your crucial ballot.)

In the five years this Democratic presidential campaign seems to have been underway, the two presidential wannabes have debated pretty much everything else of real significance for the nation's future -- whether Obama's grandmother is a typical white person, whether Clinton prefers diamonds or pearls, what someone once wrote in a kindergarten paper.

Revealing his proclivity for government secrecy, Obama even refused to disclose what kind of underpants he wears, if you can imagine such a thing in a society where a magazine offers an ex-governor a bundle of money to pose nude.

So, all that's left really are Mandi Hamlin's nipple rings. She thought she....

The McCain Girls. Wow. That's all we can say.

And no, Rene Magritte didn't direct this. But it makes us very glad we live in a desert, where when it does rain, it's only water.

-- Scott Martelle

Coming soon: Kristen, the video

You're probably wondering this morning, given all the political sex news out of New York state these days about the former governor and the new governor and the new governor's wife and their numerous affairs with other people and the Client #9 T-shirts, what's happened to Kristen.

Obviously, all this political fallout is her fault. She started the whole thing by being a high-priced prostitute and forcing Client #9 to transfer thousands of dollars from covert accounts.

And since her space on MySpace is gone now, along with this photo, we're all left with no way of knowing.  Well, there is news. Kristen is going to run for governor of New York on a pro-vice ticket.

Just kidding. But according to the Associated Press, word came late Tuesday from Joe Francis that we will soon be seeing a whole lot more of Kristen, aka Ashley Alexandra Dupre. You may recognize Joe's name from the reputation and fortune he's made from the "Girls Gone Wild" videos that have sold so many thousand copies but nobody you know says they've ever seen.

The Ticket has never seen them either, but we're told these videos involve passing parades of what appear to be sophomore women in sophomoric displays of undress and other non-academic activities seemingly during spring break celebrations. Joe's been in some legal trouble for such things over the years, having been recently released in Florida for filming underage girls and still facing federal tax evasion charges.

But that didn't stop him, he says, from offering a million dollars to Kristen's lawyer to film her. But wait, he said, someone thought to check his company's archives and, lo and behold, there are hours of tapes of said Kristen from 2003 when she traveled to Miami to celebrate her 18th birthday, got in a fight with her girlfriend, was thrown out of her hotel and happened to spend a week on the Gone Wild bus.

Why wouldn't the parent of any 18-year-old girl approve such a celebration?

Just doing the math here. This is 2008 and Kristen is said to be 22. So five years ago she would have been, oh, never mind.

Joe tells AP he's offering website access to those tapes for a lot less than the $1,000 an hour that Client #9 paid. He says it's like finding a winning lottery ticket in his couch.

What a coincidence! Just what we were thinking.

-- Andrew Malcolm

                                                        Photo Credit: MySpace via AFP/Getty Images

All Kristen All Eliot All the Time All Weekend

In case you hadn't heard, there's this working woman named Kristen who apparently got paid $5,500 for one night's duties in a Washington hotel with someone identified in a federal wiretap transcript as Client No. 9.

He's now immortalized on T-shirts and buttons.

">And if you tune to Sirius Satellite Radio Channel 126 (not the NASCAR or NHL channels) this entire weekend, you can find out a whole lot more about him and maybe her, but you won't see this photo of her new watch from Kristen's MySpace page on the radio.

The subscription service Sirius is dedicating an entire channel until midnight Monday to the case involving Kristen, and the Emperors' Club VIP and the about-to-be-former governor of New York, who used to be against prostitution.

According to a company statement, "Client 9 Radio was created in response to passionate listener response to the story throughout the week.'' The photos probably had nothing to do with this passionate response.

They're going to have on the programs the usual talking suspects -- Ed Koch, Judith Regan, Bill Bennett and Alan Dershowitz, who'll go on any channel at any time to argue about anything.

According to the Sirius statement right here on the desk, the programming will also include interviews with real live prostitutes and with presidential Candidate No. 1 for the Republican Party, whose political advisors may not have been consulted when the communications team so eagerly booked him onto this temporary radio channel about illicit sex.

But you better hurry, because the show's already started.

--Andrew Malcolm

                                                     Photo Credit: MySpace via AFP/Getty Images

Hillary and Barack invade the real dreams of millions

Over these past eight busy political months, loyal Ticket readers have come to expect the unexpected here. We've had nearly-naked hotties 4 Ron Paul. We've had Republicans voting for Hillary Clinton. And the usual boxers vs briefs question. We've even had a U. S. Senator tapping his foot in a men's room.

But this morning's opening primary election day item may top them all. It's about how our presidential politicians literally reside in our subconscious.

Let's say you're in the mall and Hillary walks up and says she's had another argument with Bill and needs a hug. So you hug and she asks if you voted for her and you say yes, even though you didn't, because she looks sad.

Suddenly, you're at the railroad station, but the train is just....