Sports & Entertainment

According to The New York Times, a series about vampires, “True Blood,” is lifting HBO out of the ratings doldrums, “pulling the channel out of a dry spell that began when several hit shows like ‘The Sopranos’ ended.”

We are in the vampire moment, led by Count Obama.

President Obama is the lead vampire. He is seductive, with impossibly high popularity ratings, given the circumstances facing the country. He prefers the nighttime to party (he turned down a dinner invitation from Vladimir Putin so he could party with Washington Capitals hockey star Alexander Ovechkin). He is debonair, with a winning smile, and a certain elegance that plays well with female voters especially. Read more...

Over this past weekend, while watching the U.S. soccer team lose a gut-wrenching Confederations Cup final to the Samba Boys of Brazil, I had a strange insight: that being a U.S. Soccer fan is a lot like being a member of a third political party. I can only claim knowledge of what it’s like to be a U.S. Soccer fan, but the similarities seem striking.

Consider that in both cases, casual acquaintances think you’re a bit strange — it’s not that they consider your choice a fatal character flaw, but it’s obvious that you possess a very different worldview. I’ll admit that I’ve tried to work soccer into more discussions than normal conversational etiquette would recommend and I’ve observed the same thing about members of a third party (ever get caught in a three-hour conversation about the elimination of the income tax?). U.S. Soccer is always looking for a savior to lead it out of irrelevance, a player on the shortlist for best in the world. In short, it is looking for someone like Abraham Lincoln, someone who can displace one of the “big four” American sports, like Honest Abe vanquished the Whigs. Read more...

Armstrong Williams remembers Michael Jackson as the cultural and musical icon he was, and says the world will remember him for his contributions to society and not the unstable behavior that Jackson had displayed in recent years.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) has graciously accepted David Letterman's second attempt at what he is trying to pass off as an apology for his inappropriate "joke" about her daughter having sex with A-Rod. Good for Sarah — but she really didn't have to.

After the increasingly unfunny late-night show host "joked" about Palin's 14-year-old daughter becoming pregnant by an adult male athlete while accompanying the governor to a Yankees game on her visit to New York, there was, understandably, a firestorm. Even Letterman's biggest fans had trouble defending him. Read more...

"I told a bad joke. I told a joke that was beyond flawed ... It's not your fault that it was misunderstood, it's my fault ... I'm sorry about it and I'll try to do better in the future," David Letterman said on "The Late Show" last night.

After a week of controversy, the apology was spot-on and came not a moment too soon. Read more...

I've never been a devoted fan of David Letterman, but I've watched his show enough to appreciate his wit. He can be truly funny, and his political humor, though always one-sided, is some of his best work.

But this week he went too far.

By now, more people know about his remarks Tuesday night — about Palin, mother and daughter — than they do about the potentially regime-changing election in Iran and the stiff new U.N. sanctions against North Korea. Read more...

It was good of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has a daughter of his own, to come out in support of his running mate, Sarah Palin, after her daughter — or daughters — were slandered by late-night comedian David Letterman.

The Palins have shown remarkable grace and restraint in this. Other commentators have disgracefully attacked their children in the past, some working for the highest newspapers. If it was my daughter, I’m not sure that I could be so restrained. Read more...

It turns out that the new political feud isn't Rush Limbaugh vs. Barack Obama or Dick Cheney vs. Colin Powell. As Rick Klein notes in ABC's indispensable The Note, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) and David Letterman are locked in a battle over jokes made at Palin's expense this week while she was on the East Coast.

The jokes included a line in Letterman's famous Top 10 list, this one devoted to Sarah Palin, in which he joked about Palin having a "slutty" look and another joke in which he described Palin's daughter being "knocked up" by Alex Rodriguez at a Yankees game. Read more...

President Obama wasn’t even out of the ballroom at Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner before the buzz started: “Did Wanda Sykes go too far?” Especially with her joke about Rush Limbaugh’s being the 20th hijacker, but he missed his flight because he was whacked out on Oxycontin.

Give me a break! Of course she didn’t go too far. And of course there’s no need for her or anyone else to apologize. Read more...

Just when we leave town for a few days for Son No. 1’s college graduation in Tennessee, key events occur; not in the Punjab, Iraq or Washington, D.C., but closer to the mythical core of our American being — on the strange and timeless island of J.J. Abrams’s long-running TV show “Lost.”

This is important to us because, like J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, set in the background of an ancient European tribal and ethnic conflict with religious overtones that expands to every corner of the world, the “Lost” hero is given a task that much be successfully completed before the endless conflict and confusion can stop and the world can begin again. Frodo must kill the Golem in the Tolkien series. In “Lost,” John Locke. Man of the Enlightenment, must kill Jacob, the spirit voice of the island’s ancient temple, before the new millennium, identified in the mythology as the first Aquarian millennium, can awaken. In this week’s episode, Locke goes to kill Jacob. Read more...