The New York Daily News is reporting on a credit card dispute between one Robert McCormick, CEO of Savvis Communications (pictured left), and American Express. AMEX is suing McCormick for refusing to pay a $241,000 bill from Scores, New York’s famous gentlemen’s club.

McCormick, married with three daughters, doesn’t deny having gone to Scores on the night in question. He does, however, dispute the grand total. He says at most he spent $20,000.

Still, that’s an awful lot of lap dances.

Now I know what some of our readers are thinking: Don’t forget to take into account the bottles of champagne, the tips to dancers and bouncers, the cost of reserving the champagne room all to yourself, more tips to make the bouncers turn a blind eye, bonuses for the lap dancers to offer those Oriental massages, and on and on…

Or, um, is that just me?

(Just kidding, honey!)

From the Baseball Crank:

. . . so far, everything we’ve seen of Miers’ writings suggests that the woman simply is not the kind of writer I would consider a good summer associate at my law firm, let alone a Supreme Court Justice.

Just what you’d expect from a Hah-vahd Law grad who practices in one of those Big Time firms in New York City.

Typical.

Because she’s the bestest, the Cake Editrix has provided an actual copy of the GQ profile on Sarah Silverman that is sure to delight and entertain you all weekend long. (With a title like “Sarah Silverman has the Cleanest Breasts in America,” how can you go wrong?)

Many thanks, Kathy; you’ve done a great service for America.

The Wershovenist Pig pours one for Matus:

What does a tourist do in the Highlands, apart from gawk at the ubiquitous sheep and bison-like brown cows? Visit Scotch whisky distilleries.

Walking by huge copper pot stills and oak vats, I felt as though I was in an oversized chem lab, but instead of precipitating out para-dichloro-benzene, the workers here were making spirits, sweet spirits.

There follows boozy analysis of liquor stocks.

Danielle Crittenden hints at something which I’ve been waiting for someone to notice:

We are asked to stand by her because, simply, she is a woman — a “pioneer,” a “glass-ceiling breaker” — even while other more qualified women were rejected for the position (and interestingly, rejected by Harriet herself, who headed the “search” committee).

We’ve been told by Miers only that she didn’t want to be considered for the first vacancy, but it’s not clear that she wasn’t angling for the second slot. Certainly, what Crittenden notes here is interesting: Miers was in charge of the search committee and somehow none of the qualified women made the cut. I wonder why that was.

Yes! JusticeMiers.com has arrived.

Just so you know I’m not completely in the tank for the Best Magazine on the Planet, their profile of Sarah Silverman, “Quiet Depravity,” is something of a dud.

Silverman makes great copy, and anyone profiling her should get out of the way and let her make the funny. The New Yorker‘s Dana Goodyear lets us have little tastes of Silverman:

“I wear this St. Christopher medal sometimes because—I’m Jewish, but my boyfriend is Catholic—it was cute the way he gave it to me. He said if it doesn’t burn through my skin it will protect me.”

And even better:

I got in trouble for saying the word “Chink” on a talk show, a network talk show. It was in the context of a joke. Obviously. That’d be weird. That’d be a really bad career choice if it wasn’t. But, nevertheless, the president of an Asian-American watchdog group out here in Los Angeles, his name is Guy Aoki, and he was up in arms about it and he put my name in the papers calling me a racist, and it hurt. As a Jew—as a member of the Jewish community—I was really concerned that we were losing control of the media. Right? What kind of a world do we live in where a totally cute white girl can’t say “Chink” on network television? It’s like the fifties. It’s scary.
There are only two Asian people that I know that I have any problem with, at all. One is, uh, Guy Aoki. The other is my friend Steve, who actually went pee-pee in my Coke. He’s all, ‘Me Chinese, me play joke.’ Uh, if you have to explain it, Steve, it’s not funny.

But neither of these bits is vintage Silverman and Goodyear gets waylaid by extended riffs about feminism and outrageousness in comedy.

For the definitive Silverman piece, got back to the March 1999 issue of GQ and read Michael MacCambridge’s “Sarah Silverman has the Cleanest Breasts in America.” (I can’t find it online.) It’s a great read and features lots of classic Silverman, including this very blue, and hence invisotexted, bit:

A couple nights ago, I was licking jelly off my boyfriend’s penis [pause]

And I thought, Oh, my God–[beat]–I’m turning into my mother!

Byron York has a grim piece about the terrible toll the White House is paying because of the assault from elitist Beltway conservatives. Some of the highlights:

“It’s been a gradual descent into almost silence,” says a second source of the calls. “The meetings with the senators are going terribly. On a scale of one to 100, they are in negative territory. The thought now is that they have to end….Obviously the smart thing to do would be to withdraw the nomination and have a do-over as soon as possible. But the White House is so irrational that who knows? As of this morning, there is a sort of pig-headed resolve to press forward, cancel the meetings with senators if necessary, and bone up for the hearings.”

Of course, all of York’s sources are anonymous, so you shouldn’t trust these disloyal leakers. No, you should be reading Marvin Olasky, who has real standards and thinks that things are going just fine. Mr. Olasky hasn’t received a single negative view on Miers^*.

^{*That is, a single negative view that meets his superior standards of publication. He’s not some shoot-from-the-hip cub reporter like that rascally Byron York.}