Augusta National was the subject of controversy back in 2002 when Martha Burk, chair of the National Council of Women's Organizations, criticized the club publicly. Earlier this year, Ms. Burk rallied for the club to accept IBM's CEO, Virginia Rometty. In a possible rebuke to Ms. Burk's recent advocacy, whom former Augusta head Hootie Johnson had previously claimed to be holding the club "at the point of a bayonet," the club noted in a statement that "consideration with regard to any candidate is deliberate, held in strict confidence and always takes place over an extended period of time."

Could Ms. Rice next achieve her long-held dream of becoming NFL Commissioner? Will she model golf gear next? We'll be sure to expect the unexpected.

Daily Beast TV, the online video channel The Observer first caught wind of in July, has launched on the Beast's website. Though none of the shows bear the name of Ms. Brown’s erstwhile CNBC show, Topic [A], Daily Beast TV makes the same promise: original news commentary from trusted personalities.

The channel’s slogan, “the smartest take on the day’s biggest stories,” is reminiscent of Cheat Sheet’s “read this, not that,” suggesting an audience overwhelmed by the volume of news and starved for a Brown-curated mix.

One existing video series already features the Daily Beast TV logo: “Ask Andrew Anything,” the rotoscoped web-camera videos in which the star blogger Andrew Sullivan answers reader questions like, “What is the meaning of life?” (A: He won’t say, but he does recommend we see Tree of Life.)

Another, "Op-Vid 2012," introduced yesterday, invites "writers, thinkers, and doers" to read essays about the issues at the heart of the campaign, which are then  animated by the Daily Beast. The first features Niall Ferguson on the economy.

"Beast Feed" appears to be more of a catch-all category, including videos related to content in Newsweek, like a video of last week's cover girl Condoleezza Rice playing the piano and casual chats between Daily Beast entertainment writer Ramin Setoodeh and Rolling Stone critic Peter Travers, called "Flick Picks."

The new video initiative suggests the company is still prioritizing the digital operations at the Beast, which has enjoyed a slight bump in traffic since swallowing the Newsweek website and now attracts 10.3  million unique visitors a month, according to the company's Omniture report. (Compete.com reports 2.5 million and Quantcast reports 3.9 million.) Internally, however, some wonder if the business side is equipped to sell advertising for such an amorphous media company.

Newsweek's print advertising was down only 10 percent last quarter, compared to 20 percent drops the previous two quarters, but it remains a drag on the business. Much of Newsweek’s veteran print-ad sales team has departed. In August, associate publisher and Beast veteran Jeff Barish left for Condé Nast and was soon followed by five others in ad sales, who departed for positions at Time, Inc., US Weekly, Bloomberg Businessweek and Harper’s Bazaar, according to an insider, who added that the decision to publish a recent double issue had been made due to flagging ad revenue. Yesterday Adweek wrote that the company lost $30 million last year.

Newer executives may be better equipped to sell the custom digital advertising packages touted by Ms. Brown. Publisher Ray Chelstowski, formerly of the short-lived magazine for the super wealthy, Prestige, and president Robert Gregory, poached from Plum TV last month, both come straight from luxury media, suggesting the once-stodgy newsweekly may be courting advertisers befitting Ms. Brown’s Talk days. Today, the Daily Beast TV vertical displays a large Lexus campaign, although individual videos do not have commercials.

But even one year later, Beast brass still appear a little unsure as to what exactly they’re after. One of Mr. Chelstowski’s hires, a vice president of marketing, has already been let go, according to an insider.

Subheadlined "W. comes clean—on his dad, Condi's farts and the time Dick waterboarded the house boy," the piece is the sort of prankish, juvenile, utterly bogus Q&A that works better in a magazine like Vice (see this month's hilarious—and patently fake—interview with two guys called The Porn Rangers) than an earnest publication like Rolling Stone, which takes its own interviews so seriously—be they with Brad Pitt, David Letterman or John McCain—they lard them with institutional weight by calling them "The Rolling Stone Interview."

Here's Mr. Taibbi pretending to grill the man his magazine once enlisted historian Sean Wilentz to condemn as The Worst President in History, about an important matter that touches on all aspects of his eight years in the White House, from ignoring the August 6, 2001 briefing that read Bin Ladin Determined To Strike Inside US to the invasion of Iraq, the mishandling of Hurricane Katrina, "Mission Accomplished," torture, warrant-less wiretaps, the economy, and his massaging of German Chancellor Angela Merkel:

Deadline for the 2009 National Magazine Awards was Jan. 5.

The U2 frontman will write between "six and ten" columns next year, and he's doing it ... pro bono.

Other Rosenthal dish from last night:

• He admires the work of The Atlantic's Megan McArdle and The National Review's Byron York
• "Condoleezza Rice is a particularly bad op-ed writer."
• Tom Wolfe writes too long

The movie, which stars Josh Brolin, who uncannily channels George W. Bush (or “Bushie,” “Geo,” “Junior” and, of course, “W.”/“Dubya”), does plenty more than paint a picture—or caricature—of the man who still inhabits the Oval Office. It many ways Mr. Stone tells a classic, tragic father-and-son story (as many early critics have noted, one conclusion to draw from the movie is that each of President Bush’s actions have been a direct result of his feeling inadequate to his father, George the elder). But it’s also a cautionary, still-in-session history lesson, and at times a comedy, if in a holy-cow-look-at-the-unbelievable-mess-we’re-in kind of way. But much like Mr. Stone’s other films—say, Wall Street, or his other two grapplings with the modern presidency, Nixon and JFK—W. demonstrates an unrelenting interest in that almighty American ideal: power. In this case, even as we have an elected official sitting in the most powerful office in the world, Mr. Stone seeks to answer this question: Who is the one really pushing the buttons and pulling the levers?

Regarding the past seven years, the answer seems clear. “I think Bush is in charge because he ultimately says yes or no, but it’s clear that he lost control. I think Cheney had more actual practical power because of the appointments he was able to control. … Cheney played [Bush] very, very well. Very well. Masterfully! Because Cheney wanted to control policy but wasn’t interested in the trappings of the presidency,” said Mr. Stone. “It’s really Cheney and [Cheney’s chief of staff David] Addington who are probably the two most villainous aspects of this administration.”

When we meet young Bushie in W., he’s a (somewhat) lovable screw-up—a twinkly-eyed, good-time scamp that his father, played with grave elegant reserve by James Cromwell, continuously has to bail out of trouble and lecture about not embarrassing the family name. Jeb is the good son. W. drinks too much and is a hothead like Babs. After college, he drifts through his 20s and 30s, having the good fortune to meet and marry a sweet and intelligent woman, Laura (played here by Elizabeth Banks). But he’s still unmoored and directionless.

“Honestly, I found him to be a fascinating subject because he’s such a great story,” Mr. Stone said. “It’s a Frank Capra figure, a Preston Sturges figure. Here’s a guy who was 40 years old and a failure in most everything he did. And then he turned it around and had a wonderful second act, and then there’s the third act. And that’s what fascinates us, because that was the presidency. You get a sense from the movie how his character shaped and developed and how he became the president he was.”

Despite the fact that it may seem as though Mr. Stone is trying to do the work of journalists—as with Tina Fey’s impression of Sarah Palin, might it be Josh Brolin’s W. who takes up residence in our memories, as opposed to the man we’ve met through the newspapers and evening news—he’s quick to mention the research he consulted and books he read while preparing for this film, rattling off titles by Ron Suskind, Richard Clarke and Bob Woodward, whose State of Denial was particularly influential. “We finally got past the veil,” he said, pointing out that very little was known early on in Bush’s presidency about those early years in office, with every appearance and press conference orchestrated and the president spending much of his time in Crawford, Texas. “These investigative journalists are really the only ones to peel it back,” said Mr. Stone. “We suspected a lot of stuff was going on, but we didn’t know. We couldn’t have made this movie in 2004 or 2005. It really did take a while, and I think there’s going to be more stuff that’s coming.”

Still, it’s W. himself who is most humanized in the film (though Mr. Stone prefers to say his W. is “empathetic”), which may surprise many viewers given that Mr. Stone is a director not exactly known for having a light touch when it comes to expressing his opinions. Take, for example, 1995’s Nixon, and Anthony Hopkins’ withering depiction of a man wholly consumed by gloom and paranoia.

“I did not like Nixon. I suffered, like many people suffered under him, in Vietnam,” said Mr. Stone. “But you know what? In the movie, we went in there and my job as a dramatist is not the same as that of a private citizen. I wanted to walk in his shoes and understand him. Opinions don’t add up. Hate, love, those things change. Understanding is far more valuable to me.”

But is there something that ties Mr. Stones oeuvre, from JFK to Nixon to W., all together? “Off the top of my head, concern for my country,” he said. “Contrary to what many people think, I love America. It gave me my chance. I love this country and I just think there was a betrayal in the Kennedy assassination, there was a second betrayal with Nixon. I think Reagan is the son of Nixon, and I think Bush Jr. is the grandson of Nixon. I do think Nixon is the forebear to a lot of this stuff.”

W. was completed quickly in order to come out before this year’s election. When asked if he thought that releasing the film while Bush is still in office could influence history as it unfolds, Mr. Stone (who openly supports Senator Obama) was quick to say, “I have no say in that.” But he warned that those who inherit the job will be untangling these past eight years for the next few decades. “W.’s influence is not going to go away in January 2009. He’s going to be impacting us for 20, 30, 40 more years. We’re fighting three wars—Iraq and Afghanistan, and frankly, the most expensive is the war on terror. We have a government that’s been stripped of its ability to function and react, from the economy to New Orleans. There is a disregard and hatred for government in these people that has led us to the place where you have to ask, where are we going to go now? How did we get here?” He paused. “So, we made a first good stab, but there’s more to come in understanding the phenomenon that took over America.”

We’re thinking W. 2 has a nice ring to it.

svilkomerson@observer.com

Oliver Stone’s W., from a screenplay by Stanley Weiser, arrives at a strange time in our nation’s history, when even Iraq and Afghanistan have been pushed off the front pages and away from the TV talking heads by our current doomsday financial crisis. Of course, Mr. Stone, Mr. Weiser and their array of gifted collaborators had no way of knowing before they finished work on their production that the darkest days of the Bush presidency would soon dawn with what now seems like a Herbert Hooverian plunge into the abyss of a worldwide economic collapse. Unfortunately, there is very little discussion of the laissez-faire policies of the Bush administration in W., which might have given the film an aura of prophecy.

Instead, we get a not-entirely-unsympathetic view of George W. Bush in Josh Brolin’s uncanny incarnation of perhaps the most controversial president in our history. Actually, Mr. Brolin is almost as close to the original as the tremendous Tina Fey is to Sarah Palin. He is the linchpin of what seems like a conscious effort to make the 43rd president something more than a Michael Moore caricature.

As Mr. Stone explains his approach in the movie’s production notes: “Regardless of your opinion of George W. Bush, the essence of the movie is to ask questions about the presidency, what happened, and who the man is. How he gets to be president is an amazing story unto itself. At first, he squandered his privileged circumstances. W. explains how he got it back and then what he does with it when he’s President.”

The casting of James Cromwell as W.’s father, George Sr., the 40th president of the United States, is consistent with the non-cartoonish casting of Mr. Brolin as W., as well as that of Elizabeth Banks as Laura Bush and Ellen Burstyn as Barbara Bush. Mr. Stone directs these four pillars of the Bush family with a certain degree of sensitivity and tenderness, almost belying his partisan admission that he rushed the film to completion in 46 days so that it could come out in time to influence this year’s election in the direction of the Democratic Party.

But all bets are off when it comes to the writing and direction of the administration’s inner circle, which is shown as complicit in George W. Bush’s overly macho decision to invade Iraq. This band of miscreants includes Richard Dreyfuss as Dick Cheney, Scott Glenn as Donald Rumsfeld, Toby Jones as Karl Rove, Thandie Newton as Condi Rice, and Jeffrey Wright in a somewhat wishy-washy portrayal of Colin Powell. Mr. Jones’ weasely Truman Capote-like Karl Rove is especially cartoonish, at least in terms of a complete lack of physical resemblance to the old Bush adviser and the new Fox television commentator.

What the film makes crystal clear is the lasting impact of the Oedipal traumas George W. suffered by his father’s favoritism toward his younger son, Jeb. When the first President Bush invades Iraq, and decides, after American and U.N. forces have routed Iraq’s army and liberated Kuwait, not to march to Baghdad and topple Saddam Hussein from power, George W. loudly deplores what he perceives as his father’s timidity. He later blames this allegedly wrong decision as the cause of George Sr.’s subsequent loss to Bill Clinton in the 1992 presidential election.

George W.’s grievances against his father escalates when George Sr. pleads in vain for W. to postpone his run for the governorship of Texas so as not to coincide with Jeb Bush’s running for governor of Florida. Ironically, W. wins and Jeb loses. No matter. W. complains that George Sr. is more disconsolate over Jeb’s defeat than gratified by George’s victory.

In Anthony Tommasini’s interview article with Mr. Stone in the Arts and Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times of Oct. 12, 2008, the director of W. reveals that he cut three fantasy sequences involving Mr. Bush and an actor playing Saddam Hussein: the first in the White House, where Mr. Bush chokes on a pretzel while Saddam is nearby; the second when the president flies over Baghdad on a magic carpet as American bombs rain down on this Arabian Nights city, and Hussein shakes his fist from below; and the third with the Iraqi dictator hurling insults at both George W. and his father.

Why did Saddam wind up on the cutting-room floor? As Mr. Stone explained to Mr. Tommasini, “It was wacky stuff that at the end of the day took us out of the movie.”

Even so, Mr. Stone makes his anti-Iraq-war points without dragging in Saddam Hussein by the scruff of his neck. He is less successful with George W.’s midlife born-again conversion to Christ. The camera has a hard time keeping a straight face as George W. kneels in prayer with Stacy Keach’s evangelical preacher Earle Hudd. It is a long way from Gary Cooper’s Alvin York almost being struck by lightning on a dark and stormy night as a message from God in Howard Hawks’ Sergeant York (1941) to George W.’s forcing by example his retinue to lower their heads at cabinet meetings, which the president opened with a prayer as if he were the White House chaplain. Indeed, at one point George W. intimates to a subordinate that he is not listening to his own father’s advice, but to that of his Father above, who presumably approved the shock-and-awe bombing campaign in Iraq.

There is one chilling dream scene in which W. goes mano a mano in a brawl with his father over all their differences. The point is that Mr. Stone has made a film of unusual sobriety about a political figure who makes many of us giddy with revulsion. I recommend it to everyone, but I am afraid it will end up as a seedless sermon for the already converted to Bushophobia.

asarris@observer.com

Chuck Schumer, along with Claire McCaskill and John Kerry, responded quickly with a letter to Condoleezza Rice asking her to prevent the deals from going forward until there is an oil-revenue sharing law.

Both Schumer and Kerry are on the Senate Finance Committee; Kerry and McCaskill are both surrogates for Barack Obama, whose campaign has been going after John McCain for McCain's new, oil company-friendly position on offshore drilling.

Here's the release along with the letter (which, weirdly, doesn't include McCaskill's name at the end of it).

Except that the speculation may have just taken a twist that the Powell talk never did: There’s suddenly reason to believe there might be something to it.

The twist was provided by, of all people, Dan Senor, a Republican talking head who was once the spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. During the weekly political roundtable on ABC’s This Week, Senor announced that Rice is “actively, actually, campaigning for this” and that she presented herself 10 days ago to the meeting of conservative heavyweights convened by Grover Norquist every Wednesday—“and she wasn’t there to talk about the NATO meeting in Bucharest.”

Until this point, it’s been easy to dismiss the Rice speculation as the product of a celebrity-driven press corps. Publicly, she’s adamantly maintained both a desire to leave Washington and government at the end of the Bush administration and an utter disinterest in running for public office. But Senor is right: Wednesday Group ring-kissing thoroughly undercuts that posture.

If she really does want the VP slot, John McCain would be well-advised to give Rice a long, hard look. Just like McCain, logic says that any national political aspirations that Rice may harbor should be DOA, thanks to the disastrously unpopular war for which she is in no small part responsible. But, again like McCain, there is reason to believe that Rice’s personal appeal remains strong, even to independent voters who long ago turned on the war.

Public opinion polling on cabinet members is spotty, but two polls released last year gave Rice approval ratings near 60 percent, about twice her disapproval rating. These numbers are the exact opposite of her boss’s—even though her fingerprints are all over the foreign policy that, more than anything, has dragged George W. Bush’s popularity into the gutter. Another survey released last year found that about twice as many people have a favorable personal opinion of Rice compared to those who don’t.

This data confirms what has been clear for a while: Rice is one of a very few high-profile figures whose standing with the public hasn’t measurably eroded through a close association with the Bush White House. And it reinforces what, through McCain’s resurgence, we have learned (yet again) about mass opinion: If voters like and respect a politician at a personal level, that bond—more often than not—will override whatever policy differences they may have with that politician.

McCain is a case study. His reputation was made eight years ago, when he happily claimed the maverick mantle and went to war with George W. Bush and the Republican establishment. It made him a hero to independent voters—finally, a politician who’s not afraid to call BS even on his own party—and a villain to conservatives. In truth, what both groups of voters were really responding to was a caricature. But the electorate rarely sees gray.

The degree to which that image remained intact became clear earlier this cycle, when McCain defined his campaign by his commitment to the Iraq war. He has ridiculed those who call for a withdrawal of troops, adamantly maintained that the preemptive invasion was warranted, loudly blocked every legislative attempt in the Senate to scale back the war and even suggested that a similar war with Iran might be in the cards if he’s elected president.

Logically, this record should infuriate the independent voters who adore Maverick McCain. It should also make him a hero to the right. And yet: The old caricature has prevailed. McCain only won his key early primary state victories thanks to support from antiwar independents and Republicans, while Republican voters who most favored the war lined up with Mitt Romney.

And that goes a long way toward explaining why the personally popular and respected Rice would be a considerable asset to a McCain-led ticket—even though it makes no logical sense.

On This Week, The Nation’s Katrina vanden Heuvel scoffed at the mention of Rice as a VP prospect, dubbing her “the worst national security adviser in modern history.”

Vanden Heuvel and other highly engaged liberal partisans know Rice as the national security adviser who ignored considerable evidence to the contrary and assured Americans in 2002 and 2003 that Saddam Hussein possessed a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, and that the smoking gun proof of this might take the form of “a mushroom cloud” over the United States.

But at the moment, this is not what most Americans think of when they think of Rice, even as they’re telling pollsters that they don’t think the war was a good idea and that they don’t like the work the Bush administration has done. It’s the same with McCain: The same surveys that show voters declaring the war a mistake by a two-to-one margin also show McCain significantly outpolling both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama when it comes to the war and foreign policy.

If McCain were to pick Rice, he’d be sealing his intimate attachment to the war for the rest of the campaign. This should be political suicide. But because voters think so highly of him and of Rice, they might see something completely different—and appealing.

Barack Obama's passport file was also recently accessed without authorization.

It did, however, cut to the heart of how the party’s presidential candidates see the world and America’s place in it.

CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer asked simply, “Is human rights more important than American national security?”

The inquiry came in the midst of a discussion about Pakistan and its authoritarian leader, Pervez Musharraf. Some candidates—Senator Chris Dodd, and, more nebulously, Mrs. Clinton—indicated that they would give national security primacy. Governor Bill Richardson asserted that human rights were more important.

But the way in which the question was framed reflected a fundamental and habitual error in foreign policy thinking.

Two ideas hold enormous sway: first, that a commitment to human rights and a commitment to national security are mutually exclusive, or at least in constant tension with each other; second, that realism in international affairs inevitably involves choosing the latter over the former.

The consensus that has built up around these notions is profoundly unhealthy.

One candidate, Senator Barack Obama, addressed this point more clearly and effectively than anyone else on the stage:

“The concepts are not contradictory, Wolf,” he told the CNN anchor. “They are complementary.”

Mr. Obama added:

“The more we see repression, the more there are no outlets for how people can express themselves and their aspirations, the worse off we’re going to be, and the more anti-American sentiment there is going to be in the Middle East. We keep on making this mistake.”

Indeed we do – and the dwindling regard for the U.S. across the Middle East and in many parts of the developing world is the dismal result.

Simply declaring American support for democracy, liberty and human rights will not solve the world’s problems. This administration provides a signal example of how fine rhetoric comes to naught when it is applied selectively or not acted upon at all.

Mr. Bush’s second inaugural address, which proclaimed freedom as “the permanent hope of mankind, the hunger in dark places, the longing of the soul” struck an epic tone. Those lofty ambitions soon sagged and expired.

Placing the promotion of human rights and democracy at the core of American foreign policy would not be without costs. Those costs—primarily, the election of governments that would not be especially pliable to Washington’s will—would have to be paid before the benefits would likely be seen.

But the longer-term payoffs would include an increase in the U.S.’s stature and moral authority, and a decline in anti-Americanism. Such developments would be profoundly significant, because they would help siphon off the support that some radical groups vituperatively opposed to the U.S. currently enjoy.

There is, in any case, good reason to believe that the doom-laden pronouncements of the self-described foreign policy “realists” may be exaggerated in several instances.

In Pakistan, for example, de facto U.S. support for Mr. Musharraf continues, and is justified on the basis that the general serves as a bulwark against Islamic extremism.

In fact, support for Islamicists in Pakistan is weak. The main coalition of religious parties received only 11.1 per cent of the vote in the last general election in 2002. The former cricket star Imran Khan busily capitalizes on his sporting fame in Pakistan and parts of the West to promote himself as a political player among the Islamists. His party received a mere 0.8 per cent of the votes in 2002.

Even after the shocking events of recent weeks, the U.S. has brought only tepid pressure to bear on Mr. Musharraf. That Washington should think it prudent to remain allied with a man who is opposed by around 80 per cent of Pakistanis, and should justify this on the basis of fears about anti-Americanism, says all that needs to be said about the back-to-front U.S. thinking in the region.

Similar missteps and inconsistencies have occurred throughout the Middle East. In the process, they have rendered Mr. Bush’s professed belief in a new democratic dawn absurd to many people.

The U.S. correctly resisted calls to push for the postponement of Palestinian elections in early 2006, only to then expend enormous energy trying to ignore the result and isolate the winner, Hamas.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice cancelled a trip to Egypt in early 2005 in protest at the jailing of dissident Ayman Nour. Mr. Nour was later released but, toward the end of that year, jailed yet again. Ms. Rice then went back to Cairo in January 2006, did not bother uttering Mr. Nour’s name and went out of her way to praise Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.

The leading ally of our freedom-loving president in the Muslim world is Saudi Arabia, which is ruled by a kleptocracy. Its judiciary distinguished itself last week by sentencing a rape victim to 200 lashes. (The woman’s ‘crime’ was being in the same car as an unrelated man. She was 19 at the time.)

Is it really a surprise, given its willingness to reach accommodations with such malevolence, that skepticism about America’s avowed values, beliefs and goals is so widespread?

The sad paradox here is simple: a large swathe of the foreign policy establishment constantly encourages the U.S. to sell out its own professed principles for the sake of stability. But the idea is self-defeating because its inherent hypocrisy only serves to encourage enmity against America, and thus breed instability.

An idealistic foreign policy is not an elixir for all ills. But its benefits are infinitely greater, and its downsides less severe, than the corrupting short-term pragmatism for which this nation has too often settled.