Here is what Barbara Walters says at the beginning of the following clip: “I never got that big interview with Jacqueline Onassis or Greta Garbo—but now I have some consolation. Ladies and gentlemen, my interview with the cast of Jersey Shore.” Dear Lord.

Here comes the next chapter in the Julian Assange/WikiLeaks saga: ABC News is reporting that Assange “could soon be facing spying charges in the U.S. related to the Espionage Act.” Their source is Assange’s attorney, Jennifer Robinson. The embattled founder of WikiLeaks is already in custody in London; he was arrested on sexual assault charges earlier this week. Robinson told ABC that while these latest charges are imminent, she doesn’t believe they have any merit:

In her recent hour-long interview with Barbara Walters, Oprah Winfrey revealed that she’s still one of President Obama‘s number one fans. “I think it’s unfortunate when you have a nation of people who don’t want to support the president of the United States,” she said, adding that she doesn’t think Americans realize how much worse the recession could have been if not for Obama’s actions. Oprah was a lot less open, however, when it came to expressing her opinion of another polarizing political figure: Sarah Palin.

David Hasselhoff once promised that he would be there for TV viewers, “forever and always.” Unfortunately, A&E saw things differently. Willa Paskin of Vulture reported last night that The Hoff’s brand new reality show—titled, of course, The Hasselhoffs—has been canceled already, even though only two episodes of the show have aired so far.

Sometimes these things just speak for themselves. Here’s a hilarious post from FishbowlNY about a New York Times writer who’s leaving the Gray Lady for… well, just read on:

If you’re somehow still a fan of Jersey Shore, you’ll be tickled to hear that MTV is planning to have Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi climb into a ball that will then be lowered into Times Square on New Year’s Eve. If you, like most sane people, are over Jersey Shore, we’re sorry if you just felt a part of your soul die as you were reading that last sentence.

Skewed urban cityscape, out—slick nested “C”s, in. Comedy Central just announced that it’s replacing its old logo with the new one at left, starting January 1. The shift is the cable network’s first major revamp in 10 years, according to Alex Weprin at FishbowlNY.

Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Bloomberg, George Lucas, and a baker’s dozen of other American billionaires are really taking this whole “season of giving” thing seriously. The Wall Street Journal reports that 16 tycoons have just signed on to the “Giving Pledge,” thereby vowing to donate most of their wealth to worthy causes.

Aaron Sorkin, sharpen your pencil. Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the crew-rowing, patrician twins who sued Mark Zuckerberg in 2004 for allegedly stalling their Harvard dating site in order to get his own social network—The Facebook—off the ground, are at it again. Though they received a settlement for $65 million in 2008, the Winklevii now say they should have gotten more money—so they’re suing Zuckerberg for a second time.

Get ready, world: here comes Christine PAC. It’s a “new kind” of PAC that’s being formed by defeated GOP Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell, one that, according to the Delaware News Journal, “will allow her to endorse candidates, do independent expenditures in certain races, lobby on issues and do things ‘that other activist organizations have the handcuffs on because of the IRS.’”

Like a lot of liberals, Rachel Maddow is pretty disappointed with President Obama‘s decision to capitulate to Republican tax cut demands, as well as the forceful defense of his actions he made in a press conference today. But unlike most liberals, Rachel Maddow has a TV show—which tonight gave her the perfect opportunity to go through each point Obama made during his press conference and refute them, one by one.

During a defensive press conference today, President Obama ruffled a few feathers by making a controversial comparison between Republicans and hostage takers. Fox News Washington Correspondent James Rosen especially took umbrage at this remark—but not because he thought it was uncalled for. Instead, as Rosen told Bill O’Reilly tonight, he thinks Obama’s comment could have “national security implications.”

Tonight on Hardball, Chris Matthews brought up a thorny issue: exactly who should have the right to vote? A small group of conservatives, including Tea Party Nation president Judson Philips, think the answer to that question should be “property owners.” And while MSNBC Correspondent and former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan told Matthews that he doesn’t wholeheartedly agree with that group, he does think that the idea of universal franchise is badly flawed.

Let’s get one thing straight: Glenn Beck doesn’t support Julian Assange. But the same time, Beck is also skeptical about and confused by the sex crime charges that led to Assange’s recent arrest. And if Glenn Beck is puzzled, he knows you must be too. That’s why he trotted out his trusty blackboard during today’s show and used it to carefully explain exactly why Assange was taken into custody. Gather ’round, children!

It turns out there’s a lot more to hunting than buying a gun, aiming it at a living thing, and pulling the trigger—at least, according to The Awl’s Abe Sauer. Yesterday, he published a piece that claims the latest episode of Sarah Palin’s Alaska, in which Palin and her father go caribou hunting, “absolutely exposes Palin as a charade” who doesn’t truly know the first thing about the sport.

Apparently, before Julian Assange was arrested in London, he penned a defensive editorial for The Australian. In the piece, Assange asserts that Wikileaks has “coined a new type of journalism,” that his organization has “changed whole governments” without hurting a single person, and that as a truth-teller, Assange himself has a close resemblance to another pair of famous, Australian media moguls: Rupert Murdoch and his father, Keith.

It’s no secret that the publishing industry has had a rough few years—a rough decade, really. Stephen Colbert acknowledged as much when he started a segment on his show last night by sharing with his viewers Time‘s latest (fake) cover story: “For the Love of God, Please Buy This Magazine: Why Editors’ Children Need to Eat, Too.” Some magazines, though, are thriving, even expanding—like Cosmopolitan, which just launched a long-awaited Mongolian edition. Colbert took this as a positive sign, using it as the basis for some sage advice for print media.

So much for the Christmas spirit. This afternoon, Ben Armbruster of Think Progress published a blog post about Texas Tea Partiers who are working to oust Rep. Joe Straus from his position as the state’s House Speaker. Straus’s detractors aren’t working against the representative because of his political views—Straus is a Republican. Instead, they’re calling for him to be thrown out of office because he’s Jewish.

When Kathy Griffin joked that Bristol Palin looked like “the white Precious” after her supposed weight gain, her audience—a group of servicemen and women at the Marine Corps Air Station in Miramar, California—booed in response. Curiously, though, the group responded much more positively when Griffin made a crack about “deformities”—even though soldiers injured in battle must have been watching the show, VH1 Divas Salute the Troops, both during its taping and as it was simulcast around the globe.

Women from the most sparsely populated independent country on Earth are in for a treat this week, when a new Mongolian-language edition of Cosmopolitan will start appearing on shelves. As Jeremy W. Peters at Media Decoder notes, this is the 61st international iteration of the women’s magazine juggernaut; different versions of Cosmo are already being sold in countries including Croatia, Estonia, Kazakhstan, and Slovenia, as well as nations throughout Europe and South America.

Almost exactly ten years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that George W. Bush would be the 43rd president of the United States. To commemorate that landmark decision, New York Magazine asked five writers to each compose a short piece detailing what might have happened if Al Gore had instead unequivocally won in 2000. Those authors include Kurt Andersen, Kevin Baker, Jane Smiley, Walter Kirn—and, most surprisingly of all, Glenn Beck.

It’s a good thing that the sight of a famous man wearing a pair of fake boobs is still enough to make most people giggle. Otherwise, the following sketch from tonight’s episode of Saturday Night Live would have been a total—excuse the pun—bust. In it, Andy Samberg plays “Blizzard Man,” a hip-hop hitmaker tasked with coming up with a hook for SNL musical guest Diddy‘s new song. Host Robert De Niro plays Samberg’s supportive, tight-sweater-wearing mother.

After the events of this week, it was inevitable that Saturday Night Live would find some way to work WikiLeaks into a sketch. And the show didn’t disappoint, tackling the website and its Bond villain-esque founder, Julian Assange, during the first few minutes of tonight’s broadcast.

Rumors have been swirling this week about tabloid darling Britney Spears and her current boyfriend (slash former agent), Jason Trawick. According to this week’s issue of Star Magazine—one of America’s lying-est tabloids—Trawick’s relationship with Spears has turned abusive. The mag said it has a picture and an audio recording of Spears to confirm their story. Britney’s people, though, say the report is “completely and utterly false.”

It would have been a lot of fun to be on Sean Hannity‘s show last night. During its “Great American Panel” segment, a discussion about airport security led inevitably to a discussion of Fergie’s recent experience with a body scanner—which spurred Juan Williams to possibly make Fox history by uttering the phrase “lady lumps” on air. Williams’s comment sparked both laughter and an observation from Hannity, that he had “lost all control of the panel.” And then Hannity had an unfortunate slip of the tongue that only made the segment sillier.