Tiger Woods steps on President Obama's 11 a.m. news conference.

Which 11 a.m. appearance are you going to watch?

Obama?

Obama plans to hold a press conference at 11 a.m. in Washington today, his fifth public remarks on the debt in a week, as he presses lawmakers to reach an agreement to raise the $14.3 trillion U.S. borrowing ceiling before an Aug. 2 deadline. The president and bipartisan congressional negotiators agreed to meet every day until they reach a deal, said one legislative aide on condition of anonymity.

Or Tiger?

[T]he news that Tiger will sit down with The Golf Channel's Kelly Tilghman on Monday morning at 11 AM ET seems a bit strange....

What could it be?... Here are a few of the possibilites.

-- Tiger won't play golf for the rest of 2011...

-- Tiger needs to have surgery to fix his knee/Achilles.

-- Tiger might comment on his relationship with Anthony Galea, maybe just to clear the air after Galea was indicted last week on counts of transporting illegal drugs across the border for a number of athletes.

-- Tiger might be giving us an idea of when he will return to golf.

Which press event will you tune to at 11 a.m.?
	Obama
	Tiger
	Neither
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Tiger Woods, expelling bodily fluids in the wrong place again.

This time, it's spit.

"Obama wants to take our penises."

One of many out of context quotes — 2 of which are from me — in this montage of sexy highlights from the last 5 years of Bloggingheads:



ADDED: Here's the context of my reference to "masturbating boys":

Should Elin settle for $750 million from Tiger...

... if it includes "a lifetime 'confidentiality clause' that would prevent her from writing a book or doing any interviews about the split"?

Should Elin take the money and shut up?
	Yes. That's so much money!
	Yes. We'll all be better off if that nasty material never sees the light of day.
	Yes. Elin, you will be better off looking for the future and not dwelling on the past.
	No. Tiger must pay for what he did and shouldn't get anything back in exchange.
	No. You need to explore and air this all out for your own good.
	No. I want to read all about it! Come on! Dish it out!
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ADDED: LOL.

"Socially, artistically, it was totally worth it."

"Financially, it wasn't worth it."

"It is what it is. Whatever it was, it wasn't good enough.''

Tiger Woods misses the cut... by 8 shots.

What is, at long last, driving Elin Nordegren to divorce Tiger Woods?

Supposedly, her friends are saying the last straw was that Nike ad, the one with him staring blankly while the voice of his dead father gives him a talking-to.

Who's behind "Crash the Tea Party" movement urging people to show up with racist signs...

... etc.

It could be either anti- or pro-Tea Party.

Think about it. It's damned easy for anyone to screw up Tea Parties by showing up with the racist signs the media and liberal blogs would love to exploit. But, that being the case, it's also quite useful for the Tea Party to get everyone to think that any bad signs probably came from their opponents. There are too many layers to this. I think that mostly hurts the Tea Partiers. It generates too much chaos and uncertainty. If you don't know what's real and what's fake out there in that world of political action, don't you want to pull back into your more intimate relationships with people you actually know?

***

By the way the "Crash the Tea Party" website is most notably selling T-shirts. Maybe that's really the whole idea — T-shirts, not Tea Parties. Buy the merchandise. Maybe there's no real politics, just a guy with a little wit, trying to make a buck. He just got some big links, so, in his way, he earned it.

***

As I was writing this post, I looked up from my window table at a café in Madison, Wisconsin and saw a middle-aged man, shambling along in Birkenstocks, wearing a T-shirt with a big, faded:



Everybody always needs a new T-shirt.

***

And as I wrote the words "your more intimate relationships with people you actually know" my very next thought was: I wonder how Tiger's doing at the Masters today? You see my train of thought?

Teed up for teasing. It's Tiger Woods.

In the new Nike promo:



Ha! Absurd. I know there are all sorts of instant parodies out there, and I haven't clicked on any yet. The original is already ridiculous. Shameless.

On the other hand: the leaderboard.

OR: You could say:

Without speaking a word, he humanizes himself. Tiger's close bond with his demanding father always felt like the one warm, relatable dimension of an otherwise cold and remote personality....  (By the way, is it me or is there something very Hamlet about the way a haggard Tiger gets interrogated by the ghost of his father on the misty ramparts of a golf course?)

Oh, please.

At the Masters, Tiger Woods will have 90 bodyguards to protect him from the women he screwed.

"None of these girls are allowed anywhere near him... If one photo comes out of a beautiful lady touching him, it would be a disaster."

So not just "these girls" — the ones he fucked — but any "beautiful lady"? Doesn't that make you — female readers only — want to doll yourself up and head down to Augusta, Georgia to see if you can sidle into a photo frame with Tiger?

Ordinary spectators are not allowed to have cameras at a golf tournament. They even search your bag. You'll be at the mercy of the authorized photographers inside the event. But won't they try to frame Tiger with pretty ladies in the background? (Don't they do that anyway, without even any sex scandal to for resonance.) What if a beautiful woman stands stands on the other side of the hole when Tiger is putting? She'd be framed in professional photographs. And she'd distract him with her feminine radiations. She'd be kicked out of the golf course, I bet.

"If I were Elin... man, I would have hit a lot more than she did. I would have kept hitting!"

"You would still be swinging the golf club?" "Yeah, (Elin) stopped. She was respectable. I'd get the baseball bat, I'd get everything out."

That's Sandra Bullock, the supposed "girl next door" type, being, presumably, cute and adorable. We're expected to find that especially poignant now because Bullock did not know at the time that her husband was cheating on her too. Poor, darling Sandra!

There will not even be a tiny dent in Bullock's lustrous reputation for her endorsement of — or lighthearted joking about — murderous domestic violence.

"This is how sports agents and crisis managers imagine speaking from the heart, but only in the abstract."

"It is somewhat the same way when they imagine sincerity. They think we're all as easy as the other women in [Tiger] Woods' (former) life."

"In Defense of Monogamy, or What to do about Our Polyamorous Genes."

"Because of our ancestors’ polygynous and polyamorous sexual behavior, where a small group of powerful men, mostly traveling military warriors and merchants, had children with numerous women of diverse ethnicities, backgrounds and nationalities, more diversity was passed along to us along our ancestors’ X chromosomes than their Y chromosomes. Both men and women inherit diverse genes from their mothers and pass along these diverse sex genes on the X chromosome to their children."

What, then, did you expect from Tiger Woods?

And, speaking of genes:



I made a mess in my genes....

Get friendly with randy, normal genes.

"After much soul-searching, I have decided to take an indefinite break from professional golf."

"I need to focus my attention on being a better husband, father and person."

Eugene Robinson on Tiger's women: "What's with the whole Barbie thing?"

"No offense to anyone who actually looks like Barbie, but it really is striking how much the women who've been linked to Woods resemble one another. I'm talking about the long hair, the specific body type, even the facial features. Mattel could sue for trademark infringement."

Really? Here's Barbie. Here's a montage of faces that have horizontally faced Tiger's. I'm sorry, Eugene, but these women are just not that pretty. Barbie is very pretty and glossy and made-up, but in a daytime, cheerleadery way. The Tiger women are all made-up for nighttime, indoor work, and they are not all that pretty. Tiger's wife is the Barbie. Tiger's women to cheat on Elin with are all getting away from Barbie/Elin. It strikes me as a touchingly ordinary search for sex that feels dirty.

A Woody Allen joke: "Is sex dirty? Only if it's done right."

Robinson rambles on:

If adultery is really about the power and satisfaction of conquest, Woods's self-esteem was apparently only boosted by bedding the kind of woman he thought other men lusted after -- the "Playmate of the Month" type that Hugh Hefner turned into the American gold standard.

Which Elin is, but — what is wrong with you, Eugene? — these other women are not!

But the world is full of beautiful women of all colors, shapes and sizes -- some with short hair or almond eyes, some with broad noses, some with yellow or brown skin. Woods appears to have bought into an "official" standard of beauty that is so conventional as to be almost oppressive.

What is wrong with Eugene Robinson? He is seeing race, race, race. The Tiger women look white to him — are they? — and, beyond that, some big hair, big makeup, and big boobs makes them Barbie. Hardly.

His taste in mistresses leaves the impression of a man who is, deep down, both insecure and image-conscious -- a control freak even when he's committing "transgressions."

I don't think so. I'd say he's a man who went for the Playmate ideal in choosing a wife and aimed low for cheating. He was the opposite of image conscious and controlling, and that's one of the reasons his fall from the god-like stature he had for us is so very long and hard.

***

If you clicked on the Barbie link and heard the voice of Barbie, don't you think she sounded an awful lot like Mira Sorvino in her Oscar-winning role — as a prostitute, naturally — in the Woody Allen movie "Mighty Aphrodite"? I say "naturally," because they are always handing out Oscars to actress who take on the amazing challenge of playing a whore.

Barbie, sluts, Woody, Woods...

"Paramedics removed a woman from Tiger Woods's Florida home early this morning and transported her to hospital...."

"... WESH-TV reported that a patient at first refused to be taken for treatment, but was later listed as an 'advanced life support' patient and transported to hospital. WESH broadcast footage of what it called 'a middle-age' woman being taken into the hospital on a stretcher."

Another mystery. Should we avert our eyes?

Video.

ADDED: Apparently, it was TW's mother-in-law. And, hey, isn't this headline (hilariously) mean?

Tiger Woods refusing to talk to the police ≈ Desiree Rogers refusing to talk to Congress.

Maureen Dowd doesn't really have anything new to say about Tiger,

Tiger may have been the greatest pro golfer but he was an amateur adulterer. His puffed-up ego led him to leave an electronic trail with a string of buffed and puffed babes. Like so many politicians before him, Tiger ignored the obvious rule: Never get involved with women who have 8-by-10 glossies.

Amusing writing. But with nothing much to say about Tiger, Dowd makes a column of it by forcing a parallel with Desiree Rogers, the White House social secretary who purported to stand on constitutional principle as she refused to talk to Congress about the White House gate-crashers. Tiger, you see, refused to talk to the police.

But Tiger is a private citizen, and he faced potential criminal charges, either for himself or his wife. Dowd doesn't even mention the Constitution in connection with Woods — even as she's going for parallelism — but Woods had a constitutional right not to talk to the police, and I assume he was well advised by lawyers as he chose not to talk. He had a right to do what he thought was best for himself. The public may be interested in him, and he needs to worry about our loss of respect for him, which would hurt his lucrative career in product endorsement, but he doesn't owe us anything.

Rogers, on the other hand was working for the government, in a position of a public trust, and her refusal to account for herself was quite a different matter. The constitutional provision for executive privilege is not like the individual right against self-incrimination. It's a matter of separation of powers having to do with the ability of the executive branch to function independently. If it is invoked, it should not be Rogers protecting her own interests. It should be because it serves the public good for the executive branch to be free of interference from Congress. It may well be that there are legitimate reasons for maintaining secrecy about the details of planning and carrying out a big White House dinner party. There are some delicate, sensitive matters in party planning, no? One could imagine Congress picking apart such things for the devious purpose of distracting and weakening the President.

Dowd says:

Both Tiger and Desiree hid and stayed silent because they mistakenly thought they were protecting the Brand. But despite their marketing savvy, these two controlling players spiraled out of control.

That sounds clever and amusing, but only if you don't try to imagine what Woods and Rogers might be hiding and how, if they spoke, their words would be used to damage them further.  Dowd assumes that the truth has or will come out: "Don’t stonewall. Admit your mistake before others piece together the embarrassing facts." That is: It's the cover-up, not the crime. It will hurt more if you don't come clean. But I think there are things about what happened the night Woods ran into the tree that will never come to light. And who knows what more there is to the gate-crashers story? It sounds pretty frivolous, and we are expected to get over it. A slight glitch that represents nothing else of any concern. But is it?

I'm in the NYT.

And they give me the last word about Tiger Woods and race.

Was Tiger Woods sleep-driving when he crashed?

An emailer writes:

I had a eureka! moment last night. Tiger was not awake when he crashed his car. This is why he was said to be snoring in the street by the neighbor in the police report. He probably is using ambien and "sleepwalked" the whole thing. His wife probably broke the window to attempt to wake him up, following him out of the house, but obviously being behind enough in time that he already had gotten in and started the car. This type of thing is a very common side effect of ambien. He can't sleep because his wife had already found out about the girlfriends.... I'm surprised I haven't seen this explanation offered by anyone.

Here's a news article saying he was sleeping and snoring in the street after the crash:

They found Woods apparently unconscious in the street, while his wife, Elin Nordegren, standing nearby. Woods was shoeless, in a T-shirt and shorts.

"He was actually snoring," [a witness] said.

Sleeping and snoring in the street after all that? You don't snore when you're knocked unconscious, do you? That sounds like a sleeping drug, which also explains how the highly skilled Woods could drive so badly.

Looking for that news article, I found this:

From Radar: "[Rachel] Uchitel told friends that she and Tiger liked to have sex while taking the drug Ambien. Uchitel told one pal, 'You know you have crazier sex on Ambien — you get into that Ambien haze. We have crazy Ambien sex.'" Readers: Is that a thing? We've witnessed people in an Ambien haze, certainly. But Ambien sex? This makes us feel old not knowing this.

Is it all fitting together now?

ADDED: The emailer was Elliott Althouse (no relation). And, in the comments, several people say that a person unconscious with a head injury might snore.

"Take Your Name Off Your Phone."

The voicemail remix: