Boy, ABC News president David Westin must have really been moved by the story of Randy Pausch, a 47 year-old professor and father who has terminal cancer. It's not every day an exec as high up as Westin takes the time to email the entire ABCTV staff just to talk about an uplifting story! Westin is truly touched by how Pausch has altered our lives. That's one interpretation. Another, more accurate interpretation, which is completely validated by the contents of Westin's email [via Jossip], is that the exec saw a good chance to use this ill man's story as an example of the badass corporate interactivity going on under the Disney umbrella. Westin's totally excited about Pausch's TV segment, sister company Hyperion is publishing the book, and the guy once wanted to be an "Imagineer" for another Disney unit... When he still had his life before him, of course. The full email, after the jump.

Judy Greer has been orbiting around stardom for the better part of the last 10 years. And although she's had a couple of delicious supporting turns over the years (13 Going On 30, Adaptation, Jawbreaker), she's never quite broken through into the leading lady category ... until now. Ashton Kutcher picked her to be the lead of his new ABC comedy, Miss Guided, and now the lovely and talented Miss Greer is getting her first taste of hitting the promotional circuit as a star. And guess what? She's eating it up. She was as giddy as a school girl during her appearance on The Late Show With David Letterman last night, but also managed to rein in her emotions enough to tell Dave a funny story about how she's still forced to endure some of the humilities that the Hollywood machine puts second fiddles through.

· En fuego producer Rob Thomas sells his third pilot of the season, this one to ABC. (He already sold them Cupid, and sold The CW the 90210 spinoff.) Based on a Kiwi show, Outrageous Fortune follows "matriarch of a family of criminals [who] decides it is time for her brood to go straight when her husband ends up in the clink for five years." Your move, Matchbox 20's Rob Thomas! [THR]· FremantleMedia is bringing Family Feud to primetime for the first time in its 30 year history, where it will air along with American Gladiators on NBC's "For The Love of All That is Holy, Just Pick Up A Book Already" summer programming block. [Variety]
· Elizabeth "Zack and Miri Make a Porno" Banks has been cast as the First Lady in Oliver Stone's Bush. Stop your snickering! [THR]

In these politically charged times, we are hard pressed to think of four more qualified individuals to address the delicate issue of race and religion than three comediennes and a former reality show contestant. That said, we don't cast The View, we just watch it. And this morning's show featured a real humdinger of a Hot Topic, as the conversation between the ladies of The View turned once again towards the controversial subject of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. As Whoopi and Joy attempted to bring Elisabeth to the realization that she may have unfairly slighted Obama by equating his views on race in America with his Reverend's, the backed-into-a-corner Liz broke out one of the more ridiculous analogies we have ever heard air on public television. Expect a lawsuit from the good people at JIF and Smucker's to be filed within the hour. [The View]

How did we miss this in December? Kevin Rose, the cofounder of Digg, served as the answer to a question on ABC's Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and the show in which his name appeared is rerunning now on KGO. Sarah Lacy, the BusinessWeek columnist whose upcoming book prominently features Rose, spotted the mention. If you didn't tune in, YouTube has a replay:

In case you hadn't heard, Oprah's Big Give special, which aired on ABC March 2nd, was a hit in the smashiest hit kind of way. The debut attracted 15.7 million viewers, which HuffPo claims was the highest rated primetime show that week aside from American Idol. While it's no surprise that anything Oprah does is bound to reel in a massive audience, her latest profitable stunt may have been formulated under unethical circumstances. A Boston mother of four named Darlene Tracy is claiming Oprah stole the idea from a pitch she'd laid out for Oprah's producers, a nearly identical idea called The Philanthropist, "in which contestants are challenged to help the needy." And now she's taking legal action. But after reviewing the history behind these series of unfortunate events, we're putting on our thinking caps (boy were they hard to find!) to try and figure out whether or not Darlene has a case or not...

It's startling to us that after the last iteration of ABC's perennial romance sweepstakes—in which Hunkiest Bachelor of Them All Brad Womack cruelly withheld a suspiciously oversized engagement ring from last-standing-soulmate Deanna, choosing instead to slip the sparkling keepsake over his own member as a gesture of narcissistic fidelity—that producers of The Bachelor would find another 25 women desperate, lonesome, and fame-whorey enough to subject themselves to similar, nationally televised humiliation.

While execs at the Fox network long ago learned that people have a strong desire to watch shows aimed at an audience of gore-hound rubberneckers (think, America's Most Shocking And Deadly High-Speed Rollover Accidents Part Six), the folks at the more family friendly American Broadcasting Channel rolled the dice when they cast the last season of Dancing With The Stars. Their bet was that they could appeal to an under-exploited niche of the American television viewing audience by casting a one-legged former trophy wife of a Beatle. After all, would people really tune in to see whether or not she would fall on her ass while doing the Cha-Cha? Not surprisingly, they did tune in ... in droves, even. So when it came time for this season to roll around, producers decided to go right back to the developmentally-challenged well when they decided to cast the hearing-impaired Oscar winner (and stone fox) Marlee Matlin.

"Are you a man" — hand chop left — "or a woman?" — hand chop right, asks a Nightline correspondent interviewing Megan Wallent, the Microsoft executive who came out as transgender last fall. "I'm me," Wallent replies. Good answer! But did the Nightline guy really need 15 seconds to spit out the question?

Megan Wallent, the Microsoft executive who first revealed her plans to become a woman on Valleywag, has told her story to ABC's Nightline. The segment airs tonight at 11:35 p.m. on KGO. Wallent rarely speaks about her relationship with her wife Anh. But in the TV profile, Wallent explains how he first confided his discomfort with his birth gender to her. "It felt like a betrayal," Anh told Nightline. "In 38 years he couldn't find someone who he felt comfortable enough to open up to and share this." Until Wallent met her, that is. The couple, who have a young child born before Wallent's transition, say they are staying together. When I first met them last December, shortly after Wallent's first surgery, the two spent most of lunch flirting with each other like newlyweds.

Oh, poor dejected Dan Rather. Dumped by his network, left out of self-congratulatory media parties and solitarily pursuing a vanity lawsuit. Well, at least he has the gab fest of that is the View. Today, he got to pontificate about the election, as well as explain his conspiracy theories about why he was fired from CBS. Joy Behar even called him a "sex god." About four minutes in, Barbara Walters asks Rather about his lawsuit, and Rather gets all Howard Beale-lite. His paranoia got our paranoia going. What personal vendetta is Barbara Walters pursuing by asking Rather about his crazy suit? Did ABC News bigwigs tell her to bring up the case to hurt CBS News? Was 9/11 an inside job? Video after the jump.

· Count the things wrong with this sentence: Bumped, a modern-day version of The Breakfast Club set at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, has been given a greenlight, with McG protege Anna Mastro attached to direct. [THR]
· SAG StrikeWatch threat alert: Honeysuckle! The actors guild won't start negotiating until April at the soonest. Asked for a reason, president Alan Rosenberg paused for a moment, then offered, "Oh, who are we kidding. I'm a slave to the draaaamaaaaa." [Variety]

While we here at Defamer are perfectly happy recognizing Oprah Winfrey as the supreme deity that she is, her rare missteps (if you want to call Beloved a misstep—but personally, we loved it, O exalted one!) obviously part of some Bigger Oprah Picture that has yet to reveal itself to us, not all are as worshipful. In reviewing her 8-episode Oprah's Big Give reality show for ABC, THR's Ray Richmond gives Winfrey a knee-capping sure to cause a torrent of hellfire and substandard panini presses to rain down upon their offices. Some of the most sacrilegious highlights:

Seemingly unstoppable late night force Jay Leno has already demonstrated that he needs no writers to conquer his time slot: Audiences looking for non-addictive insomnia cures and lovemaking soundtracks clearly prefer Leno's middling presence and chirpy joke-delivery over his more cantankerous competitors. For whatever reason, however, the management at NBC decided four years ago that Leno required an expiration date, unfeelingly stamping the host on the forehead with a "BEST BEFORE 2009" notice, and designating Conan O'Brien as his successor. Now, a full two years before his contract expires, rival networks and studios are unfurling their green, high-currency plumage, and doing the late-night mating dance for the still viable talk show host. The NY Times reports:

· If the concept of the two names Tyra Banks and Ashton Kutcher (Tyrashton?) melding into a single, reality-TV -producing force for ABC would drive you to incontinence with excitement, well, maybe you should take a bathroom break before reading this story. [THR]
· Quarterlife, the drama from the creators of thirtysomething that started as a pilot at ABC, then got resuscitated for MySpace, and finally was resurrected on NBC, tanked last night, posting a 1.6 rating/4 share. The series about "twentysomethings coming of age in the digital generation" was doomed to be outdated before it ever reached a wide audience, already replaced with far more timely takes on the same material, like ABC's mid-season replacement, Tumblr Road. [Variety]

In case any of you ugly ducklings out there stare at the impossibly adorable and feisty Elisabeth Hasselbeck, The View panel's hawkish contributor, and see in her an unattainably shrill ideal, fear not. She too was once a gawky pre-adolescent, smiling past the sadness through a wall of orthodontic appliances and tragically outmoded frames purchased at the short-lived Sally Jesse Raphael Optical Centers (Your Glasses—and Some Tough Love—in About An Hour!™).

We are growing concerned. After her career as an ABC nonjournalist fizzled, the formerly famous, generously-racked host of Rocketboom has been absent from her own blog since November 27. An "under development "show with HBO has gone nowhere. On January 23, Congdon Twittered that she was "writing monster blog post reflecting on ABC and talking about what's next." Amanda, 28 days is more time than even Scoble puts into a post. Just press Publish, ok?

In a stunning victory for lovers of linear medical serials peopled by a variety of horny doctors prone to solipsistic monologue-delivery over aficionados of tropical sci-fi adventures with a penchant for adding confounding new plot elements without explaining the significance of the approximately two dozen such elements introduced prior, ABC has announced a Thursday night programming shift. The network will be returning Grey's Anatomy to the prime, Thursday-at-9 spot on their post-strike schedule, bumping Lost to the less-desirable 10 p.m. slot:

Is there any mid-February tradition more cherished than the announcement of the Dancing with the Stars cast? These dozen brave, ballroom soldiers—of wildly varying Q-ratings and coordination skills—are plucked from every conceivable branch of celebrity, thrown into chest-bearing vests and horrifying baby doll dresses, and shuffled onto a well-greased dance floor. And it's all for America's perverse, compound-fracture-curious pleasures. Revealed last night on Dance War: The Chatterbox Gaytalian Strikes Back, and repeated again this morning on GMA, the sixth season brings Dancing a higher caliber of "star" than ever:

· Variety floated the days-old AICN rumors about The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus this morning. Namely, they re-report that Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell have all signed on to play the role in which Heath Ledger was originally cast. Reps for Cate Blanchett, meanwhile, have yet to confirm her involvement, but it's widely assumed she'll also throw her interpretation into the ring, and walk away with the picture. [Variety]
· The ACE EDDIE Awards give top editing honors to The Bourne Ultimatum and Sweeney Todd. The best reality show editing went to an episode of Cops (for real!), though the winner's acceptance speech was tragically cut short when he triumphantly waved his Golden Scissors trophy above his head and lost his grip. [Variety]