• Stephanie Seymour and Peter Brant will meet in Greenwich divorce court for the first time today. Expect some fireworks: Brant has already filed a motion demanding Seymour "undergo drug and alcohol testing"; for her part, Seymour is accusing Brant of "hostile, threatening and intimidating behavior." [NYP]
• Now that he's split from his wife, Sean Penn is supposedly dating Natalie Portman (again), since she "stimulates him in ways no other person has." [Star]
• Rumor has it Madonna and Jesus Luz are planning some sort of commitment ceremony at the Kabbalah Center sometime soon. [NYDN]
• Luke Russert was either the "It" boy at the White House Correspondents' dinner on Saturday night, or has been a major disappointment for MSNBC, depending on who you talk to. [NYDN, P6]
• Speaking of nepotism, Meghan McCain reportedly "lost it" and acted like an "insolent child" when a guard told her she couldn't bring two friends into the Correspondents dinner on Saturday. [NYDN]

Gossip Cindy Adams celebrates her 79th birthday today. Barbra Streisand is 67. Designer Jean-Paul Gaultier turns 57. Mets star Carlos Beltran is turning 32. Playwright Eric Bogosian is 56. Djimon Hounsou (and Kimora Lee's significant other) is 45. Political reporter Andrew Kirtzman turns 48. Mystery writer Sue Grafton is turning 69. Veteran diplomat Richard Holbrook is 67. Kelly Clarkson is 27. Cedric the Entertainer is turning 45. And Shirley MacLaine is 75. Weekend birthdays—including that of the newly-named worst CEO ever, Dick Fuld, this Sunday—after the jump!

The most important issue of Barack Obama's impending presidency has yet to be answered. Just who, pray tell, is going to perform at his big inaugural concert bashes?? No one knows! And it's so soon!

A momentous power summit accompanied last weekend's Kennedy Center Honors, where Barbra Streisand had her first-ever audience with President George Bush. Video from the event features Streisand — a vicious Bush critic who spent much of the recent election cycle as the Obama campaign's Deputy Director of Fundraising Medleys — welcoming the outgoing president to not only within bitchslap's-length, but actually close enough to share a skin-searing bipartisan kiss.

Neither the White House nor Barbra Streisand were much inclined to release a proper photo of the beloved entertainer kissing beloved soon-to-be-former president Bush at the Kennedy Center Honors yesterday, so America will have to make due with these scattered pictures of the smiles they left behind. [Update: You can no cllick to watch the video!] The singer's name itself has long been shorthand for everything wrong and out-of-touch about Hollywood Liberals, while Bush is, as we all know, like Hitler but worse. How much worse? Oh, it's all too painful to remember. Good thing we can just look up some of her best anti-Bush statements on the Google and present them to you, below.

When we wondered a few weeks ago whether Josh Brolin might be bringing too much sexual energy to his role as George W. Bush in the upcoming Oliver Stone-directed biopic W., little did we know how much extra erotic mojo the actor has to throw around. In fact, in an interview with (the very appropriately named) W magazine, a freshly unjailed Brolin revealed the recipient of his most unlikely sexual crush — his own father, James Brolin:

What a Gyp: So what did $2,500 get you at last night's wallet-draining Barbra Streisand concert for Barack Obama? Four songs — and not even her best, we hear, with Streisand going all conceptual during a quartet featuring, "When the Sun Comes Out," "Make Someone Happy," "What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?" and "Shining Hour." Meanwhile, for $26,000 more you could have shared rubber chicken and a playful slap from the candidate himself: "[T]his is not a game. This is not a reality show, no offense to any of you," Obama told an elite, amused gathering of 250 industry insiders. "This is not a sitcom." Expect a fair, even-handed and appropriately unfunny SNL riff on the matter this weekend. [Fox News]

♦ In his new book, Alec Baldwin goes off on TMZ's Harvey Levin, and says that the fallout from his infamously leaked voicemail made him want to commit suicide. [R&M]
♦ Barbra Streisand sang four songs at an Obama fundraiser last night. Attendees included Leonardo DiCaprio, Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen. [Fox News]
♦ Anne Hathaway acted like a bit of a diva at an event in Toronto. She also smokes, which her publicist doesn't want you to know. [OK!, R&M]
♦ Sarah Palin's "secretive circle of stylists" dressed her in a $2,500 Valentino jacket for her big speech at the Republican convention. [P6]
♦ Bad news: Hugh Hefner says all three of the Girls Next Door are getting spinoffs. [E!]
♦ Even worse news: Heidi Montag and her sister Holly are "developing a top-secret project" together. [LAT]

Barbra/Bush AwkwardWatch: On the eve of her command performance at an Obama fundraiser at the Regent Beverly Wilshire, Barbra Streisand has learned she's been made a Kennedy Center Honoree, which involves a reception at the White House, then sitting in a balcony just inches away from President George W. Bush as she relives her life in variety show form. To make things even more awkward, ABC News also points out that this will come two months after "Streisand's stepson, Josh Brolin, hits theaters playing Bush in the Oliver Stone-directed biopic W." Oh, can't we set aside our petty differences just one night to bliss out to the underrated sex appeal of Marvin Hamlisch, people? [ABC News]

Uh-oh. Barbra Streisand—referred to among the elite Democratic core as the Black Buttah Widow for the way her endorsements mean the certain kiss of death—will perform at an Obama fundraiser at the ballroom of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel on September 16. This is a room that holds only 700 people, so attendees will be expected to pony up for the privilege. From Variety.com:

Celebrities: a bunch of hypocrites! They all pay lip service to environmental issues like global warming. But most of them are heavy private jet users. They also engage in a smorgasboard of other environmental sins, from investing in oil companies (Madonna) to wasting water by demanding 120 bath towels at each appearance (Barbra Streisand) to various other transgressions you can read about here. But it's primarily the globetrotting use of gas-guzzling private planes that make their frequent entreaties to save the earth seem empty. So we're polling you, our readers, who have some of the most finely tuned hypocrisy detectors in the world: Which of these six "green" stars is the biggest environmental hypocrite? Cast your vote after the jump.

James Lipton, host of Bravo's Inside The Actor's Studio, has a book! It's called Inside Inside and we got our copy today. It's 492 pages long and costs $27.95. If the first two pages are any indication, it might be the most gloriously horrendous book ever written. You have to love a man who starts the memoir of his middle-brow career with an epigraph by Chaucer, from 'The Canterbury Tales': "And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche." Nearly as trenchant as Dostoevsky's "Raskolnikov seemed offended." (Crime and Punishment, pg 144.) Or Faulkner's immortal words, "'Such good beer,' she said." (Sanctuary, pg 140.) Except with the added benefit that Chaucer is a) in Middle English and b) in the prologue. Let's face it, Lipton only has time for prologues. He's a busy guy and can barely read. But can he write? You decide.

PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers, and are posted several times a week, so send them in often. Submit yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line so we don't lose them) and tell everyone about the time you spotted Kirstie Alley grocery shopping.

Last week, PR man Ken Sunshine went on Anderson Cooper's little house of 360 right after Larry King's interview of Paris Hilton to help dissect it all. Sunshine was an interesting choice for the program, since Paris Hilton is just the kind of client Sunshine seems to avoid!

• E! offers Dina Lohan the chance to screw up her remaining kids for your viewing pleasure. [Page Six]
  

Glaring Omissions reproduces tips received from readers in the last week that weren't covered on Gawker, either by accident (it happens!) or by design (it happens more often).

• Julia Allison puts her Halloween costume back on in response to our thoughtful bio. [Julia Allison]
  

Plenty of coverage of Barbra Streisand's triumphant! return! to Madison Square Garden last night, her first New York show in six years. Newsday and the Daily News concur that the diva was in top form, her performance sending the hearts of Gays, Jews, and your mother a-soaring. The Times agrees that Streisand's singing was buttery good, but notes that her Bush-bashing — complete with a skit featuring a Bush impersonator — was a "miscalculation." And then there's the Post, which says nothing about the music and, rather, runs with the standard News Corp. angle:

Pervy Defamer sibling site Fleshbot points us to a particularly intriguing lot on eBay: An 8mm print of a vintage porn entitled "Barbra Streisand": In Hardcore, in which the winning bidder is promised an unobstructed view of the legend as only James Brolin (and Elliott Gould, and Ryan O'Neal, and Warren Beatty, and Jon Peters, and Don Johnson, and Andre Agassi, and Peter Jennings, etc...) has seen her before. And what will the privilege of owning such a piece of rare, full frontal Babsmobilia cost? Bidding starts at $250,000—pricey, yes, but as ticket buyers to Streisand's Farewell Comeback Tour already know, Streisand worship comes at a premium. The singer, meanwhile, has reportedly seen the film—rumors of its existence have dogged her for years—and flatly denies the generously beschnozed performer is her, once telling Playboy the proof is "when the camera zoomed in on her hands around the guy's you-know-what. There they were: short, stubby fingers!" Her evidence is indeed compelling—Streisand's digits are anything but short and stubby, as anyone who has ever witnessed the damage reaped by a single flick of her french manicured eagle talons already knows.

• Brangelina, Shiloh, and "those other kids" plan on returning to Malibu this weekend. When their plane touches American soil, our country will celebrate the reclaiming of our national treasures. [TMZ]
• After his jokes about Brokeback Mountain, Howard Stern gets snubbed by Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams. At Nobu, no less, for bonus shaming points. [Page Six]
• For every tabloid tell-all book, there's a spurned ex-boyfriend getting a gun permit. In Bridget Harrison's Tabloid Love, it's the Post's Jesse Angelo; for Deborah Schoeneman's 4% Famous, it's Rocco DiSpirito. [R&M (2nd item)]
• 59-year-old actor James Woods is now dating his daughter, 20-year-old Ashley Madison. [Lowdown]
• Barbra Streisand tours again! Cue fainting Gays! [IMDb]
• Fake David Cross is to the East Village and Lower East Side as Fake Jimmy Buffet is to the Hamptons. [Page Six]