Yesterday we learned that an entry in Maureen Dowd's Sunday Times column appeared to be lifted straight from a blog post by TPM's Josh Marshall on Thursday. Last night, Dowd admitted to plagiarizing Marshall.

Whoops! It appears Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall a Talking Points Memo follower might've busted Maureen Dowd doing a little bit of plagiarism. At the very least, she's definitely being accused of it. Ruh roh.

Elizabeth Edwards is, obviously, more or less the most sympathetic woman in the world, as a cancer survivor married to an asshole who cheated on her with some hippie freak. But no one likes her.

Last week, Maureen Dowd went to Google and complained about how they were breaking newspapers, or something. Today: she meets the heads of Twitter. She doesn't really like Twitter!

What happens when the prim self-satisfaction of New York's media elite meets the smug hubris of Silicon Valley's unblinking technocrats? Why, a Maureen Dowd profile of Google CEO Eric Schmidt, that's what happens.

Dispatches from the land of Twitteronia: Penelope Trunk and Brooke Hammerling wrestled with their relationships, while Jason Pontin and Chris Lehmann wrestled with the facts. These are the fights Twitter always wins:

Barack Obama has some distant relative from a place called "Moneygall," in Ireland. Maureen Dowd joked about that in an interview that ran on Monday. Days later, she couldn't come up with a better line.

Look how adorable the Times' most aggravating columnist was, in her little "Irish stuff" outfit!

Today in the New York Times opinion section: Maureen Dowd reads the Post and pretends to be outraged at perk-addicted rich people, Thomas Friedman just makes up some nonsense.

• Giuseppe Cipriani hasn't been seen in New York for months, but he says that has nothing to do with the handful of investigations now underway, or because he's banned from the US. He's just "busy" and says he'll return to New York "soon." His son Ignazio has been busy, too. The 20-year-old has been charged with third-degree assault for beating up a limo driver outside 1OAK back in December. [NYP, R&M]
• The latest man to fall into Paris Hilton's clutches: She was was spotted at Sundance making out with MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe. [P6, NYDN]
• Prince William's girlfriend, Kate Middleton, may be planning to move to New York to take a job in fashion, thanks to advice she received from Tom Ford and Anna Wintour. [Daily Express]
• Maureen Dowd threw a big party on Sunday eve to honor of David Geffen. In attendance: Tom Hanks, Jeff Zucker, David Katzenberg, Ron Howard, and George Stephanopoulos, who knocked over a tray of martinis and left the party red-faced. [P6]

Maureen Dowd is thrilled DC is "finally integrated." To celebrate, the Times columnist made an A-list nightclub of her home then dined like French aristocracy.

Last Friday the New York Times sent out a memo telling staffers it's cracking down on expenses across the board. Sunday it published Maureen Dowd's (expensed) account of three days at Canyon Ranch resort. Huh:

The Tim Geithner confirmation hearings will be postponed! All because Obama's Treasury pick has some unpaid taxes and a briefly illegal housekeeper. Man, Geithner, step up your game.

Worst birthday ever: Embattled Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit turns 52 today, although we're going to assume that whatever big party Swati Pandi had been planning is not going ahead as scheduled. Others celebrating: 60 Minutes' Andy Rooney is turning 90. Fox News anchor Shepard Smith is 45. The New York Times' Maureen Dowd is 57. Models Karen Elson and Angela Lindvall are both turning 30. Filmmaker Steven Soderbergh is 46. Cranky liberal Eric Alterman is 49. Venture capitalist (and babe magnet) Adam Dell is turning 39. Jason Bateman is 40. Dave Grohl is celebrating his 40th. LL Cool J is 41. Faye Dunaway is turning 68. And Ms. Kristin Cavallari is turning 22 today.

From the least surprising news ever file: Maureen Dowd flirted with the guy from the FX show Damages, which sums up everything about her, maybe?

Every Thursday and Saturday, I have the same nightmare. When I wake up in the morning to read the Times on those days, the dream is made real...all over the op-ed page. Her name is Gail Collins. Once the paper's editorial page director, she now writes twice a week, and when those days come around, I'd rather listen to Thomas Friedman say "flat" 800 times than read a single word she writes. Today she has topped herself with the most banal column in the history of the op-ed genre. Don't believe me? The close is "Time for a change." Experience the worst:Collins' reign over the Times op-ed page until the end of 2006 wasn't altogether a hapless one - she brought along a number of popular columnists. (She did move Frank Rich to the op-ed page, where the best columnist on the paper got a larger platform.) We can't personally testify to any of her editing abilities, but she must have been one hell of a re-writer to have stayed with the paper this long as a weekly writer. She makes Maureen Dowd's column ideas look unique and original. The only advantage she has on Maureen is that she's not a racist (probably). The theme of today's opus is on her impatience for Barack Obama to replace George W. Bush. Thanks, Gail — you've taken what we're all thinking, albeit weeks ago, and somehow turned that into a column. A long column. A column that actually contains the words, "Can I see a show of hands? How many people want George W. out and Barack in?" More boring than outright bad, here's the kind of high level thinking that Gail makes you do:

Unreconstructed Liberals have their own reasons for disliking the Clintons, and movement conservatives obviously have even more, but what the hell explains the pathological antipathy the Washington Press Corps still feels for President Bill and Senator Hillary Clinton? The roots of it go back 16 years or so, but what's amazing is to see it still in such pristine condition, as if we haven't had eight terrible years to get over it. Now, as the Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State job offer becomes yet another press-driven telenovela, with the Clintons as, I dunno, the country's presumed dead ex-lover who just turned up on the day of our wedding to Barack Obama, or something, it's instructive to see how the press corps still sees the former first family. Christopher Hitchens comes at the Clinton issue as an old-timey Leftist (leftists hate liberals!) and also a drunken contrarian, but his comments and criticisms have been accepted by the resolute centrists of the DC press corps as a, bizarrely, an argument against Clinton with a great deal of popular support. The opinion of Chris Hitchens represents the views of precisely one person on this planet. He is representative of no one on the left, right, or in the center. You wouldn't know that from listening to Joe Scarborough:

If her column today is any indication, ancient op-ed mariner Maureen Dowd is not overly familiar with black people. Sure, living in Washington D.C., a city with a high concentration of African-Americans, she has noted the occasional "cute black mailman," but generally, this week was the first time she had ever seen whites and blacks speaking to one another. If this is the kind of analysis Dowd will be delivering twice a week in the Obama era, there may be no need for any other president-elect related comedy to exist.Maureen's pre-election columns were generally ghastly enough. Not to be outdone by rival condescending op-edders, she breaks out the big guns today with a column that begins, "I grew up in the nation’s capital, but I’ve never seen blacks and whites here intermingling as they have this week." It gets better:

Times columnist Maureen Dowd spent a decent chunk of this campaign trying to paint Barack Obama as another effete faggy Democratic wuss, as she did to John Kerry and Al Gore, just because, hey, why not. OBambi was all her, remember? Also she called him a "butterfly." Now, today, she's thrilled Obama won, and certain he'll restore dignity and grandeur to Washington and the White House. Obama "has the chance to make the White House pristine again." Yes, because Washington DC and the White House were certainly pristine before all this, right? Dowd explains how rough the last 16 years have been:

Admit it. You've been wondering what John McCain eats for breakfast. The answer? Coffee, cereal, and fruit. (No, not babies.) Barack Obama gobbles down four to six eggs, potatoes, and wheat toast, and occasionally adds fruit, bacon, and oatmeal to the menu. (How does he stay so thin?) We certainly didn't see this one coming, but Tom Brokaw says he's a granola and yogurt kind-of-guy. Maureen Dowd? "I don't eat breakfast. Just coffee." A few other breakfast choices of media and political types after the jump.