Adam Frucci
Blogger on Gizmodo.com

For this week’s Photoshop Contest, we focused on new Friend of Giz Jeffrey Toobin, brilliant CNN legal analyst and fellow work-avoider. After busting him not once, but twice surfing the internet on his laptop while on-air during a presidential debate, we decided to give him some more fun stuff to read on the internet when he’s supposed to be working by making him the focus of some Photoshoppery. Hit the jump for the top three winners and then the rest of the best in our Gallery of Champions. Oh, and Toobs: it’s all in good fun. Nothing but love.

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Editor’s Note: Jeffrey Toobin will be on AC360° tonight to discuss the billions of dollars Leona Helmsley left to her dog and the many other pet owners adding their animals to their wills. Watch at 10p ET.

Jeffrey Toobin | Bio
CNN Senior Legal Analyst
New Yorker Columnist

The life of Leona Helmsley presents an object lesson in the truism that money does not buy happiness. Born in 1920, she overcame a hardscrabble youth in Brooklyn to become a successful condominium broker in Manhattan, eventually alighting, in the nineteen-sixties, at a firm owned by Harry B. Helmsley, one of the city’s biggest real-estate developers. The two married in 1972, and Leona became the public face of their empire, the self-styled “queen” of the Helmsley chain of hotels. In a series of ads that ran in the Times Magazine and elsewhere, Helmsley’s visage became a symbol of the celebration of wealth in the nineteen-eighties. She wouldn’t settle for skimpy towels, the ads proclaimed—“Why should you?”

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Jeffrey Toobin | Bio
CNN Senior Political Analyst

Conventions are about politics, not policies, so it’s not surprising that we’ve lately been preoccupied with Hillary Clinton’s body language and John McCain’s real estate.

But it seems timely to offer a reminder that this election is really about something — about issues that will affect the lives of every American and, most likely, everyone in the world.

Presidential candidates are cagey about specifics, so here’s some informed speculation about how the world might look differently if McCain or Barack Obama wins in November:

Obama has three clear priorities for his presidency. He wants to end the war in Iraq, he wants to undertake a major expansion of guaranteed health care, and he wants to change energy policy to lower our dependence on foreign oil and start to address global warming. Can he do any or all of these?

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Andrew Giuliani, center, and his father Rudolph Giuliani, right, pose with Tiger Woods in 2001

Jeffrey Toobin
CNN Senior Analyst

I realize I should be concentrating on more important matters today, but I am currently obsessed with one of the more remarkable lawsuits I have ever encountered.

Andrew Giuliani, son of the former presidential candidate and mayor of New York City, is suing Duke University for throwing him off the varsity golf team.

The gist appears to be that the coach of the team, O.D. Vincent (great name!), decided to cut the number of players on the team, and Andrew, who is a rising senior, was one of the players to get the axe. Keep reading

Jeffrey Toobin
CNN Senior Legal Analyst
AC360° Contributor

South Carolina is soon going to be offering a new option for its license plates: a rendering of a Christian cross over a stained-glass window and the words “I believe.” The question is whether this offer is constitutional.

License plates have already generated a surprising amount of litigation. As most people know, New Hampshire plates say, “Live free or die.” A Jehovah’s Witness, who objected to that message, taped it over, and he was prosecuted for tampering with the plate. In 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court said the prosecution was unconstitutional because the defendant had the right not to speak –- that is, not to display the words on his car. Keep reading

I met Eliot Spitzer in the fall of 1984.  I was a first-year student at Harvard Law School; he was a second-year.  My criminal law professor was Alan Dershowitz, who was involved in a fascinating extracurricular activity.

He was representing Claus Von Bulow, who had been convicted of trying to murder his wife Sunny, in a sensational trial in Newport, Rhode Island.  Eliot was one of two students who were working as research assistants to Dershowitz, trying to win Von Bulow a new trial on appeal.

From the beginning, there was an odd contrast between Eliot and the Von Bulow case.  The attempted murder trial was a sordid drama, full of tales of illicit drug use and wild sex.  Eliot was the straightest of straight arrows.

He seemed so unlikely to be involved in such a matter.  But Eliot and his good friend Cliff Sloan were precocious and energetic young investigators, and they helped win Von Bulow a new trial; he was later acquitted.

Dershowitz wrote a book about the case, Reversal of Fortune, and it became a terrific movie, starring Jeremy Irons.  There is a composite character in the movie loosely based on Eliot and Cliff.

I’ve seen Eliot Spitzer turn into a prominent national figure in the years since, and we’ve remained friendly acquaintances.  I always got a kick out of the idea that he got his start in such an unseemly drama - which was so different from what his public persona became.

So today’s news is especially shocking to me, and especially sad. 

- Jeffrey Toobin, CNN Sr. Legal Analyst

T.S. Eliot is said to have observed, “Good poets borrow, great poets steal.”

All writers build on the work of their predecessors, and politicians do it most of all.  Is there one challenger for any office who has not said, “It’s time for a change”?  Is there one candidate for president who hasn’t promised “to get this country moving again”?  And who thinks politicians write their own speeches anyway?  That’s why the job of speechwriter exists.

And yet there is something a little creepy about a candidate who borrows too closely from the words of others.   The most famous example of controversial borrowing came in 1988, when Joe Biden said in a speech:

“I was thinking as I was coming over here, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? Why is it that my wife who is sitting out there in the audience is the first in her family to ever go to college? Is it because our fathers and mothers were not bright? Is it because I’m the first Biden in a thousand generations to get a college and a graduate degree that I was smarter than the rest? …. Those same people who read poetry and wrote poetry and taught me to sing verse? Is it that they didn’t work very hard, my ancestors who worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours?”

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