Armstrong saga gets sleazier by the day

Turns out that investment bank Thomas Weisel Partners, which bankrolled Armstrong's former cycling team, also managed assets for the head of Union Cycliste Internationale, cycling's governing body, the WSJ is reporting. That's great - the guy who is supposed to be enforcing anti-doping rules is being advised by the same firm that's at the center of the scandal. "It certainly stinks to high heaven," Travis Tygart, head of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, told the Journal. Meantime, everybody seems to be enabling everybody else. Armstrong himself is enabling Oprah Winfrey by agreeing to be interviewed tonight and tomorrow on her struggling channel (Quick - what's the number on your cable system? Thought so.), while Winfrey is enabling Armstrong to lay out some sort of mea culpa - the first leg of what we'll just call the Chutzpah Redemption Tour. So what have we learned from all this? NYT columnist Gail Collins wonders:

We can certainly grant him absolution as a human being, but he appears to be in the market for forgiveness as a celebrity. And, really, once you get past the now-demolished race record, there's not much point to Lance Armstrong, Famous Person. He has no other talents. He isn't particularly lovable. He was once cited for using 330,000 gallons of water at his Texas home in a month when his neighbors were being asked to conserve by cutting back on their car-washing. He left his wife, got engaged to the singer Sheryl Crow. He said he broke up with Sheryl Crow because of her "biological clock." The New York Post had him dating one of the Olsen twins.