The things a gal has to do to save America.

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RELATED: A decade ago gambling magnate and leading Republican donor Sheldon Adelson looked at a desolate spit of land in Macau and imagined a glittering strip of casinos, hotels and malls. Where competitors saw obstacles, including Macau’s hostility to outsiders and historic links to Chinese organized crime, Adelson envisaged a chance to make billions. Adelson pushed his chips to the center of the table, keeping his nerve even as his company teetered on the brink of bankruptcy in late 2008. The Macau bet paid off, propelling Adelson into the ranks of the mega-rich and underwriting his role as the largest Republican donor in the 2012 campaign, providing tens of millions of dollars to Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and other GOP causes. Now, some of the methods Adelson used in Macau to save his company and help build a personal fortune estimated at $25 billion have come under expanding scrutiny by federal and Nevada investigators, according to people familiar with both inquiries. Internal email and company documents, disclosed here for the first time, show that Adelson instructed a top executive to pay about $700,000 in legal fees to Leonel Alves, a Macau legislator whose firm was serving as an outside counsel to Las Vegas Sands. The company’s general counsel and an outside law firm warned that the arrangement could violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. It is unknown whether Adelson was aware of these warnings. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act bars American companies from paying foreign officials to “affect or influence any act or decision” for business gain. Federal investigators are looking at whether the payments violate the statute because of Alves’ government and political roles in Macau, people familiar with the inquiry said. MORE

PHAWKER: Dude is worth $25 billion and this is the best dye-job he can get?

For your consideration.

[by Dan Springer caricatureking.blogspot.com]

NEW YORK TIMES: Unlike some of her Comedy Central brethren Sarah Silverman never made an episode of her show that elicited ominous messages from shadowy groups – her only sin was producing a series that grew too expensive for that cable channel to produce. (O.K., and possibly showing a man deriving illicit pleasure from a toy train. And casting Ed Asner as a Nazi officer.) But those days are no more: Comedy Central said on Wednesday that it was not picking up “The Sarah Silverman Program” for a fourth season, confirming a report that appeared in The Hollywood Reporter. MORE

DEADLINE HOLLYWOOD: [The show] was on the brink of cancellation in 2009 when she and fellow executive producers Dan Sterling and Rob Schrab threatened to quit after the cable network asked them to slash the series’ budget by more than 20%. A last-minute deal with sister network Logo was reached to co-finance the series, so a 10-episode third season was ordered. But midway through Season 3, which wrapped last month, the network bumped the series from 10:30 PM to midnight, hinting at its intention not to continue with Sarah. MORE

RELATED: EVEN with the Red Sox beanie pulled over the trademark mane of black hair, it’s not hard to spot Sarah Silverman in the lobby at the Bowery Hotel: she’s the grown woman dressed like a 14-year-old boy. Promoting her new memoir, “The Bedwetter” — which was No. 9 last week on The New York Times nonfiction hardcover list — Ms. Silverman saunters toward me in an American Apparel sweatshirt, Free City sweats, and worn Adidas. “In 18 months of working with her, I don’t think I ever saw Sarah in a shirt that didn’t have a number on it,” says David Hirshey, her editor at HarperCollins, which paid $2.5 million for her book. “She dresses as if she’s always ready for a touch football game.”

“Wait, am I dressing like a 14-year-old boy, or are all 14-year-old boys dressing like me?” she asks in that voice that sounds as if it belongs to a baby with really bad allergies. “Remember, they’re my demo.” Well, part of it. There are also the young women who aspire to look “as cute as Sarah in geeky chic,” as one nose-ringed indie girl put it at Ms. Silverman’s book-signing at the NoHo Urban Outfitters in April. And of course there are the legions of middle-aged urban men who see in Ms. Silverman one of their more prominent dude fantasies: the hot tomboy-next-door who will laugh at your potty jokes, punch you in the arm and then make out with you. It’s almost embarrassing to witness the exchange between her and the waiter at the hotel. When she asks if she could possibly, maybe, please, have mint in her ice tea, he declares, “For you I find mint!” I’m not sure if he bowed as he handed it to her, but the bow was implied.

Ms. Silverman’s look is, in a way, an integral part of her comedy. It provides a buffer — the buffer of adorableness. The 39-year-old, who has been doing stand-up since she was a student at N.Y.U., has become famous with the most brilliant, jaw-dropping, deliberately shocking jokes about racism, abortion and rape. (“I was raped by a doctor … which is really bittersweet for a Jewish girl.”) Somehow hoodies and pigtails soften the blow. MORE