I don’t know about the rest of y’all, but I will be spending my White House Correspondents Association Dinner watching punk rock documentaries and drinking wine. But the whole thing is a hilarious spectacle, particularly the rush by news organizations to secure high-profile guests at their tables. And these are the funniest, most revealing guests each of the outlets have scored this year—that we know of so far.

ABC: Christa Miller and Bill Lawrence of Cougar Town. The network keeps the show in limbo forever, but hey, it’ll throw the folks involved some rubber chicken!

AFP: Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage of Mythbusters. Oddly appropriate for a newsgathering organization.

Atlantic Media: Sex and the City‘s Darren Starr. Did Carrie ever score a byline in The Atlantic? Her fights with big would fit her in just fine among some of the magazine’s other female regulars.

Bloomberg: Zooey Deschanel. Clear win for odd couple of the evening

CBS: Homeland star Claire Danes. Blatant, but brilliant, Obama-pandering.

Fox: Lindsay Lohan. Not that Fox engages in tabloid journalism or anything.

Huffington Post: True Blood stars and parents-to-be Anna Paquin and Stephen Moyer, who will also edit HuffPo’s Vampire Parenting section.

The New Yorker: Portlandia stars and New Yorker profile subjects Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein, who presumably will enquire after the welfare of their rubber chicken.

Newsweek/The Daily Beast: Reese Witherspoon, who will totally play Tina Brown in the inevitable biopic.

People: Peeta, we mean, Josh Hutcherson, who will be a mystery to the core WHCA dinner demographic.

POLITICO: MPAA Chairman Chris Dodd and Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt who should make for the evening’s most awkward table pairing.

USA Today: Kelli Garner of Pan Am. Well, maybe not anymore. But I guess they could have bet on the Playboy Club?

And though I’m generally loath to yield them pride of place, the Washington Times totally schools the Washington Post. The latter scored Pierce Brosnan. The former, The Artist scene-stealer Uggie.

George Clooney was the actor who irritated me most in 2011: I thought The Descendants was a less-revealing-than-it-thought-it-was celebration of rich people, and the Ides of March fundamentally misunderstood the dynamics of politics, and was weirdly smug about that ignorance. But I think he gets something important right about celebrities who want to speak out about politics in this week’s issue of The Hollywood Reporter:

Through the years, he says he has learned to think carefully before he speaks out on issues, but that makes his commitment to some causes all the more courageous. His criticism of the war in Iraq made him a highly controversial figure in the early 2000s. “They did a half-hour show on Fox saying my career was over, and there was a cover of one of those magazines with the word ‘traitor’ written on it, and the White House was passing out a deck of weasels and I was on one of the cards,” he recalls. After initial anger, there was a brief moment when he felt afraid. “I called my dad and said, ‘Am I in trouble?’ And he said, ‘Grow up. You’ve got money. You’ve got a job. You can’t demand freedom of speech and then say, “But don’t say bad things about me.” ‘ And he was right.”

Even more precisely, I think it’s that you can’t expect both that your endorsement of a cause or position will mean something and then also expect that people will not react to that endorsement as if it carries weight. I don’t think that the only way for artists to be of service to their politics is for them to validate politicians and policies with their constituencies—they have independent ideas to offer about framing and policy. But recognizing, when you have a lot of power, that you speak from a privileged position, is always smart and classy.

I’m not usually one to police the behavior of celebrities, but Mark Wahlberg’s recent statements about September 11 are really egregious and deserve a thorough fisking. He told Men’s Journal: “If I was on that plane with my kids, it wouldn’t have went down like it did. There would have been a lot of blood in that first-class cabin and then me saying, ‘OK, we’re going to land somewhere safely, don’t worry.”

First, who knew Mark Wahlberg knew how to fly commercial aircraft?

Second, for the love of all that is holy, do you know nothing about what went down on September 11? When people get out of their seats and start murdering members of the crew, it wouldn’t have been particularly surprising if people were shocked enough not to react until it was too late. And as it turns out, they weren’t. The passengers on United 93, including a judo expert and a rugby player (who may not be as fit as Mr. Wahlberg, but are not incapable people), fought back against the men who hijacked their flight. As it turns out, people with weapons who are determined to die are decent at thwarting the people fighting back against them who want to live. The hijacker at the controls of the plane dipped and rolled to thwart the passengers’ efforts. And he crashed it before they could get to the cockpit.

This is just profoundly disrespectful to everyone who died on planes on September 11, whether they fought back or not. It shows no understanding of their ordeal, or their courage. And it mistakes action movie theatrics, where the fights are scripted and all the participants share an interest in making a great scene rather than finding themselves at deadly odds, for the struggle to live.