The inevitable has happened in St. Louis, with Scott Linehan getting dumped as Rams coach after an 0-4 start.  Fans responding in a St. Louis Today.com poll were urging the dismissal by a 92% count.

Linehan’s departure moves Rams defensive coordinator Jim Haslett into the head coaching spot, and maybe that’s the product of some overdue karma.  Haslett’s firing as the New Orleans Saints’ head coach in 2005 was a heartless move that got overlooked in the wake of all the chaos that followed Hurricane Katrina.

Yes, Haslett managed only a 3-13 record in the season that followed Katrina, but he in essence played an entire season of road games while the Superdome was repaired.  Throw out that season, and his 45-51 career record looks a lot better.

Also, Haslett has experience at picking up someone else’s broken pieces, points out St. Louis Post-Dispatch columnist Bryan Burwell.  When he took over the Saints in 2000, they were coming off a 3-13 season, and transitioned to a 10-6 team in Haslett’s first year.  So he has experience cleaning up a train wreck, which is exactly what they have in St. Louis.

The next question is how long until Rams president John Shaw and GM Jay Zygmunt follow Linehan out the door.

Stunning actress Scarlett Johansson (23) and actor Ryan Reynolds (31) officially got married over the weekend in an intimate ceremony in Canada. This surprising news definitively proves that it actually is possible for celebrities to celebrate major life events while still remaining relatively under the radar…they just need to play their cards close to their chests.

 The couple chose a remote wilderness retreat outside of Vancouver, B.C. to hold their wedding ceremony. Only family and the closest of friends were invited to take part in the couple’s special day.

 Ryan Reynolds’s rep Meredith O’Sullivan confirmed the marriage to People magazine. This is the first marriage for both Johansson and Reynolds, although Reynolds was previously engaged to singer Alanis Morissette. He and Johansson began dating last year, shortly after his split from Morissette. For her part, Alanis rose above whatever break-up angst she may have been feeling and told People magazine in June that as far as Reynolds’ engagement to Johansson was concerned, she was “really happy for him.” Only future Alanis Morissette CDs will truly provide insight as to whether or not the oft-moody singer is telling the truth.

 As for Johansson’s hopes for the marriage, the actress previously told “Entertainment Tonight Canada” that she hopes to become an honorary Canadian, as Reynolds himself is Canadian. Said Johansson, “I’m very excited. I’ve had wonderful times in Canada. It’s a lovely country. It’s a beautiful country and hopefully I’ll be able to get through immigration faster now!”

 While Johansson might now be an honorary Canadian, we have a feeling that Reynolds may have officially lost his place as an honorary favorite actor for many men out there. While Johansson and Reynolds are surely thrilled over their new union, it’s safe to say that others are none too pleased with Reynolds’s success at taking the lovely Scarlett Johansson off the market.

Editor’s note: Ed Rollins, who served as political director for President Reagan, is a Republican strategist who was national chairman of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Ed Rollins says last week wasn’t good for the candidates, the president or Congress.

NEW YORK (WNM) – Wow what a week!

Having watched Congressional leaders and the White House deal behind closed doors all week, I now know why the country has been giving them some of the lowest approval ratings in history.

John McCain is a big gambler according to a lengthy story in Sunday’s New York Times. And certainly a roll of the dice is the best way to describe the last week. Congress is betting billions of our tax dollars that Wall Street — which lost much of its own and its investors’ money in bad bets — will do better with the government’s money.

Our “Swaggerer in Chief,” President Bush, who has strutted from crisis to crisis with utmost arrogance for two long terms, sheepishly arrived on primetime television to scare the daylights out of the very people he should be reassuring. I have never heard a president give a less reassuring speech.

It was definitely a “Chicken Little,” the-sky-is-falling performance with no explanation of why taxpayers must mortgage their kids’ futures to pay for this latest crisis to occur on his watch.

It’s amazing there wasn’t a run on the banks in every little town in America the next day. I guess the president felt if “fear tactics” worked to get and keep us in Iraq, maybe they could help this raid on the Treasury to go forward without a single public hearing on the substance of the bill.

If all that wasn’t enough, we had the first of three presidential debates. Most viewers called it a draw or gave a slight advantage to Obama.

Depending on your political corner, last week was either the most bizarre, high-risk seven, days for John McCain, the “Gambler in Chief,” or the week “Lecturer in Chief” Barack Obama couldn’t finish him off.

Say what you want about McCain, he’s certainly not predictable. And as he proved by threatening to cancel the debate and jumping into the legislative fray on Thursday — where he was not welcome — he wants to be in the action. And he is still in the action.

With five weeks to go, John McCain is alive and still fighting. The man who many times has been left for dead — both politically and on the battlefield — is wounded but not down.

After absorbing severe, self-inflicted damage last week, he was in Mississippi on Friday night, wobbly and ready to be taken out by Obama.

McCain proved in his opening answers to moderator Jim Lehrer, that he had no clue how the government should respond to the financial crisis. He failed to articulate how he would cut his own programs in response to the crisis.

Other than vetoing $18 billion of his fellow members’ pet projects called earmarks (doubtful since more than half are defense projects) and not allowing another $3 million study of the DNA of grizzly bears (a measure McCain voted for by supporting an appropriation bill including it) he offered little guidance on what a McCain administration would do with an emptier U.S. Treasury.

Obama, on the other hand, proved once again that he can’t close the sale. With polls moving all week in his direction, all he had to do was appear presidential and make his case that McCain was going to be “Bush-like” in his approach to governing.

Equally important for him, is that American voters now want more than a strong commander in chief, they also want an “economist in chief.”

This should have tilted the advantage to Obama. But instead of impressing on this front, Obama showed a total lack of understanding of the economic crisis. Like McCain, he failed to name which of his programs he would cut in the face of the current economic crisis.

The rest of the debate, focused on the night’s topic, foreign affairs, and proved both men could pronounce the names of foreign leaders — for the most part.

McCain doesn’t want to deal with unfriendly foreign leaders without them signing an “I’ll be a good boy” pledge. Obama wants to talk to them anyway and he’s definitely a better talker.

The scariest part of the debate is that both said they want to escalate and send more troops to Afghanistan.

Obama is like the smart kid in the class who talks too much — never says in a sentence what he can say in a paragraph. John McCain is like the crusty old teacher who condescendingly wants to tell the smart student: “Shut up, kid. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

We will know more today about whether the Wall Street bailout can get sufficient votes to pass Congress.

We will know later this week whether the gambling man’s biggest bet will work when his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, debates Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Joe Biden on Thursday night. Palin’s primetime interviews with CBS’s Katie Couric and ABC’s Charlie Gibson show she’s not ready to do primetime interviews. But at least it’s been a boost to former SNL star Tina Fey.

The other big events of the week were the football upsets of No. 1 USC by Oregon State and No. 4 Florida by Mississippi.

Underdogs do win. But in the presidential race, given the narrow margin in the polls, who is the underdog?

Gambler McCain is betting he is. And who wants to bet against him?

Fasten your seatbelts — everything indicates this week could be just as crazy as last.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the writer.  

Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama expressed cautious support for a $700 billion bailout of the nation’s biggest financial institutions, though both reserved the right to change their minds after they have reviewed details of the hastily arranged deal.

The candidates made their comments as both prepared to return to the campaign trail after an odd week in which electioneering was interrupted by the economic crisis, McCain’s brief pledge to suspend his campaign, and the first debate between the two candidates.

Both camps now turn their attention to Thursday’s debate between the vice presidential candidates, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (Del.), which is sure to draw intense interest because of Palin, whose limited exposure to tough questions has been criticized by opponents and supporters alike.

McCain’s campaign announced that Palin will step off the trail entirely tomorrow and Wednesday as she prepares for her first major unscripted event of the campaign, which follows an interview last week with CBS News’s Katie Couric that was widely panned.

On the economic bailout, McCain said in an interview on ABC’s “This Week” that he will “swallow hard and go forward” with the plan, adding that it is time to “get this deal off the table, let’s get this to the president.”

McCain, who rushed back to Washington last week to help Congress reach a deal, said yesterday that “the option of doing nothing is simply not an acceptable option.”

Obama called the need for a bailout “the culmination of a sorry period in our history, in which reckless speculation and greed on Wall Street and lax oversight from Washington led to a meltdown of our financial markets.”

Obama said that as president he would order a review of the bailout plan to make sure it meets the principles he sought, including strict oversight and limits on executive pay. But he said a failure to approve it would have “devastating consequences” for the U.S. economy.

“When taxpayers are asked to take such an extraordinary step because of the irresponsibility of a relative few, it is not a cause for celebration,” Obama said. “But this step is necessary.”

The campaigns continued to squabble over the extraordinary scene of last week’sWhite House meeting on the economy and the sometimes angry negotiations over the bailout package, which culminated in a deal early yesterday morning.

McCain explained on ABC that he “came back because I didn’t want to phone it in. I won’t claim a bit of credit if that makes them feel better.”

But Democrats noted that McCain spent very little time on Capitol Hill talking directly with lawmakers, instead preferring to work the phones from his Crystal City headquarters.

And an Obama spokesman sent out e-mails to reporters reminding them that while lawmakers and congressional staff members worked into Saturday night to hammer out the deal, McCain was at CityZen, one of Washington’s priciest restaurants.

“After taking 22 hours to get from New York to Washington to pull a pointless political stunt, McCain spent yesterday working the phones — from his campaign headquarters across the river from the Capitol,” said Damien LaVera, a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee.

Campaigning in Detroit, Obama continued to attack McCain, saying the Republican’s backing of deregulation laws helped cause the economic crisis.

“You can’t make up for 26 years in 26 days,” Obama told a crowd of more than 15,000 at a rally in downtown Detroit. “For most of the 26 years, he’s been against the common-sense rules and regulations that could have stopped this problem.”

Throughout Friday’s debate, McCain suggested that Obama didn’t “understand” a number of issues, a charge Obama tossed back at his opponent yesterday.

“He kept on asking me, ‘You don’t understand.’ No, I understand — you want more of the same,” he said, referring to McCain’s embrace of some policies advocated by the Bush administration. “A fifth-grader could understand it’s more of the same.”

A McCain spokesman responded that Obama had “ignored his record of opposing middle-class tax relief” during the rally.

“Barack Obama voted 94 times in just three years for higher taxes,” said McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds.

Palin also sparked some controversy over the weekend by saying in response to a question at a campaign stop that U.S. troops in Afghanistan should cross the border into Pakistan to fight terrorism. “If that’s what we have to do stop the terrorists from coming any further in, absolutely, we should,” she answered.

Democrats quickly noted that McCain has criticized Obama for a similar answer, including at Friday’s debate. In the appearance on ABC, McCain played down the comment, saying: “She would not . . . she understands and has stated repeatedly that we’re not going to do anything except in America’s national security interest.”

Referring to Palin’s critics, he added: “They can complain all they want to. The American people have responded to her in a way that’s been wonderful. I’m so happy that she is part of the team.”