THE MOLE: One of three things must be true about the final task on The Apprentice:

1. Omarosa really is that rude and incompetent, and is behaving this way of her own volition;

2. The producers persuaded Omarosa to behave in such a way, in order to make for better television, but this will not be acknowledged on-camera. (It's not like such manipulation would be unusual for Mark Burnett. See Deposition of Dirk Been in SEG, Inc. v. Stillman at 32:22-35:22, 37:14-44:25 and beyond); or,

3. The producers persuaded Omarosa to behave in such a way, in order to make for better television, and they also persuaded someone on Bill's team to do the same, with the intention of forcing each finalist to make a decision as to whether to fire the poor-performing employee -- and this will be revealed as a deliberate twist at the conclusion of the final episode.

I mean, she can't just be that bad, can she?

OH, THOSE JOKE-CRACKING LIBERTARIANS: From a WaPo online chat today with John Stossel, 20/20 co-host and author of "Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media...":

Philadelphia, Pa.: John, did you have to pay Nell Carter's estate any money for the rights to this title for your book?

John Stossel: No.

Later, however, he did acknowledge that he pays Keith Hernandez a licensing fee for the mustache.

AUGHTN'T WE DECIDE? You know, it's 2004 already, and we still don't have an agreed-upon name -- or any name, really -- for this decade. Is it the Double-O's? The Zeds? The Zeroes? The Aughts? The Ohs?

C'mon, people.

PIE-YANNA MAN: An early entrant in the Belated Comeback of the Month competition -- lookie here at Josh Gracin's lone fan, who defends the tone-deaf Lance Corporal's year-old decision to stay and sing rather than fight in Iraq with his fellow Marines.

Nicole writes: "If you think about it if all the Marines stationed at Camp Pendleton went to Iraq then there would be no one protecting your but here in the United States."

Well, thank you, Josh Gracin, and thank you, Nicole. If he's as good a Marine as he is a singer . . .

APPRENTRIXES NEED NOT APPLY: I can't possibly be the first person to notice this, but I haven't seen anything about it on TVTattle.com, so I'll post it: Last night's episode of The Classiest Show in Alla Television ensured that the first season will end with Trump never having fired a man when he could have fired a woman.

IN HIS HONOR, JOHN STEVENS WILL BUTCHER 'STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU': Next week on AI3: special guest judge Quentin Tarantino for Movie Night.

THIS MAY BE THE ONLY OPPORTUNITY YOU EVER HAVE IN YOUR LIFE TO USE THE WORD 'DEFENESTRATE': Via Gawker comes this fascinating report from a writer who lived downstairs from one of the apartments renovated and rented during week seven of The Apprentice.

Oh, the things Mark Burnett doesn't want you to know: like that the apartment's previous occupant committed suicide there. Or this, which is pretty damning of the Burnett-Trump notion of "reality":

It turned out that [the successful renter] had actually rented the apartment before it was renovated. She had looked at a few places in the neighborhood, picked the apartment upstairs from us, and made arrangements to move in before learning that it had been pulled off the market for the show. She went ballistic. The landlord told her not to worry, she could still have the apartment at the agreed-upon rent but would have to participate in the episode in order to get it. During the filming, she went through the motions and rented the apartment at a price higher than the one she would actually be paying. The negotiation was a sham.

Up next: will we hear from the penthouse-renters from last week? How did they know to find Nick and Amy with just minutes to spare?