That’s because he didn’t know what a tidal wave of raw outrage he’d provoke from Lindsay Lohan’s millions of adoring fans. Well, OK, not really adoring. And there weren’t millions of them, either. And the term ‘fans’ is pushing it as well, come to think of it.

In fact, the sum of the backlash that Barack Obama has faced after turning down Lindsay Lohan’s offer of help is one email. One email from Lindsay Lohan’s dad. One email from Lindsay Lohan’s dad that wasn’t even directly addressed to Barack Obama and was only written because Lindsay Lohan’s dad is weirdly compelled to make a public comment about Lindsay Lohan every time she even so much as farts because he wants to make up for being a bad father. So, yeah, watch out Obama you big sod.

Barack Obama is in no position to turn down anyone’s help at the moment. Thanks to Sarah Palin and her incredible reproducing children, John McCain is creeping slowly into the lead in the polls ahead of November’s general election. So Barack Obama needs all the help he can get, even if it comes from mostly-naked former childstars who spent most of last year zig-zagging between police stations, jails, morgues and rehab.

Except, no, Mr Barack Obama is too much of a bigshot to want the help of a needy, trouble-addicted career opportunist like Lindsay Lohan, which is why he so rudely declined Lindsay’s offer of help recently.

And, quite rightly, this snub has got Lindsay Lohan’s dad in a right old state. Michael Lohan, you see, stands 100% behind everything that Lindsay Lohan ever does, unless it has anything to do with other girl’s minges. And he’s so incensed about Obama’s refusal to see the latent potential within Lindsay that he’s felt the need to speak out publicly about it.

So it must be serious, because Michael Lohan has a strict policy of only publicly commenting on Lindsay Lohan’s life when she does anything at all no matter how completely bloody inconsequential it all is.

In an email to Fox News, Michael Lohan made the very good and not at all startlingly misinformed point that Barack Obama should have definitely taken Lindsay Lohan up on her offer because he’s only going to be the executive leader of the planet’s sole superpower and she’s making a film about a lady who pretends to be pregnant. Seriously:

“Lindsay is gifted — she has a wonderful heart and she can and will affect millions of people in a very positive way. She is here to stay. Obama might have eight years, and then he will be giving lectures. Who knows, maybe Lindsay will give him a part in one of her movies.”

Actually, that doesn’t sound like such a bad idea. Look at it this way – as it is Lindsay Lohan is recognised as a terrible actress with a hopeless reputation that she occasionally supplements with the odd bit of nudey work, so in eight years’ time it’s almost a scientific inevitability that Lindsay Lohan will be churning out micro-budget direct-to-DVD softcore erotic thrillers. And Barack Obama would rule at being at those, perhaps starring as a randy policeman or a private dick with an itch to scratch.

Oh wait, no, we’re going to have to stop. We brought a bit of dinner up. Sorry.

You know, a friendly dialogue over the falsities of society entangled throughout Anna Karenina, a little chat over motifs of enigmatic love and philosophies of death in War and Peace – it happens every day. No, really. Just ask Mel Gibson and Britney Spears. These two were all chummy-like over dinner at a Russian restaurant over the weekend that has a unique selection of Russian books on the premises.

You see, Mel Gibson is trying to help Britney Spears, so of course they got together for an evening of laughs and Russian literature. And everyone knows that it takes one sometimes embarrassingly drunken nutter to save another sometimes embarrassingly drunken nutter. 

We once had a bit of a crush on Mel Gibson during our formative years. There may have been a time when we carefully snipped his picture out of magazines and placed them on our bedroom wall in a decorative collage, but we’d never admit it. And to tell you the truth, we probably wouldn’t say no to those dreamy blue eyes today – drunken, racially-charged rants notwithstanding – if he wanted to save us from our own self-destructive behaviour and general state whacked-out insanity. So it’s no wonder Britney Spears has been spending time in the company of Mel Gibson, who reportedly wants to show support and guidance to Brit.  

Of course, nothing romantic between Mel Gibson and Britney Spears is going on. The mere thought of such an idea causes our brain to thrash itself against our skull until it settles into a protective coma-like state. Although, if a romantic connection was happening, we wouldn’t have to find any other topics to write about for weeks. That’s some blogging gold, right there.

But alas, Britney Jean Spears and Mel Columcille Gerard Gibson, who used to be neighbours, dined with family and guests at the Studio City restaurant Romanov in a platonic (i.e. boring) manner, for two hours. A source/sell-out random person who sold a cheese pretzel to one of them had this to say about the meeting: 

“Mel and his wife Robin clearly saw a woman in crisis and wanted to extend themselves in any way possible. There's just a handful of people in the world who understand the kind of intense attention that Britney goes through, and how to raise a family with some semblance of privacy and how to keep one's family intact and out of the limelight. There are no expectations, there is no agenda. It's simply an act of human kindness – one neighbor reaching out to the other." 

That’s sweet of the Gibsons, but two whole hours with Britney Spears? What on earth could Mel Gibson and Britney Spears ever talk about for two hours? Perhaps these two were meeting because: 

1) a Crossroads/Beyond Thunderdome project is in the works. Mel will step in as Tina Turner’s character while Britney takes on Master Blaster with whips made from locks of her shaven hair and her still intact womanly virtue.

2) they are gathering together for strength as the last two surviving people in Hollywood that haven’t converted to Scientology.

3) they’ve been possessed by aliens and are wearing Britney and Mel disguises and meet in secret to plot world domination. Or in other words, they’ve converted to Scientology.   

We're torn between the possible reasons, so we'll just go back to not caring at all. It's what we do best.    

Read more: 

Britney's Surprise Dinner Companion: Mel Gibson - People

It doesn't matter that Britney Spears is now being looked after by her family and seems to be making inroads into overcoming whatever problems she's suffered from, because it's fairly obvious that Britney Spears would receive far better treatment from a supermodel she's probably never met and her balladeering husband.

Which is why Heidi Klum has invited Britney Spears to come and live with her, either until Britney's completely better or until Heidi's children get so freaked out by Britney constantly rubbing herself and muttering in confusing British accents that they promise not to keep taking mummy for granted so much.

It's a well-known fact that Heidi Klum doesn't have blood running through her veins, but pure white healing light. There is literally nothing that Heidi Klum won't do for her fellow man. If you ask Heidi Klum for money, she'll definitely give it to you and maybe more, if the way she took pity on poor old scar-faced Seal off the Space Jam soundtrack and let him do it with her until she got pregnant is anything to go by. 

There's no doubt at the moment that the person most in need of a dose of Heidi Klum's philanthropic goodness is Britney Spears. She's been through so much, and nothing has really succeeded in helping her. Britney Spears got her kids taken away and that didn't make her better, Britney Spears ended up living in a padded cell and that didn't make her better – not even the time-honoured practise of mashing anti-psychotic drugs into her food could make Britney Spears better. 

Now it looks as if the short-leash conservatorship approach taken by her father is slowly helping Britney Spears to understand the magnitude of her problems, but in the eyes of some that's still not enough. Britney Spears, they say, will stay damaged until she goes to live with Heidi Klum for a while.

And by 'the eyes of some' we mean 'the eyes of Heidi Klum' as the Associated Press reports:

Heidi Klum wants to help Britney Spears. The 34-year-old model says she'd be willing to open her home to Spears while the troubled pop singer puts her life back together. "She can call me and come live in our house with us for a couple of months," said Klum, a mother of three who is married to the singer Seal and lives in Beverly Hills, Calif. "I would help set her straight. I am sorry when a young person gets thrown so off track," Klum said, according to a transcript of an interview that will be aired Monday night by the German broadcaster ARD. "She has, of course, lived an extremely wild life."

This stunning level of altruism has inspired everyone at hecklerspray to follow Heidi Klum's lead and help other people, too – next time we hear of a young person in crisis, we're going to do as Heidi did and open our doors to them. Also like Heidi did, we won't offer the troubled youngster help directly, but we'll mention it in passing in a language that they don't even speak on a TV show broadcast in a country that they wouldn't even be able to find on a map. 

Heidi Klum's our hero. Really, she's like the Pope or Bono or something.

Read more:

Klum Says She Wants to Help Spears – Associated Press 

Made aware of Amy Winehouse's plight by a shining crack-signal beamed into the sky, Mary J Blige has made it her business to help Winehouse out by hook or by crook, whatever it takes.

Or she just mentioned it in an interview because she's got an album coming out soon and she knows it's newsworthy. Guess which one it is, kids!

When Britney Spears had her crazy meltdown at the start of the month, Dr Phil was at hand to sort everything out. Sure, Dr Phil's credentials might not be up to the standard of a state-licensed psychiatrist, but he's shouted "Get real!" at rednecks multiple times on TV before and that's almost the same thing.

But Dr Phil isn't there for Amy Winehouse. Things are looking doomy for Amy, with her banged-up husband apparently seeking a divorce and a video of her smoking all the crack in the world getting investigated by the police and possibly putting the skids on her attempt to, ahem, 'crack' America, but in the absence of a television almost-psychiatrist, Amy Winehouse has got the next best thing rushing to help.

Mary J Blige.

Now, granted, Mary J Blige isn't so much a qualified psychiatrist as a self-obsessed woman who might be on steroids. And she's not so much rushing to help as using Amy Winehouse's predicament as a way to drum up sales for her new album. But she has dispensed advice to Jamie Lynn Spears before and that's almost the same thing.

Speaking to ITV about Amy Winehouse, Mary J Blige said:

“I have things to say to Amy Winehouse, loving things and things she will be able to relate to. But I don’t really think she can hear me right now, because when I was in a situation like she was in I couldn’t hear.”

OK, so Mary J Blige isn't going to help Amy Winehouse come off crack after all. But she would, so long as Amy Winehouse wasn't on crack. If she wasn't on crack then Mary would get her off crack in a second. But she is on crack, so Mary's probably just not going to bother.

Did we mention that Mary J Blige has an album out? 

Read more:

Mary J Blige offers shoulder to Amy - ITV 

So with that in mind, thank Christ that Dr Phil has taken it upon himself to personally wade in and resolve to fix Britney Spears' broken mind forever. According reports, Dr Phil managed to accompany Britney Spears home after her weird little episode on Thursday evening that ended up with her being wheeled to hospital in a stretcher for psychological tests. And Dr Phil is so hell-bent on sorting out Britney Spears' life that he's even going to do a TV show all about it tomorrow. And quite right too, because if anything's going to set Britney onto the straight and narrow it's the sight of a chubby bald man pointing at a photo of her and shouting "Let's do it! Get real!" 350 times on the trot on daytime TV.

A few days have passed now since Britney Spears was taken to hospital in a stretcher following a ridiculous standoff with Kevin Federline over custody of her children that saw six police cars, ambulances, fire trucks, helicopters, a vanload of paparazzi, those stop-motion skeletons from Jason And The Argonauts, Digby The Biggest Dog In The World, the cast of South Pacific and Batman get sent to her house in a frenzy, and finally things have started to become clear about what went down.

Apparently – based on reports of the incident that we've read from various sources – the whole malarkey started when Britney Spears refused to hand over her children to Kevin Federline at the court-appointed deadline. At that point Britney Spears either barricaded herself in a room with one of her children, both of her children or none of her children and then either took a bunch of illegal drugs, took a bunch of prescription drugs, drank some alcohol or didn't consume anything and then either threatened to kill herself, kill her children, kill her ex-husband or kill none of the above with a gun, some other sort of weapon or no weapon at all. We hope this helps.

Anyway, after whatever the hell is supposed to have happened, Britney Spears was taken to hospital for a mental evaluation to see if she suffers from a tragic mental illness or not. Since she was released from hospital on Saturday morning, we can take it that Britney Spears doesn't actually have a mental illness – meaning that she's just a bit of a twat – but that hasn't stopped Dr Phil from diving in and trying to get his face noticed.

Apparently Dr Phil – the one-time Oprah acolyte who routinely cures idiots of all sorts of life problems on his TV show by shouting bland self-help nothingisms like "This relationship needs a hero!" and "This is going to be a changing day in your life!" at them again and again like a pudgy parrot – escorted Britney Spears home from the hospital. And the experience was so moving for Dr Phil that he's going to base an entire TV show around Britney tomorrow because he loves her and not at all because he thinks that more people will watch his show if he fills it with lots of photos of Britney Spears dribbling in a stretcher. According to Dr Phil:

"My meeting with Britney and some of her family members this morning in her room at Cedars leaves me convinced more than ever that she is in dire need of both medical and psychological intervention. She was released moments before my arrival and was packing when I entered the room. We visited for about an hour before I walked with her to her car. I am very concerned for her." 

There's no mention of whether Britney Spears will appear on tomorrow's edition of Dr Phil – probably because she won't but more people will watch if they think she will – but maybe some direct televised Phil-isms will be what Britney Spears needs to change her ways in any case. And if that fails, it'll be time to bring in the last-ditch heavy artillery to set her straight – we're talking Maury.

Read more:

Britney Spears Leaves Hospital After Visit From Dr. Phil - MTV