There has been a lot of media coverage about Paula Abdul’s contract negotiations for the next season of American Idol.  She’s even Tweeting about how no deal has been reached.  I suspect that there will be a last minute, hail Mary type deal which will ensure at least one more year of  Paula “I Swear There’s Just Water In My Product Placement Coca-Cola Glass” Abdul.  But if it doesn’t pan out the way I and millions of others hope that it will, I think Jimmy Kimmel has a brilliant idea.

On the opening monologue of last night’s show, Kimmel proposed a new game show vehicle for Paula, called What the Fuck is Paula Abdul Talking About?  It was an idea that started out as a joke, but I would actually totally watch that.  Paula, if the money is there, I say “Go for it!”  

Stay tuned to the end of the clip, where Ryan Seacrest briefly appears with a seemingly afro’d child on a spoof promo for Are you Tanner Than A 5th Grader.  Offensive?

Noooooooooo!!! NOOOOOOO!!!!

They CANNOT kick Paula Abdul off Idol. They simply CANNOT. I will be devastated. Half the reason I watch that show each week is to play the delightful game that I invented. It’s called “Paula Abdul: How High?” And basically the way you play is you watch Paula “talk,” you watch her glazed eyes roll around in her head, you watch her try to slap Simon and practically miss, and then you write down on a piece of paper how many milligrams of Xanax you think are currently in her body. If the number you’ve written down is greater than 10, you move on to the next round. In round two, you write down on a piece of paper how many milligrams of Hydrocodone you think are in Paula’s body. If that number is greater than 30, you move on to the final round, in which you have to guess how many shots of vodka she’s had that day. If that number is greater than five, you are the champion. Needless to say, I win weekly.

But now word on the street is that Paula Abdul has still not been offered a contract for the new season of Idol — and auditions start August 6.

“Very sadly, it does not appear that she’s going to be back on ‘Idol,’” David Sonenberg, Abdul’s manager, told the LA Times. Sonenberg says he doesn’t even have a proposal for a new contract from FremantleMedia and 19 Entertainment, the production companies behind the show. The new season is scheduled to premiere in January.

“I find it under these circumstances particularly unusual; I think unnecessarily hurtful,” he said of the contract holdup. “I find it kind of unconscionable and certainly rude and disrespectful that they haven’t stepped up and said what they want to do.”

Representatives for Fremantle, 19 and Fox all separately declined to comment.

OK, look, Kara DioGuardi won me over a teensy tiny bit on the finale when she showed up Bikini Girl in her own bikini — that was cool — but she can NEVER replace Paula in my heart. I don’t care how difficult it is to work every week on live national television with a drug addict, Fox — figure out a way! We can’t lose our Paula!

(Meanwhile, Ryan Seacrest’s new Idol contract has him earning a cool $45M over the next three years. The hardest-working man in show business is well-compensated, I’ll say.)

Twenty years ago this week, Paula Abdul scored her second No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 singles chart with “Forever Your Girl.” This week, she’s back on the charts, with her new single “Here for the Music” coming in at the #87 spot following her appearance on Idol last week. Not an especially embarrassing ranking for a 46-year-old doing dance tracks, but I’d wager money that it’ll be off the charts entirely by next week.

Meanwhile, Chris Daughtry’s “No Suprise,” which debuted on Idol the same day as Paula’s single, is on the charts at #15. That one, I think, will continue upward.

The student has become the teacher, yo.

You may remember a couple of weeks ago when I mentioned a Nightline interview in which Paula Abdul offered up her medical records as a means to prove that she has never been addicted to anything.  She actually claimed she had never even been drunk which was a shame since that was the only explanation I previously had to explain her wardrobe.

Just a couple days ago, Beet told you all about how Paula was finally coming clean about coming clean.  She granted an interview to Ladies Home Journal in which she talked about how she could have killed herself, the pain of withdrawal and rehab.

Well now Paula claims that her comments were taken out of context.  Which I can totally see. Have you seen the way those hardcore bastards over at LHJ will twist facts just to sell magazines?  I can’t tell you how many “The Benefits Of Calcium” articles I had to read in their publication before I caught on to their malicious intent.

So the newest episode of Abdulmentia looks like this:  Paula called into Detroit’s Mojo in the Morning radio show today to debunk any addiction talk.  According to Abdul, she never told LHJ that she was addicted to painkillers and never said she went to rehab despite the magazine’s use of direct quotes.

Of course, in the same radio interview, she also said Kara DioGuardi is a “dear friend” so I think that right there proves she’s a liar.

Above:  video of Paula performing her new single ” Here For The Music” on American Idol last night.  Ironically, the performance was lip-synched.  It starts at the one minute mark.

After years of denying her SUPER OBVIOUS pill addiction, Paula Abdul is opening up about it … and it JUST SO HAPPENS to coincide with the release of her new single. Funny, that.

Paula says she’s kicked the pill habit, which I’m almost willing to believe, as she’s been more sober during this season of Idol than any season prior. She talks openly in a new interview about the detox process:

“I could have killed myself,” Abdul, 46, tells Ladies’ Home Journal in its June issue. “Withdrawal – it’s the worst thing.”

Abdul says she checked herself into the La Costa Resort and Spa, in Carlsbad, Calif., last Thanksgiving to help beat her use of medication. “I was freezing cold, then sweating hot, then chattering and in so much pain, it was excruciating,” she says. “But at my very core, I did not like existing the way I had been.”

After taking medication to combat pain from injuries that happened during her grueling years as a dancer – beginning with a back injury when she was 17 and including a neck injury sustained in a plane crash in 1993 – the American Idol judge says, “I’d been working nonstop,” and her desire to carry on with her work led her to take more pain pills.

“I’m an old school professional,” Abdul says of her “Never let them see you sweat” credo.

By 2005, Abdul was diagnosed with reflex sympathetic dystrophy syndrome, a chronic condition that resulted in debilitating pain. As a result, she wore a pain patch and took nerve medication and, occasionally, a muscle relaxant. The combo made her “get weird,” she says.

Ehhh, I’m not gonna give her too hard a time here. I’m glad she finally got honest about it, because it’s been so ridiculously obvious for years now, and her lies about it were such a punchline. Hopefully she’s really clean and planning to stay that way.

Looks like Paula Abdul managed to stumble into a recording studio and allow a voice modulator to give her throat a little break from the pills. The result? This new single, called “Here for the Music.” The song was previously recorded by Kylie Minogue as a demo but never released. (You can listen to Kylie’s version here.)

I know this song’s intended as a dance track, but I still think it’s pretty freakin’ awful. It’s sounds more like a track that Heidi Montag rejected, and you all know that’s saying something. Paula’s reportedly going to be performing this song “live” on Idol. I don’t know if even that level of exposure can save this thing. Plus there’s the added risk that it’ll kill Simon.

“I’ve never been addicted to any prescription drugs. I’ve never been drunk. I’ve worked my whole life.  I will not take those drugs.  And you can check my medical records. There is nothing like that. I was never on Oxycontin or Vicodin or anything like that. I was on nerve medicine and anti-inflammatories.”

Paula Abdul in a Nightline interview in which she defends her frequently erratic behavior.  Oh, and when Nightline did ask for consent to view her medical records, as per her offer, Paula declined.