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Hoaxes
FYI
Keith Gessen cannot adopt the adorable foster cat we got him, because he is apparently leaving the country soon. So it's available! She's spayed, housetrained, about 6 months old, and v v friendly. So if you'd like your very own Lolcat, email us.
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Hoaxes
Ordinary People
Chris Matthews Is America
Chris Matthews is actually incapable of conceiving of "regular people" who aren't him. Which is to say, aging white men with blue-collar backgrounds, probably from the eastern seaboard. The stream-of-consciousness pundit just came out and explicitly said it on his show yesterday, asking, "can Obama now win over the regular folks, white folks, against John McCain?" White folks! They're so regular! Previously, Chris asserted that he knew for a fact that only "people with money play pool these days," in his insane campaign to convince everyone else of his dearly held belief that the only people in America who count are those who are exactly like his own cartoonish and inaccurate sense of himself, the millionaire television personality. Anyway. The clip is after the jump. More »
consumer guide
Howard Wolfson, Music Critic
Hillary Clinton aide Howard Wolfson is now a regular contributor to Fox News, but in his heart of hearts, he'd like to be a contributing editor at Spin. As we've mentioned, he regularly sends out indie-heavy playlists of what he's listening to to friends, fellow flacks, and journalists. And we finally found his 2004 end-of-year list! Complete with blurbs! Wolfson's top ten, and other assored bits of music criticism from the be-sweatered communications consultant, after the jump. More »
Labor Relations
Union Takes Anti-Wasserstein Fight to (Most) New York Media
Billionaire Bruce Wasserstein is under attack from communists! And they're taking the fight to the blogs! SEIU, the service industry union, has been trying to unionize workers at a chain of nursing homes called Atria Senior Living. Atria was recently bought by Lazard Real Estate Partners, which is a little corner of Lazard Ltd., which is the parent company of Wasserstein's investment bank. Since the buyout, SEIU says the nursing homes have raised rents while cutting staff and level of care. You'll find SEUI's tricky pretend financial ads on the sites of the New York Post, the Times, and, yes, Gawker (see attached, or look up). But you probably won't see them over at the homepage of New York Magazine, which is owned by a guy named Bruce Wasserstein. [NYP]
Miracle Baby
Lara Logan With Child, Howard Kurtz With Exclusive
No wonder Lara Logan was so cranky on The Daily Show—she's preggers! Logan, the CBS war correspondent whose well-deserved promotion to CBS' chief foreign affairs correspondent was overshadowed by all this homewrecking nonsense, is now safely in Washington and expecting a child with Joseph Burkett, the contractor she famously carried on an affair with while stationed in Baghdad. The scoop comes from Washington Post "media critic" Howard Kurtz, which is funny, because he is generally useless and was all hand-wringy about how tabloidy this story was last week. Funny how a little exclusive can change a guy's mind, right? More passionate wartime forbidden love, below. More »
Howard Wolfson
Howard Wolfson, the Hillary Clinton surrogate whose many television appearances were second in embarrassment only to Terry McAuliffe's, has a new job! The former communications director is taking his message of Cosby sweater-inspired victory to Fox News, where they continue to find new and inventive ways of hating the Clintons, like by parading their vanquished aides before the nation. Clinton's campaign came to believe that Fox was more fair to her during the primary campaign, mostly because they never tired of beating up on Obama and his pastor or whatever. Wolfson, recently named "the most charmless human being on the planet," is excited to bring his tireless advocacy for failure to the fair and balanced network.
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Unpleasant Flack Joins Unpleasant Network
Howard Wolfson, the Hillary Clinton surrogate whose many television appearances were second in embarrassment only to Terry McAuliffe's, has a new job! The former communications director is taking his message of Cosby sweater-inspired victory to Fox News, where they continue to find new and inventive ways of hating the Clintons, like by parading their vanquished aides before the nation. Clinton's campaign came to believe that Fox was more fair to her during the primary campaign, mostly because they never tired of beating up on Obama and his pastor or whatever. Wolfson, recently named "the most charmless human being on the planet," is excited to bring his tireless advocacy for failure to the fair and balanced network.
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sabotage
Obama's Plane Makes Emergency Landing
Yesterday, the plane carrying presidential candidate Barack Obama was forced to make an unscheduled landing in St. Louis. The plane, an MD-80, experience pitch problems after an emergency slide in the tail cone inadvertently deployed in the tail cone. Which we have never ever heard of happening before. We're not saying it was sabotage but, you know, we just saw this: More »
Lawsuits
Jared Paul Stern Will Sue Ron Burkle Forever
Former Page Sixer Jared Paul Stern's defamation suit against billionaire creep Ron Burkle was recently tossed out, as we all know. But his nutty lawyer Larry Klayman promised an appeal! Unfortunately, that appeal can't go forward in New York just now. Klayman, who is insane, is not allowed to practice law in New York, and Stern's New York attorney just quit, saying his "military service is complete." Yeesh. Still, they'll hire a new guy and fight on. Why? Why continue embarrassing himself further? Stern explained why in a terse statement: "I've got nothing better to do than bury the fucker if it takes 20 years." Enjoy your gadfly, Ron!
It's Funny Because He's a Closeted Republican
Breaking: the (female) fiancée of probably gay Florida governor Charlie Crist owns a company that manufactures beards. [HuffPo]
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Breaking: the (female) fiancée of probably gay Florida governor Charlie Crist owns a company that manufactures beards. [HuffPo]
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speaking ill of the dead
Wildly Hateful Man Widely Hated
Precisely one good thing happened to America this July 4, the arbitrarily selected pretend "birthday" of our cursed nation: a vile bigot died at a very, very old age. While the country as a whole would've decidedly been better served by his having died many decades ago (we came so close!), it is at least some small comfort that former Senator Jesse Helms spent his last miserable years suffering from dementia alone in a nursing home. But don't take our word for it! The internet is alive with vitriol directed against the dead old bastard. Join us on a tour! More »
the riches
Subprime Crisis Hits Those Who Created It
While the merely superrich have been unable to sell or buy homes in the Hamptons for some time now, the mega-rich have continued purchasing giant estates for absurd prices. But as Vanity Fair explains, no more! Now there is precisely one man rich enough to buy a Southhampton property for an insanely inflated price, and he is the man who predicted and bet on the subprime crisis taking the toll it has. Now former Bear Stearns employees are worried about their mortgages, JUST LIKE REAL POOR PEOPLE, and it's all very, very, very sad. Listen to just how sad it is! More »
Academia
Late Columnist Gets Own Ivy League Building
Here's a good argument for marrying rich: buildings named after you! If you are rich you can get big libraries and stuff, but the spouses of billionaires have to settle for century-old class buildings on Ivy League campuses. Ronald Perelman, recently in the news for his bitter divorce from Ellen Barkin, was once married to Page Six editor Claudia Cohen. Cohen, who more or less invented the mercurial and biting Page Six house style, was married to Perelman from 1985 until 1993. Perelman bought the naming rights to the University Pennsylvania's Logan Hall in 1995. Cohen died last year of ovarian cancer, and now Perelman has exercised those rights. You can probably imagine how academics feel about this! More »
Speculation
Attn Celebrity Interviewers: 'Meet the Press' Gig Still Open
After the election, Tom Brokaw will end his stint as host of Meet the Press (which is too bad, because as smug as the dude is, he's been good). Then no one—least of all NBC—knows what will happen. Howard Kurtz seems to think Ted Koppel might get the job, and Koppel has not ruled that out. But he is old, and he retired from regular TV news to do 50-part documentaries on China. If NBC plans on poaching someone so expensive from ABC, they should go after Diane Sawyer, who is bored with Good Morning America and pissed off at the network for sending Charlie Gibson to the evening news and keeping her in the morning ghetto. DC's elite will be able to get over their horror as the prospect of a lady in the Meet the Press chair by reminding themselves that she's a Republican hack who once dated Kissinger. And so the Sunday Morning Circle Jerk will continue.
Week in Review
The Week We Broke the Budget
- Rafaello Follieri was friends with Ron Burkle was friends with Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein, who is in jail. Whee.
- The Jews don't want you to watch that video about how they run the whole country. So they forced the baseball player to hang out with the singer lady to DISTRACT YOU.
- Alum report: former editor Thayer Core, after stints at the Observer, New York, and Radar, has just sold his book, And They All Say Candace Bushnell Sucks In the End (Whatever), to Gotham Books for a zillion dollars.
- Did you hear about how CBS reporter Lara Logan once had sex with a guy and then had sex with another guy? Then you are part of the problem.
- Crap voicemails from a dad.
- So. We don't like Donald Trump or Harvey Weinstein or middle-aged dudes in general, actually. Some of us do like Ryan Adams. (Some of us.) (Fire Sheila.)
- Maybe we should like Harvey Weinstein, though—after all, because of him, we may get to see Gwyneth Paltrow do the Turkey Lurkey dance.
- The internet is full of euphemistic jargon, just like the rest of everything. Anyway, we're all getting adjustments for Christmas!
- Happy 3rd of July! No Gawker tomorrow, and the weekend ought to be slow—Ian Spiegelman is off, working on a scheme to break into a Florida county prison in order to personally shiv Jeffrey Epstein. Hooray Independence! See you next week!
chaunce hayden
Entire New York Gossip Agenda Shaped By One Dude in Jersey
Recently, Steppin' Up editor Chaunce Hayden got himself banned from tipping Page Six because of an inaccurate item he sorta sent them about a sex tape involving the wife of radio morning show host Opie. Does that sentence confuse and upset you? It should, because there's no fucking reason you should've ever heard of Chaunce Hayden, Steppin' Out, or "Opie," as Chaunce Hayden more or less admits in a Radar profile today. The unread free New Jersey magazine is actually just a vehicle for Mr. Hayden to meet famous (or "famous") women and land his name in the columns. More »
bloggers in peril
Blogger Shot in DC
Yikes. Media Consortium blogger Brian Beutler was shot in Washington DC last night, a block away from my old apartment. Or pretty much directly in front of Andrew Sullivan's apartment. He is expected to make a full recovery. And next time, thanks to the Supreme Court, he will be able to shoot back. [DCist, Photo]
Bad press releases
Kennedys Tangentially Involved in New Website
Ameritocracy is some new blog site widget internet social networking community aggregator or something, in which people vote on things other people say and decide if they are relevant. Whatever, it's terrible. But there's a Kennedy involved! A real-life Kennedy! They had a launch party with two Kennedys! Robert Kennedy Jr and Robert Kennedy III! (Note to the Kennedys: there are other names.) Those Kennedys showed up because Bobby III is their "outreach director." And also because if there is one thing members of the Kennedy family know about, it is getting ahead in "a meritocracy." (Do you see what they did there?) Attached is the press release celebrating this revolutionary new website. Maybe they can hire Robert Kennedy IV as their proofreader?
too insidery
Stop Reading This Site Or We'll Shoot These Bloggers
"The only answer, from the company's perspective? To keep getting more traffic—but to pay the producers of that traffic less for each pageview. So for the first two quarters of 2008—and now the third, according to a new memo regarding the pay rate for the quarter that began this week—the company has reduced the rate of pay per pageview." [Radar]
Retro
2004 is Back!
How, we ask you, could someone named "T. Boone Pickens" possibly be bad? T. Boone is, as you have probably guessed, a Texas billionaire. An oil billionaire! But he does not spend his billions on running moonshine or buying the world's largest cement pond. No, instead Pickens—who will be played by Charles Durning for the remainder of this post—funds slanderous attack campaigns against Democratic political candidates. The campaigns feature lies so ridiculous that the only people who regularly take them seriously work at every cable news station and many newspapers. More »
War his hell
Lara Logan and the War Correspondent Sex Scandal Double Standard
CBS war correspondent Lara Logan was recently promoted to "Chief Foriegn Affairs Correspondent," but no one noticed because OMG SEX SCANDAL! The Enquirer broke it, the Post semi-legitimized it, and it's been mentioned now in, like, real newspapers and everything. She slept with some people in Iraq! One of them was married! Some wonder if there is maybe a double standard. Would we hear about the dalliences of male journalists in the war zone? Well... sort of? More »
whatever
Anderson Cooper and Jeffrey Toobin Are Going to "Shoot Some Varmints"
The oddest thing about this clip of adorable CNN unicorn Anderson Cooper flirting with legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin is that Coop calls Toobin a "city boy" and offers to take him to a rifle range later. This would be the Anderson Cooper who was born in New York to Gloria Vanderbilt and photographed by Diane Arbus as a baby, right? Anyway. These two New York-born Ivy Leaguers are going to "shoot some varmints" after work. Hey-o!
Canada
Canada Is Amazing!
Canadians! Did you know they get their own day? It's true! And it's today! We've been celebrating all day by ragging on Canadian Malcolm Gladwell for no good reason and also extending more publicity to creepy scumbag Canadian Dimitri the Lover! It turns out the FreeCreditReport.com guy is also Canadian! But French Canadian so he probably doesn't even want to be Canadian. Go celebrate the nation that oppresses his people by watching that video where not knowing his credit rating made him marry that total bitch and take on her stupid girl debt (probably incurred by shoe-buying and driving poorly). [HuffPo]
Dimitri the lover
