"Will you ever run for president again? Yes or no," Curry asked.

"No," replied Clinton.

Ok. Done. Good. Right? That is enough of a straight-up denial to satisfy anyone! Unless, like, you run a website of some sort, and are also trying to drum up interest in an upcoming book about Hillary Clinton's relentless ambition. Then you would make this interview, with its question about Hillary being "marginalized" that comes entirely from your own writing highlighted, your top story. And you would also say that Hillary is lying about not wanting to run for president, any more. Because you are basically shameless, and you are Tina Brown.

Good news: your book, The Clinton Chronicles, is due to be published next year. Just make sure to keep planting stories about how dissatisfied and unhappy Hillary is, in the meantime!

A new profile of Isabell (seen here with Molly Ringwald at the launch party for his Parfumes Isabell product line in 1996) by Arthur Lubow examines his finances and real estate deals around the city, and shows that after he bought at the height of the market and as real estate prices and rents were crumbling. On August 1 of this year, he had a $48 million dollar loan that was due and no way to repay it. Though friends say he remained outwardly cheerful, it sounds like a stressful situation.

At the center of his real estate woes were 837 Washington, a Meat-Packing District building he bought for $45 million in 2008, that he planned to turn into studio spaces and offices for high-end clients. After he successfully flipped two buildings in 2006 — one on West 13th Street and another on Little West 12 Street — he thought this was his next step in the real estate game. When he couldn't get approval from the neighborhood landmarks commission to renovate the space on Washington, there wasn't any return on his investment to repay his loan.

They ranked Fresno the stupidiestest:

"These people are here living their lives and doing the very best they can. They shouldn't be put down like this," said a lady in a bookstore.

They ranked my hometown, Vegas, right above Fresno. They haven't won any Pulitzers in the last few weeks, but they do have a UNLV professor who thinks The Daily Beast is right.

An English professor at UNLV, the 70-year-old Hickey considers those criteria and says, "Well, honestly, (the low ranking) is because the school graduates losers. It graduates people to middle management.

Go Rebels. San Antonio was next:

The Mensas at The Daily Beast are banking that you will get bent, click through to their site, read the rankings and let the Daily Beast reap the harvest of epic page views. They make you mad, you give them page views, and they scoop up the ad revenue. Trouble is, I didn't include the link, and I'm not going to include it. The Daily Beast can bite my ass. If they think I'm sending page views their way, they're not that smart.

Power to the people (and Google). Further up the list, Phoenix proved how astute they are with this cynical assessment of The Daily Beast:

The Daily Beast is one of those websites that summarizes what's on the internet on any given day.

while Houston trotted out some issues. The headline: "The Daily Beast: Houston — You Are 'Mildly Retarded.'"

Raleigh-Durham was cited as America's supreme genius city; profoundly retarded Fresno, with an IQ of 6, was listed as the dumbest. Austin was the highest-ranked Texas city, but you probably knew that already. It always comes out on top in these kinds of things.

What about the "winners?" In Raleigh, the mayor trotted out a press line. One comment on a website:

Obvious from this story that our diversity-driven schools are a complete failure.

Not much else. Seventh-place Seattle, pissed:

It's hard not to suspect some brainless methodology — considering the facts.

And New York, you're lucky number 13. A Google News search for reactions turned up virtually nothing, locally.

The lesson? America's slightly insecure, but we're not exactly a country divided. A general consensus proves that lists like these are inaccurate, pro-perception, anti-reality, useless, and that we—and I—are stupider for dignifying them. Sorry.

[Jasper Johns' Map, 1963, via MoMA]

Just a few months ago, Vogue editor Anna Wintour was fighting negative press and rumors of a replacement. Then she came up with a plan...She allowed the documentary director R.J. Cutler's movie cameras behind the closed doors of Vogue's offices in Times Square...Now [The September Issue] movie is a hit. Anna is bigger than ever.

So, if she came up with a plan three months ago, she must have then gone back into the past to September of 2007, told past Anna to make the documentary happen so that future Anna could save her job. Did she have a flux capacitor installed in her town car? Yes, we agree that Anna has orchestrated this whole thing—movie release, Letterman appearance, Fashion's Night Out—but this strike has been years in the making. Anna is nothing if not shrewd.

Tina's theory is that this isn't a Make-People-Like-Me Tour at all, but that she's trying to play up her caricatured bitchiness.

After so much reality TV and confessional celebrity interviews, the public is tired of accessible stars. Who needs them to be Just Like Us? Just Like Us means just as boring as we are. It's mystique today that everybody craves. What's she really like behind the dark glasses? Anna's appeal is that she has no interest in pretending to be human.

Ouch. And this is a very public swipe, considering the long simmering rivalry between the two that goes back a generation, when Wintour's father, the editor of London's Daily Standard would run bad reviews of the movie's produced by Brown's father. Now Brown is using her digital instrument to serve Wintour backhanded compliments.

But as one ex-high-powered magazine editor to a current high-powered magazine editor, Brown does have some sympathy.

But maybe Anna isn't a bitch, just a smart, hard-headed businesswoman doing her job...I guess you get called a bitch when you get things done.

Sounds like something Tina might know from experience.

Goldman's write-around profile of an artist in crisis goes a long way toward explaining exactly how the world's most celebrated celebrity photographer wound up hocking her photographic legacy to keep up with her mounting bills. Mostly it's that she never cared about how much anything cost, was an obsessive perfectionist, and trusted the wrong accountant.

Here's Annie the spendthrift:

Leibovitz had also built a life that had become extraordinarily expensive to maintain. It wasn't just the mortgages on the homes. It was the Range Rover, the trips to Paris, the chef and housekeeper, the handyman, the personal yoga instructor, the terrace gardener, and the live-in nanny. There was only one man Leibovitz deemed qualified to work on anything involving air-conditioning or ductwork at either residence, and he lived in Vermont. "She wanted her life to be like a magazine spread," Kellum says. "Everything beautiful, nothing out of place. She wanted everything to be perfect."

Along the same lines, Goldman reports, she flew in kid-song star Dan Zanes and Rosanne Cash to perform at her daughter's first birthday party.

As for Annie the perfectionist, in 2007, former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown asked Leibovitz to take the author jacket photo for her book about Princess Diana. Leibovitz showed up with two cars bearing a stylist, an assistant, a wardrobe, and a wind machine, and tried to extend the shoot to a second day after she was unsatisfied with the first days' results. Leibovitz was bearing the cost of the shoot herself.

That sort of behavior tends to pile up the debts, and in 2007 Leibovitz—who had an extremely hard time doing simple things like signing her own prints in order to make a lot of money selling them—fired her accountant Rick Kantor and manager Jimmy Moffat, who told Goldman that they had done what they could to rein in Leibovitz's spending. She replaced them with an accountant named Kenneth Starr (no relation), who had worked with Wesley Snipes (!). It was Starr who introduced Leibovitz to Art Capital Group. Goldman says Leibovitz didn't run the loan by her family or agent, and had no idea what she was getting into. She was shocked by a New York Times article reporting that she'd put her photos up as collateral:

"Trust me," says her sister Paula. "She thought it was a pure loan. That New York Times article was as much news to her as it was to anybody else."

Interestingly, the loan was financed by Goldman Sachs, which seems to be behind every epic collapse these days, and Goldman is now distancing itself from Art Capital: "We are deeply troubled by recent developments concerning Annie Leibovitz and Art Capital," Goldman (the firm) told Goldman (the writer). "Goldman Sachs owns a portion of the loan underwritten by an affiliate of Art Capital to Annie Leibovitz, but we have no involvement in the current sales-agreement dispute between Art Capital and Ms. Leibovitz. We have proposed to Art Capital that we terminate the current loan agreement with their affiliate so that we can work directly with Ms. Leibovitz to help her resolve her financing needs."

The one question that Goldman doesn't answer: Where did she get the money that she was spending so liberally? When Leibovitz went to Art Capital, her mortgage debts totaled $15.5 million. Half that, Goldman notes, was owed to her employer Condé Nast itself. (We broke that story two weeks ago, but Goldman doesn't credit us. We forgive him both because he is a stand-up gent and because he found out about it independently before we did, but sat helpless while New York's publication schedule worked its slow magic and the internet kept going.) But Leibovitz borrowed $24 million, indicating that there was an additional $9 million or so in debt she was facing—otherwise why borrow that much more than she needed for a short-term loan? There were other debts, including about $700,000 in lawsuits from unpaid vendors and a million or so in tax liens. But no matter how you cut it, Leibovitz appears to have owed millions more than we currently know about. We have a good idea what she spent it on, but where did it come from? Who else was loaning Leibovitz money? It's an especially interesting question because Leibovitz was never a good credit risk—as far back as the 1980s, Goldman writes, she had trouble getting an American Express card even as she was shooting ad campaigns for American Express (an ad agency intervened and arranged for her to get a card after Leibovitz lost an envelope full of cash she kept handy to pay vendors).

Somehow, it seems, Leibovitz managed to get nearly $10 million in the hole over and above the mortgages on her homes. Was that all on her AmEx? We don't think so.

Ha: CNN prez Jon Klein, who lately has been seeming like a pretty okay dude, has told his producers to stop booking radio talk show hosts as guests, because they are "too predictable," meaning "wingnutty." Admirable! Lou Dobbs is himself a radio talk show host, btw.


Tina Brown is launching a British version of The Daily Beast "within months." Truly, Barry Diller's fortune is bottomless. But not growing.


Turn that frown upside down: some magazines actually managed to raise their ad pages in the first half of this year, as compared to last year. They include Fitness, Cooking With Paula Deen, The Week, OK!, Family Circle, Scholastic Parent & Child, Organic Gardening, Sports Illustrated for Kids, Country Weekly, and Muscle & Fitness. The clear formula for magazine success now: Target America's stupidest readers.


MTV is moving out of its famed Times Square studio because its famed Times Square studio has raised the rent 1000% over the past decade. Now you'll all have to find somewhere else to stand and wave your testicles at the Jonas Brothers.

The party, or "The Party" as it has come to be known by some, remains famous for it's over-the-top flamboyance, and since Talk was partially funded by Miramax money, Harvey and Bob Weinstein served as co-hosts for the event, leading the New York Observer to headline their coverage of the night's festivities, "Weinstein Brothers Revel in Vulgarity, Glory of Manhattan."

In her Daily Beast post eulogizing Isabell dated July 12th, Tina Brown reminisced about the illuminated-by-Japanese-lanterns soiree on the electricity-less Liberty Island to bring in the now-defunct magazine. She spoke wistfully about the plethora of stars she shipped in on an ark to genuflect at her altar, The Statue of Liberty, for the evening. Here's the money quote:

Guests, who included Madonna, George Plimpton, Demi Moore, Tom Brokaw, Kate Moss, Christopher Buckley, Helen Mirren, and Jerry Seinfeld, disgorged one after another from the Liberty Island ferry that Buckley immediately re-christened the "Star Barge." Like an A-list Noah's Ark, it motored slowly toward the tiny island where the Talk staff waited to greet the 800 guests in a warm August dusk.

Brown's piece must have triggered the memory of the New York Times' David Carr, as he dedicates his Monday "Media Equation" column to the Talk launch party, only his take on the event isn't so much a fond remembrance as it is a look back at what he now views as an event marking of the beginning of the end of an era of excess. Noting that the ten years that have passed since "The Party" have seen the death of many established titles as well as a dramatic drop in ad pages, Carr, who says he's "still ashamed to admit that I wasn't one of the lucky 1,000 people invited to the party," writes:

Too bad nobody saw the sharks circling in the harbor. Rather than the culmination of a century of press power, the Talk party was the end of an era, a literal fin de siècle. Flush with cash from the go-go '90s and engorged by spending from the dot-com era, mainstream media companies seemed poised on the brink of something extraordinary. But that brink ended up being a cliff. partied

Ten years ago, journalists, long the salarymen of the publishing economy, began gorging on big contracts and options from digital start-ups like shrimp at a free buffet. With coveted writers commanding $5 for every typed word into magazines that were stuffed to the brim with advertising, there was a fizziness, some would say recklessness, in the air. The industry was drunk on its own prerogatives, working a party that seemed as if it would never end.

Carr goes on to note that Tina Brown's Daily Beast launch party in 2008 was held at Pop Burger in the Meatpacking District, where assembled guests munched on miniature burgers and hot dogs until about 8:15 or so, when the food sadly ran out. Indeed, that's quite a remarkable contrast. But hey, there was an open bar, so it couldn't have been that bad, right?

Finally, all of this brings to mind the words of a certain eccentric American prophet who, speaking about partying in the year 1999, once said, "Life is just a party and parties weren't meant to last." And really, all things considered, is that such a terrible thing?

10 Years Ago, An Omen No One Saw [New York Times]
Farewell to the King of Parties [Daily Beast]

The piece, written by Festivus chronicler Allen Salkin-the Seymour Hersh of the Times' Style section-doesn't bring any new information to the table, but it does a great job of highlighting some of the people who helped enable Leibovitz to get to the point in her life where she might have to divest herself of all fiscal interests, including the rights to her original photographs. For example, Graydon Carter - one of her standby employers - notes that she's, uh, not exactly great with money:

"The mind that can take these extraordinary pictures is not necessarily the same mind that is a perfect money manager..."

Revealing. How about former Vanity Fair editor Tina Brown, defending Leibovitz's personal spending habits?

"Annie is not an expensive liver herself," said Tina Brown, who edited Vanity Fair from 1984 to 1992, where Ms. Leibovitz began working after her early years at Rolling Stone magazine. "She hangs out with her kids. She doesn't hang out in the lights at the parties."

There's more about Art Capital-who gave her a $24M loan-shopping around the rights to her work around, her relationship with Susan Sontag and speculation on Leibovitz's inheritance from Sontag (only personal artifacts, says Sontag's son), and in the end, a potential scenario of tragedy for Annie's life's work:

On July 31, Justice Emily Jane Goodman denied Art Capital's request for a preliminary injunction against the contract between Ms. Leibovitz and Getty. The judge dismissed parts of the lawsuit, but ruled that other issues would be decided later. Until now, Ms. Leibovitz has closely guarded the right to reproduce her photographs. But should she lose control of her archive, her famous portraits of Whoopi Goldberg, Jack Nicholson and the like may one day be found on postcards in Times Square.

Without being entirely sure which Times Square tourists would be buying Leibovitz postcards of Whoopi Goldberg in Times Square, one thing is certain: Salkin's softball piece misses the elephant in the room: Leibovitz was (A) surrounded by enablers and (B) represents so much of the reason publications like Vanity Fair from media conglomerates like Conde Nast are facing financial issues now. Especially telling is this:

Over the years at Vanity Fair, her shoots became more complex and expensive, often elaborate as movie shoots. "Month after month, it got a little bit more complicated with every shoot," Jane Sarkin, a Vanity Fair features editor, said in the documentary. "Her demands became bigger. Fire, rain, cars airplanes, circus animals - whatever she wanted she got."

Emphasis mine. Leibovitz's photographs - while nothing to scoff at in terms of the talent they represent - are the type of overpriced commodities (like town-cars, lunches at Michael's, or any other Glossy Expense that could've been pared back a long time ago) that are now driving the magazine business under, or at least driving companies like Conde to have to bring in Firing Specialists.

All of these companies convinced Leibovitz that her projected worth was way more than it needed to be, by paying her as such. The irony that Tina Brown is being quoted about somebody wasting money is unbelievable, as even Brown herself lamented the ridiculous expenses of her own fallen publication - Talk - two weeks ago, when mourning the death of her party planner Robert Isabell.

People like Leibovitz and their work on his covers were and still remain points of pride for Graydon Carter, almost in the same way collecting celebrities at The Waverly Inn and Monkey Bar are. Maybe that's the cautionary tale here. Not to be better with money, but to show people like Annie what their true value in New York is: as a social commodity.

Salkin chalks up Leibovitz's eventual fate to the personal finance habits that will or won't get her out of the dire straits she's in. At this point, it's probably going to have just as much to do with her respective job markets, especially one big media bosses created and are now being forced to marginalize. The real question then becomes how many Vanity Fair readers can tell the difference between an Annie Leibovitz cover and one snapped by somebody less pricey. They might have to start to learn how. Now that Conde's firing entire divisions, don't think the size of this difference escapes them.

Even if she can cut down her costs, does Annie Leibovitz have the energy to be prolific? The most telling note in Salkin's article quotes a former Vanity Fair photo archive director, Charlie Scheips, who recently spoke with her. She sounded frantic: "I'm really under the gun. I've got three daughters, I lost my spouse. I've got too many jobs to do and it's chaos."

For Annie Leibovitz, a Fuzzy Financial Picture [NYT]

Because even when Mom - the former editor of Vanity Fair, the short-lived Talk, and the current Editor-In-Chief of Barry Diller's latest experiment in revolutionizing information - and Dad Harry Evans - who's been knighted for his services in journalism - try their hardest, daughter Isabelle still find herself at the mercy of the Harvard Admissions Overlords. Observe, from a well-placed tipster:

Tina and Harry have spent the past year wining and dining and campaigning everyone they know (Jon Alter, Mark Whitaker, Mandy Grunwald)—or can get to know—with Harvard connections in order to get their daughter, Isabel, admitted. And where has it gotten the poor thing? First she was wait-listed until the last possible minute, then admitted with a year's mandatory deferral. The so-called "Z list" of shame. Not a good thing to have such pushy parents.

For the record, that's Newsweek columnist Jon Alter, NBC News Senior VP/Correspondent Mark Whitaker, and Democratic political consultant Mandy Grunwald, none of whom apparently have enough grease to get Isabelle Brown her RedCard on demand.

Meanwhile, when she's not busy trying to get her daughter in the door of America's most elite educational institution, she's feeling the pain of the people she's trying to shut down. Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Connie Schultz points out a quote from an interview with Brown that ran last week in the Chicago Tribune:

"It's most difficult, I think, for the people who are in their 50s who are part of a big media organization where they've spent most of their lives," Brown said. "They see it all changing around them and there isn't time for them to make the adjustment, or they fear making it."

To be certain, Tina's talking about the media, but when using words like "most difficult," we're talking about people - journalists, writers, etc - who've had it fairly cushy up until this point. And given a chance to opine on the economy, she - like so many other journalists - only sees it through the prism of the media's own economic trauma. A good example? Check out Ms. Schultz's column in which she quoted Tina, entitled "Journalists' own hard luck tales help them tell those of others."

She's too busy kvetching about how "most blogs (are) an affront to those of us who believe reporting and attribution must precede publication" to realize how deep her head is up her own ass. This...is infuriating:

Shared experiences nurture empathy, and that's a handy skill when you're capturing in words, pictures and video the essence of another human being. Our privileged, arm's length status from the people we cover has evaporated, and the view from common ground is fueling some of the most poignant journalism in years...One of the greatest challenges for print journalists now is to respond to change while staying rooted in the values that brought us to this profession. We feel more vulnerable because we are, but troubled times can soften edges and open hearts to the suffering around us. We are a country of hurt right now. Home foreclosures, lost jobs, closed businesses: These are hard stories, but they are the biggest stories of our time....Journalists have never been better prepared to tell them.

Yes, because the fact that your job might be in trouble - even though you clearly still have one - definitely brings you closer to, say, the autoworkers of Detroit, whose skill sets have been literally outpaced, outsourced, and deemed worthless. Or low-income workers who were spun by sub-prime mortgages into a vortex of debt that the low-income they started with got them into in the first place (by being put in the position to even take a sub-prime mortgage).

As for Tina, it doesn't sound like she has that much to worry about: when she's visibly campaigning around town enough to the point of, well, us hearing about it, she's clearly got bigger concerns ahead of her than the fate of the economy, media or not.

Journalists' own hard luck tales help them tell those of others [Cleveland Plain Dealer]

This is kind of classic Old School Media: getting sentimental with What Used To Be, in pre-9/11 New York, and bombastic titling in a story about someone who'd perfected an obscure, fleeting for-the-rich-by-the-rich "art." All that being said, it's a pretty great piece about, well, What Used To Be. Just imagine: you, getting shitfaced with George Plimpton in the head of the Statue of Liberty, pretending to be in Ghostbusters II. Meet "Farewell to the King of Parties," by Tina Brown. Highlights:

• The opening salvo, regarding the Talk magazine launch, which she does not take lightly! "The last party he pulled off for me was the Talk magazine launch event, co-hosted with the magazine's co-owner Harvey Weinstein, on Liberty Island in 1999, an extravaganza I have come to see as the last social celebration of the pre-9/11 celebrity decade."
  
  
• Then, her guest-list, which she trots out while trying to remain as calm and humble as possible. Okay, or, not: "Guests, who included Madonna, George Plimpton, Demi Moore, Tom Brokaw, Kate Moss, Christopher Buckley, Helen Mirren, and Jerry Seinfeld, disgorged one after another from the Liberty Island ferry that Buckley immediately re-christened the "Star Barge." Like an A-list Noah's Ark, it motored slowly toward the tiny island where the Talk staff waited to greet the 800 guests in a warm August dusk." Emphasis mine, because that's exactly what I think when I hear about Christopher Buckley and Kate Moss on a boat: God told Tina to capture all the creatures of the land and save the ones worth saving, or something.
  
  
• Brown's semi-aplogetic, but slightly seething dismissal of the scale of the party in the face of the magazine's massive failure: "When the magazine folded two years later in a howl of schadenfreude, that party was considered one of the calumnies of hype I would never live down. (As the movie producer David Brown once said, "Never give an opening night party that's better than the movie.")"
  
  
• The previously mentioned George Plimpton throwdown: "A soft shower of purple rain over the Hudson River signified the start of the fireworks display narrated by one of the guests, George Plimpton. "This one is for you, Salman," George boomed over the intercom. "It's banned in Iran."" Comment needed? No.

And that's just the first page. Seriously. There's Salman Rushdie's apparent first meeting with Padma Lakshmi in there, too. And the rest of the article goes on to actually eulogize Isabell The Person, but not before you forget who you've been rhyming with this entire time. First, this priceless picture, included in a gallery with the article:

It's of Brown, Interview editor and Andy Warhol-ite Bob Colacello, Studio 54's Ian Schrager, and the founder of Phoenix House, Dr. Mitch Rosenthall. At one of Isabell's parties. Facinating, but: no Isabell to be found. Then this, the last shot fired:

There was a clear, full moon, and my husband and I stood leaning out over the rail facing the wash at the bow of the boat, along with a last group of stragglers who included Helen Mirren, the New Yorker writer Hendrick Hertzberg, and the movie stars Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson. As the boat sped back toward the lights of Manhattan, a large cold wave washed over the side and soaked us all.

The next decade turned out to be a colder wave than any of us imagined. Two years after that glorious party, the Twin Towers came down, Talk magazine folded, Padma and Salman recently got divorced. The economy collapsed. I last saw the beautiful Natasha Richardson in March lying like a medieval effigy in the open casket at her wake. And Robert himself has left the party forever. Our revels now are ended!

Revels, indeed. Did Natasha Richardson really have to be brought into this? Oh well. Yeah, The Party Planner may have died, and he may have taken The Party with him, but I think, as far as parties go, we're all better off.

All Tina's eulogy/wake-a-sleeping-dog dissection into history does is serve to remind many of the publications and people who used these extravagances of their asinine spending habits of yore that preceded the poor, shitshow shape they're in now (like Vanity Fair, which had to fire so much of it's support staff, or Talk, which is, again, long dead, but was a trendsetter as far as the "magazine launches signify magazine deaths" trend). Or of their jobs, which they used to have.

Is there any question as to why that aforementioned schadenfreude ever existed, though? These parties, though probably fun, cost ridiculous amounts of money, and were only accessible to a microscopic percentage of New York, let alone the rest of America. Much like the things they were meant to celebrate. And, naturally, much like this blog post about them.

Farewell to the King of Parties [The Daily Beast]

Colbert's guest stint will mark the first time that Newsweek, which recently underwent it's second major design reconstruction in three years, has ever used a guest editor in its 76-year history. Meacham told The Observer how the idea came about.

Mr. Meacham said the idea was born from a lunch he had with Mr. Colbert at Gabriel's near Columbus Circle.

"I was just very impressed with the range of his knowledge and he had an almost encyclopedic feel for anything that came up," said Mr. Meacham. "As we think about ways to both inform and surprise readers of the magazine, the notion of having him as a guest editor seemed like a good one."

Meacham denied that the decision to bring Colbert in was a stunt similar to Tina Brown's bringing in Roseanne Barr to edit the New Yorker in 1995.

Mr. Meacham said his inspiration was when Bono served as guest editor of the Africa issue in Vanity Fair in July 2007.

"The notion of having someone who cares deeply about an issue and who wants to do something more than being profiled or writing a single piece has some appeal to us," said Mr. Meacham.

The Observer piece says that Colbert will write an essay for the issue, help design its cover, hand out assignments, pick pull-quotes to highlight, and feature "a number of unpublished letters to the editor Mr. Colbert has written to Newsweek since he was a kid."

Desperate PR stunt or not, we think it sounds like the most fun week of work Newsweek staffers will ever have at the magazine.

Newsweek Turns to Tina Tricks: Meet Guest Editor … Stephen Colbert! [New York Observer]
Image via Collider

• Model Helena Christensen finally calls out Page Six for constantly insinuating she's a slut. [P6]
• Tina Brown likens Annie Leibowitz's photographs to "crack cocaine." Meaning, I suppose, "They were popular between 1984 and 1990." [P6]
• Dennis Rodman won't go to rehab because he doesn't want to miss the Celebrity Apprentice reunion. [P6]
• LiLO's ex is ashamed of their entanglement. No, not SamRo but Harry Morton, owner of Pink Taco USA. The two dates in 2006. [Showbiz Spy]
• A waitress is NOT dating John Mayer. They are just hanging out, says waitress. A waitress IS dating John Mayer, says E!, not just hanging out. A waitress is not dating John Mayer AND not hanging out with him, says waitress friend to E! [UPI]
• Olds Demi Moore and Madonna recently bonded about younger men. (No, not Malawi orphans. Brazilian models!) [Daily Mail]

There were two other panelists at this IFC Media Project event in Midtown too, but they were both very reasonable, so who cares? Let's get to the highlights!

Tina Brown: She was the most glamorous of the bunch. Paps flashed their flashbulbs at her! And I must say, she holds the sanest views of any of our three stars!
Tina says Obama's made an honest attempt on the torture issue. She wants truth commissions in America to get to the bottom of it. She is the Steve Biko of IFC Media panel discussion!
Also: "TV doesn't do well with nuance." She learned that by having a failed TV show! Tina's not sweating the death of newspapers so much—rather, she's concerned about where the journalism will go. Screw newspapers, she said (paraphrase!).
At one point she told Peggy Noonan she was wrong.

Ari Fleischer: Virtually everything he said made one want to choke on one's own scoffing. He's very smirky at all times.
What grade would he give the Obama administration on "Transparency"? C. That means you get a G, Ari.
Ari is surprisingly against truth commissions exploring the various tortures sanctioned by his bosses and explained away by him daily, for years, because were there to be a torture investigation, it would devolve into "acrimony." And anyhow it should be done by Congress, but oh it can't be done by Congress, because Congress is too partisan.
Then he said: "I'll be proud" to answer a subpoena. "Much of (our various torturing) is questionable in the day's light... but people are proud of what they did to keep us safe." Yea? Somebody subpoena this guy already.
Ari lives in Westchester county and didn't read any international news sources when he was in the White House and he still doesn't, so don't ask him about un-American news like that.

Peggy Noonan: A very strange person. There is no way not to describe her as "doddering," as she enjoyed looking up at the ceiling wide-eyed as others were speaking. But so many things to say!
At the recent Obama press conference, she said, "We saw the return of the Obama thinking look... you could actually see him thinking!"
What about this Obama White House? "This is a big White House and a consequential one, making big decisions." Expertise gleaned at the highest levels of government, ladies and gents. "Obama as an individual is something new. [BLACK GUY??] There's a certain level of cool, of shrewdness."
At one point the moderator asked Peggy if she wanted to respond to a point. "Actually I was daydreaming about something I read in the newspaper," she replied. "It was that George Will column."

TOP THREE PEGGY NOONAN QUOTES OF THE DAY:
"If I say I'm Peggy Noonan from PeggyNoonan.com, he's not gonna feel like he has to take that call." OH?
"I believe I know the lyrics to every Al Jolson song."
"I love. The fizz."

The kids, the Daily Beast editor explained, will post mean comments underneath online articles critical of her.

What does Brown make of this anonymous bloodsport? Well, consider that when she was atop Vanity Fair and feuding with Vogue's Anna Wintour, Brown published a take-down on Wintour's womanizing then-boyfriend — and pillaged for quotes a private lunch Wintour invited her to with Princess Diana. So, yes, Brown approves. And probably would still approve if the perpetrators weren't her own flesh and blood.

The fear is palpable in Brown's Daily Beast column about Portfolio. If Condé Nast is giving up on a big project like Portfolio, she asks, how will it nurture visionary, money-losing editors like... well, like Tina Brown? Has Si Newhouse, steadfast chairman of the magazine group, and longtime Brown benefactor, lost his stamina — his manhood?

The fact that [Newhouse] elected to close [Portfolio]... suggests a worrying element of panic engulfing the steadfast publisher I worked for so comfortably for 17 years at Tatler, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker...

Until now, he was always the media emperor who could live and do as he chose... Let's hope this pitiless economy doesn't force him to cap his noble career by performing a lobotomy.

The closure no doubt has Brown fretting over the $18 million her upstart Web venture the Daily Beast will cost Barry Diller's IAC through fall 2011. No worries, Tina: Diller still has the sort swagger old Si threw off in the early days of Portfolio. Though for good measure, you might to whisper for him your line about a money-losing publication being a mogul's "sexiest calling card." You know how much he loves being fabulous and sexy.

The former Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor must relish the opportunity to hijack the national conversation in hours rather than weeks, now that she's running the Daily Beast. Especially when she gets to compare herself to a pirate captain in the process.

Watch how slyly Brown draws that parallel, in the midst of a column about how slow-moving U.S. corporations are just like the big boats attacked by pirates:

...big lumbering corporate entities hover on bankruptcy and plead for bailouts; baffled media companies beef about the web insurgency; the Google boys rewrite the whole web environment while mighty Microsoft is asleep...

(Emphasis added.)

Brown seems to have let her "Commander of the British Empire" title go to her head.

Still, we don't mind playing a little dress up with you, Tina, provided we get to be the pirate who isn't shot dead by Navy SEALs.