With the economic crisis putting the squeeze on nearly everyone and with fashion retailers dropping like flies, it's a tough time to be a young designer. So we're glad that Russia Today thought to check in with clothing empress Kira Plastinina—whose latest line was unveiled in Moscow last week—and even gladder that the 16-year-old heiress isn't stressing about her business. "The collection is not expensive, it is affordable," she says. "And I think it is important that fashion is affordable to all girls." We agree, and as for the common assumption that her success is thanks to her juice and dairy magnate father Sergei Plastinin, well, nothing could be further from the truth: "People who know me, my friends and my family, know that I work really hard." And if such hard work is rewarded by, say, Paris Hilton or Nicole Richie being paid millions to sit front row at Kira's runway show, what's wrong with that?

♦ Music manager Chris Lighty, who has worked with the likes of Diddy, 50 Cent, and Busta Rhymes, has picked up two condos in the Chelsea Stratus building on West 24th Street for $5.28 million. [NYO]
♦ Tech exec Michael Sprague has put his five-story townhouse at 73 Bedford Street on the market for $8 million. [Cityfile, Corcoran]
♦ Giuseppe de Corato, CEO of the fashion company Luigi Borrelli, and his wife, Holly Lang, have sold their apartment at 15 West 20th Street for $2.65 million. The buyers are Greg Sovell, co-founder of the underwear line C-IN2, and Andrew Cohen. [Cityfile]

Have you heard that William Thompson, New York City's comptroller, is running for mayor? Probably not, since the man he's going up against is slightly better known to the public (not to mention slightly better funded). But Thompson is clearly making headway with the city's most prominent celebrities and movers and shakers! His fundraiser last night attracted rapper Kurtis Blow! [NYDN]

We can't imagine why the auto industry is struggling right now: Why, just yesterday, Donald Trump strolled into a dealership in Palm Beach and picked up a Dodge Ram truck! And it's just as good as any car made by a foreign manufacturer, he tells Greta Von Susteren. He then goes on to explain that he usually insists his employees only buy American cars, before backtracking moments later and admitting he buys "both foreign and domestic" vehicles. Good thing, too, because last time we checked, neither Rolls-Royce, Maybach, or Ferrari had been purchased by GM.

Yes, it's Rod Blagojevich's birthday! The disgraced Illinois governor is turning 52, although we can't imagine much celebrating will be going on today. The White Stripes' Meg White is 34. Whitney Museum director Adam Weinberg is 54. Verizon's chief executive, Ivan Seidenberg, is turning 62. Summer Phoenix, the sister of Joaquin and the late River Phoenix, is 30. Kenneth Branagh is 48. Actress Emmanuelle Chriqui is 31. And child star Raven-Symone turns 23 today.

• Someone in Toronto has Tom Cruise's BlackBerry. The Church of Scientology will disavow any knowledge of the actions needed to get it back in the event an agent is caught or killed. [P6]

♦ Haven't seen Giuseppe Cipriani around town lately? There may be a reason for that: He's believed to be outside the U.S. since he's on probation and because Andrew Cuomo is investigating how the family managed to keep its liquor license earlier this year. [P6]
♦ Angelina Jolie has been undergoing secret fertility treatments in the hopes of becoming pregnant with twins within the next two years. At least that's what Star says. [Star]
♦ Everyone on Gossip Girl may be hooking up with each other, but at least one relationship isn't going so strong: Blake Lively was spotted making out with a guy who was not Penn Badgley. [E!, P6]
♦ Leonardo DiCaprio lost his wallet at Rolf's on Third Avenue, and Tom Cruise lost his Blackberry somewhere in Toronto. [P6, P6]

Wiretap transcripts yesterday indicated that Tribune Company honcho Sam Zell might have subtly conveyed (wink-wink) that he might just have to restructure (wink wink) one or more bothersome Chicago Trib editorial writers out of their jobs in response to demands from Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, who was delaying a deal to buy the Chicago Cubs from cash-strapped Zell. Insanely, it has emerged that the whole thing was Blago's evil wife's idea ("hold up that fucking Cubs shit. . . fuck them"), but also that it seems to have gone nowhere.

"Dude, I just talked to Karl Rove on my fucking phone. You think I’m fucking with you? Mike Huckabee called me, like, three hours ago." [Observer]

♦ Congressional Democrats and the Bush administration are in the final stages of negotiating an auto bailout package. A vote in the House is expected as soon as Wednesday afternoon. [NYT]
♦ Bad news for GMAC: The auto and consumer lender failed to secure additional financial and will not be able to transition to a bank holding company. [CNNMoney]
♦ Yahoo! is expected to hand out 1,500 pink slips today. [CNN]

David Letterman's rivalry with Jay Leno goes back more than 15 years, to when Leno outmaneuvered Letterman to host the Tonight Show, a job Letterman deeply coveted. Now Leno has ceded the Tonight Show timeslot to Conan O'Brien (rather than fight him from ABC), and accepted to a proffer from network suits to move to 10 pm to make a (still amorphous) show 1/10th the cost of a primetime drama and less likely to be TiVoed. And Letterman isn't about to miss the chance to get in a few digs about how this makes Leno a capitulating loser. (Video after the jump.)

Though apologist analyst were apparently out in force, and though the firm bragged about selling $1 million in Barack Obama knicknacks (whee!), there was no hiding the New York Times Company's financial distress at a bank's media conference in New York Tuesday. The most alarming report in the wake of the event: Word that the Times will try to renegotiate at least some of its more than $1 billion in debt and is preparing to do without much of a $400 million credit line expiring in May.

You have to hand it to Jimmy Fallon: He dispensed with the inevitable topic of being called a "douchebag" on the internet (by this guy apparently) very quickly, in the second "webisode" for his forthcoming Late Night. You can totally see the joke coming, but at least he's trying this time! And he's tripled the runtime to four and a half minutes. Which is plenty. Seriously, it's fine. Really. Enough. (Video after the jump.)

Yahoo isn't firing people en masse — it's "getting fit." That noisome euphemism for today's layoffs of 1,500 people must have hissed forth from the brain of some overpaid management consultant. Likewise for pages upon pages of instructions on how to sack employees — which Valleywag has obtained.

Oh, it's a terrible time to own a magazine. Advertising is falling and expected to plummet further. Everyone's laying people off, going online only or outright shutting down. But every editor worth his salt knows how to put a contrarian, positive spin on a dire situation. Time Inc. may be in the process of laying off 600 people, but, hey, the magazine group's executive vice president told Peter Kafka the layoffs are "pretty much" done, and if you're still employed with the company you probably won't get laid off between now and New Year's. Why, that's positively delightful! And dig the way Newsweek tried to positively spin a purported 1 million-copy-cut in its rate base:

"Publicist Jordan Brown delivered the straight line that Fran Drescher is serious about becoming the next junior senator from New York." [AP, Previously]

Maybe it sounded like Paula Abdul was "chiding" Fox on her satellite radio show Monday, as the AP headline has it, but the charge was quite serious: That the network purposely gave Paula Godspeed a slot on American Idol to irritate singer/judge Abdul. In other words, Fox put Godspeed on the show, repeatedly, not because they were ignorant of her history as a mentally imbalanced stalker, but precisely because they knew this history. Godspeed's 18 years of letter to Abdul and her stint on the show were capped, infamously, with an apparent suicide near Abdul's home.

The Wall Street Journal's Thomas Frank, he of the book "What's the Matter with Kansas?," eviscerates in tomorrow's paper that infamous Times rich-people reporter Alex Kuczynski. Kuczynski, herself quite wealthy, published a mostly shameless account of renting a poorer woman's uterus in the Nov. 30 Times Magazine. Frank is unsparing:

A stalker emailed just a few minutes ago with this sighting: "Tracy Morgan at the AMC theater in Times Square. Standing behind him on the escalator as he bitches about Obama not caring about black people." Perhaps some sort of alliance with Jesse Jackson is in order! It worked for Sammy Davis Jr. Or maybe he was just quoting Jackson. Who knows.

Google somehow contrived to include full digital images of old New York magazines in its new magazine search service on Google Books. Sadly, the archive is missing key issues, containing such classics as "Radical Chic: That Party At Lenny's" and "Tribal Rights of the New Saturday Night." But both of those are available, albeit ripped from their original context, on nymag.com, and Google has one classic that isn't: Barbara Goldsmith's "La Dolce Viva," which revealed the seedy side of Andy Warhol's entourage through Viva, a shriveled one-name actress. "I had never seen anything like it," Tom Wolfe wrote of accompanying nude photos from Diane Arbus. But the article's appearance in the fourth debut standalone New York nearly ended Clay Felker's magazine.