Shep Smith's on-air response to an email flame broke several rules for fighting effectively on the internet: Don't give attention to a troll; don't let your opponent know when he's gotten under your skin; don't defend when you could be attacking. As such, the Fox News host's mounting rage against his small-fry critic doesn't deliver the same satisfaction as his other recent smackdowns. An especially ill-advised tactic: Trying to convince emailer "Mr. Fuentes" with an argument about the plight of Smith's "lawn-care maintenance guy." Since, you know, Señor Fuentes will surely understand an economic argument if it's translated into gardening terms. Click the video icon to watch. [via Johnny Dollar]

After a CEO's ouster, the knives always end up in the wrong person's back. Take how Jerry Yang is being ritually badmouthed now that he's out of Yahoo's top job: Such a nice guy. We all loved him. But he couldn't make a decision to save his life. Now, Yahoo's board of directors is being lionized for giving the nice guy the boot, and heroically engaging in a search for his replacement. But aren't they guilty of the same sins?What rank hypocrisy! Where's the blame for tapping Yang for the job in the first place? For not pushing him out sooner? And for that matter, for not having a hot-swappable substitute in the executive ranks when Hollywood dude Terry Semel abruptly quit last year? Those are all grave transgressions to which Yahoo's directors ought to confess. Chairman Roy Bostock should be first out the door. An old-school adman ridiculed within Yahoo as an "empty suit," Bostock has added nothing to the company. And he shredded any remaining credibility by brazenly lying to Newsweek about Jerry Yang's status as CEO, saying he was firmly ensconced in the job even as the board discussed his ouster. Add to the list investors Ron Burkle, Gary Wilson, and Art Kern, whose ouster I called for earlier this year. Can anyone say what Yahoo has gotten from their collective 26 years on the board? Corporate raider Carl Icahn, too, should make his stay on Yahoo's board brief and symbolic, a prize won for waging a fierce battle with Yahoo management over its failure to sell the company to Microsoft. He may have been right about Microsoft, but I can't believe he has the company's long-term interests at heart. And Jerry Yang, who has been allowed to keep his board seat, should resign it. Yahoo needs a clean break from his mismanagement; a lingering presence will only hurt the company he professes to love. Whoever Yahoo picks as its next CEO should make a priority of mucking out the boardroom; candidates for the job should demand that these six directors offer their resignation before they sign on the bottom line. Otherwise, the job will be untenable. The rest of the board I'd recommend Yahoo's next CEO keep, at least for the time being. Frank Biondi and John Chapple are too new to pass judgment on; venture capitalist Eric Hippeau and Hewlett-Packard executive Vyomesh Joshi actually have knowledge of the marketplace that's valuable to Yahoo; and telecom exec Maggie Wilderotter is a credible candidate to step in as Yahoo's CEO, should the board choose one of its own.

Surprisingly, everyone appears to have missed the subtle nuance in a chapter of comedian Denis Leary's book entitled "Autism, Schmautism." Go figure. Controversy arose after the Post excerpted a paragraph from Leary's Why We All Suck reading, in part, "I don't give a [bleep] what these crackerjack whack jobs tell you - yer kid is NOT autistic." Last night Leary appeared on the Daily Show to explain that he was quoted out of context, and in reality was taking a sophisticated stand on the scientific mystery of surging autism cases:

Nothing, it seems, can stop Google — except the overweening hubris of its employees. Every time Googlers venture outside the Googleplex to demonstrate their charitable embrace of the digitally unfortunate, they end up just reinforcing their snobby superiority. So it went with the search giant's job-swap program with starchy old-media marketer Procter & Gamble.Tim Armstrong, the Google sales guy who came up with the program, had the best of intentions. Wall Street will keep punishing Google's stock until the company can prove it has another trick besides selling text ads linked to search terms. Television advertising is a huge market — in the U.S. alone, it still generates $70 billion a year. Google wants a piece of that business. At $8.7 billion a year, Procter & Gamble's TV budget is the largest in the country; who better to learn from? The only problem: A detailed look by the Wall Street Journal at the program, which had two dozen Googlers and "Proctoids" — P&G employees — spending weeks at each other's employer showed the Proctoids learning and the Googlers laughing. For example: P&G marketers snagged actress Salma Hayek for a Pampers promotion, but, to the disbelief of a Googler, didn't invite any mommybloggers. A useful insight: Pampers brand managers corrected the omission. Proctoids also learned how to track the popularity of online search terms. What did Googlers learn at P&G? When a Proctoid presented a 1950s-era television ad, and told them it reached 70 to 80 percent of the audience, they scoffed. That kind of historical data did not fit their algorithm. A fruit of the companies' joint work was a campaign for YouTube users to create spoofs of P&G's "Talking Stain" commercials. That's vastly cheaper than running a television advertising campaign; Google, which has hardly figured out how to sell ads on YouTube, foots P&G's bandwidth bill for the videos, and gets little visible in return. Google's Armstrong may have hoped his salespeople would learn how to pitch Procter & Gamble for a piece of its multibillion-dollar ad budget. They were too busy giggling while their counterparts at the staid soap-and-diapers company were learning how to market their products cheaply online. P&G got the beter end of this bargain: It may well save money, but it's not clear Google will get much of it. At that rate, P&G will have the last laugh.

Last year the SEC and New York attorney general's office opened investigations related to a novel business: a company that hired as "consultants" moonlighting workers with access to proprietary information of interest to hedge funds. Ethical questions will also be asked about the network of insider media consultants Dan Abrams has assembled after Rachel Maddow took the Elle Macpherson-dater's MSNBC slot. With advisors like former Us Weekly editor Bonnie Fuller, ex-Huffington Post writer Rachel Sklar and Lockhart Steele, once of Gawker Media, Abrams Research is meant to be simply a "mock jury of bloggers, TV personalities and newspaper or magazine editors," the Wall Street Journal reports. But it could get so much more thorny than that.

Citing "several" anonymous people close to Hillary Clinton, Politico reported the Democratic senator is still weighing whether to accept the job of Secretary of State, should it be offered. That contradicts a report in yesterday's Guardian that Clinton planned to accept such an offer from Barack Obama offer once the president-elect's team was done vetting her husband, the former president. Hillary might want to stay in the senate and help fix health care instead, her people tell Politico. Translation: there's no formal offer yet, and also no way in hell Hillary Clinton is going to let people think her future is at the whim of That One's "fairytale" administration:

A classic tech dream: Reinvent every facet of an existing business, from top to bottom. The personal computer industry was built on the impossible dream that there would one day be a computer on every desk — an example which inspires countless attempts to reengineer the virtual world. Most prove to be expensive busts. Like the air-taxi business. Eclipse Aviation, which made small jets which its backers hoped startup airlines would fly from point to point at a cost lower than private jets, failed to meet payroll last week, and only now has scraped up financing to pay its employees.Vern Raburn, the big dreamer behind Eclipse, left the company this summer — a condition without which the company would not have raised a round of financing. He had envisioned Eclipse building fleets for countless air-taxi operators, which would operate from new, small-scale airports — a whole new air-taxi economy, dreamed up from the ether, which he would monopolize. DayJet, the most notable air-taxi startup, shut its doors in September. But Eclipse failed not just because all the component pieces of Raburn's vision failed to come together. It would be easy, surely, for him to pin the blame on operators who didn't deliver on their part of the bargain. It's not clear that there ever really was enough demand for the service in the first place. As much as people complain about commercial air travel, the major airlines move millions of people a year, at a cost its customers pay, albeit with grumbles. Asked how large the air-taxi market would be, Raburn told a magazine in 2007, "The only thing you can say about predicting the size of new markets is that you will be wrong." Give Raburn credit: He was right about that. (Photo by AP)

Newsweek has come up with the worst rationale yet for canceling the annual holiday party: The magazine said it is sacrificing the Christmastime shindig to have any even more awesome party in April. Because spring is totally the time you want to be partying late with coworkers, and the sun goes down three hours later (7:39ish vs. 4:30), so management doesn't have to worry about people punching out early. We suppose this sounds better than "we want to reduce the chances of having to fire you all amid the rapidly accelerating implosion of print media and Western capitalism, just like Condé Nast, Viacom, Hearst ABC News and News Corp. before us." The internal memo is after the jump.

· You know, the new youth-skewed and sexed-up Star Trek does seem uncomfortably well-suited for the 90210 market. We bet there's even a part for Tori Spelling! [Thanks, Metroville] · Sacha Baron Cohen has a brother: Erran Baron Cohen. And Erran Baron Cohen has a record: Songs in the Key of Hanukkah. Want to know more? Oh. Well here's the link anyway. · We don't know what Peter Bart is complaining about: Variety has plenty of Oscar consideration ads! They just happen to be two years old. · Cause we're basically a sucker for Videogum's Gabriel Delahaye, here's a video about making the perfect fauxhawk or something. · Glad to see our fake Bruno title is alive and well Down Under. It. Won't. Die. · Speaking of Australia—like, no offense, but can't you get some less freakish-looking celebrities for your movie premieres?

We thought the cult of Scarface — from the quaint, Capone-influenced 1932 original to the salty, bloody 1983 remake and ultimately the 2006 video game — might have struck its apex with the recent publication of the must-read survey Scarface Nation:The Ultimate Gangster Movie and How It Changed America. But another, far less-touted symbol of the gangster story's grip on our national imagination emerged Monday in the unlikeliest of places: Montgomery County, Ohio, where a newly booked suspect struck us with not only the greatest name-homage in film history, but also an uncanny felony cocaine possession rap. Seriously — the video game is great and everything, but this is attention to detail. Click through for a full-size glimpse. [TSG]

It's a mixed bag tonight, and despite what we learned from last night's Silverman-Rose man-grapple, the world of television programming still holds many delightful mysteries, from androgynous best friend candidates to wolf children. WATCH Paris Hilton's My New BFF [10 PM, MTV] - This week Paris invites some BFF rejects back to makeover the remaining contestants before they strut it at a fashion show. Later the girls try to raise money using only a bucket and a cardboard cutout of Paris. Fingers crossed that Onch is one of the returning airheads.

Sirens greeted Forbes reporter Brian Caulfield when he visited Yahoo's campus in search of quotable employees after CEO Jerry Yang announce was stepping down: "Paramedics, police and a fire truck responded after a Yahoo employee suffered a seizure, a company security guard said. It's unclear what caused the seizure, but employees at the company's headquarters are bracing for 1,500 jobs cuts that are expected next month." Anyone know who the unlucky Yahoo was, and if he or she has recovered? [Forbes.com]

It's true: Soap Opera Digest reports that Deidre Hall, who's played Days of Our Lives's Dr. Marlena Evans for 32, um, colorful years, has been let go along with longtime screen partner Drake Hogestyn, aka John Black. Deidre was your run-of-the-mill soap diva until insane genius writer/producer James E. Reilly (himself a resent casualty of a more permanent, God-mandated downsizing) took over and incorporated Satan-rape into the proceedings. In Marlena's memory, we revisit the classic Days exorcism scene, featuring Hogestyn as the vomit-splattered Man of God sent to drive out the ratings-goosing demons. It might be daytime TV, but this is some effectively scary shit—particularly when she starts stabbing her privates with an Itty Bitty Book Light. Video after the jump.

For better or worse, Yahoo now doesn't have a leader. At least the market thinks that's a good thing and Yahoo shareholders got rewarded with a $1.3 billion bump. Today's featured commenter, mew, has a different idea about Jerry Yang leaving:

The secretive team behind the late, great SocialiteRank.com (backstory here) has returned to the Web. Or least that's what the founders of Astrocrack.com tell us. (And we're inclined to believe it, if only because the site is as wickedly funny as Socialite Rank once was and full of the same colorful collages.) It's an astrology site and promises to explain such mysteries as "why Leo ladies collect tens of thousands pounds worth of beauty products" and "why Virgo men bald faster than any other human beings." The email announcement is after the jump.

Now that he's stepping down as Yahoo's CEO, will Jerry Yang ever take a public stage again, as he did at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last January? Suggest an appropriately elegiacal caption in the comments; the best will become the post's new headline. Yesterday's winner: ShreeCeto, for "Hey Jason! What's going on with your valuation?" (Photo by Yodel Anecdotal)

If there's one thing Chuck Norris is good for, it's the 1995 canine buddy cop movie Top Dog. If there are two things Chuck Norris is good for, we would have to think long and hard to come up with a second thing, as we've already disavowed the campy appeal found in Walker: Texas Ranger (for it led to Paul Haggis) and Norris's political endorsements (for it led to this). Still, Norris continues to press on with the politics, and now he has contributed an article to the conservative website Town Hall that bashes gay people rallying against Proposition 8. It is entitled, "If Democracy Doesn't Work, Try Anarchy." Let's have a look!

CSI: Diddy. CBS announced today that Sean Combs has agreed to a two-episode guest-starring stint on CSI: Miami, in which the versatile rapper/mogul/actor "will portray a prosecutor who doesn't get along with police Lt. Horatio Caine, played by David Caruso." Little else was disclosed about his appearance beyond a note that Diddy's episodes will air in mid-winter before his character is vanquished in short order in a dramatic, best-of-five, shades-shedding duel with Caruso. [AP]

Pictures from Life's centuries-old archives will now be available as part of Google Image Search. The images will be hosted on Google servers, however they carry no clear usage instructions. At least it's now easier for bloggers to spice up their posts with something that has a bit more gravitas than 4chan images. (Image via Time Inc.)

The Frigid 50 Runs Cold. We used to look forward to Film Threat's annual Frigid 50—their "line-up of the least-powerful, least-inspiring, least-intriguing people in Hollywood"—but a quick perusal of this year's countdown led us to wonder if the list itself hasn't become the nippily uninspired equivalent of shrunken wizard naughties. It tops out with a desperate cry for publicity by naming Heath Ledger Hollywood's most frigid—he's dead! Do you see how outrageous a claim that is?!—but it's the other occupants of the top ten that leave us even colder. Carmen Electra? Star Wars? Pacino and DeNiro in separate entries? This list's dead on arrival. Shoulda been you, Heigl. Oh wait—you're there too, quite predictably, at #3. [Film Threat]