Here is your hilarious coda to the Bush presidency: Vice President Dick Cheney has been indicted by a grand jury, in Texas. He is expected to repair to his moonbase shortly, never to return to Earth. [Chron.com]

Guess who the new Attorney General will be? Eric Holder! He was an assistant AG back in—wait for it—the Clinton Administration! Yay, change! Hah, see, this is what happens when you only had an eight year vacation from your 40 years of desert wandering. Holder will help close Guantanamo Bay. Thankfully, Holder has a lot of experience freeing evil criminals, because he totally signed off on the Marc Rich pardon! Let's all take a magical trip back to that wonderful story, shall we? Marc Rich founded Glencore, a commodities supplier that does lots of business with "rogue states" and so on, back in the wild 1970s. Rich was a fantastically wealthy commodities trader and decided one day to evade some taxes and also to do some illegal business with Iran, during the oil crisis. He bought some cheap oil, from Iran, and sold it in the US for double the price. Some of this oil dealing happened while Iran was holding a couple Americans hostage. Whoops! Then Rudy Giuliani indicted him and Marc forgot to come back to America from Switzerland and he ended up on the Most Wanted List for a while. Some time later, Marc's lovely wife Denise donated millions of dollars to Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, and she ponied up $450k for the Clinton library. One day, as his presidency ended, Bill pardoned Marc. Denise was thrilled! Some mean Republicans wanted to indict Bill, because honestly they'd just had a lot of fun hounding him for bullshit and were sad to see that wonderful time come to a close. But, you know, the president can pretty much pardon anyone he wants for any reason he wants. Pardoning an asshole millionaire because his socialite wife gave you money is probably more defensible than pardoning Nixon so the nation can heal or whatever. Still, it was gross and dumb, because no one liked Marc Rich besides his wife and some Israeli charities he donated to and the King of Spain. Not even his old lawyer, noted asshole Scooter Libby, actually liked him that much, though he defended the tax evasion, which was, oddly, the thing Bill didn't pardon him for. Anyway! Bill didn't seriously ask anyone in his Justice Department about whether or not he should pardon Marc Rich, but he did ask then-deputy AG Holder for his opinion, and Holder said he was "neutral, leaning towards favorable." So it's all his fault and he will be the worst Attorney General ever, as long as you pretend not to notice that the last three guys to do it have probably been the worst in history, or at least since Ed Meese. The Clinton scandals were fun because no one actually got hurt or was tortured and most American cities survived more or less intact.

The accompanying chart from TechFlash says it all: Online sales just aren't growing anymore. October's 1 percent growth over October 2007 is the worst performance measured by ComScore since they began tracking stats in 2001. TechFlash quotes Gian Fulgoni, chairman of the research firm: "We can only hope that the recent sharp drop in oil prices will cause a continued easing of inflation and a strengthening in consumer spending as [we] enter the critical holiday shopping season." We can only hope? Dude, we can get down on our knees and pray.

Dave Kansas, a former editor at the Wall Street Journal and TheStreet.com, is out as the president of personal finance site FiLife.com, Portfolio reports. Kansas will keep a title with FiLife, but it'll be as "editor at large." And given his connections to the WSJ newsroom, we wouldn't be surprised to see him land back there eventually. But Kansas is a reminder that journalists — especially reporters on media and financial beats — are particularly prone to thinking they could do a better job than the folks who handle the money in the business—the only people, it seems, who stand any chance of getting rich.This syndrome is partly occupational hazard, since reporters and editors spend so much time talking to real business people who like to flatter with effusions of how brilliant and right on their analyses are. No one has been more of a poster-boy for the yearning to cross the editorial-managment divide than Kansas, who signed up in 1999 with Jim Cramer at TheStreet.com first with an editorial tile and then more venerated monikers like Executive Vice President and Chief Strategic Officer. At one point, his stock in the company was worth $9 million, but even more importantly it was the sort of gig that could position him for management positions down the line. But the dot-com crash wiped out the paper money and Kansas was soon back at the WSJ again, editing stuff. Last year he left again to run FiLife, taking the title of president. We can't blame him for trying to make the jump: editorial employees are being laid off left and right, and even the superstars in the field are looking burnt out and less special every day. Maybe next boom, eh?

The lauded, mishandled film Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired saw its high Oscar hopes perish Monday when the Academy announced its shortlist of candidates for this year's Best Documentary Feature prize. It joined other conspicuous snubs including the year's top-grossing doc Religulous and the follow-up doc from last year's winner Alex Gibney. But there's a bit of extra sting afflicting Wanted and Desired, which compellingly challenged Polanski's 1978 rape conviction and eventual exile in Paris and was a Sundance darling before HBO acquired it for broadcast last summer. As you might recall, that could have gone better — both then and now.The network's attempt to qualify the film for Oscar consideration — by burying it for a week in the farthest reaches of L.A. and Manhattan — denied it the "true release" Academy voters are fond of; a later theatrical run grossed less than $60,000 and hastened its fade from Oscar consideration. Religulous pulled the same stunt prior to premiering at Toronto in September; it fared better with Lionsgate behind it, earning $12.5 million since its release Oct. 1. But that's about all the gold it'll get. On the bright side, Werner Herzog is a step closer to his first Oscar nomination; the Bavarian maverick was shortlisted for his quirky Antarctic adventure Encounters at the End of the World. Any fan of his jilted 2005 classic Grizzly Man will agree justice delayed remains justice denied, but every bit helps. He'll face old pal and '04 winner Errol Morris, whose Iraq doc Standard Operating Procedure was shortlisted as well and whose vying against Herzog for an Oscar is itself the surreal, cerebral stuff of a feature-length doc in the making. Or at least we hope so; those guys film everything.

Dallas Mavericks owner and dotcom jillionaire Mark Cuban has posted an SEC P2 filing to his personal blog. Cuban can run a team, but he's a bit sloppy trying to put the paperwork in context. In short: The SEC has accused Cuban of ordering the sale of his shares in Mamma.com in 2004, based on inside info, to avoid a $750,000 loss. Here's what Cuban is trying to say with his post:

You'd think that in these hard times more people would be scaling down to cottages, but no. Time Inc. just announced to its staff that Cottage Living—which had a rate base of 1 million(!)—is folding. The website will also die. According to an internal memo, "the economy inhibited its ability to grow and therefore, sadly, we had to make the decision to close it." Sad for cottage-livers. More sad for the apartment-living employees.

My worst fears for a favorite writer have been confirmed: Dan Lyons told Valleywag alumnus Jordan Golson via phone that (A) Newsweek, his new employer, ordered Lyons to remove a blog post calling Yahoo publicists "lying sacks of shit," and (B) rather than continue to blog under the boss's watchful eye, Lyons — once Internet-famous as the Fake Steve Jobs — has stopped blogging altogether. The man has two kids and Newsweek pays real money, so I'm not going to toss rocks. Except at Newsweek, which hired Lyons because of Fake Steve Jobs, his hilarious fake-Apple-CEO persona; urged him to blog outside the magazine; then freaked out when Lyons continued to write honestly in his spare time. You maniacs! You blew it up!

We're not going to spill any digital ink describing Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg as unlikely compadres. After all, if you can't see how these two herb-aficionado ex-cons fit snuggly into the same gangsta pod—both enjoying nothing more than kicking back after a long day of baking and wreath-construction with a blunt the size of a corncob and getting fucked up for real in this bitch—then you probably don't deserve to be here. On today's Martha, Snoop popped by. Martha introduced him by reading aloud her many correspondences from the hip-hop titan:· "Hello Martha. It's Snoop Dogg. What did you do? Hit me back when you get a moment. Stay sweet." · "Hey, M.S. It's Snoop Dogg says hi and seein' how you doing. Hollah back. Boo." · "I would love to hang out with you whenever time permits. I dig your style, M.S. For real, for real. So hit me back when you are free for me. Be sweet and stay [blank blank]. Yours truly, Snoop Dogg." They then moved on to that time-tested gangsta dick-measuring contest known as comparing posses—his is more physically intimidating, but hers are far better at frothing egg whites—before diving into the potato-mashing task at hand. HuffPo has the video.

It used to be that you could pull a really good hoax on people and it would take a long time to be figured out (if it was figured out at all!) And then everyone would have a good story and maybe be a little embarrassed, but not for too long. You know, like those great old stories about people like Clifford Irving faking a Howard Hughes book and Alan Conway who passed himself off as Stanley Kubrick for a while. I guess people were less cynical back then, and weren't always terrified of getting duped. "Trusting," I guess is the word. Well, not anymore. Everything gets figured out so quickly! Is it the quality of the hoaxes, or the cynicism of the hoaxed? Well, probably both. Take a look at some recent examples:

Reality Bites: We've been agitating for a while to get an image of Winona Ryder donning her Vulcan ears as Spock's mom for J.J. Abrams's new film Star Trek: Underwear, and thanks to /film's helpful selection of big still frames from the trailer, we got what we wanted — almost. Yes, that's the first image of Ryder in character, but the "babuschka chic" look covers her...wait, what's that? Spock's mom is human, not Vulcan? Then we have no earthly explanation for how the 37-year-old Ryder apparently popped out Spock's portrayer, 31-year-old Zachary Quinto, at age six. [/film]

Yesterday, Yahoo was worth $14.7 billion. Today, it's worth $16 billion. Why the boost? Stock traders bid up Yahoo's stock after CEO Jerry Yang's surprise ouster — partly out of speculation that Microsoft might make a new bid for the company with Yang out of the picture, and partly, we think, out of sheer relief.

We've been hard on Common, the "conscious" Chicago rapper who spends an inordinate amount of time making ads for damn near everybody and then coming up with weird justifications for how he's still keeping it real. Now his new TV ad for Zune, the off-brand iPod that Common called "a representation of me," is out. And he's pulled godfather of the beat Afrika Bambaataa into the advertising web along with him! This, along with The Roots signing on as Jimmy Fallon's house band, is pounding my capability for sincere outrage into a sense of zombie-like acceptance. Watch the full ad below and surrender:
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[via Adrants; pic via]

Imagine our delight when we found this sentence while reading a New Yorker story about gourmet beer: "Wood experts rate a species’ hardness on the Janka scale—a measure of how many pounds of force it takes to drive a half-inch steel ball halfway into a board." It sets up perfectly a lowbrow joke: of course super-aggressive date-a-holic Paul Janka would have a last name that refers to measuring the hardness of wood, right? So we did some research to estimate where on the Janka scale Paul's personal wood would actually be.Balsa—the thinnest, softest wood—rates at about 100. Eastern White Pine's a 380 and Hemlock is a 500. Those are all fairly soft woods. Brazilian walnut is one of the hardest woods, at 3684. Ebony rates a 3220, and red oak is at the low-middle end, with 1290. Which wood would compare to Paul Janka's hardness most accurately? We'd guesstimate—a very uneducated guess—somewhere around the hardness of sycamore. Look it up.

Where the Wild Things Are director Spike Jonze recently gave his most expansive interview yet about his troubled, tortured, presumed-dead and reanimated fantasy epic, which Warner Bros. is now committed to opening Oct. 19, 2009. And while light-treading Jonze makes his biggest statement about the delay by offering virtually no statement at all, a teasing philosophical aside about his young star Max Records summarizes pretty much all you need to know about Jonze v. Warners:

Your Gmail sponsored link that will make you hate Democrats of the day: "Mama Voted For Obama." It's precisely the idiotic indoctrinating garbage you think it is, except for this awesome scene of cartoon Obama reenacting the My Pet Goat incident as, presumably, the nation burns. Good work, Mama. The terrorists won. [Little Democrats]

Arianna Huffington is branching out and branching out some more! Fresh off her adventurous night subbing as the host of Rachel Maddow's show, the accented mogul (and current non-friend to us) announced today that the Huffington Post "is going to raise money to fund investigative journalism projects." How does she plan to come up with the cash for this, the most expensive type of reporting? She won't say! Yet. According to Reuters, she said there won't be any details for three months. Perhaps in that time the economy will improve and donors will look to throw money at investigative journalism? Ha, no. So where will this cash come from? Some guesses:

Times columnist Bill Kristol went on Fox back in June and told the world that this governor from Alaska named Sarah Palin would be the best Vice President ever! He loved her, very much, because she was a maverick. Five months later, she is a national joke, and he is a sad, sad man, trying desperately to salvage his credibility. "I met her for the second time in my life. I know we're supposed to be such great friends, but the truth is I've met her twice... I've spoken to her on the phone once. For all our great closeness," he tells The Observer, "I barely know her." Too late, Bill. You're all washed up! Since time immemorial the New York Times has kept its rich old conservative readers slightly satisfied with some token conservative voices in the Op-Ed section. For many, many years there was reliable old Bill Safire, the Nixon speechwriter, a member of the smart old educated class of Republicans who were able to write up support for disastrous policy implemented by the corrupt and incompetent with smart, almost plausible-sounding arguments. He left, replaced with John Tierney, a libertarian-leaning sort who didn't last long on the op-ed beat and now writes "researchers say a counterintutive thing" features instead. And there is David Brooks, a quietly doctrinaire Republican who fancies up his usual party line with armchair sociology. But Brooks broke with the party this year, calling Sarah Palin a cancer, leaving only poor, dumb, Bill Kristol. Bill Kristol, who tried to sell America on Sarah Palin, and ended up repeatedly embarrassing himself, over and over again, and losing John McCain his election. Now he just mumbles about hating the mainstream media, to all his mainstream media friends, in the pages of the New York Times. Already the vultures are wondering who'll replace him—you can be terribly wrong and stupid and remain a Times columnist indefinitely, but you must be terribly wrong and stupid in the service of the conventional wisdom. So Tom Friedman's Iraq columns get a pass, as does Maureen Dowd's constant stream of nonsense. But Kristol is no longer merely just a hack, he's a failed hack. No one bought his line this year. So maybe someone nutty and anti-Palin like, say, David Frum is next for the Affirmative Action Conservative Slot?

Naturally, we at Defamer think the world of Emma Thompson — after all, who doesn't? (Don't answer that, Branagh.) Still, we didn't expect much from her appearance last night on Letterman; maybe some cute banter, some veddy English trilling, but certainly nothing on the level of Helen Mirren's "I'm a crazy British woman" press tour.However, Thompson immediately bucked our expectations by marching onto the set while brawling with a stuffed fox who would not let go until it got a firm disavowal of Love Actually. Sure, Thompson was most likely satirizing Letterman's previous guest, who had survived an animal attack on her own, but we prefer to think of Thompson's stunt as a singular, non sequitur bid for attention. You've won this round, Thompson. Now go do something at Ellen's dunk tank and we can really crank it up.

Can it get any dumber? Jerry Yang's post on Yahoo's corporate blog, "Stepping down," is throwing me an error message that suggests Yahoo has banned the IP address of my Sprint wireless Internet card, but only for their corporate blog. And yet the post is visible on the blog's homepage. It seems too bad to be true: Yang can't even say goodbye right. Update: The "999" error indicates that the server automatically throttled itself to prevent a surge in traffic from taking the site down. Yang's resignation blog post had made the front page of Digg, the news-discussion site. What does it say about Yahoo's competence at building reliable websites if Digg can take down the boss's blog?