Sometimes the wheels of justice turn slowly, it's true. But it is surely unexpected that a Supreme Court justice, of all people, would have to wait so long for deliverance from reckless cruelty. Over and over and over again, year after year since 1980, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has had to endure the sight of her name carelessly rendered "Ginsberg" or some similarly awful facsimile in the pages of the Times. Would the paper deign, even once, to run a correction? No, it would not. Any formal objections were presumably, well, overruled. Until now.

Condé Nast publishers and editors have been instructed by the powers-that-be to cut both their staffs and budgets by five percent immediately. Also, to the 29 faithful subscribers to Men's Vogue, please be advised the magazine may be closed down in the near future. [NYO]

♦ Don't get your hopes up, but supposedly Madonna and Guy Ritchie are hoping to settle their divorce by early next week. Until then, though, we'll be treated to lots more gossip about their wacky marriage, including the set of rules Madonna posted on the wall of their Central Park West apartment and how she wanted to fill up their Olympic-size swimming pool with Kabbalah water. [NYP, Daily Mail]
♦ You think your house is complete chaos? For their stay in Berlin, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have six full-time nannies and a fleet of 20 Volkswagens (provided to them by the car company gratis, of course). [NYDN]
♦ Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of former presidential contender John Edwards, was spotted without her wedding ring at an event Monday night. Now the talk is that the couple isn't living together anymore either. [P6]
♦ Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen are supposedly feuding because Ashley wants a boob job, but doesn't want to get one unless Mary-Kate goes under the knife at the same time. [Star]

John Edwards knows how to drag out a scandal. After falsely denying an Oct. 2007 report he was cheating on cancer-stricken wife Elizabeth, a more credible investigation was published in July, and Edwards spent several weeks dodging questions. He eventually confessed to ABC News, but insisted he hadn't fooled around with his mistress since 2006. Everyone thought that was bullshit, and now it looks like they were correct: The Washington Post this week noticed Elizabeth Edwards was missing her wedding band at a recent George Washington University appearance, with her husband absent. And Page Six heard further whispers:

♦ AIG is already running out of the $123 billion in cash it was provided by the Federal Reserve, which means the authorities are slowly waking up to idea that something else might be going on. [NYT]
♦ The U.S. economy shrank at a 0.3 percent annualized rate in the third quarter as consumer spending declined at the fastest rate in 28 years. [MW]
♦ The Fed's half-point rate cut yesterday? It won't do much to prop up the economy. [NYP]
♦ Andrew Cuomo has asked banks to provide his office with bonus data. [NYT]
♦ Some hedge funds are still raking in cash from investors. Steve Cohen's SAC is down 5.5 percent in 2008 (and he's moved most of his funds into cash), but he's accepting new funds beginning in January. [Bloomberg]

When Robert Thomson's Wall Street Journal ran a story labeled "EMBARGOED!" in June, we held out hope the tag referred to the paper's in-house lingo for an exclusive to be kept off the Web until the last possible minute, not to the sort of embargoes where sources dictate when information may be published. But alas, it appears former managing editor Marcus Brauchli's noble defiance of public relations choreography is truly abandoned, as evidenced by the screenshot above and the factually identical stories in the Times and Journal this morning (about a Netflix-TiVo deal). Sometimes, even the Journal will submit to a flack's rules. And even add a slammer!

So not only did Barack Obama avoid making a terrible GAFFE on the Daily Show, he was actually much more engaged and funny than a written summary of his comments by elitist pool reporters would lead you to believe. The Democratic presidential nominee's 6-pointish lead didn't leave Obama cocky, but did relax him enough to joke about being a Kindergarten socialist, libtard propagandist and half-redneck Frankenbitter who won't be able to cast an Obama-Biden vote without imploding. His guest-editing stint on Wonkette starts Thanksgiving Eve, drunkenly. (Click the video icon for excerpts.)

It was inevitable that the Huffington Post would somehow end up sullied by recruiting such a massive army of unpaid contributors. But few would have imagined something this awful: Valued HuffPo political blogger Carol Anne Burger shot herself Friday, and police now believe she was responsible for the brutal murder of her former lover two days earlier. Burger was a scuba-diving instructor who brought an amateur's zeal to her work, and in this sense embodied the best of HuffPo's democratic approach, calling to mind fellow contributor Mayhill Fowler, who broke the "Bittergate" story. But the website will not be eager to associate itself with Burger's energy in dispatching Jessica Kalish.

Elisabeth Hasselbeck has been one of the most vocal supporters of the Republican agenda on the View for years, she was the toast of the Republican National Convention in early September (she hosted a luncheon for Cindy McCain and handed out "McCain '08" t-shirts she designed herself), and just last weekend, of course, she hit the campaign trail with Sarah Palin. So you'd think that some staffer in the McCain camp—or an official at the RNC—would have taken a moment to verify that Hasselbeck is a registered Republican, right? Apparently not.

• Chris Matthews, MSNBC: "It was romance. It was realism... I thought it was fabulous."

A media pool report on Barack Obama's Daily Show taping indicated he handled the appearance with his usual calm rationality and didn't blow everything with an ill-advised gaffe, as nervous nellies (or anyone who has tracked Democratic presidential nominees for the past, oh, two decades) might worry he would. According to the Daily News' Mike McAuliff, the candidate (wisely!) wouldn't even indulge a joke about old people in Florida:

Click to view · Can't wait 'til 8 to find out what happens in The Barack Obama Show? Well then you might be interested to learn the surprise twist that he [SPOILER ALERT!] is actually God and is fucking Sarah Silverman! · Self-professed stalker and balls-addict The Blazing Shark details her ongoing e-mail exchanges with a cute TV "child actor in a film almost all of us have seen" she desperately wanted to de-pant (and did, in a car). [via LAist] · Over a year later, Mel Brooks comes crawling back to Cloris on his hands and knees. Delicious vindication! · The Beatles have licensed their music to Rock Band, thereby rendering the video game our neighbors have driven us insane with over the past eight months bigger than Jesus by association. · Hey—Obamicorns!

For a movie that the religious right hasn't even gotten around to touching yet, Milk certainly has caused its fair share of controversy this week. First, a questionable THR column on the movie's marketing earned the ire of Focus Features, and now that the film had its first public screenings last night, the reactions range from rapturous to...fight-inducing? Let's take a look!The initial salvo came from David Poland, who said, "For the first time in my memory, we have a major Oscar movie that actually is a gay agenda movie. But on the making, it is so much more. It is a brilliant, powerfully humane piece of work that reaches well beyond the issue of gay rights or any idea that this is a gay-only film." Jeffrey Wells chimed in with an "8.5" score and this statement, "I felt a genuine gayness from Sean Penn, who plays the title role of the late San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, that I didn't think he had in him." Yes, acting — isn't it marvelous? Then, the wheels came off the Typepad bus, as dissenter Kris Tapley of In Contention spent less time going over the film's flaws and more time picking fights with every other Oscar blog, but most especially Milk partisan Scott Feinberg. Tapley posted a delightfully catty, personal attack on Feinberg ("We as bloggers have to be careful to understand the context of our work...That is a lesson I truly hope Feinberg learns sooner rather than later, for his sake and, certainly, for the sake of the LA Times, who rather hastily threw him an editorial voice after behind-the-scenes plans for the upstart fell through") that prompted a lengthy rebuttal from Feinberg and a "fight, fight" taunt across the blogosphere. Truly, it is a continuation of Harvey Milk's legacy that he could inspire so many self-publishing Oscar pundits to set aside their petty grievances with a film and turn those attacks on each other. You gotta give 'em hope, kids — and you have! Kudos! [Photo Credit: Getty Images]

Within minutes of this post's publication on the East Coast, the Barack Obama infomercial American Stories American Solutions — formerly known as Hole in the Wall: Election Edition — will premiere on NBC, CBS, and FOX. The procrastinators at the Obama campaign waited until this afternoon to unveil the official spot promoting the 30-minute ad, supplying what we think is the first-ever commercial for a commercial in electoral history. As with most mediocre trailers, we imagine that once you've seen this, you don't need to see the rest (hint: talking candidate, stirring music), but you be the judge after the jump: Is it Obama or Pushing Daisies in your 8 o' clock hour?Click to view

· Wednesday night music: Spinnerette play Spaceland, The Notwist are at the Henry Fonda, and The Muslims play a free show at Amoeba. · An all-star cast including Dave Foley, Tom "Spongebob" Kenny, Jill Sobule, and Paul F. Tompkins perform a live rendition of Eban Schletter’s Witching Hour, the classic Halloween record. It's at the Steve Allen Theater. · The L.A. premiere of Meredith Monk and Ann Hamilton: Songs of Ascension features Ann Hamilton's multimedia art, the Todd Reynolds String Quartet, and a 20-person choir from the CalArts voice program. And of course, Monk's owl-scaring vocal gymnastics. At REDCAT. It all promises to be gloriously weird and beautiful.

Jason Kilar, the CEO of online-video site Hulu, has rediscovered a truism: less is more. Hulu, which is mostly owned by NBC and News Corp., runs fewer ads on the TV clips it licenses from its TV-network parents than they air when they broadcast the same shows. And yet the ads are more effective. This could simply be a novelty effect; everything about Hulu is new, so the ads also draw more notice. But Hulu may be onto something. Why don't networks try running fewer ads on air, too? (Photo via Alarm:Clock)

Click to viewBoomp3.com On the London set of Sherlock Holmes, free spirit Robert Downey Jr. did his best to cheer his director Guy Ritchie up. Partnering up with the effects and stunt departments, Downey crafted a rig that allowed him to fly around the set. A rather glum Ritchie perked up at the sight of Downey soaring majestically, as Downey shouted down, “Relax, Guy. I’m going to fly in this movie, too. People love it when I’m flyin’.” [Photo Credit: Bauer-Griffin] *A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.

Is hogging elevators evil? RhymePhile is today's featured commenter for suggesting that Google's kitchen cutbacks could lessen the environmental impacts on fellow tenants of its New York office building:

The dream is dead for Cloris Leachman, but the capital-H Hope for a brighter day in America through brightly-colored, quirky, hour-long Lee Pace vehicles remains. WATCH Pushing Daisies [8 PM, ABC] - Newly-injected gay icon Stephen Root guest stars this week as a Pie Hole patron who has questions about Ned's father. Meanwhile, Emerson (Chi McBride) gets to the bottom of a murder at a Chinese restaurant. Big ups to ABC for not airing the Barack Obama infomercial so that we can get our fantasy-dramedy-baked goods fix.

Back when Jim Cramer was an active hedge-fund trader, rather than an on-air fit-thrower for CNBC, he kept his distance from TheStreet.com, lest the site be accused of advancing his portfolio. No such distance now: He's replacing Thomas Clarke as chairman. Clarke remains CEO. [Silicon Alley Insider]