Donald Trump has been claiming he's worth $10 billion these days, which is a good thing because he may need a good chunk of it if expects to dig himself out of the mess he now finds himself in. The Wall Street Journal checks in on Trump's 92-story Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago today, and finds that the situation pretty dire. It turns out Trump owes a lot of money to a lot of people, and he's been having difficulty finding people who want to live in his gold and marble palace. The credit crunch, declining housing market and weak retail sales? They're not helping either!

See also: The Worst Fact-Checking Team In Newspapers [Gawker]

Dominick Dunne is 83 years old today. New Yorker editor David Remnick is 50. Winona Ryder is turning 37. Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer Simpson, is 51. Art gallerist Mary Boone turns 57. Actor Richard Dreyfuss is 61. Gabrielle Union is 36. Olympic swimmer-turned-swimsuit model Amanda Beard turns 27. Actress Joely Fisher is 41. And social fixture/Cinema Society founder Andrew Saffir is 42 years old today.

"They don't appreciate me." [Observer]

♦ Angelina Jolie is either "burning up with jealousy" over Brad Pitt's flirtatious relationship with co-star Diane Kruger, or she's completely happy and getting ready for her next adoption in the next few weeks, depending on which tabloid you pick up. [Star, OK!]
♦ Elisabeth Hasselbeck gets more death threats than any other host on the View, news that probably won't surprise you. [P6]
♦ Jennifer Aniston and John Mayer spent last weekend at a romantic spa in Arizona. [Star]
♦ Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen appeared at a book signing yesterday, but they did not permit fans to talk to them. [P6]
♦ Page Six follows up on the news from three weeks ago and reports Ivanka Trump is converting to Judaism for Jared Kushner. She's attending synagogue regularly, too. [P6]

It's hard to tell if magical things just happen to Tina Fey, or if the magic is in the comedy writer/producer's telling. The movie Psycho transforms her three-year-old daughter into a miniature murder detective; she has a life-changing hug with Oprah Winfrey; the Republicans nominate a vice presidential nominee who looks almost exactly like her. And then there was the anecdote the 30 Rock star shared with Late Night host Conan O'Brien last night, in which Sarah Palin offers up daughter Bristol to babysit Fey's daughter on the set of Saturday Night Live. The incident would be a stretch even as the premise of an SNL skit, but there you have it. Click the video icon to watch.

♦ The Fed is expected to cut interest rates again today, possibly to as low as 1 percent. [WSJ]
♦ The White House is pushing banks to stop hoarding the bailout billions and start making more loans. [AP]
♦ George Soros says the number of hedge funds "will be reduced in size by anywhere between half and two thirds" over the next few years. [Reuters]
♦ GMAC, which is controlled by GM and Steve Feinberg's Cerberus Capital, is now looking to become a bank holding company so it can tap into the $700 billion bailout pool. [WSJ]
♦ Credit card crunch: Lenders wrote off an estimated $21 billion in bad credit card loans in the first half of 2008. [NYT]

Time Inc. is cutting six percent of its work force, or 600 people. [NYT]

Patrick Swayze, like other media and entertainment personalities, opted to work through his treatment for pancreatic cancer. The Times got the first interview with Swayze since his diagnosis, and reported he's working 12-hour days on his TV show, has restored some healthy bulk to his physique and missed less than two days work. But it also indicates Swayze's doctors are still battling his disease, which kills 95 percent of patients within five years. The actor couldn't help but sound a contradictory note amid the Times' reverentially upbeat story:

The name should perhaps be changed to Saturday Night Streamed, suggests the Times' Brian Stelter, and he kinda has a point: The most memorable SNL sketches of the season were likely seen by more people online than on broadcast television. Tina Fey's debut impersonation of Sarah Palin was viewed 14 million times on Hulu.com, compared with 10 million people estimated to have seen it on TV. Numbers for her follow-up impersonation were similarly lopsided. We love the way NBC has used Hulu, but the whole thing looks like a trap.

"A one-time $18 million start-up cost for the launch of a web site is excessive, inconsistent with IAC’s operations, and just not accurate in this case." [Wired]

Google's offices in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood are the latest to feel the pinch, with hours curtailed and snack service cut back, according to an internal memo. To understand what a shock to the system this is, remember how, when Google went public four years ago, cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin swore they would increase employee perks over time. Since then, Google PR has built the company's great-place-to-work reputation largely on its free meals. How fast things change: Just a year ago, the luxe perks of Google's New York office were a selling point, as the search engine courted the city's fashionistas. Now the food is just another cost to cut. Starving artists, don't count on mooching off free meals courtesy of your Googler friends: Google New York is also cracking down on guests. Here's the memo New York Googlers received Tuesday around lunchtime:

Barack Obama is a stimulating speaker. The Daily Show is of course an entertaining and provocative show. Barack Obama on the Daily Show less than a week before the election? Stomach-knotting, sweat-inducing and nerve-wracking. It will be hard for supporters to laugh during Obama's confirmed appearance on the news-comedy show Wednesday if they spend the whole time cringing at the thought of the Democratic presidential nominee making some sort of gaffe that would blow his commanding lead over rival John McCain. Opponents, meanwhile, will be far more ready to laugh at Obama than with him. (Video from Obama's Aug. 2007 appearance is after the jump)

After it was revealed that she doesn't write her own column for Page Six Magazine, socialite and self-styled "Freelance Journalist" Lydia Hearst took to her Facebook to announce she would devote her "eighteen-hour days" to a "new beginning." What will this fresh new start for the model entail? She's not really sure, but it's going to be awesome, because anything can happen in New York. After all, Krispy Kreme donuts were invented here!

· Keanu Reeves took the stand today in his paparazzi-running-over trial, insisting that photographer Alison Silva "walked backwards, lost balance and tripped over his own feet" in front of the actor's oncoming car in March 2007. Reeves's compelling defense, according to courtroom observers: "Whoa." · NBC and reps for Britney Spears both deny rumors that the singer will appear on Saturday Night Live this fall to promote her new album Circus; naturally, expect one or both parties to announce a date some time in late November. · This sucks: Deep Throat director Gerard Damiano died over the weekend in Coral Gables, Fla., of complications following a stroke. He was 80. · Guess the critic: "“It’s really important to tell people to go out and see W. so they can talk about it and have an opinion about it and this freedom of speech of course that allows us to go and talk about a film about a current sitting president.” Hint: He has a thing for stars. · After a tepid denial last week, Terrence Howard's archenemy pimps at Marvel Studios confirmed that Don Cheadle will indeed inherit the role of Jim Rhodes in Iron Man 2.

Inspired perhaps by this Call to the Bullpen of a particularly bloodless-looking Diablo Cody, and an accidentally stumbled upon image of the astonishingly well-stacked Mad Men star Christina Hendricks looking like she's about to crack open Peggy's skull and help herself to a handful of copywriter brains, we thought we'd collect some other photos of comely, zombie-like actresses for your Halloween-season titillation. There's more undead goodness after the jump!

Excuse us, did you just hear a loud thunk? Did it sound something like a gauntlet being thrown down? Because it just got all tense up in here, and we think that's thanks to the only thing that could derail Al Franken's unlikely-yet-succeeding candidacy for the U.S. Senate: a stern, bobble-headed rebuke ad from his old Saturday Night Live coworker, Victoria Jackson! You may remember Jackson — less so for her SNL tenure than for her recent proclamations that Barack Obama is an "Anti-Christ whitey-hater." Now, she and other well-respected Hollywood Republicans like Stephen Baldwin and John Ratzenberger (what, was D.B. Sweeney's quote too high?) have taken to the airwaves in an attempt to boost Franken's competitor, Sen. Norm Coleman. For what it's worth, we think Jackson's screech of "Go VIKEEEEEENGS!" is indubitably her best work since Handi-Off. Enjoy the clip, after the jump:

Granted, the headline number is a shocker: 600 people losing their jobs starting two weeks from now at Time Inc. The cuts, reported this evening by the Times, will further hurt morale among magazine workers who once had the nearest thing to lifetime employment in American journalism. But put in proper perspective, the cuts look less draconian than one might have speculated after rumors started circulating earlier this month. For an organization with 10,200 staff, the layoffs amount to six percent of the workforce — a shave rather than an amputation, by the standards of endemic newspaper layoffs and the Great Magazine Die-Off. And they should come as no shock: Time Inc. has been contracting for years now.

Click to viewBoomp3.com At the 12th annual Hollywood Film Festival awards, popular culture impresario Diablo Cody decided to celebrate Halloween a few days earlier, doing her best zombie walk down the red carpet. Cody described herself as a fresh zombie, just a couple of hours old, but also felt she could go another way with her outfit. Cody said, “It’s a tad Stepfordy too. Like if Pris from Blade Runner was somebody’s wife.” [Photo Credit: Getty Images] *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.

The Future of Weiner. A rumor that Lionsgate is approaching various agencies in search of a Mad Men showrunner to replace a too-rich-for-their-blood Matthew Weiner was shot down by an insider, who told Defamer the negotiations had just begun, and that while he asked high, they were absolutely "not looking to replace him. He IS the show." Fret not, Mad Men fans still in mourning over the end of Season 2 and sweating the fate of Season 3: the studio is confident the deal will close before Christmas. (And without the celebrity dancing competition Jon Hamm promised in his SNL monologue.)