[Update: Now with a minor correction, and also an awesome Ted Stevens statement!] Ted Stevens is guilty of violating ethics laws, and not understanding how the internet works. Hah, just kidding, it's just the fraud stuff. His insane jury, made up of Alaskans DC residents [deny them congressional representation and see what happens, Senators] who kept having violent outbursts, found Stevens guilty of seven charges of corruption. He doesn't have to step down from the Senate, of course, and he's still running for reelection next week. He has said he will not step down. Which is awesome. What with the presidential election going on, we've barely had time for prominent congressional Republicans to face embarrassingly public trials and indictments, like in 2006! In 2006, America watched in glee as Republican congressmen Randy "Duke" Cunningham, Bob Ney, and Tom DeLay all faced indictments on the eve of the midterm elections. Resignations and bitter GOP infighting soon followed! Ney refused to resign until days before the election! Oh, then Florida congressman Mark Foley, uh, had some sort of scandal involving sexy, sexy underaged male pages. Also there was this Jack Abramoff guy! It was an exciting time, sort of. Now we are so busy with Barack Obama being a socialist and John McCain being old that Ted Stevens getting kicked out of the Senate, finally, after 200 years, seems like some happy afterthought. So. Corrupt Alaska Republican fucks his own party and loses an election. Who knew Alaska would matter, this year?

The old way to tell you're about to be fired: Your boss comes up to you, claps you on the shoulder, and acts all chummy. The new way to tell you're about to be fired: Your boss leaves a glowing recommendation for you. Revision3's Damon Berger got one from CEO Jim Louderback five days before he was laid off from the online-video startup. Damon, you should have gotten a clue when Louderback wrote that you could be "a great front-person for any organization."

While outlandish casting rumors for the next Batman sequel are a dime a dozen (we're starting another right here: fresh from her Dreamgrillz triumph, VH1 star Tiffany "New York" Pollard is being tipped to star as Bruce Wayne's next love interest), we've never been able to put much stock in them, principally because Bat mastermind Christopher Nolan hasn't actually signed on to a third film yet. Now, talking to the LAT, the director signals that his future involvement in the series shouldn't be seen as an inevitability:

An Andy Warhol painting that Sotheby's hoped would auction for over $10 million netted just $7.6 million at auction over the weekend, and the work of several high profile artists including Jeff Koons, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Gerhard Richter went unsold at London's Frieze Art Fair. Auction houses are making brave sounds, but the declining economy has only begun to take its toll, a reality that has forced houses and collectors to look elsewhere.Christie's postwar and contemporary sale at Sunday's Frieze Art Fair managed just $55.5 million, against an expected $100 million to $132 million, with almost half the lots going unsold. Sotheby's sale the Friday before netted $38 million against pre-auction estimates of $54 million to $75 million, reported the WSJ. The featured piece in the Sotheby's auction was the assemblage of Warhol's Skulls series and it netted more than a million less than its lowest estimate. This was probably because it only had one bidder, collector and dealer Jose Mugrabi, who quipped, "I feel safer with Warhol than with U.S. Treasury bonds.'' Mugrabi's son Alberto doesn't agree. He told Bloomberg News why he passed on a different Warhol in the auction:

As a startup, you are now, officially, on your own. You can't count on your VCs saving you or some magical offer from Yahoo or Google showing up to bail you out. Taurus has laid off Fondue. You need to rewrite — no, not your business model. Your business plan. Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis, in his latest private email, offers this advice:

♦ Following reports in July that Tory Burch was offering a 30 percent stake in her hugely successful womenswear and accessories label, she now says that the company is not for sale. Also, she says the economy has had an impact on her designs: "I don't think women want to be over-the-top anymore. They want something that's chic and elegant, but not such a big statement." [WWD]
♦ If you've noticed slightly fewer giraffe-like teens with unplaceable accents on the streets of Manhattan, it's because in a sobering indicator of just how bad things are, Elite has slashed 60 models from its roster. [Fashionista]

Click to viewBoomp3.com Oscar favorite Anne Hathaway took to the produce of her local Whole Foods to recreate one of her favorite scenes from the movies, the shower dance from Flash Dance. The Rachel Getting Married star was perfectly in sync with the produce sprinkler system as she twirled around the fresh vegetable department. Hathaway’s impromptu dance number ended with a thunderous round of applause and a flurry of five and ten dollar bills. [Photo Credit: X17] *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.

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance: How Wall Streeters are working through the classic grieving process as they cope with the meltdown. [Page Six Mag]

Don't blame the Radar staff for those horrible celebrity gossip items going up on the site today. The entire staff has been locked out of the office since Friday afternoon. After the news the magazine would be folding was announced on Friday during an interminable meeting, an HR official came in to tell the staff at 1p.m. that they would need to empty their desks by 3p.m.Staffers were, of course, a bit disgruntled that they had just two hours to clear out their things, but the HR official made a little speech about how he had just lost his mother and learned in the process that stuff didn't matter nearly as much as the memories. Of course, employees looking to copy their email address books and collect their things may have disagreed. Said one unnamed ex-Radar staffer: "I'm not even sure he had a mother." But with the number of pink slips flying these days, we're sure there are worse layoff horror stories out there. Please send yours to tips@gawker.com.

Davos, baby! The partying at the World Economic Forum, the annual conference held in a Swiss resort town that has become synonymous with the event, was "out of control," organizer Klaus Schwab now admits. The Wall Street bosses and Beltway bandits were too busy having a ball to keep their eye on it, even as the economy lurched towards the abyss. This strikes me as revisionist history; the Times reported on the nervous mood at this year's Davos So who kept the event festive?Why, Google did, according to Davos party correspondent Meghan Asha, the sometimes girlfriend of TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington, who got her in. Google's affair included Norman Jay, a British house-music DJ. There you have it: Larry and Sergey are at fault for distracting the world's best and brightest from preventing the meltdown we now face. If Schwab is serious about keeping thing's serious at the next WEF, we recommend disinviting Page and Brin. And Arrington and Asha.

28 million swing state residents got a special gift with their newspapers recently! An hour-long DVD called Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West was tucked in with papers thanks to Clarion Fund, a nonprofit group established by a radical right-wing Israelis dedicated to making Americans scared of Muslims. And hah, incompetent superflack Ronn [sic] Torossian is behind it all! The Obsession movie is linked to a group called "Aish HaTorah," a far-right Jewish movement that Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg calls "the lunatic fringe" of Israeli politics. Torossian, of course, represents them. Here is a fun story Goldberg tells about the time he met Ronn!

♦ New York's Adam Platt visits Bobo and Bloomingdale Road this week, and while he isn't thrilled with Bobo chef Patrick Connolly's portions (they're "barely large enough to feed a flea"), it still earns a two-star review. Bloomingdale Road isn't quite as lucky: It gets a zero-star review thanks to its "bizarro conception and spotty technique." [NYM]
♦ A look inside Michael Huynh's new BarBao on West 82nd St. [Eater]
♦ Brussels chain Rouge Tomate and Tom Valenti's West Branch are both slated to open this week, while the Plaza's Oak Room is expected to open its doors "early next month." [NYM]
♦ New York is experiencing a "coffee renaissance," apparently. [NYT]
♦ Tips on how to create the perfect menu for your election night bash. [RG]

· Sam Raimi is executive producing Spartacus for Starz, a gladiator drama whose look and tone will owe more to 300 than it will to the 1960 Kirk Douglas movie. So it won't be suggestively homoerotic, but rather overtly homoerotic. We're seeing plenty of cross-promotional broadcast potential on Starz sister-channel, Gayz! [THR] · Warners has bought the rights to Japanese anime movie Ninja Scroll. The rights to commenter scroll_lock's life story, however, are still available, and would make a compelling action/suicider. [Variety] · The economy is affecting your quality of life in ways you hadn't even thought of: It's being fingered as the reason a group of struggling new shows like Knight Rider, Private Practice, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles have been given full-season pickups. [THR] After the jump: Is it a Dr. No or a Dr. Yes? Chinese weigh in on the new Bond film.· A&E has picked up a second season of Benjamin Bratt series The Cleaner. [THR] · The People's Glorious Bureau of Cinematic Cleansing has deemed Quantum of Solace appropriate for Chinese eyes, as the latest Bond film will screen in that country without a single edit. [Variety]

Congratulations to Technology Review editor-in-chief Jason Pontin. His wife, Boston Globe editor Anne Nelson, has validated his long-rumored but heretofore unproven heterosexuality through the birth of a son, Alonzo Pontin. Heir, heir! Jason, Valleywag will keep a summer internship slot open for Alonzo in 2027, provided he doesn't inherit his dad's obnoxiously fake British accent.

Duly Noted: To us, the simple three-note structure of the famous NBC chimes leaves little room for interpretation, but then, we lack the cunning intellect of NBC head Ben Silverman. According to Variety, the network is asking musical acts like T.I., the B-52s, and the Flaming Lips to record their own twist on the theme for ads that will air between NBC's shows. Is it too much to hope for that Silverman will submit his own, Ryan-Seacrest-approved version? "Hey, dwindling Knight Rider audience! Ding DING ding!" [Variety]

Natasha Boncompagni is responding to the lawsuit filed against her by her sister, Tatiana, who claims she authored the forthcoming HarperCollins novel, Hedge Fund Wives, without any help from her sister. Natasha claims Tatiana's lawsuit was an attempt to "preempt" a lawsuit of her own, and says Tatiana couldn't have written the book by herself since it was based on her "Wall Street career" and "insider's knowledge of the social workings of the hedge fund community." There's more: Natasha also says her sister's "history of lying" is a "well-known fact both within our family and with her current publisher, HarperCollins," and that she only landed her first book deal after she lied about being descended from an Italian princess. Thanksgiving dinner at the Boncompagnis is going to be a blast this year, huh? Natasha's full response after the jump.

A tender postmortem in today's New York Times reminds the world yet again that seriously — like, really, this time — David Geffen is leaving DreamWorks. Having shepherded the monolith through the Hollywood establishment from conception to its first marriage (and divorce) before giving the frazzled bride away a second time in an arranged marriage to its dashing Indian suitor, Geffen's tenure is remembered fondly by his 'Works co-founders Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg. Not that they'll admit to knowing what they're doing without him.Such modesty! To a point, anyway: If and/or when his Reliance Big Entertainment honeymoon ever tapers off, Spielberg and DreamWorks president Stacey Snider really won't have the Geffen touch to help woo another international conglomerate into bed. But by then Spielberg, 62, will probably be ready to scale back anyway, and survival will be less about braintrust than brand (and the library it manages to develop with its new distribution partners at Universal). He shouldn't even be there now, if one of his more illuminating disclosures today is to be believed:

Economic analysts on the right and left continue to openly suggest that we may not have hit bottom yet. If you want hope, don't talk to an economist, ask a novelist. Fiction writers tend to have a more optimistic view: once they've thrust characters into a financial abyss, they are forced to script a path out of it. What have our finest authors found to redeem us from this depression?Speculative fiction often refrains from defining the terms of an economic collapse, but it's always forced to either solve the problem or make things considerably worse in the end.

A wave of layoffs is sweeping startupland. But why? "Today is my last day at Revision3," writes Damon Berger, one of the victims, in a mass email. "Due to budgetary cutbacks that are a direct result of the economic meltdown, I will no longer be employed at the company." Revision3, an online-video startup, has slashed five Web-video shows from its lineup, and with it some unknown number of employees. But are we to believe that collateralized debt obligations killed "Internet Superstar"? Of course not.Yes, online advertising is headed for a slowdown — but signs of problems were present in the market well before Wall Street went into crisis. An explosion of usage had created a supply of space for ads that far outpaced marketers' demand. A recession will further temper demand. Berger, and countless like him at ad-supported enterprises, would have ended up on the street regardless. (Which is a pity, since I've met Berger, and he strikes me as personable, clever, and eminently employable elsewhere.) Revision3, best known as the home of Digg founder Kevin Rose's beer-chugging Diggnation podcast, has always been the kind of lovably goofy startup one hopes does well despite itself. Anyone who suffered through "Internet Superstar" knew the show was going down. It failed on the merits, not because of distant economic forces beyond anyone's control. To paraphrase Tolstoy: Successful startups are all alike. But every unsuccessful startup is unsuccessful in its own way. And so with all the startups whose managers have jumped on the firebus. If they had run their businesses efficiently, they wouldn't have needed to fire anyone. They are laying people off now not because of an economic imperative, but because they have a convenient excuse to cover their mistakes. Revision3 should always have concentrated on its main shows, and found cheap ways to experiment with new shows, as it's doing now. Helium.com should have figured out that there's not much money in user-generated content before laying off a third of its 110 employees. And Seesmic? Well, Seesmic should never have launched at all, good economy or bad. I'm declaring the layoff window shut. Big companies lay people off because of economic conditions; startups lay people off because their managers have fundamentally misjudged some aspect of their business. Any startup CEO who lays people off, from here on out, should be held accountable for his own mistakes. Blaming the economy for your cuts? So mid-October 2008.

In 2000, New York magazine published a story by Mark Jacobson called "The Return of Superfly," which detailed the life and times of Frank Lucas (left), the drug dealer who cornered the Harlem heroin market in the late '60s and early '70s before he was brought down in 1975. The article was later turned into the movie American Gangster starring Denzel Washington, and now, eight years later, it's spurred a lawsuit. Late last year, New York republished "The Return of Superfly" on nymag.com and repeated an allegation by Lucas that the NYPD and DEA agents who raided his home also stole millions in cash. The retired cops, furious that they have been depicted as thieves, are now suing Lucas, Jacobson, New York, and Primedia (New York's former parent) for "no less than" $5 million for defamation and the "severe emotional distress" they've since had to endure. The full lawsuit is after the jump. But the ex-cops shouldn't be surprised if they don't get a timely response: The lawsuit was sent to New York at its former address on Madison Avenue, which hasn't been the mag's home for close to a year now.