The new editor of RadarOnline.com—presumably replacing Alex Balk—will be David Perel. He's the current editor of the National Enquirer! So what does he do on the same day that AMI buys the website and everyone there gets laid off? He tells CoverAwards, “I have already been contacted today by some top entertainment and news journalists who want to be part of this new venture. I am looking forward to putting together a new team that is the best of the best. We are hiring now!” Uh, is it just me or is that an enormous prick move?

National Review's The Corner is the best blog in America if you enjoy abject despair, self-delusion, denial, desperation, and embittered finger-pointing. As yet more conservatives defect from the McCain camp, Cornerites press on, demanding that the media investigate Obama's birth certificate and calling Democrat-endorsing Conservatives traitors to the cause. Today, National Review Online ran Kathleen Parker's amusing column on how McCain selected Palin because he wants to bone her. National Review Online editor (editor! she's in charge of the site!) Kathryn Jean Lopez posted to The Corner a bitchy, bitchy preemptive response to the column without mentioning it by name or linking to it. It's a wonder. Enjoy! [The Corner]

Nine signs your boss is about to fire you. [BusinessSheet]

Google crossdresser-in-chief Sergey Brin got his company, after contentious internal debate, to express opposition to Proposition 8, a California ballot initiative which would ban the same-sex marriages rendered legal earlier this year by the state's Supreme Court. Now Apple, too, has expressed its corporate views, donating $100,000 to the No on Prop 8 campaign. Who hasn't weighed in? Yahoo.We hear that CEO Jerry Yang wrote a long, rambling, presumably uncapitalized email to the troops explaining why the company, which is otherwise outspoken on gay rights, is not taking sides on the issue. Gay employees at Yahoo are purple with rage. Will someone forward us the memo? We'd love to read Yang's explanation of why, once again, he can't make a decision one way or another. (Disclosure: I got married to my husband last month, and recently held a fundraiser in opposition to Proposition 8.)

Your lovely and talented Gawker crew has a new member joining up next week. As a lad in Mystic, CT, Alex Carnevale dreamed of one day getting his MFA in fiction writing from The New School. Well, he did that last year. He's over here now. Alex is the founder of the arts and culture blog This Recording, so it's fitting that he'll be covering the high culture beat starting Monday. We're gonna have high culture! Alex notes that he's also a fan of "the lowest of the low." Why am I introducing him? Well, he's covering for me this weekend, because I'm giving up my weekend duties for a while. Allow me to overshare? I'm kind of burned out. It doesn't require a treatment facility or anything, but I do need to use the weekends as actual downtime while I concentrate a little harder on the work I do during the week itself. Also, I'd like to spend some quality time not reading any newspapers, anywhere, ever, and return to getting all my news directly from Gawker, MSNBC, and The Daily Colbert Show Report. I'm going to keep contributing to Gawker, just not on such a structured basis for the time being. Anyway, talking about the future makes me itchy, so I'll leave it at that. This is not a goodbye so I won't be doing anything mushy. Here are Drunk Monkeys, Buffy, and that Surfer Dude.

There's a blissful, View-free weekend coming up (well, except for Floridians), but until then, we leave you with this clip of an undaunted Elisabeth Hasselbeck locking horns with Whoopi Goldberg on today's show. The conservative co-host challenged Goldberg about the folly of negotiating with terrorists (a position we're sure she came to after the unilateral talks between her and Joy Behar collapsed spectacularly backstage). Instead, Hasselbeck embraced a brand of conflict resolution no doubt passed on by benevolent dictator Barbara Walters: no negotiations (or hugs), just a simple cold shoulder, a passive-aggressive remark, and a threatening, late-night phone call from someone who sounds a whole lot like Henry Kissinger.

Right now, a leader needs to do two things: Communicate clearly, act decisively, and project confidence. That's three things, but Jerry Yang can't even do one of them. In a two-part interview with Kara Swisher, Rupert Murdoch's pet eyeball-poker, Yang fails to sell, or even tell, Yahoo's story:

Click to viewBoomp3.com After another down day on the stock market across the globe, Academy Award winner Charlize Theron set up a booth outside of the Roosevelt Hotel to hand out free hugs to anyone recently affected by the downslide. Theron said, “In times like these, sometimes a hug will help you get through the day. I could tell them to hang in there and that things will work out in the long run, but a hug I feel is just as good.” [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.

Fashion Group International hosted its "Night of the Stars" gala at Cipriani Wall Street last night, where Kate Bosworth, Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony, Prince, Karl Lagerfeld, Ashley Olsen, Anna Wintour, Isaac Mizrahi, Donatella Versace, Allegra Versace, Georgina Chapman and Harvey Weinstein (left), Debra Messing, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, Francisco Costa, André Leon Talley, Stephanie Seymour, Stefano Tonchi, Blake Lively, Penn Badgley, Alexander Wang, Bobbi Brown, Lindsay Price, Tom Florio, Christopher Bailey, Behnaz Sarafpour, Zani Gugelmann, Chanel Iman, Cindi Leive, Julianna Margulies, Christian Louboutin, Peter Som, Philippe Starck, Nina Garcia, Roopal Patel, Glenda Bailey, Tim Gunn, Jonathan Adler and Simon Doonan, Ruben Toledo and Isabel Toledo, Justine and Jeff Koons, Jonathan Newhouse, John Varvatos, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Patrick Demarchelier, Linda Fargo, Phillip Lim, Leigh Lezark and Max Minghella, Mary Alice Stephenson, and Mamie Gummer celebrated the industry. [InStyle, Wireimage, PMc]

And it continues: 02138, the glossy mag for Harvard alumni that was bought by Manhattan Media last May, is folding. The magazine was conceptually pretentious and we've made fun of it plenty in the past, but honestly, we don't really have the heart right now. At this point we support any publication with paying jobs. The Great Magazine Die-Off is going to be a bitch. The full statement on the magazine's death is below:

♦ Sirio Maccioni is already looking at replacements for Le Cirque chef Christophe Bellanca. [Page Six]
♦ Julian Niccolini says says his customers at the Four Seasons aren't skipping power lunches because of Wall Street's woes, although they do seem to be ordering cheaper wines. [GS]
♦ The Eldridge's Matt Levine confirms the existence of laser-engraved admissions cards; he won't comment on whether Prince has ever turned up at the nightspot. [The Feedbag]
♦ A preview of what you can expect from Dovetail's brunch service, which starts this weekend. [GS]

Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of things that actually make money, sat down for a filmed power breakfast with NBC's Today show. Aside from a fib at the start — that she doesn't think of herself as a female Googler, when that's how she's listed in her corporate bio, and how she introduced herself, quite recently, to ABC News, It's a good performance — no nervous tics, no creepy laughs captured on camera. But it's missing something.Mayer makes a convincing argument, at least on the surface, that gender-neutral policies are the best way to advance women's careers. It would have been more impressive if she'd talked honestly about the very real discrimination women — or at least women who aren't Marissa Mayer, ex-girlfriend of cofounder Larry Page — face at Google; how unevenly those policies are enforced by poorly trained managers; and how Google's culture shunts many women into classicly female roles like sales and operations.

· TV networks are going bananas with their election night coverage, including competing Times Square broadcasts: ABC on the JumboTron, Fox News on the AstroVision monitor, and MSNBC on the OlbermannGiantForeheadSonic. [Variety] · Rejoice virginal fantasy nerds! Columbia is producing a movie of Deryni Rising, the first book in the Deryni Kingdom cycle— a series set "in a medieval kingdom...of people with psychic and magical abilities." [THR] · Exquisite weirdo Crispin Glover has joined the cast of Tim Burton's motion-capture Alice in Wonderland. He'll play the Knave of Hearts, on trial for tart-stealing treason. [THR] After the jump: Which of the two men to play Mike Brady is joining the cast of Entourage?· If Gary Cole could go ahead and join the cast of Entourage for three episodes, playing Ari's "oldest Hollywood friend," that'd be great. All right! [THR] · Now Paramount is negotiating with Chris Columbus to star in Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, which is still set to star Jim Carrey...Believe It or Not! [Variety]

The death of Radar is just one more reminder of the incessant economic crisis that is destroying jobs for hardworking members of the media (and, you know, everyone else). But there may be an upside! Way back on September 16, when The Panic of '08 was just getting started, Curbed founder and real estate blog generalissimo Lockhart Steele made this prediction to Guest of a Guest: "You will know when we have hit the bottom of this financial crisis the very day when Radar Magazine goes out of business. And you can quote me on that!” So things should be looking up!:

Wall Street Journal writer Ben Worthen's summary of a new survey of IT employees: "Forty-eight percent were confident in their ability to find a new job, even though they don't believe anyone is hiring." Of course, Ben: Tech workers are Ron Paul-voting, Ayn Rand-reading rugged-individualist übermenschen who believe they can create their own reality through sheer individual brilliance and force of will. Did you need to read a survey to know that?

['Sex and the City' authoress Candace Bushnell promoting a book in London today; image via Splash]

It wasn't quite as bad as some feared this morning, but the stock market still took another beating today. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 312 points, or 3.6 percent, to close at 8,378, its lowest level in more than five years. If you've made a conscious effort to avoid looking at your 401K the past few weeks, now is probably not the time to start. The Dow has now tumbled 26.6 percent since Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in mid-September. [AP, Marketwatch]

Movie producer Kathryn Tucker (and the estranged wife of indie film mogul John Sloss) mentioned today that a certain senator's wife has been "desperate" for her help getting his/her kids into preschool? Who is it? We're not sure, but we'd love to find out! [NYO]

It's long been rumored that Steven Soderbergh keeps a checklist in his wallet — a tattered index card on which he's scrawled dreams nurtured since before his sex, lies and videotape breakthrough nearly 20 years ago: "win an Oscar," "make a four-hour Socialist biopic," "work with a porn star," and alllll the way at the bottom, "shoot a completely fucked-up 3-D musical version of Cleopatra." Finally, with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Hugh Jackman in talks to star, he might be that much closer to crossing off that last Impossible Dream.Variety reports that Soderbergh will follow his current film The Girlfriend Experience with Cleo, a $30 million project with music provided by Guided By Voices and a script by GBV's bassist James Greer. No one seems to know how or even if this news squares with the Liberace biopic Soderbergh is plotting with Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, but we admit we're a little less intrigued by Cleo knowing that Jackman would not, in fact, play the Egyptian queen. And surely, in a sleek, dark loft somewhere in Australia, a sleepless Baz Luhrmann is wondering why he didn't think of this first.

It happens in threes, it seems: Radar magazine was shuttered earlier today. Then came the news that 02138, the glossy mag for Harvard grads, was closing down. Now Fashion Week Daily is reporting that Elle Accessories has folded, too.