Why should this family mastiff be homeless, along with the family? Because CNN's Soledad O'Brien is personally terminating a lease to remove the gassy creature.

Anderson Cooper prefers to address questions about his sexuality with on-camera winks, nudges and the like. There's a reason the CNN anchor is not asked for more direct answers in formal interviews.

Fox News' Greta Van Susteren is Sarah Palin's close friend and kitchen buddy, and she's not about to stand back and let CNN slanderously accuse Palin of "falling from grace" last year. Huh.

Invite Richard Simmons on your morning show, and he will not only bring the flair/"issues," but will also become your devoted manservant.

Kathy Griffin may have shouted at a heckler, on CNN, "I don't go to your job and knock the dicks out of your mouth," but it's just a "vulgarity" in the Times.

Obviously we live in a cruel and absurd universe of well-rewarded idiocy and undeserved second chances, but if we didn't, these are the ten people you'd meet in the nu-depression's breadlines.

Erica Hill filled in for Anderson Cooper on AC360 Wednesday. Afraid to lose the nation's attention for even a day, CNN's loveliest anchor leaked his yearbook photos to D-Listed. Chistmas: a childlike time!

The happy side of being CNN weatherman Rob Marciano? You get women (and men!) hotter than a low-pressure tropical system. The sad part? A drunken night has a very public hangover.

Yaay! It's time for Barack Obama's report on the internal investigation into the Blago mess!

Like Rudolph Giuliani, the news crawl was great on 9/11 but was soon useless and despised. Now CNN is killing it, and hopefully Fox News will too, if the Simpsons mock them again.

Finally, hero president George W. Bush is speaking out on the terrorist shoe assault that shook the world to its very core. He doesn't want the attacker's violent jailers to "overreact." Our beatific leader!:

• New Yorker editor-in-chief David Remnick has confirmed he's writing a book about "Barack Obama, race and politics in America." [Politico]
• David Shuster is the new host of MSNBC's 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. [NYT]
• Vogue was the most profitable magazine at Condé Nast this year. [P6]
• Crain Communications (AdAge, Crain's New York) is laying off 60. [NYP]
• The list of layoff victims at CNN grows longer: Jamie McIntyre, Kelli Arena, Linda Stouffer and Rusty Dornin are all on the way out. [TVN]
• The Day the Earth Stood Still was No. 1 at the weekend box office. [NYT]

"I told them... listen, make sure you get it on video." [Cindy Adams]

• Someone in Toronto has Tom Cruise's BlackBerry. The Church of Scientology will disavow any knowledge of the actions needed to get it back in the event an agent is caught or killed. [P6]

Gloria Vanderbilt's youngest son has been using his mother as a foil since he appeared on the Tonight Show with her at age three. Anderson Cooper more recently brought his mother onto CNN to passive-aggressively scold him on Mother's Day and to provide the silver fox some sensible, embarrassing advice on the occasion of his 40th birthday. So when Cooper recently declined to invite his mother on a holiday trip to Egypt — "No! I wasn't going to take my mom," he told a befuddled David Letterman — she was ruthless in her revenge. You might not acknowledge that's what's going on, Anderson, but it's plain as day to the rest of us. (We're speaking of the revenge, of course.) Video after the jump

Hey, good for John King. The blue-eyed, silver-haired CNN guy who isn't Anderson Cooper, and who is famous for manipulating a giant iPhone to display election results, will get a four-hour Sunday show on CNN. Jon Klein calls him "the best political reporter of his generation," even though John King honestly just manipulates a giant fucking iPhone and talks about demographics. Media "critic" Howard Kurtz's "Reliable Source" show will be a part of this new show, as well, and we'll continue not watching CNN, because honestly it's worse than Fox, in its own way. [CNN]

♦ Michael Wolff's biography of Rupert Murdoch goes on sale tomorrow, as you probably know thanks to the torrent of coverage over the past couple of days. Among the juiciest bits: Murdoch despises Bill O'Reilly, his wife Wendi Deng occasionally reads his email, and he's fond of sleeping pills. [NYT, Gawker, Politico, NYO, Portfolio]
♦ The third quarter of 2008 was a punishing one for newspapers. Ad revenue plunged 18.11 percent, the steepest decline in four decades. [E&P]
♦ Tina Brown's pick for host of Meet the Press: Rachel Maddow. [TDB]
♦ Four Christmases was No. 1 at the box office over the weekend, racking up an estimated $31.7 million in ticket sales. [THR]

The Associated Press is said to be planning staff cuts. Customers and readers are up in arms over its drift away from hard news. CNN, meanwhile, is fat and happy, and getting moreso by the day, investing in free food, holograms and international staff. So there was probably more than a little jealousy behind AP chief Tom Curley's disdainful swipe at the cable network's plan for a "CNN Wire" to compete with AP.

CNN chief Jonathan Klein says of his broadcast network competitors, "“What they’re playing is golf...That is, they’re trying to get there in as few strokes as possible." But at CNN, he says, they want to "Run up the score." And he promises, "We're not going to trim our sails." If you can afford three different sports metaphors in three paragraphs, you're doing just fine. [NYO]

♦ Time Inc. is slashing another 250 jobs. [NYP]
♦ CNN is spending a fortune on fancy-shmancy technology and new talent, but it's making a mint, too: The network is recording double-digit profit growth for the fifth straight year. [NYO]
♦ Dan Abrams is starting some sort of research firm/expert network/PR agency now that he's been replaced by Rachel Maddow at MSNBC. His first client is Ron Perelman. [NYT]
♦ 60 Minutes has been the most-watched program in the nation for the last two weeks, believe it or not. [NYT]