We'd hoped that by last night's premiere of The Apprentice: LA we'd have already seen an end to the ugly feud between notoriously media-shy and soft-spoken nemeses Donald Trump and Rosie O'Donnell, allowing us to fully devote our rapt attentions upon the West Coast adventures of the Manhattan land baron and his Slovenian trophy succubus. Sadly, however, the fat jokes and combover cracks continue to be lobbed from either side (best single development: In Touch Weekly's probably fictitious report of Trump frenemy Martha Stewart sending O'Donnell a bouquet of roses with a note attached reading, "Be careful of pricks"), with nary an olive branch offering in sight. On The View today, O'Donnell had this to say about Trump's merciless jabs at her weight (video available courtesy of BestWeekEver.tv):

Wesley Autrey, who saved another gent by hurling himself to the subway rails and letting a train pass over the both of them, has spent the last week rightly showered with attention, honors, and accolades. To his enormous credit, all the buzz hasn't seemed to dent Autrey's genial, humble demeanor. How can you not love the guy? We'd like to extend him full Gawker commenting privileges, just to do our part! Of course, that's extremely small potatoes in terms of Autrey's swag bag. After the jump, a full list of rewards for the Subway Superman, running the gamut from sincere to maybe just a wee bit opportunistic. Not that there's anything wrong with that!

· Tonight on ET and The Insider: Discover the context for the quotes that have been amusingly edited together to make James Brown's widow sound like a lunatic!
· Tonight on Ken Levine's Lost House 24: "6 pm - 7 pm: Kate gets caught in another hanging net. Locke shoots Boone. House correctly diagnoses a gunshot wound... but only after removing Boone's liver. Jack learns that Claire is really his daughter. Ten minutes later she's of course kidnapped."
Chud.com calls out Variety for the paper's uncredited discovery of box office smash Zyzzx Road.
Fishbowl L.A.'s Kate Coe interest in how the LAT underplayed the story of a Halloween hate crime in Long Beach spills over into the L.A. Weekly, and then back onto Fishbowl.
· NBC.com is streaming the first 20 minutes of the new, L.A.-based season of The Apprentice; note that The Donald's infamous combover (the greatest combover in the world!) cannot be stirred even by driving in a convertible with the top down. Impressive.

Every so often, we like to spotlight the work of innovative publicists who aren't afraid to think outside the box—or, in this case, outside the red-and-white-striped bucket full of fried chicken parts—by exploiting a timely Hollywood story for the benefit of their clients, and so we share a pitch that landed in our inbox a couple of hours ago:

We'd hoped that the New Year's holiday break would have given Donald Trump sufficient time to come up with a new round of masterful insults with which to pepper nemesis/secret lust object Rosie O'Donnell, but it appears that everyone's favorite egomaniacal, lesbian-savaging billionaire showed up to his latest ET/The Insider session (in which he seems to be responding to Barbara Walters' claim that she's happy with her hiring of O'Donnell) woefully unprepared to top his previous operatic assault, falling back on an uninspired litany of recycled taunts. Still, ET's punishing editing somewhat enhances the cumulative effect of The Donald's relatively half-assed efforts at provocation, and the ensuing stream of quick-cut, loserslobliafatslobcrudetough arrogantpushydisgustingdegeneratedegenerate invective might be just enough to tempt O'Donnell to drag on the now-tired feud for another round when she returns to The View's couch, possibly by threatening to make out with his precious, bi-curious Miss USA whenever she gets out of rehab.

When not suing his Palm Beach neighbors over the size of his pole, Donald Trump keeps busy pushing his personal vision. Resembling nothing so much as a rich jerk's version of Sky Mall, Trump Magazine has shockingly existed since 2004. Normally found largely in airport newsstands and Trump hotel nightstands, Trump broke a little wider with the "launch" of its New York regional issue. The quarterly found in NYC now sports a back section of local listings and listicles that makes Time Out look positively bleeding edge. Advertising tilts unsurprisingly toward Trump products and several producers of the most hideously gaudy watches this side of a pirate movie prop chest. But let's take the occasion of our very own New York Trump — at last! — to delve into these glossy pages and see what awaits.

We don't really want to hear much more about what The Donald is trying to "inject," and where, but since we've been talking at such length about honesty around here, it's a good thing he's a firm believer in second chances, especially since newly-minted fake-executive E.J. Ridings likely doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of getting one.

On Christmas weekend, what's a Times Op-Ed columnist to do? You can write about poverty, like Paul Krugman, or about the ongoing misery in New Orleans, like Bob Herbert. Or you could go the Maureen Dowd route, and just call up Donald Trump and ask him what he thinks about a whole bunch of shit:

We wanted nothing more in these last few hours before the Christmas break than to report that a legitimate miracle had taken place: That Donald Trump, having been visited by various ghosts of real estate development past, present, and future throughout the night, had awakened in the wee hours soaked in a pool of his own, gilded sweat, and realized that he had made a terrible, terrible mistake. With a yank of the braided velvet rope hanging by his bedside, he'd slide silently off his black satin sheets, careful all the while not to wake a slumbering Melania; he'd then tiptoe onto the solid-gold-and-glass elevator that would bring him to the roof of his spectacular residence, where a "T"-emblazoned helicopter would instantly rush him over to Rosie O'Donnell's home.

• NYT says "[Redacted], you [redacted] [redacted] of the CIA. Go [redacted] a up your [redacted] [redacted] [redacted] until it [redacted]." Ouch. [NYT]
  

There's probably one more day of this crap to be milked before everyone heads off for the holidays and forgets about it, but the latest volley in the ping pong match between Ms. O'Donnell and Mr. Trump comes from the former, today on The View. We imagine that we're not the only ones for whom Christmas cannot come soon enough.

In the interest of fairness, we present you with Donald Trump's side of what is rapidly becoming the modern-day equivalent of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. We're sort of speechless, actually, which is just fine, because Trump won't shut the fuck up. Enjoy.

You've by now had some time to savor every last morsel of Donald Trump's buffet of fat jabs and stupid-lady jokes aimed squarely at Rosie O'Donnell. We can finally share with you the attack that started it all: a spirited invective in its own right from O'Donnell, in which she first performs an amazing approximation of the Manhattan land baron's otherworldy hair, then calls him out for his self-serving "pardoning" of the cokey-boozy reigning Miss USA, and concludes with heartwarming Hannukah wishes for Trump to "sit and spin, my friend."

It's been, what, a day since we've shown anything from The View, so here you go: This is a clip from yesterday's episode wherein Rosie O'Donnell issues a blistering diatribe against Donald Trump. We have to say that - apart from her blatantly offensive impression of the beleagured ethnic group of people with terrible hair - we're pretty much in agreement with her. Trump, predictably, is less so, telling the News in the classy, trademarked style we've come to expect from the man, that

• DONALD TRUMP VS. ROSIE [YouTube]

· We tried and we tried (we swear!), but in the end, we just couldn't make ourselves give a shit about the Miss USA situation. Even a little. We will, however, run this large picture of the semidisgraced Tara Conner getting theatrically weepy at press conference announcing The Donald has temporarily exiled her to rehab until she learns to party in a manner more becoming a Trump-owned pageant winner.
TMZ EXCLUSIVE 'AMERICAN IDOL' SHOCKER! Prospective Contestants To Be Brought To Hollywood, Made To Sing Songs By Established Musical Acts!
15 grams of coke? Tawny Kitaen really didn't fuck around with her drug abuse.
Year-End ListMania! 10 TV Shows That Failed! 10 Celebrity Videos That Went Viral!
x17 Online has some striking before and after pics of Paris Hilton running the alcohol/chemical-abuse gauntlet at Teddy's. Couldn't she pull herself together a little bit for the cabbie?

Today, the studly Brian Montopoli, who blogs over at CBS News's cute Public Eye, shared his thoughts about the manufactured Tara Conner drama. His contention? That Donald Trump has masterfully manipulated the media, during a traditionally fallow stretch, into giving the whole "Miss USA is a drunk" story about 674% more airtime than it really deserves. We heartily concur — and we applaud Trump's efforts on our behalf during this difficult time. Seriously, we don't know what we'd be writing about if Trump weren't there, dishing out quotes like "It's a story that has happened many times before, to many women and to many men that came to the Big Apple." But Brian saves the best of his chiding post, Vanessa Williams-style, for last:

After we got over our initial antipathy, we opened this week's Observer 'Family Issue' and breathed a sigh of relief. In the thick of this slow news month of top ten lists and shopping guides, we thanked god that someone was going out there and reporting on original, newsworthy topics. And even better, the Observer is finally giving attention to the underreported families of New York, like the the Mortimers, Schnabels, Jong-Fasts, Foers and Hearsts! And what of these Trump upstarts we keep hearing murmurs about? We've always wanted to read a feature that gently mocked them while lavishing them with backhanded compliments. And today, we did! We learned so much! For example, did you know:

• Big shakeup at Yahoo includes resignation of former ABC head Lloyd Braun. [NYT]
  

• Arthur Sulzberger may try to take the New York Times private rather than see it fall into the hands of Hank Greenberg or Jack Welch. [BW]