Back at the start of 2006, Gawker ran one of those classic shock-starlet items that just tends to stick with you: Lindsay Lohan and new best friend Kate Moss, doing their part to prop up the Colombian economy, stumbled into a New York bar bathroom, whereupon Lohan reportedly asked if anyone had a Sharpie. Someone did. She then wrote something not very nice about Scarlett Johansson, which, according to photographic evidence, went something like, "Scarlett is a bloody cunt / L / Peace and love / [illegible] / fucker." Almost three years later, Scarlett was asked to address the vulgar communiqué in an interview with Allure

LA Times columnist Patrick Goldstein used his blog yesterday for the entertaining purpose of viciously mocking Variety and its Hollywood fixture editor, Peter Bart. Mocking them for being poor! This column is awesome for the following reasons: because media outlets don't usually air their dirty laundry like this; because Peter Bart and Variety certainly deserve the mocking; and most of all because Patrick Goldstein seems totally unconcerned that his own paper does the same exact thing he criticizes Variety for, and that that very thing keeps him employed. Ha: Peter Bart wrote a column of his own (Headline: "Will fiscal funk trip kudo contenders?" WTF) bitching about the lack of Oscar-related ads from the studios in Variety. Patrick Goldstein appropriately tells him to shut it:

Henry Blodget, the Wall Street analyst returned to journalism, wrote that Michael Lewis' (last?) Portfolio article on short-seller Steve Eisman and the collapse of Wall Street generally is "pure pleasure from start to finish." It's true; it's the sort of piece that will keep you up late, assuming you're remotely interested in the ongoing collapse of the modern financial system. But the article's most compelling section deals not so much with finance as with the eternal tension between writer and subject, i.e. fucking over your sources. '

It was kind of an awkward joke to begin with: CNET News.com writer Caroline McCarthy publicly imagining how her fameball buddies David Karp and Charles Forman would be mocked by Perez Hilton if the celebrity blogger worked for Valleywag. Hilton would, of course, call the cuddle-buddies gay, as McCarthy made clear in a mockup posted to her Tumblr Wednesday night. But throw in the fact that McCarthy and Karp very recently, we heard, broke up, and the image takes on an entirely more vicious, passive-aggressive sheen.

He's not the most trustworthy source, granted, but Fox News host Chris Wallace claims to have heard that CNN is all embarrassed about its election-night holograms, which teleported the likes of singer Will.I.Am and correspondent Jessica Yellin into CNN studios in New York. Wallace, who serves as Fox's ambassador to the Godless liberals at the Daily Show, also maintains ties to CNN, via an old college roommate who is a technical producer there. He called this buddy at 5 pm on election night, resulting in the following exchange, according to Broadcasting & Cable:

The bitter online video fight between former Enterprise crew mates William Shatner and George Takei today reached what appears to be its penultimate round, with Shatner and his daughter/Star Trek grudge repository Liz discussing what exactly it might take to arrange peace between the actors.We can't be sure if Shatner's professed annoyance with his onetime co-star stems more from his recent accusations on Entertainment Tonight or simply that ET syndicated Takei's grievance while Shatner's crack psychoanalysis episodes wither on YouTube, but in any case, there can be no mistaking the tentative olive branch extended herein. We hope Takei accepts and that together, they may reach the final frontier of detente. Or at least that Shatner can just get a copy of Takei's wedding video and call it good. [YouTube]

Had Ted Turner's old rival Rupert Murdoch just issued an "autobiography" written by a former lieutenant, as Ted Turner has, one suspects it would not have been embraced so eagerly by sympathetic journalists at 60 Minutes, the Times, the Wall Street Journal and even AP, which meditated whimsically on the CNN founder's chapter titles. Maybe that's because the News Corporation chairman still enjoys the blood sport of media feuds in his old age, coordinating multi-outlet attacks on relative small fry like Keith Olbermann, while Turner is in the business of moving on — and making plenty of media friends in the process. He has forgiven Murdoch for what he suspects was the hiring of private investigators to prove him insane in the 1980s, as he explains in the attached 60 Minutes clip, and put behind him the loss of $7 billion, a devastating divorceand a bad prescription for Lithium.

Desperate mogul Sumner Redstone may be able pay off some of his $1.6 billion in debt before half of it comes due in December. The solution: Sell off Midway Games, money-bleeding maker of classic arcade hits like Rampage, Spy Hunter and Mortal Kombat. Some $800 million in cash infusions for Midway were a major contributor to Redstone's debt and pissed off daughter Shari, according to the Wall Street Journal, which reported Monday morning that Shari just resigned as chairwoman to Midway, signaling a sale may be in the works.In addition to Midway, the Redstones are said looking to unload their slot machine company. What the hell is divorced ole Sumner supposed to do for fun??

"They are all shitting on each other. . Let’s try to make some sense of it." [Wonkette]

Sarah Palin famously claimed she had "absolutely no diva in me," but former McCain aides did their best to demolish that assertion in a super-juicy Thursday Times story. Among their embittered, anonymous and still entirely plausible claims: They budgeted the Republican vice presidential nominee around $25,000 for clothes and were shocked at her $150,000 shopping spree; Palin wrote a concession speech that she desperately wanted to deliver Tuesday night; and she never told McCain about a call she thought she had scheduled with the president of France (really a DJ prank). Now they're talking about sending lawyers to audit her family's closets and just generally trying to destroy her chances of running for anything anywhere, ever. Here's what they told the Times about Palin's clothes shopping:

New York magazine expanded on the legend of MSNBC hotshot Rachel Maddow, revealing her further as a sharp scholar ("I still send students to [her] thesis as a model," says a Stanford professor), unabashed bleeding heart (spending nights "worrying about nuclear proliferation and the Fourth Amendment ") and refreshingly down-to-earth television personality ("There is nothing funnier than a fart"). It also broke the news that the Rachel Maddow Show host now, at long last, owns a television! But then the profile reminded us Maddow got her slot at the expense of a guy in a long-running feud with her advocate Keith Olbermann:

Poor Missy Chase Lapine. The beleaguered cookbook authoress wrote a tome called The Sneaky Chef, about how to deceive children, that was later plagiarized (maybe!) by Jerry Seinfeld's wife Jessica in a book called Deceptively Delicious, which was also about lying to little ones. Lapine was brave/stupid enough to publicly accuse Seinfeld of plagiarism, which awoke the sleeping giant Jerry. He went on talk shows and said things like: "If you read history, many of the three-name people do become assassins. Mark David Chapman and, you know, James Earl Ray. So, that's my concern." Lapine says this was "devastating" and is now suing Seinfeld for slander: "I have never felt so frightened and vulnerable as the day my daughter, 7 years old, came home from school and asked, 'Mom, what is an assassin?," Lapine told the court. She also said that she maybe "made a big mistake talking to any reporters because now this billionaire is angry and attacking me everywhere." Which is probably true! You do not want to get billionaires angry. Hell, you don't want to get millionaires angry. They'll just mess with your life as long as they want because they have more money than you and you'll always have to stop first. So, whether or not Lapine was plagiarized doesn't really even matter anymore. The Seinfelds already won, as they always will. Oh, and the saddest part of the whole thing? She'll never be on Oprah. "Four times I attempted to be a guest on Oprah. I was rejected each time." Devastating indeed. Image via New York Times

You have to feel a little bit sorry for Tatiana and Natasha Boncompagni, the two sisters embroiled in a nasty spat over the rights to the forthcoming novel Hedge Fund Wives. (If you've missed the action thus far, see here, here and here.) Both women have seen their reps damaged as a result, and Tatiana's career as a journalist and novelist will probably be overshadowed by the incident for many years to come. (Fortunately, she married into money. Or so she says.) Yesterday Natasha took down the website that hosted pages from the disputed manuscript. (We have a copy of the judge's ruling here, in case you're interested.) One party, we hear, that is not all that unhappy about the flurry of press that has followed in recent days? HarperCollins, not surprisingly. Hedge Fund Wives is now available for pre-order and the book's sales rank has edged up ever so slightly from 500,000 to 132,377. The messy feud has also boosted Boncompagni's first book, Gilding Lily: It dipped below 10,000 earlier this week before losing some ground today. It's now ranked 19,921.

For a movie that the religious right hasn't even gotten around to touching yet, Milk certainly has caused its fair share of controversy this week. First, a questionable THR column on the movie's marketing earned the ire of Focus Features, and now that the film had its first public screenings last night, the reactions range from rapturous to...fight-inducing? Let's take a look!The initial salvo came from David Poland, who said, "For the first time in my memory, we have a major Oscar movie that actually is a gay agenda movie. But on the making, it is so much more. It is a brilliant, powerfully humane piece of work that reaches well beyond the issue of gay rights or any idea that this is a gay-only film." Jeffrey Wells chimed in with an "8.5" score and this statement, "I felt a genuine gayness from Sean Penn, who plays the title role of the late San Francisco supervisor Harvey Milk, that I didn't think he had in him." Yes, acting — isn't it marvelous? Then, the wheels came off the Typepad bus, as dissenter Kris Tapley of In Contention spent less time going over the film's flaws and more time picking fights with every other Oscar blog, but most especially Milk partisan Scott Feinberg. Tapley posted a delightfully catty, personal attack on Feinberg ("We as bloggers have to be careful to understand the context of our work...That is a lesson I truly hope Feinberg learns sooner rather than later, for his sake and, certainly, for the sake of the LA Times, who rather hastily threw him an editorial voice after behind-the-scenes plans for the upstart fell through") that prompted a lengthy rebuttal from Feinberg and a "fight, fight" taunt across the blogosphere. Truly, it is a continuation of Harvey Milk's legacy that he could inspire so many self-publishing Oscar pundits to set aside their petty grievances with a film and turn those attacks on each other. You gotta give 'em hope, kids — and you have! Kudos! [Photo Credit: Getty Images]

HarperCollins appears to be standing by Tatiana Boncompagni as she battles her sister, Natasha, over who actually authored the forthcoming novel Hedge Fund Wives. At least for the moment! We just heard back from Erin Crum, director of corporate communications at HarperCollins: "We hope that they can work it out amicably, and we will still be publishing the book on May 5th."

An angry Focus Features is doing a bit of air-clearing this morning, the day after it premiered its Oscar-chasing biopic Milk to an adoring hometown crowd in San Francisco and offered its first screenings to press in L.A. and New York. But it's a few people who haven't seen the film who are of particular interest to Focus president James Schamus, who all but firebombed Hollywood Reporter headquarters Tuesday in a letter to the editor denouncing its coverage of his film — a screed conveniently CC'd to the rest of the Internet as well.The contretemps started yesterday morning when THR reporter Steven Zeitchik — who mostly sounded ticked off he wasn't invited to the first press screening — wrote about "the Milk marketing conundrum," suggesting that Focus had "eschewed publicity" while pushing director Gus Van Sant and star Sean Penn's biopic about Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the country, who was assassinated in 1978. The main point of comparison was Focus's Brokeback Mountain, which THR noted was a lightning rod for conservatives months before it was released in 2005. Citing no festival appearances, limited press exposure and, bafflingly, a Las Vegas test screening in which two senior citizens reportedly sought to leave during a love scene between Penn and co-star James Franco, THR's big picture showcased a movie that Focus depoliticized on purpose, lest the early backlash hinder its box-office and awards chances. "With all the politicking going on (not just the election but, here in California, with Proposition 8, a subject that mirrors eerily one of Harvey Milk's battles)," Zeitchik wrote in a blog follow-up, "the company was eager to avoid talk-radio defining the movie for it."

Oh Fox News PR machine, how we've missed your vicious personal attacks on anyone speaking ill of the Mothership! It's been literally months since one of Roger Ailes' specially trained attack flacks unloaded against a reporter or a PR person or anybody else for the crime of calling Fox News a den of writhing right-wing pus-sucking leeches, or words to that effect. Well now they're up against 6'6, 250-pound man who specializes in snatching balls. Finally, a fair fight: NBA Hall-of-Famer, erstwhile (former) Alabama Republican and free-speaking man Charles Barkley pointed out the obvious:

The neverending battle between Bravo and the Weinstein Company continues. We crowed about this particular bit a few months ago, and now Harvey Weinstein, whose company produces the series, is jumping on the bandwagon: didn't it seem like Bravo totally tried to sabotage the latest season of Project Runway? The claim is that, having sour grapes over Weinstein's decision to air the show on Lifetime for the sixth season, Bravo decided to bury the fifth season of the fashion design competition show with poor promotion. Weinstein has filed a counterclaim to Bravo's lawsuit to get the show off of Lifetime, stating that the network ran nothing but "mundane and unappealing" ads for the the season, and that they provided news outlets with little compelling information in the lead up to the premiere. All of which seems sort of true. Except, maybe it didn't matter anyway. The show had its highest ratings ever this season! The show averaged close to 4 million viewers per episode, which is a lot for a conspicuously gay fashion show on basic cable. We agree, Harve, that the promos were lacking, but so was the season. Maybe the Bravo marketing people just couldn't find a damn thing worth touting. There really weren't any interesting contestants, challenges, or designs. It was just a rehash muddle of seasons past. Or maybe they did consciously sabotage, but if so, it certainly didn't work. Given that the show actually did perform well, we (and NBC Universal, which own Bravo) just don't think that there's a case here. But if for some reason Weinstein does win his 'unspecified damages,' we think we should get a cut of it. Because we said this months ago! Months! Though, ruh roh, it looks like Harvey could really use the money. We'll just a take a small amount, we promise.

The feud between Tatiana and Natasha Boncompagni gets messier, and nastier, by the minute. Just in case you've missed the story thus far, Tatiana Boncompagni is the author of the chick lit novel Gilding Lily and has been working on a new book called Hedge Fund Wives. Natasha is her sister and claims she co-authored Hedge Fund Wives—in fact, she says the story is largely based on her own Wall Street career—but was then cut out of the deal by Tatiana, who she says has "a history of lying." Tatiana is insisting it was solely her work and that her sister simply offered "input," and has filed suit against Natasha for claiming partial credit, and for copying the manuscript from her computer and posting part of the manuscript online in an act of retribution. Natasha, for her part, is upset her sister has denied her role in writing the book, and is countering with various—and potentially very damaging—claims. Following so far? Good. After the jump, more from the Boncompagni scandal and a few scandalous emails, too.

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.