With money scarce, locals and tourists alike have stopped tossing their spare change and loose dollars to New York City's famed street performers. When every last penny has to be preserved for booze, tranqs, and anti-anxiety drugs, people are simply not splurging on curbside entertainment like they used to. Even that silver statue/robot dude from Times Square and the South Street Seaport is feeling the pinch. The performer, who calls himself Orange Mime, testifies, "The economy has definitely affected my earnings as a street performer. I am a living statue (silver/gold robot guy) and I have noticed a significant loss in recent weeks... I only hope it gets better for December because that is usually my best month."

Once again Howard Stern is fulfilling his mission of delving deeply into the sex lives of our childhood-and more recent-crushes. On the hot seat for tonight's installment of Stern's On Demand show is none other than Marsha Brady, nee Maureen McCormick. As one of the top five teen idols of the late 60's and early 70's, there is one crucial thing the world needs to know about McCormick: Has she had anal? She has! But does she like it? Folks on both sides of the issue are going to have to rework their Marsha Brady fantasies. Clip after the jump. Click to view Also? 34 years after The Brady Bunch went off the air and she is still so amazingly hot! And that's not just nostalgia talking.

The market gyrations of recent weeks has nearly doubled traffic to financial websites. Bad news elsewhere should be good news for them, right? Wrong. Their most profitable advertising is sold in advance; neither publishers nor advertisers can anticipate swings in traffic, so the bumper crop of pageviews doesn't mean a windfall in ad sales. As Hamilton Nolan notes in Gawker, this is a good time for new sites like the Business Sheet and Big Money to attract readers — but a lousy one for them to build their own business.

Oh no! Bad things are happening to the already trod-upon desolate dead-eyed employees of the mighty Hearst Company! The magazine business sucks, and the economy's cratering, and CosmoGirl closed, so Hearst has decided that this year there will be no Hearst Christmas Party. Ye gods! Last year the party already moved from Tavern on the Green to their office (it's a big fancy brand-new office, but still), who knew there was yet more indignity to be suffered. This is a bad sign, for America. Now we are officially in another depression. Surely William Randolph Hearst threw opulent Christmas parties during the Great Depression, right? (Well, the Depression saw Hearst lose control of his company and sell off many of his vast and glorious treasures. But he still threw parties dammit.) This Depression must be even Greater! It's official! The only chance Hearst has of making it through the coming dark times is to gin up support for a foreign war, probably. Can we get Marie Claire to work on the Spanish threat, people? The fate Christmas itself hangs in the balance!

It's been painted as a reconciliation, but McCain's appearance on Letterman last night was a sorry spectacle. Letterman spent half the interview talking to McCain like he talks to Paris Hilton—an object of obvious scorn—and half of it trying quite hard to get McCain to admit that the Ayers line is useless bullshit and that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment. McCain squirmed. He hasn't done The Daily Show in a while, either, presumably for fear of a similar line of questioning. Which is sad! Because McCain loved doing those shows! He loved being the funny, charming, lovable, funny old man of the Senate! Watching him at the Al Smith dinner, you see the obvious joy he took in just getting laughs in a friendly room again. Which is exactly why McCan needs to lose this race. We're not going to argue about the security of this country, about McCain's sense of "honor," about the toxic atmosphere of the campaign, no—we're just talking about McCain's simple enjoyment of his own privileged life. McCain's humor has always been caustic, mean, sarcastic, and cruel—"thanks for the question, you little jerk" is hardly an example of wit, funny though it is—and it is sometimes a window into a dark, deep embitterment. It doesn't work politically, in the way the Reagan's genial old wisecracks worked. A president needs, to a certain extent, to be somewhat humorless. McCain's sense of humor is dark enough to make that need doubly true in his case. And it's clear McCain hates the grab-and-grin aspect of the race. He's never cared for the idiot rabble of "the base," and they've never cared for him. He's energized by the Sunday Morning Shows, not by a rally crying for blood. He took the mic away from that crazy lady because she was embarrassing him. Those aren't his people. He's not enjoying himself. And McCain palling around with Jon Stewart and Dave Letterman was certainly more fun to watch before this miserable race. It's easy to say that all McCain wants in this world is to be president, but honestly it sometimes seems like all he wants is to already have been president. Who wouldn't want to be Bill Clinton before he embarrassed himself during this campaign? Or Bush Senior after everyone forgot his miserable single term in office? Should McCain lose, he can hopefully look forward to a happy post-election media good will tour, and all his sins will be again forgotten. Maybe he can crack wise on Palin and Ayers. We'll happily let him go back to the way things were, with only a minimum of chastising those who take him back—as long as he promises never to run for president again.

There were "massive layoffs" today—amounting to 14% of staff—at Heavy, the guy-focused network of websites. Heavy has been on deathwatch recently, since it's become increasingly clear that the company's strategy of inflating its traffic figures by buying pop-up ads will not be enough to satisfy its big investors. This is a bad sign for those sites with flashy branding but little substance to build a strong base of regular visitors. The venture capitalists who sunk millions into Heavy two years ago thought that it's "Heavy Men's Network" could turn into something big among the coveted young male demographic. But apparently the company's ad network isn't making any money. The financial crisis is going to hurt the ad market even for strong sites. For shakier ones, it could be a death blow that even the grownup businessmen Heavy brought in to professionalize the company can't avoid. Heavy's optimistic statement today:

We hear from a good source that Sumner Redstone, the 85-year-old media mogul who controls Viacom (which includes MTV, BET, Paramount, and Dreamworks), is separating from Paula Fortunato, his wife of five years. Fortunato will be moving out this weekend, our source says. Redstone married Fortunato—a former public school teacher who is 40 years his junior—in 2003, several years after he divorced his first wife. Redstone's finances are currently under a significant strain thanks to the recent economic meltdown, causing him a good deal of stress. Fortunato's biggest moment in the spotlight came when she reportedly forced her husband to break with Tom Cruise in 2006. There were rumors a year ago that the marriage was not happy; now, according to our source, it's all but over. Anyone with more information can email us. This may be the first sign that relationships based on anything other than love or sexual attraction will be sorely tested by this financial crisis. Another source tells us that Martha Stewart and Mark Burnett, the reality show maven who works with her, "had a giant blowout, over money." Along with the timing of this Sumner Redstone rumor, it paints a grim picture. Let's hope this doesn't get so bad that it filters down to the non-rich.

♦ It's confirmed: Sarah Palin will appear on Saturday Night Live tomorrow. [NYDN]
♦ Yet another tragic consequence of the economic meltdown: Suze Orman is making money off the crisis with big-money endorsement deals. [WSJ]
♦ Playboy is cutting costs. How? With energy-efficient lightbulbs, naturally. [WWD]
♦ The Grammy nominations—not the actual awards, mind you—will be a TV special. [NYT]
♦ A hiring freeze is now in place at Condé Nast. [NYP]

Hey, this Sunday's Times Magazine features an awesome "Domains" interview with everyone in the world's favorite tee vee pundit Rachel Maddow! We read an advance copy and can officially break the news that Rachel Maddow is totally cool. She lives way out in western Massachussetts with her partner Susan (pictured). She is seemingly the most normal and charming and totally well-adjusted cable news host in America. Seriously! Totally without the crippling ego of everyone else on every other cable network! She still has no television of her own, she is annoyed at having to dress like "an assistant principal" in order to be allowed on tv, she identifies with Wally Cleaver, and after learning her favorite hobby we decided conclusively that we want to be her friend:

The Times shows us "What You Get for...$1.2 Million": a house on six acres in Massachusetts with four bedrooms, four bathrooms, and "KKK" posted above the back door. Click to enlarge.

Suze Orman is, essentially, a hustler. It's not that she necessarily gives bad advice—it's that she sells the idea that anyone needs Suze Orman to give them advice in the first place. Here's an example: the strongly-haired CNBC personality wrote a book called Women and Money. You know what women need to know about money? The exact same stuff that men need to know. Stuff which is primarily available for free, on the internet. Like "don't spend money on books full of facts available for free elsewhere." Unfortunately, Americans are more seduced than ever before by Suze Orman's steely gaze. She's not your friend! During the total economic meltdown of our nation's financial system, who do people turn to? Suze freaking Orman. She's now the face of FDIC, for god's sake. She may not be as dangerous as her closest competitor, mad man Jim Cramer, who actually gives specific advice that will cause you to lose your life savings. But she's insidious nonetheless; if people want financial advice, they definitely shouldn't turn to someone who's really an ad pitchwoman.

Arianna Huffington for many years sought to downplay the extent of her involvement in the Movement For Spiritual Inner Awareness, a cult ex-members described as sexually and financially exploitive in a series of Los Angeles Times exposés in the 1980s and 1990s. During her then-husband's 1994 U.S. Senate run, the Greek-born socialite claimed movement founder John-Roger (pictured with her at a 2004 book party, left) was a mere friend, and pictures of him holding her daughter were ordered withheld from the group's newspaper, the editor later said. But the Huffington Post editor-in-chief is an ordained "Minister Of Light" in the group and once described John-Roger to Interview as her "way-shower." She relaxed a bit in the New Yorker's Oct. 13 profile , admitting she had been too "defensive" about John-Roger, and allowing writer Lauren Collins to listen to a guided MSIA meditation stored on Huffington's iPod. But she wasn't entirely forthcoming. What about the role she has fashioned for her cult in HuffPo staff development?

As recently as the mid-1980s, the newspapers that ostensibly own the Associated Press constituted 50 percent of its revenue. Over the past decade, with the explosion of syndicated news on wesbites and the proliferation of cable news channel, cashflows have come increasingly from new media customers, who tend to favor more soft news coverage on topics like entertainment and lifestyle. Smell like a recipe for disastrous internal strife? Funny, because that's exactly how it's turning out! It was one thing when the editor of Pittsburgh Post-Gazette likened AP's CEO to a Soviet apparatchik this past April. But now even the insane revolutionaries at Sam Zell's Tribune Company are staging a mutiny, moving to cancel the wire and saying AP is charging higher prices for less hard-news (think state and local) content:

Miley Cyrus, who was shamelessly hoodwinked and tricked and bamboozled into taking off her shirt by Vanity Fair's hypnotic lesbian Jewish mystic, Annie Leibovitz, has suddenly developed normal teenaged sexual urges just a few months later! Go figure. Cyrus, still 15 despite a fake Disney Sweet Sixteen party a couple of weesk ago, is almost definitely hooking up with a 20-year old model boyfriend named Justin Gaston. Daddy Bill-Ray has said the two kids are just friends, but after Page Six ran the latest and most detailed sighting of the couple yet this morning, from an LA Fashion Week rendezvous, it's hard to believe him. Just listen to what the little harlot is up to:

To hear present and former Huffington Post employees tell it, the liberal website owes its ridiculously high turnover mainly to founder Arianna Huffington's tendency to use staffers to perform menial personal chores, to an internal culture of nasty screaming and name-calling and to a generally chaotic management structure, such as it is, subservient to Arianna's rapidly-changing whims. But Rachel Sklar managed to last a jaw-dropping two-and-a-half years at HuffPo, a rare achievement that saw her become one of the site's highest-profile editors and a frequent cable-TV talking head. Why would management, as our tipster claims, push Sklar out? Read between the lines in the memo after the jump.

Here's a preview of John McCain on Late Show tonight. He told host David Letterman, "I screwed up," then laughed and did a little "gee whiz" shrug, and made an awkward joke about being tortured in Vietnam. "What can I say?!" the Republican presidential nominee asked. Um, maybe give a reason why you lied about having to fly back to DC when you bailed on Letterman's show last time? Apparently that wasn't in the cards. Letterman later hit McCain for paling around with Watergate burglar and would-be firebomber G. Gordon Liddy, even though McCain has slammed Barack Obama for an arguably more distant relationship with 1960s radical William Ayers. By the end of the segment McCain appeared to be in full retreat on the Ayers issue. Witness McCain statement at the end of the clip after the jump (along with more bizarre face-pulls).

Kudos to Fox News PR chief Brian Lewis for being the only media company flack to make the PRWeek "PR Power List" this year. He "has assembled arguably the most aggressive PR team that has ever existed," PRW writes. "In spite of criticism, Lewis and his team keep the message consistent." That message: Fall in line or be destroyed. [PRW (my former employer) via TVNewser]

This whole Wall Street thing is pretty big news, right? So how did Condé Nast's struggling business mag respond to the biggest economic story of a generation? They put Dov Charney, the founder of American Apparel, on the cover of the November issue. [Gawker, previously]

Who did (troubled?) business magazine Portfolio select to put on its cover this month, in the midst of the greatest financial upheaval since the Great Depression? Dov Charney. Pervy, pacing, dog-loving American Apparel chief Dov Charney. There must be an explanation for this, right?

A tipster tells us that the Village Voice laid off the man who oversaw its print ad production department this week, due to budget cuts. One rumor going around the office, we hear: the possibility that the production of the Voice could be outsourced to Florida. That would be rather sad. Another rumor: the possibility that more layoffs at the Voice could be coming tomorrow. That would also be sad. They're getting down to the bone marrow over there. Anyone with more info, email us. [UPDATE: An official source at the Voice tells us that the man laid off was "a part-time production employee who had until recently been a freelancer," and that he didn't oversee the print ad production department. Of the outsourcing to Florida rumor, the source says it's "Pure fantasy."]