David Letterman naturally wanted some dish last night on Anne Hathaway's train-wreck of a relationship with Rafaello Follieri, the Italian con-man doing time for fraud, conspiracy and money laundering. He had complimented her at length, agreed to show her clip and phrased his questions politely. But the starlet became exasperated only one-minute into the good stuff. "I'm just kind of promoting my movie," she said. Ha ha ha, um, no. You don't get to sweep the imprisoned swindler ex under the rug. And no one cares about the movie anyway. By getting testy — at one point Hathaway asked Letterman, "Do you want to know his shoe size, too?" — Hathaway is just keeping the issue hot and herself entangled in Follieri's scandal even longer. Cringe at her battle with reality in the attached video (click the thumbnail to watch).

"Weinstein's rep says that once he's verified the authenticity of the Rudin e-mail, he will donate $1 million to the Robin Hood Foundation." [Post, Previously]

Professional lifestreamers Julia Allison, Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin launched a three-minute Web show, TMI Weekly . The serial is modeled after The View, according to the LA Times, although consumer goods seem to have been substituted for actual, you know, issues. Your Correspondent is about as far from the show's target demographic as one can be without collecting social security benefits or calling Barack Obama by his middle name, but he does feel comfortable making two observations: The program is supposed to be about "Sex. Tech. Style," but the only discussion of sex is a recurring joke about how Asha never has any. Change the tagline or live up to it. Also, the dog-fart chats really need to go. After the jump, a sample episode in which Allison reads from 37 hate-filled text messages from one of her dates.

So it turns out that the same night James Cramer was bragging about foretelling the Wall Street meltdown he was in the midst of a colossal fuckup. The CNBC host on September 15 recommended shares of Wachovia as a safe haven from the financial panic. Cramer took comfort in the words his former Goldman Sachs boss Robert Steel, who earlier in the show said his company Wachovia had "a great future." "You're a reassuring face," Cramer told him. In between, a CNBC promo promised "Fast, accurate, actionable, unbiased" advice. Wachovia of course went to liquidate at $1 per share Monday, less than a tenth of its value when Cramer recommended the stock. Cramer quickly apologized Monday night. "I wasn't skeptical enough," he said. It's all in the video after the jump.

Sarah Palin spent some more time with Katie Couric, her new undermining roommate, who seems to have accumulated like 20 months worth of interview material, all of it horrifically damaging to the Republican vice presidential nominee. This time around, Palin couldn't name any newspapers or magazines she regularly reads, except for "all of them," which she clarified to mean whatever four-year-old copy of U.S. News she finds in the waiting room at her dentist's office. Then she didn't know what the morning after pill was. Katie was like, "whatever, I'm so out of here." Then Palin said she "loved" her lesbian friend, and Katie got excited again, about seeing Palin naked and "unfiltered" at the big debate. When will Palin finally vote Couric out of her sorority house and end this embarrassment? Cringe for her in the attached clip (click the video icon to watch).

Vice Presidential debate moderator Gwen Ifill broke her ankle last night, TVNewser learned. She says she tripped, at home, by herself, down the stairs. Suspicious! Especially because CBS keeps slowly leaking more clips of Sarah Palin babbling nonsense while Katie just stares coldly (but warmly! it's weird) (see attached). Meanwhile, the AP says John McCain has a 1 in 4 chance of dying before the end of his second term (or, to put it another way, "McCain has a health expectancy of 8.4 years). They asked some actuaries. This went out on the wires to everyone, it will probably upset the GOP. Now you are informed about the newest in useless minutia.

Tristan Taormino, the "Pucker Up" sex columnist who has been with the Village Voice for nine years, was laid off on Friday, she confirmed to Gawker today. Voice editor Tony Ortega told her she was a victim of budget cuts. We also hear that the ailing alt-weekly's photo editor, Staci Schwartz, was recently laid off [UPDATE: more on Schwartz here]. Older, more expensive employees appear to be getting the axe (thought Taormino, at least, has a pornography career to fall back on). Anyone with further info on Voice layoffs, email us.

When we remember the New York Sun, we'll try to remember the great local reporting and the fantastic sports page and the serious and smart arts coverage. Not so much the ideological inanity and loud constant taking of the precisely wrong side of every important issue of this miserable era. In trying to remember them that way, of course, one is best advised to skip most of their farewell edition. The goodbyes are not self-pitying, at least, but they reveal a newspaper that imagines it had some small role in the destruction of this country while turning a blind eye to the many myriad ways they could've continued on their crusade if they hadn't been so utterly out of touch. The opening of the farewell editorial sets the scene:

We need to make a slight correction. We've created a certain image around Post attack hack Steve Dunleavy, who's retiring tomorrow: a sort of man you love to hate, a swashbuckling, hard-drinking, right-wing scamp who you disagree with but can't help admiring for his way with the ladies and constant adventures. When in fact, none of those qualities are as overpowering as his weird Australian-ness. Click to watch this clip of him rattling off Australian slang. There's no way to tell what it means, or why he says it, or why such slang was created. Rin-tin-tin. [via Tabloid Baby]

So Tom Brokaw is still chugging over at Meet the Press. The NBC Sunday morning institution has been hosted by the former nightly news anchor since the untimely and unexpected death of Tim Russert earlier this year. The network is probably going to permanently hand off the show to smart analyst Chuck Todd and serviceable anchor David Gregory, but Brokaw will remain at NBC News, by necessity, for a long time. Because he is now their resident grown-up. Which is why he's so irritating. As we all know, NBC news, because of MSNBC, has been taken over by lunatics. Left-wing fanatics like Keith Olbermann and, uh, Rachel Maddow, and just-plain-crazy people like Chris Matthews. The Olbermann-Matthews ticket briefly covered the conventions as if they were real newsanchors and not circus sideshows! This outraged everyone, because they are intemperate and say what they think too much (especially Matthews, who says literally every thought he has, out loud). And no one was more outraged than Brokaw, who politely pulled rank and made his bosses give the serious news back to the serious people. He had to! John McCain and the Republicans were in open revolt against NBC (and the rest of the media, as always, but "NBC" was what they chanted when they called for media blood). And Brokaw is friends with John McCain! Well, not "friends." It's complicated!

The Times gets the first-hand scoop this morning from the embattled pirates surrounded by warships off the coast of Somalia—because they have a spokesman. "Several pirates talked, but they said that only Mr. Sugule was authorized to be quoted." Good lord, journalism is finished. [NYT]

Just last week, Wachovia awarded its $100 million-plus advertising account to WPP. Then yesterday Wachovia was bought by Citigroup, and they were like, Hey, whoa, no ad deal after all! That really sucks the big one, in ad industry parlance. Too bad for Wachovia, too; perhaps a better ad agency could have ensured that the bank didn't end up with horrific ad placement like this, in today's Wall Street Journal:

Yesterday we learned that our national diet is shifting towards cheap, simple meals like tomato soup and Kool-Aid because of the national economic meltdown. But that doesn't mean your tomato-Kool-Aid soup must be boring and plain! Publishers are flooding the market with a new crop of food magazines, just in time for our collective shift from a nation of gourmet snobs to a nation of bony, coupon-clipping scavengers. 2008 saw the publication of 336 food magazines, up by a third from only five years ago. That's probably way more than necessary! Bad move? Here's a market summary: Interest is up. News stand sales and web traffic are both up. But! Ad pages are down. Several big food magazines have already seen double-digit drops in ad pages. And outside industries like travel and home furnishings that advertise in some food magazines are also hurting, and buying fewer ads. So what are publishers doing? Tying new magazines to celebrity chefs, or to the Food Network. Paula Deen! Sandra Lee! Rachael Ray! All big successes, or predicted to be! Other, more mundane cooking titles will surely fall by the wayside over the next year. The future of American food publishing: "Rachael Ray Tells You How To Use Lard To Re-Fry Your McDonalds Burgers To Raise Your Family's Caloric Intake Above Minimal Survival Levels." Mmmm! [WSJ]

The Daily News has had a sudden change of heart about Sarah Palin. On Sunday, the paper's Thomas DeFrank and David Saltonstall quoted three Republicans critical of Palin's embarrassing answers for CBS anchor Katie Couric and others on the campaign trail. The story's headline said there were increasing calls for Palin to "step down from GOP ticket." Then, on Monday, came an article by "Daily News Political Editors" — no writers' names were attached. It was titled "Eight reasons why John McCain won't drop Sarah Palin from ticket." And it called Palin a "fundraising dynamo" and "crowd magnet" who had "unconditional love" from social conservatives. We hear the story was considered an embarrassment by News journalists, but was ordered from on high. UPDATE: See below.

This hasn't been a good week for Harvey Weinstein. Last Friday NBC successfully blocked Weinstein from moving Project Runway from NBC-owned Bravo to Lifetime. Over the past few days, he's also been engaged in an increasingly public (and increasingly messy) feud with producer Scott Rudin over the fate of The Reader, a romantic drama directed by Stephen Daldry and starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes. Weinstein had wanted to release the film before the end of year so it could be an Oscar contender, and Rudin claims Weinstein stopped at nothing to move up the film's release date, going as far as to harass producer Sydney Pollock on his deathbed and pressure the grieving widow of Anthony Minghella (another of the film's producers) to make it happen.

With Julia Allison on its cover this past July, Wired confirmed longstanding rumors the internet fameball had a deal with Bravo for a reality show called IT Girls, based on her antics with handbag designer Mary Rambin and self-professed geek Meghan Asha. The development deal was to begin with just a pilot show, and it sounds like it might not go any further. In a roundup of some of Bravo's reality TV experiments this morning, Page Six said "one show starring three New York wannabes who start a Web site 'probably won't make the cut,' said a source." Embarrassing: Allison and her sidekicks recently leased a photogenic apartment because "we anticipate significant filming." Also, look who they may have lost out to:

Losing Money, New York Sun Is to Shut Down After 6 Years [NYT]
Ideal of the Scoop [NY Sun]

Right-leaning daily New York Sun has published its much-anticipated final issue Tuesday, succumbing to financial difficulties seven years after taking up the flag of a conservative paper of the prior two centuries. A Zionist publication founded by a breakaway faction from the Forward, the Sun ended its run at the start of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. It can't be said that the newspaper expected anything other than an uphill battle for survival. The creation of the Sun organization was delayed by the attacks of September 11, 2001 and came at a time when newspapers were already viewed as an endangered species. Losses mounted; if the conservative movement's identity crisis didn't doom the Sun, the Wall Street meltdown certainly did. Despite a 60 percent advertising spike in the paper's final month and a 25 percent increase this year, the paper could not find new investors, editor and co-founder Seth Lipsky told staff in comments reprinted in today's paper. The final issue revels in recent praise for the paper, its hard-won scoops and the peculiar moments one might expect amid such a quixotic effort. Some excerpts are after the jump.

What was Harvey Weinstein thinking? The movie mogul is already being dissed by once-pliant reporters and magazines, and struggling to right his company and other investments. Now he's given more ammunition to the haters and socked his pocketbook, all in one fast miscalculation. The Weinstein Company chief reportedly told the Post's Page Six he doubted the authenticity of an email quoted by aggressive Hollywood blogger Nikki Finke, and offered $1 million for charity if Finke could produce the original. The email, from movie producer Scott Rudin, concerned a feud over the release date of Kate Winslet vehicle The Reader. Page Six called Finke tonight and guess what? She has the email, and has already posted it. UPDATE: Rudin told Page Six Finke is lying. UPDATE 2: Rudin admits he lied to Page Six! See below.

Sarah Palin just keeps going back for more car-wreck interviews with Katie Couric. After forecasting a possible Great Depression and saying something indecipherable about her state's relations with Russia, the Republican vice presidential nominee reportedly went silent when called on to name Supreme Court cases other than Roe V. Wade. Also, in the attached clip, Palin and John McCain both implausibly try to blame "gotcha journalism" for reporting on Palin's support for cross-border raids into Pakistan, a position shared by Barack Obama and attacked by McCain during the presidential debate. (Click the video icon to watch.) Now, Politico reports, the Republican ticket is pulling Palin back to the safer waters of right-wing talk radio. Putting McCain's popular-but-inexperienced running mate in front of more TV cameras was a calculated gamble by the campaign to broaden her appeal. It's now safe to say that it failed.