The demise of the (surprisingly beloved [in death, anyway]) conservative daily New York Sun has been reported by us and others a hundred times now. Supposedly this is it for real. Editor Seth Lipsky just made a speech in the Sun's newsroom and tomorrow is the last edition, according to our source. It was supposed to be today, but they held out for a day. Of course then the bailout bill collapsed and the Dow plunged 777 points (!!) and maybe investors aren't so much interested in niche newspapers right now. If you have any details on Lipsky's speech or contributed your remembrances to tomorrow's edition, feel free to share in the comments.

Wow, this is a proud mark of the global influence of the financially puny New York Times: a story it did in June has prompted one of the world's richest men to sue his own brother for more than $2 billion. Awesome! Anil Ambani says that his brother Mukesh (they each inherited half of the massive Indian conglomerate Reliance) smeared his good name in the Times, so he had no choice but to sue him, the Times, and two Indian papers for 100 billion rupees. Here's the offending passage that set him off:

The Sun will publish its last paper tomorrow, says a rep. [Gawker, FBNY]

Creative Loafing, the conglomerate that owns the alt-weeklies in DC, Atlanta, Chicago, and several other cities, has filed for bankruptcy. The company has more than $40 million of debt, a number exacerbated by its purchases of the Chicago Reader and Washington City Paper last year. This may be just a foreshadowing of some painful days to come for alt-weeklies in general—we also hear the Village Voice may be on the verge of some layoffs. Creative Loafing CEO Ben Eason tried to put a positive spin on the move as one that will allow the company to reorganize safely without hurting quality:

♦ Will Project Runway move to Lifetime from Bravo? NBC won the first legal battle against PR producer Harvey Weinstein on Friday, which means it's not entirely clear where the show will end up. [NYT]
♦ The Sun may publish an issue tomorrow after all. [Portfolio]
♦ Tina Fey to the rescue: Saturday Night Live has seen a major boost in ratings so far this season. [THR]
♦ Vanity Fair on the face-off between Maria Bartiromo and Erin Burnett. [VF]
♦ An Indian version of GQ debuts this month. [Guardian]
♦ Howard Kurtz says unseen clips of Katie Couric's interview with Sarah Palin are on the way; CBS says it has released everything it's got. [HuffPo]
♦ The Times looks back at the drunken career of the Post's Steve Dunleavy, who's retiring after 41 years in the business. [NYT]
♦ The Wall Street Journal has launched a mail-order wine club. Really. [NYT]

You'd think Fox News would be thrilled with the idea of an Obama presidency! Though they made their most important mark as the propaganda arm of the post-9/11 Bush presidency, they began as a channel in opposition to the status quo. Remember Clinton? The one who was president? The modern conservative movement is built around aggrieved victimhood, and Obama in the White House should mean the return of great Fox television. But they seem more concerned, right now, about getting that John McCain guy (who they never even really liked!) elected. They're actually maybe scared that their moment is over? That Rachel Maddow really is the future? How else to explain dumb stunts like erasing an AP report on Sarah Palin from their website after it showed up in search engines. The story was on how prominent conservatives like Kathleen Parker are all terrified that the McCain is sending a genial idiot into the White House based purely on her attractiveness to the base. Not revolutionary stuff. But too hot for Fox, apparently. (Though they did report on Frank Luntz's focus group proclaiming an Obama victory in the debate. No one referenced the group's decision again that night, as far as we know, but the Fox website is still highlighting the video.) Click to view

The New York Times ran a huge (huge!) A1 investigative piece on John McCain and his weird gambling obsession and ties to the Indian Casino industry and Vegas and lobbyists and ten thousand other things yesterday. It was well-reported, historical in focus, and fair. It ran on the front page of the Sunday edition, which reaches almost half a million more readers than the weekday edition. But, you know, no one is talking about it. It didn't really stick! Did anyone read the whole thing? Were there bombshells? Who knows! What happened? The Times sabotaged itself, either intentionally or through ineptitude. Allow us to explain. Times editor Bill Keller complains a lot these days about how no one pays enough attention to the Times and their big stories. He blames the internet and a million competing voices for distracting people from the Important Work of Times journalists. He's sorta right! Gone are the days when the Times set the agenda for the national press. Though the slow death of newspapers across the nation has been beneficial to the Times in one important way: they're the only national paper, effectively. A Times investigation reaches more of the country than a Washington Post investigation. So one would expect a story of this size and seeming heft would make a big splash. But it didn't! Drudge didn't play it up—though as we move closer to the election, he regresses even more to his natural Republican hackdom, so they shouldn't have expected a push from him. And the liberals have no one coherent answer to Drudge, just a million sites trying desperately to push their own often competing agendas. Kos, Talking Points Memo, and the Huffington Post all share an elitist coastal liberal bias and huge audiences, but very different methods of achieving their goals and working the media refs. But on the other hand... the way the Times dropped the story seems self-defeating. Front page of the Sunday edition, sure. But it went online Saturday night. So by the time Monday morning rolls around, it seems ancient, even though no one actually talked about it over the weekend. Furthermore, it came right after a presidential debate, right before a hugely anticipated vice presidential debate, and right in the midst of a gigantic economic crisis and a desperate attempt by Congress to prevent another Great Depression. The Times should've had the story go live online on Thursday night (in time for it to be an issue in the debates!), they should've leaked salient details to Drudge beforehand, or they should've waited until the bailout negotiations collapsed or succeeded. The fact that they did none of those things indicates to us that they didn't actually want this story to blow up. Maybe there's nothing actually to it (though the bit where McCain helped take down Jack Abramoff because he was the competition to McCain's preferred lobbyists seems a bit juicy, right?) or maybe they've actually been cowed by the McCain campaigns attacks on their credibility, or maybe they just don't know what the hell they're doing. Now, for your edification, some interesting bits from the 100-page Times piece on John McCain's gambling addiction:

A previous winner of the New Yorker's cartoon-caption contest once wisely said, ""You are not trying to submit the funniest caption. You are trying to win the New Yorker's caption contest." The magazine's cartoon editor Robert Mankoff explained further in the Times yesterday about the impossible-to-capture essence of a good cartoon caption:

If you pass a newsstand today, you may want to pick up a copy of the Sun. Just as a souvenir. After failing to find new investors willing to put up the $1 million a month required to keep the paper alive, today's issue is expected to be the last. [Gawker, NYP]

[The story] goes like this: As a young copyboy in Australia 55 years ago, Mr. Dunleavy was so hungry for a story that he popped the tires of his father’s car at a murder scene. His father, a photographer at a rival paper, could not get to the post office to transmit photos, and Mr. Dunleavy, then about 15 years old, earned his paper a big scoop.

Here's the thing about gossip doyenne Liz Smith: She's 85 and really, really tried of the gossip scene, despite being paid to write a column on the topic. Hey, fair enough, she's earned her disillusionment. But Smith can't stop with the complaining! "There are very few really big stars these days, and that makes everything truly dull," she wrote in March. And a few weeks later: "There is already an absolute plethora of bullshit, manufactured photography, and speculation passing for gossip, and it will probably increase." New York magazine caught up with Smith for its 40th anniversary issue, and if anything she's grown even more dismissive of the whole scene, and even some of her own older work:

Congress has drafted and frozen the consensus agreement reached this morning on the $700 billion Wall Street bailout. The House is set to vote tomorrow. Now would be the time for supporters to at least briefly indulge the naysayers, especially given the weak recent state of opposition politics in this country. Elven Ohio Democrat Dennis Kucinich has had his brief say on the House floor. And within the media? In 2006 it was a reporter for This American Life playing the contrarian, asking basic questions about then-popular subprime mortgages. "Sometimes, if you want the real answer, you have to ask a dumb question," Times columnist David Carr writes of the reporting in Monday's paper. Today , the person asking the "dumb" question is David Cay Johnston, until recently the Times' aggressive tax reporter. He's wondering whether we're in a crisis at all!

We're told a New York Sun editor emailed freelancers to tell them tomorrow will, indeed, see publication of the neoconservative daily's last issue, as previously rumored. At the start of this month, the newspaper said it was desperately seeking cash. It supposedly raised "a lot" of money in the following two weeks, but then came a brutal Wall Street meltdown that appears to have ended any hope for new benefactors. The Sun editor's brief email, forwarded by a tipster, is after the jump.

Tonight, let's get musical. Awesome, amazing, stupendous, rocking live music moments. That's it. I'm taking my wayback machine to a magical concert in 1973 to get us started.

I would say that this Sarah Palin business just isn't funny anymore, but then I couldn't illustrate the following news with a Flintstones picture. "Soon after Sarah Palin was elected mayor of the foothill town of Wasilla, Alaska, she startled a local music teacher by insisting in casual conversation that men and dinosaurs coexisted on an Earth created 6,000 years ago-about 65 million years after scientists say most dinosaurs became extinct-the teacher said."

The $700 billion bailout that leaders of Congress ran out in the middle of the night to shout about, maybe isn't happening after all. Dealbreaker reports that Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich is now telling the press that the bailout plan just doesn't have the votes to get through Congress. "I will tell you right now I don't know if they have votes...If the votes were there, this would be on the floor [...] None of this has been subject to a critical analysis. We haven't had access to the books to the people who are claiming they are going broke. They rushed this Congress into the Iraq resolution and look what happened. Catastrophe for this nation as well as for the people of Iraq." After the jump, video of Kucinich blowing his lid over the proposal on the House floor this afternoon.

Simon Hammerstein, co-owner of downtown burlesque theater The Box—which pretty much everyone in the neighborhood wants shuttered—is sort of defending himself—mainly via proxy—against charges that he's a grunting hog who sexually harasses his female employees. And he's doing it in the pages of the Times' Sunday Styles, natch. First of all: he could never be untoward. Because he's engaged to a lady! "Mr. Hammerstein said he had recently become engaged and would marry 'in Decemberish.' He did not elaborate. Mystery, he said, is really the core of his business." As for charges that he regularly slapped female employees on their asses hard enough to leave bruises and that he coerced the Porcelain TwinZ, Amber and Heather Langely, to dirty up their act so that he could rename it "Twincest"? Oh, pooh-pooh. He's an artist!

The Evil League of Evil—first exposed to the public in director Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible's Sing-A-Long Blog—is calling for madmen and madwomen to join its ranks. The best applicants—"as determined by the League or its designated agents"— will be featured in an upcoming DVD. Application rules after the jump, if you think you're evil enough.

Do you know what today is? Why, it's Pulpit Freedom Sunday, of course! Oh, you know, the day when Conservative preachers all across the land take to their tax-exempt churches and endorse a Presidential candidate in direct defiance of Federal law. Because these pastors—backed by a tax exempt group of Christian lawyers called the Alliance Defense Fund—think that their free speech should be subsidized by tax-paying Godless suckers like us! Obviously, they should all be investigated by the IRS and slammed with stiff, bankrupting penalties—but that's what they want in the first place. Well, sort of. "The ministers and the conservative group organizing them know they are breaking a 54-year-old law barring tax-exempt organizations from using their sheltered status to support a political candidate. They want to be taken to court, quickly, in hopes of overturning it." They claim that simply because they don't pay taxes, they shouldn't be barred from innocently, "talking to their congregations about biblical issues related to candidates and elections.” And, hey, the pastors and their lawyers haven't even revealed who they'll be stumping for in their illegal Pulpit-based endorsements today. Really, it could be anyone! "The ministers haven’t announced their preferences, although Senator John McCain is expected to be favored. Senator Barack Obama has blurred church-state lines in promising more subsidies for social programs run by religious-based groups. But Mr. McCain has gone much farther, proclaiming America to be 'a Christian nation.' "Taxpayers of any faith should see this as an election-year gambit to dash the pillar of church-state separation. Other clergy, mindful of being spiritual not political ministers, have organized to say no thanks to Pulpit Freedom Sunday. We expect the courts and the Internal Revenue Service to say those preachers are in the right." [NYT]

Perhaps the only place more bleak and frightening than Stephen King's haunted corners of Maine is ESPN headquarters in the hell of Bristol, Connecticut. So it's only fitting that the horror master took some time from his manic schedule to film this new ad for Sports Center.