Everyone's favorite shaved bear of comedy, Will Ferrell, was good enough to brave the wastelands of the Internet to answer questions from the legions of anonymous hellions who lurk in the comments section of movie websites. As usual, they were very, very interested in male genitalia. Click to view

What's really on the mind of ice-cold snow huntress Sarah Palin? Well, heck, she didn't serve all that time on the PTA and running the lawless roads of Wasilla just to take some podunk job as the Vice President of these United States of America. And she'll be darned if she'll just sit around and wait for Old Man McCain to kick it. At a recent stump stop, she revealed her bold plans for a "Palin and McCain administration." Clip after the jump.

Are you one of those horrible thoughtless New Yorkers who no one can stand to be around and yet you believe everyone else is the problem? Are you a woman? And single and looking for some free meals? Craigslist to the rescue again! It seems that the poster is fed up with his sister's mega-douche boyfriend and is seeking a female version of the obnoxious bounder so that his beloved sis can see for herself what it's like to have a sibling swallowed up by the black hole of a shit relationship. "Candidates should be painful to be around, obnoxious, thoughtless and immature. She should use terms like, 'tragic,' 'as if' and various internet terms like 'omg,' 'lol,' 'jk,' etc." Click through for more qualifications and a bigger pic.

Media gargoyle Rupert Murdoch is savvy enough to run News Corp.—one of earth's premiere evil empires—like one of your more aggressive 19th Century robber barons, and he's savvy enough to pretend that he's in favor of government oversight when that's the thing that obscenely rich people have to say. Despite the fact that Murdoch hates any kind of regulation almost as much as he hates sunlight, he went on his zero-credibility Fox Business Network network to half-heartedly support horror-eyed Veep hopeful Sarah Palin's equally half-hearted calls for increased government regulation of the nation's financial institutions. “I think they have been sending out different signals, but I think what she says is right," he said. "Clearly, there has to be some more regulation, but we have to be careful what that is. It could make things a lot worse. The more you get the politicians in that don't know the first thing about banking, even less than me, and God knows what might come out of it.” As for Barack Obama's calls for regulation? Well, he's just being silly. "[H]is policy of anti-globalization, protectionism, is going to be—and card checks—are going to do two or three things. It's going to give us a lot of inflation. They're going to ruin our relationships with the rest of the world. And they are going to slow down the rest of the world, too. And they're going to make people frightened to add to employment. You are going to find companies leaving this country if it's—if you put a protectionist wall around it. You're going to get—his policy is really very, very naive, old-fashioned, 1960s." [THRFeed]

We were all so pure before life got in the way. Even media types! Even Ann Coulter. Via Oh No They Didn't, click for the polemical pundit, back when she was a brunette and a virgin, Lou Dobbs as a Leave It To Beaver innocent, and Rachel Maddow as a 21-year-old leather-jacketed Rhodes Scholar who could kick your ass.


Lou Dobbs

If there's one thing we're absolutely sick of it's journalists complaining about other journalists for no reason except to revel in the glorious, righteous contrarianism of complaint. And we are about to complain about it. Ha, cause we're so contrarian! Check out my surprising viewpoint, baby! I'd like to start off my complaint by telling Washington City Paper editor Erik Wemple to shut up. Wemple's column, which I am now whining about, is him whining about the whining of the New York Times. Specifically, about the Times being disappointed at the fact that their pretty fucking awesome Sarah Palin blowout story last weekend didn't have the same resonance that it would have had in times past, because the media is overcrowded these days. ***WHICH IS TRUE.*** Okay then. Go, Wemple:

Every year "brand consultancy" (the fake industry to get into, btw) Interbrand puts out a numerical ranking of the world's "best" brands. They have a long bit in the press release about their methodology, but I always assume they just count up the Google hits for "(Brand) sucks." The new list is out, and it seems to follow the "sucks" method to perfection: For the eighth year in a row Coke is the world's best brand, (drug joke). The biggest gainers this year were Google, Apple, and Amazon; the group of biggest losers included financial brands like Merrill Lynch (#1 loser with a bullet!), Morgan Stanley, and Citi. As you would expect. Also plunging into massive suckdom: Ford and The Gap. The lesson here is that in order to have a strong band, be massive yet innocuous-to-boring. I am now a brand consultant. Here's the top 20:

That hugely embarrassing mistake at the New York Times we told you about yesterday? The staff of the New York Post certainly seems quite pleased. [NYP]

Wall Street has been on a historic roller coaster all week, and there's no doubt it's tiring out some business reporters. It was only Monday morning that Times business writer Andrew Ross Sorkin said on CNBC, where he puts in the extra multimedia shift now common to newspaper reporters, that he was operating on just two hours sleep. So perhaps it should not have been entirely surprising that the Times business desk printed Thursday a sensational quote it has now retracted, because it seems no one ever said it.

Being a documented cruel animal hoarder, Paris Hilton understandably faces a lot of scrutiny over how she cares for her 17 or so dogs. So when X17 reported the celebrity heiress had left two of her (mostly small and helpless) dogs outside for a night to be devoured as a light snack by local coyotes, the story spread like crazy, including to the Daily News and this morning's Post. Now Hilton's reps are denying that any dogs died at all, saying they're all still enjoying the opulent splendor of their "doggie mansion." The only problem? Hilton is a proven liar, and this story has the ring of truth.

It's one thing for Graydon Carter to deem you worthy of, say, a 7 pm reservation at his 70-seat Waverly Inn. But if you really want an emblem of the Vanity Fair editor's approval, try getting your child admitted to the 45-child freshman class of Carter's other exclusive West Village institution, the forthcoming Greenwich Village High. The school is the brainchild of Carter deputy editor Aimee Bell, as first reported in the Observer, and her neighbor Sara Goodman. But according to the Times it's becoming something so much posher than all that!

It stands to reason that a show about frazzled females in New York media might include a cameo by Emily Gould, the former Gawker editor now working on her six-figure "book of autobiographical stories" about being a frazzled female in new New York media. Via certain Observer staff Gould is just a degree or two of separation away from Lipstick Jungle creator Candace Bushnell. But after an email tip and way too much (20 minutes!) research, we've determined that those tattoos on the Lipstick extra's arms (above) just don't match up with Gould's own body art. So you (and we) should probably move on to thinking about more important things, like the implosion of Western capitalism. Or, you know, scrutinize this Gould-aping extra some more in the clip after the jump.

We heard a wild rumor that Getty Images agreed to buy photo-sharing website Flickr from Yahoo. At first blush the gossip sounds crazy. Widely-used Flickr is a crown Web 2.0 jewel for Yahoo, which dissolved its own photo site after acquiring the company, and Getty can already license Flickr photos through a partnership announced in July. But upon further reflection there's a logic to the alleged deal.

Remember Giovanni Luciano, the high-living Italian playboy who scammed credit cards at Bungalow 8 and partied at the most exclusive places in Manhattan? He's been in jail since last year for grand larceny. Ever-enterprising New York Observer reporter Spencer Morgan wrote him a letter, then took the prison bus up to Coxsackie to meet with him. And that, friends, is where he learned about a devious money-stealing trick involving an Etch-a-Sketch.

The doubters were wrong: the Wired cover featuring dating columnist/microcelebrity Julia Allison is one of the best-selling covers for the tech magazine in the last eight years, Portfolio reports. We suppose that congratulations are in order. So congrats or whatever. Julia's Wired cover outsold Rupert Murdoch's and Sarah Silverman's. (That is 103,000 copies.) Except. She won by default! Sex n' high heels sells, obviousy, and a woman on the cover of a geek magazine—or a celebrity or fashion magazine, for that matter—always does better. And Wired doesn't put very many women on its cover. It's the Sarah Palin effect.

We were hurt when voluble Fox News conservatalker Bill O'Reilly called Gawker a "despicable, slimy, scummy" website last night. Ha, not really. We wouldn't have expected anything less! O'Reilly has always had trouble controlling his temper, ever since his "Fuck it!" days on Inside Edition, when he still had hair. Click to watch this neat one-of-a-kind compilation of Bill's angriest moments over the years. And then SHUT UP.

John Carney, editor of the readable financial news and gossip site Dealbreaker (founded by original Gawker Elizabeth Spiers), is leaving to edit a new, similar site from Silicon Alley Insider called "ClusterStock." Caroline Waxler, formerly at MainStreet.com, will be heading up fellow SAI blog the Business Sheet. SAI itself is losing its managing editor Peter Kafka, who will be starting a new media and advertising blog for AllThingsD. And wrestling champ Alex "Blue States Lose" Blagg is leaving his blogging gig at BestWeekEver. See, jobs exist!

Newly ascendant MSNBC host Rachel Maddow's show actually beat shouty colleague Keith Olbermann's in the ratings on Tuesday night, 1.8 million viewers to 1.64 million. This proves that our earlier prediction of her success was totally correct, and also that America's love affair with lesbians just keeps getting hotter. After the jump, a clip of Maddow interviewing Bill Maher on her hit show Tuesday:

Pop quiz: are you moderating a presidential debate this fall? (Hint: are you old, white, and male?) You may be wondering what you're supposed to ask about! Sure, you could just ask them to talk about their positions on various issues, politely step back as they lay out policy proposals and debate the merits of said proposals, but then everyone will get bored. Your job is to stir shit up and force them both into making gaffes! That is how we decide what to talk about when we talk about campaigns. So. Because we dislike John McCain, personally, we will now explain how best to cause him to say or do something stupid during a debate. But don't worry, Republicans: we have a trick to trip up Obama too! Foreign Policy This one's a gimme, because John McCain doesn't know a goddamn thing about the rest of the world except that he wants to bomb it. There was the "Iraq/Pakistan border" thing, which could maybe be explained by him saying Iraq instead of Afghanistan, and the Czechoslovakia thing, which is pretty much just explained by him being lol old, and mistaking Sunnis with Shiites constantly and also thinking al-Qaeda was training in Iran, which can really only be explained by not giving a shit about minor details like who we're "fighting" besides Muslims in general. But now that his confusion has spread to Western Europe, his handlers should be worried. "John McCain doesn't know where Spain is" is basically a gift to the Democrats. Of course McCain can and will play off any debate question about his gaffes with a condescending "of course I know [blank]" statement, followed by a carefully coached recitation of lessons his handlers drilled into him, which defuses the issue, but it's a clear sign that he'll be tripped up by a different lame gotcha question about world leaders or geography. Do people actually care when a candidate doesn't know "trivia"? Not really, but if he plays further into the "confused old man" routine it'll hurt him way more than idiocy did Bush. The Economy Ask him just about anything about the current Wall Street crisis. Wait for weird disjointed pseudo-Democrat talk about regulation. Followup with any serious statement John McCain has made on the economy during his 100 years as an anti-regulation Republican. Watch him forced to either sell out his Capitalist base or deliver some decidedly not-populist rhetoric. Torture Ask him, Andrew Sullivan style, if he believes the CIA should be allowed to use "interrogation techniques" similar and in some cases worse than the torture inflicted on him by the North Vietnamese. Offer to demonstrate! (Though, of course, 24 viewers definitely think the CIA should be allowed to torture, and McCain is maybe helped by any mention of his POW years, but still, this shit was indefensible.) His Commercials, Campaign, and Surrogates Just ask him if he "stands by" or can defend almost any number of questionable things his campaign has done. As we saw on The View, he will not apologize, but he will look pissed off as he half-heartedly defends shit he used to hate. Which is way worse than apologizing would be. Bonus: How to Trip Up Barack Obama Ask a serious question about a complex and important issue. Make it one that requires Obama to speak extemporaneously. He'll answer, as he thinks through it, with something pretty reasonable, but complex, and he will say "Uh," and then McCain will say "shut up, Brainiac! Babies are tiny angels, why do you want to kill them?" THE END.

Portfolio's Jeff Bercovici hears that former VP and current elitist environmentalist Al Gore is planning to buy Plenty, the environmentally-themed do-gooder magazine. Gore's on the cover of the current issue. No official confirmation yet, although Plenty's owner told Bercovici only "that wouldn't be quite accurate." So, sounds true. Did Gore miss all the smart people saying the "green" advertising boom is over? Is he itching to be a mogul past the point of good sense? Gore already has the youth-oriented Current TV network, which isn't doing incredibly well, business-wise. And his post-White House fame has allowed him to move in highfalutin circles—I'm sure he has more friends in venture capital than in farming these days. Plenty might not be the wisest investment, judging only by the general state of the print magazine industry. So this doesn't seem like mogul envy on Gore's part. He's apparently a true believer, and sees environmental media investments as part of his mission. If he makes money on them we'll really be impressed. [Anybody have inside info about Gore's plans? Email us.] [Mixed Media]