Alan Colmes is famous as a nightly sacrifice victim to the Repubican Gods who run Fox News Channel. Al Franken once called him the "zeta male" of the duo Hannity & Colmes and joked that Colmes' duties included making coffee and cleaning Fox honcho Roger Ailes' private bathroom. But something has transformed the little runt. Maybe he's taken heart in the nation's mounting hatred of all things Republican. Or maybe the John Edwards scandal has energized him. Or perhaps he just really, really hates John McCain. Anyway, here's a great clip in which Sean Hannity almost beats him to death. Click the video icon. [YouTube via Wonkette]

"So you shit on me on Tumblr, let's talk about it." [Fishbowl NY]

So remember how Gawker became obsessed with the Montauk Monster, and everyone was like, "Ho ho ho, isn't that funny and delightful, let's laugh at the 'monster' all summer until it kills us all in our sleep, LOL'?" And then CNN did a story but even Wolf Blitzer had trouble maintaing his usual humorless melodrama because he was about to bust out laughing? Well, no one's laughing now because monsters are eating the Main Stream Media alive. The terrified reports keep coming: Newsweek, as we just reported, launched a panicked, desperate effort to claim the Montauk Monster is a Photoshop hoax. CNN aired video of a Chupacabra in Texas. And now multiple cable news networks have picked up on a Bigfoot discovery that even we laughed off initially. BUT NO ONE IS SCOFFING NOW OH NO NOT ANYMORE.

Ohh, Georgians. It will be hard to maintain your current favorable coverage in the US press if you do things like this. The attached clip shows a Fox News reporter running from gunfire from Georgian troops. The absoltely amazing thing is that as he's running from them he's still, like, totally on their side? They are exhausted and humiliated by those Russians (those baaad Russians!). Also who hasn't wanted to make a Fox News correspondent dance a little, right? Totally understandable! (For balance, the clip is followed by a clip of a Georgian journalist getting shot in the arm on-air by a sniper. Presumably a Russian sniper? Who knows. Fog of war!)

One awkwardly rapping local television reporter might be written off as a crackpot. Two might simply be a coincidence. But six different videos of TV reporters breaking into rhyme? It's a trend that has spanned decades, but has only recently been teased out into the open by the hard work of YouTube skimmers. Complex puts together a definitive list of this painful but hypnotic media meme. We've included just one example for you after the jump: an apparently 17-year-old traffic reporter from North Carolina delivering her morning traffic report in the form of a spasmodic (drug-fuelled?) freestyle rhyme. Let's battle, girl:

Gannett-the largest newspaper company in America and owner of USA Today-said today it plans to cut 1,000 jobs from its smaller local papers. That amounts to about 3% of the total workforce. Six hundred of those cuts will likely be in the form of layoffs. It's a rough message, coming on the same day that rival McClatchy announced a wage freeze, Cox announced its desperate newspaper fire sale, and Sam Zell's Tribune Company lost its daily $20 million. Nobody seems able to find a competitive advantage in their rivals' misfortune. A month ago, a rash of cuts at print publications made us declare Print's Black Wednesday; today, Black Thursday, has been even worse. Soon the newspaper industry won't have any days left.

McClatchy, the struggling newspaper chain that made an ill-fated purchase of Knight Ridder in 2006, has just sent out a memo announcing that it is freezing employee wages across the entire company for the next year. The message that is increasingly going out to newspaper employees: accept wage freezes (or cuts), buyouts, and layoffs, or face total extinction. The full McClatchy memo is after the jump:

Did you know that charismatic Virginia governor Tim Kaine is on Barack Obama's Vice Presidential short list? It's true, according to today's New York Times! "Now the Obama campaign is eyeing Mr. Kaine as a potential running mate, seeing in him a like-minded breath of fresh air who has also shown he can win in a red state," Kate Zernike reports today. Pretty convincing! In totally unrelated news, the Washington Post reports today that the selection of former Virginia governor Mark Warner to give the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention is a "hint" that current Virginia governor Tim Kaine will not be Obama's VP choice. "If Kaine were chosen as Obama's running mate, two Virginians would have back-to-back prime-time speaking slots, a scenario that party officials regard as unlikely." This is great media management by Obama, right? No one knows anything! [WP, NYT]

While the New York Times spent hundreds of thousands of dollars sending dozens of reporters to Beijing for the Olympics, NBC spent hundreds of millions of dollars for broadcasting rights, only to leave a bunch of its announcers in cubicles in New York City. The Times (meta) reports that 13 different Olympic sports were deemed unimportant enough by NBC to have them called by announcers lounging around in jeans in an old Saturday Night Live studio, watching the action on TV. Oh, the glory of the Olympiad!

TV chef and cookbook author Julia Child was secretly more awesome than you already thought, because she was part of a very exciting World War II-era U.S. spy ring, government files revealed this morning. It was already known that Child had worked in an administrative capacity for the Office of Strategic Services, the less evil precursor to the CIA. And anyone who knew her biography had to wonder about her long career at various U.S. stations abroad. And about that recipe for "poached secrets."

Rev. Jeremiah Wright: "Nope. I'm not publishing anything. I'm not going on any book tours." [Essence via Wonkette, Previously]

"In the 1960s Esquire was perhaps the nation’s most vibrant magazine — sexy, mischievous, irreverent and hip — and Mr. Hills’s idea of fiction, as well as of the literary life, fit into the ethos of the magazine perfectly." [Times]

So apparently a hysterical new "non-partisan" group, started mostly by bitter supporters of Hillary Clinton, has been formed with a very important mission. The New Agenda will fight for paid maternity leave, affordable health care and fair pay for women. Or at least they will do those things once they are done getting Chris Matthews fired from his job as host of Hardball on MSNBC, which is at the top of their self-described "to-do list," because Matthews, a longtime Democratic Congressional aide, is at the nexus of all types of awful problems for women, including wife beating:

You don't have to tell us journalists sure do love a clusterfuck. But in case you thought the credentialed journalists of the world were actually doing stuff less masturbatory with their time than repurposing news items about Manhattan Media News 'N' Gossip, well…you can stop feeling guilty! Because inspired by Michael Calderone's Politico post about some Forbes post about how there will be 15,000 journalists descending upon each of this month's political conventions — hey, clusterfuck alert: Calderone used to date my roommate! — we've officially culled a list of 14 Really Big Journalist Events. The Beijing Olympics is the biggest! (But: the Iraq War = DEAD LAST.) (No "heh"!) Click to see the beautiful graph and calculate how "connected" you are. Oh yes, and also, read my "analysis" of what events planners can learn from this.As you can see, the Beijing public relations strategy was brilliant: first, get the Olympics, then generate alarming rates of economic growth bulldozing and erecting structures and developing innumerable ambitious infrastructure projects in preparation for the thousands of journalists you are expecting for the Olympics, consuming such unprecedented amounts of energy in the process that oil prices rise more than tenfold between the year you land the bid and the year the Olympics actually happen, triggering fears of a recession in the overly developed countries whose living standards your artificially undervalued currency has been subsidizing, such that journalists feel obliged to attend the thing if only to write that last epic think piece on the Emerging Superpower before taking that buyout, while gas prices force the rest of the citizenry to sit at home and watch the Olympics. Hopefully over an ice-cold Coke Zero! But in lieu of that, cool cars seem to do the trick. A lot better if you locate them in a city that is not totally depressing.

OK, fine, we'll admit this is funny: it's a video of Vanity Fair editorial assistant getting "fired" for failing to get 10,000 friends on Facebook for the magazine. Editor Graydon Carter even makes an appearance: "Facebook—what's that again?" (By the way, we hear that the underlings hate hate the stunts they're forced to act out for VF's website.) [VF Online]

"Slavery was good for the black man." This real column comes not from a neo-nazi pamphlet or the editors of the National Review, but from The Jamaica Observer, which is apparently less like our own Observer and more like a really contrarian Jamaican Slate. You will not see a finer example of conventional wisdom-upending this year. Take it away "freelance writer" Michael Dingwall! "Those of us who continue to see the millions of blacks who died crossing the Atlantic and the displacement of what we had in Africa as proof that slavery was a bad institution don't understand the mechanics of human development and evolution." Wow. This is just like when Alumbrados Illustrated published that essay on how the Spanish Inquisition wasn't so bad. He goes on!

News of the worsening condition of Senator Ted Kennedy-currently suffering from a malignant brain tumor-made the front page of The Globe, one of the trashiest of the trashy tabloids. But in the respectable press, all we hear is that a lavish celebration of Kennedy's life is being prepared for the upcoming Democratic National Convention. The reader is asked to read between the lines and figure out that Kennedy is perhaps near death. Anyone who purchases The Globe, though, is always kept well-informed as to which old famous person is closest to death's door. It's a macabre little niche that they've been allowed to dominate thanks to the squeamishness of the rest of the press in covering celebrity health. Recently, the tabloids have led the MSM in covering the illnesses of Kennedy, Liz Taylor, and Paul Newman-though how reliable their coverage has been is called into question by the continuing survival of all of those people. Then again, when the mainstream press waded into the fray with their alarmist reports of the imminent death of Patrick Swayze, Swayze seemingly underwent a miracle recovery. So the reader is almost completely without reliable information. It does seem newsworthy, in this case, to ask precisely how bad Kennedy's doing. Does he actually have two weeks to live? Wasn't he just recently showing up to work at the Senate? But much as the press only ever hinted at how far gone Reagan or Strom Thurmond were (until they were done with public service), notions of privacy and respect lead editors to gloss over the uncomfortable details. Not so in England, where tabloid media is often indistinguishable from the "real" press. The Daily Mail, Mirror, and Sun all keep running tabs on the mortality of Britain's famous. Decrepitude and mortality sell papers! Who knew? Not American editors, yet.

It's all too easy to suggest that Rafat Ali, the founder of PaidContent.org, is a nostalgia freak, as Silicon Alley Insider does. True, Ali worked at the long-forgotten inside-the-media publication, which aimed to write about the media industry with the savvy of mainstream business publications. But Ali, who testily refuses to describe the new Inside.com as a "relaunch" of the original site, is merely admitting the obvious: PaidContent.org is quite possibly the worst name for a blog ever. The nostalgia value? Priceless for Ali, meaningless for anyone else. Inside.com is simply a better name. Why not say that?

Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. looks increasingly backed into a corner. Bloomberg yesterday marshaled a wide array of evidence, including quotes from analysts and the mounting cost to hedge against a Times Co. bond default, to establish that the company's bonds are close to falling to junk status. The already-bludgeoned stock quickly fell another 6 percent. Implicated in the credit deterioration: The company's decision last year to hike its dividend payout 23 percent, a move no doubt popular with Sulzberger's stockholdling relatives but one that is gobbling up nearly all the company's free cash flow. The family has already conceded board seats to the corporate marauders from Harbinger Capital Partners and an affiliated partnership, and Harbinger now controls nearly 20 percent of the company. Sulzberger faces some unsavory choices — cut the dividend, slash costs (probably via layoffs) or flirt with selling junk bonds — all of which carry the whiff of defeat. He is running out of room to maneuver.

Leslie Kaufman's feature on Waverly Inn for the Times dining section reads too cutesy and is almost nakedly self-ingratiating. The writer couldn't find one angry chef or would-be patron to slag Graydon Carter's It-restaurant? But the piece is well-researched, on its own puffy terms, and thus useful to those strivers eager to be seen among the restaurant's celebrity diners, no matter how expensive the macaroni or rich the wine list. Here, then, is a quick list of the ways to lose friends and alienate people, and perhaps accomplish the opposite, at the Waverly: