The Way We Live Now: At the bottom of a bucket metaphor. GM is burning up the money we all gave it as fast as humanly possible. Bread lines are lengthening. But something's still selling:

A teenager was shot and paralyzed in Spanish Harlem in 1960; he died last month; and the NYPD reclassified his case as a homicide, half a century later. Cops are such sticklers.

Yesterday Dawn Spinner Davis came out as one of the "Dating a Banker Anonymous" girls. Today we know her life story. She is the living, breathing, complaining embodiment of the end of the gilded age.

"De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest are the reasons that there is a non-white president-elect for these United States. You think white folks would have gotten behind a Public Enemy X-Clan candidate? Hellz the fuck no!" This is just what we said but much more pithy. [XXL]

Allow me to construct a sports metaphor (UPDATE: Which I see the NYT also used in its lead sentence, DAMMIT. Oh well, forge ahead) that would sound stale to serious sports fans, but which I believe will sound fresh and insightful here, where we have only seven (7) total sports fan readers: Fox News is the New York Yankees. MSNBC is the Tampa Bay Rays. The Yankees throw huge contracts at aging veteran superstars, trading away their young players for big-name talent that tends to quickly prove to be over-the-hill. Tampa Bay had a string of bad years but stuck to its strategy of focusing on affordable young talent, nurturing them, and building from within. Now, Tampa Bay is in the World Series. The Yankees are sitting at home. My, this metaphor just gets more and more awesome: Fox just signed Bill O'Reilly, the most predictable shouting head on television, to a new four-year, $40 million contract. They just "lured" Glenn Beck from CNN (if you consider him a man who needs "luring") with a multimillion-dollar contract. Other Fox News names like Shep Smith and Sean Hannity get paid huge salaries to stay on. Meanwhile, MSNBC's new star Rachel Maddow came out of nowhere, in cable news terms. She was with Air America not too long ago, for fuck's sake, which is definitely the minor leagues. MSNBC took a chance on her, got her on air, saw how well she did, and then took the leap to giving her her own show. Which has paid off. The best part? They are probably paying her—in cable news terms, again—peanuts. Where are Fox News' Maddows? Where is the young talent that they nurture and build into a star while still paying them the wages of a rookie? These things are important. The economy is shit, advertising revenue is dicey, and homegrown stars are the wave of the future. I'm taking bets on Tampa Bay. Get at me, O'Reilly.

Crackhead-turned Times reporter success story David Carr is loved by media types for being a cool guy, and is basking in the generally positive public attitude towards his upcoming memoir. But everything is not well in Carr's world. Oh no. Just as Carr has found the strength to open up to the world about his past drug use, an even bigger scandal threatens to overwhelm him: his incurable fondness for potatoes.

Tim Rutten's last media column for the LA Times is about the purchase of the paper's parent company by Sam Zell:

There is a video of a young girl vogueng in her living room while her dog does something filthy to a plush snake toy in the background that somehow seems to embody the way Americans of a certain age feel about everything around them. [Nerve]

Hey, remember when the owner of the Washington Bullets changed the team's name to the Washington Wizards? Because he suddenly realized that bullets kill and violence is bad? Given the events earlier in the week, we've come to a somewhat similar realization. (We're still arguing about it, actually. Too soon v. sensitivity v. being a jerk v. English use v. being in favor of some kinds of violence but not others, etc.) Anyway! Hence our fancy new name for commenter bans. (If it worked for America's corporations, it works for us!) Much like the transformation of Viacom employees into permalancers, no lay-off is necessarily permanent here. Still, time to turn in your final TPS reports and say your goodbyes below.