The New York Daily News has trailed the Post's Page Six in the New York gossip wars for a long time. Now the paper is blowing up its gossip columns and starting over. Two major changes went down today. First, husband and wife gossip team Rush & Molloy announced this morning that they'll be moving from a daily column to a Sunday-only schedule, after more than 13 years. Second—and more dramatic—we hear that Jo Piazza, who wrote the paper's Full Disclosure column, has resigned.

Next Monday, Rupert Murdoch is planning a big bash for wife Wendi Deng Murdoch's 40th birthday on the Gramercy Park Hotel roof that has a six-figure budget and folks like Nicole Kidman and Barry Diller on the guest list. It's such a big deal that Murdoch made Michael Wolff (hey, did you hear he has a book coming out?) move his party for The Man Who Owns the News to Tuesday, according to Jeff Bercovici. They both sound like fabulous affairs. Especially compared to the staff Christmas party that the New York Post announced yesterday. News Corp. canceled its regular company-wide holiday bash last month. So, instead next Friday the staff are heading to their regular Midtown watering hole, Langan's. With a cash bar. Aside from the promised "sexy elves" and "special theme rooms," it'd be tough to tell this from any other Friday night at Langan's. Full invite after the jump.

Credit where it's due, people: the Post's cover this morning (click to enlarge) is simply a work of tabloid art. Sure, it's easy to sell papers when there's big news. But on a slow day, can you pull off a cover that combines revulsion, a perverse obsession with strange diseases, and a mythical monster? That's the news business at its finest. It's a heartwarming narrative: freaky baby born with freaky condition, doctors stumped, he begs for salvation, and it's finally delivered! Something we can all get behind. The Post is actually far more subtle than its tabloid ancestors:

♦ Barack Obama's first post-election interview with 60 Minutes (an excerpt is on your left) earned the show its biggest audience in nine years. [THR]
♦ Dan Rather has spent $2 million battling CBS thus far, but it looks like his time and money may finally be paying off. [NYT]
♦ MTV's TRL came to an end yesterday, in case you haven't heard the terribly tragic news. [NYT]
♦ Rupert Murdoch's New York Post appears to have warmed to Barack Obama. "So has Mr. Murdoch gone soft on liberals—or perhaps just reacted pragmatically to Mr. Obama's sizable victory?" [NYT]
♦ The new James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, was No. 1 at the box office this weekend. The flick generated $70.4 in its first three days. [Reuters]

Rupert Murdoch's pet Gotham tabloid may have endorsed John McCain and Murdoch's favorite lady politician, Sarah Palin, but the Post appears to be the first wing of the News Corporation empire to call the election for Barack Obama. The Post appears to have beaten even Murdoch's Fox News to the punch. It's a fast, scrappy call by a dead-trees publication. The paper's editorial page may declare McCain its true love, but the Post's front-page "wood" makes it clear Murdoch has plenty of love leftover for the Democrat (especially now that he's, uh, won). UPDATE: And after the jump, Murdoch's Wall Street Journal loudly puts Obama "on the verge:"

Lydia Hearst had a little run-in with Page Six magazine earlier this week: After bashing the media conglomerate founded by her great-grandfather in her weekly column, she accused the mag of making the item up and simply slapping her byline at the top. The heiress took her revenge last night. Sort of! Proving originality isn't her strong suit, Lydia wore precisely the same get-up that Britney Spears wore after she was dissed by Page Six way back in 2003. [GoaG, Jossip]

"They don't appreciate me." [Observer]

New York Post attack columnist Andrea Peyser is a vocal fan of both cocks and pussies (but not whores). Why is it always about sex, Andrea Peyser? "With kabbalah, you learn how to turn on the 'light force' - kabbalah-speak for, say, taking out the garbage without expecting sex from your husband in return." Hm. I'm sensing a theme in your work, Andrea Peyser:

'Smokers Should Be Shot: Experts' [NYP]

New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser is that degraded newspaper's usual voice of outrage, which is why she usually looks like this. But from now on we will use this photo of Peyser, in cat ears, cuddling with little "Barack Obama" at the CFA-Iams Cat Show this week. How could this be the same woman who wrote FELONIOUS BALL OF FUR DESERVED EVERY BLOW just last month? [MSG.com, Photo: Chad Batka]

Wow, who would have guessed??! It turns out Michelle Obama didn't order Iranian caviar, two whole lobsters, a lobster hors d'oeuvres and champagne from room service the other night, as the Post's Page Six claimed. The wife of Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama ate an entirely different treasonous elitist meal (probably) somewhere else. In fact, she wasn't even staying at the Waldorf-Astoria, as Page Six had it. Whoops. The gossip section so did not see this coming, because why wouldn't you run with something so plausible? "We regret the mistake, and our former source is going to regret it, too," it said today. To really make up for it, the paper went ahead and smeared conservative Ann Coulter, by way of trashing McCain:

" Wednesday, Michelle Obama called room service and ordered lobster hors d'oeuvres, two whole steamed lobsters, Iranian caviar and champagne, a tipster told Page Six." [Post]

Chris Wilson has had to do some major backtracking since writing, in a Page Six Magazine point/counterpoint article two weeks ago, that he saw a passenger on an American Airlines flight "either pleasuring himself to online porn, or whittling something under his blanket." The deputy Maxim editor was just joking people! Sort of like his magazine was joking when earlier this year it "reviewed" two albums which had not yet been released, allegedly via the magic of crafty editors. Anyway, Wilson was apparently invited on Oprah to talk about his traumatic airplane experience, and had to disabuse (ahem) one of the show's producers of the idea he had written something, you know, true. Now Wilson is setting the entire world straight, via his "old dear friend" at the Observer:

You know who's awesome and relevant? Ted Nugent! Which is exactly why we are writing about him, now. Because literally dozens of people care a great deal about what he has to say. Us and Page Six, we know a good story when we see it. The non-embarrassing-relic rocker has a book out soon, you see. And Page Six is excerpting it, because you care about Ted Nugent's new book. It's about what Ted would do if he were president. He'd "take appropriate gas and oil from Mexico and the Middle East as payment for all debts we are owed by them," because he's thought long and hard about complex issues and we should take him seriously. He wrote "Stranglehold"! Did you write "Stranglehold"? No, you didn't. Aren't you glad you learned about this book, from Ted Nugent? [NYP]

Retired Post hack Steve Dunleavy clarifies: "I was a wanker, mate, but never a poofter." [Forbes]

Page Six is gloating this morning. Talent agency William Morris just sold its Beverly Hills headquarters for $143 million and the Post gossip section totally called it, even in the face of William Morris' heated denials. "We told you," brags Page Six. But here's the thing: It took three and a half years for Page Six's gossip to come true. So for their scoop to be valid, you have to believe the headquarters sat on the marker for several years, even though it listed during one of the most frenzied commercial real estate markets ever, only to find a buyer in the worst office downturn in four years. Or maybe a company "desperate... to raise cash" (according to Page Six) took three years to organize a fire sale. Not likely.

[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:

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]

The time has finally come for Steve Dunleavy—the problem-drinking right wing New York Post columnist who's been called "[Rupert] Murdoch's fiercest, most loyal and longest-running attack dog"—to officially hang it up. The Post is throwing him a retirement party October 1 (click to enlarge the official invite!), putting a -30- on a career that really wound down months ago due to health problems. They don't make 'em like him any more! Is what you say about guys like this. Let's take a fond(ish) look back at the life of "The Prince of Darkness," an angry tabloid legend: Dunleavy was born in Sydney, Australia in 1938. He moved to New York as a stringer in the mid-1960s, and made his way to the Post after Rupert Murdoch bought it in the late 1970s. In 1977 he found time to publish a book called "Elvis- What happened?", a behind-the-scenes look at the life of The King that came out just weeks before Elvis died. Hm. In the 80s Dunleavy was a lead reporter on A Current Affair, the Post of television.