The morning news is terrifying even before the ominous opening of U.S. markets today, and was also scary hours ago before overseas markets opened and U.S. stock futures fell sharply. The bankruptcy at Lehman Brothers, the takeover of Merrill Lynch and the plea by insurance giant AIG for $40 billion in federal aid made for scary front pages (pictured, click for larger image) and heated chatter on CNBC. And no one wasted any time telling everyone how bad things really are. The "American financial system was shaken to its core," the Wall Street Journal said, warning of a "crisis on Wall Street." Other media outlets were scarcely more comforting:

TIFF Tiff Update! Via MCN, we've learned that Roger Ebert has posted to his blog regarding the now-notorious thwacking he received at the hands of NY Post critic Lou Lumenick. Titled "An Incident at Toronto," Ebert confirms the NY Daily News account of the dustup, but adds that he wishes it had never been made public. "This whole matter was embarrassing, because it drew attention to me and invited pity, which makes me cringe...in one way I feel sorry for him. He had no idea who was behind him when he smacked me. Now it looked like he was picking on poor me. I have had my problems, but I promise you I am plenty hearty enough to withstand a smack, and quite happy, after the smack, to tap him again. I had to see those subtitles." [Roger Ebert]

After a battle with thyroid and salivary gland cancer sidelined Roger Ebert and left him without part of his jawbone and unable to speak, he bravely returned to his post as film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times last year, an inspiring feat that could warm the hearts of anyone in the film industry. Anyone, that is, except gruff New York Post critic Lou Lumenick. According to the NY Daily News, both film critics found themselves at a Toronto Film Festival screening of Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire, though Lumenick wasn't aware that he was sitting in front of Ebert, nor that he was blocking his view. Not long after the lights went down, Ebert tapped on Lumenick's shoulder, soliciting a shouted, "Don't touch me!" Ten minutes later, he tried again to the same response. That's when things got ugly:

Keith Olbermann may have been pushed out of his gig anchoring MSNBC's election coverage, but the Countdown host actually made out pretty well, with the cable news network widely reported to be in the process of extending his contract. Far sadder is the case of Olbermann's fellow shouting head Chris Matthews, also ejected from the election team over his on-air feuds. Matthews' contract is up in 2009, two years sooner than Olbermann's, and yet no one is talking about buttering him up! That's probably because lantern-jawed Olbermann, by far the more overtly partisan of the two, has done more to gin up ratings. But apparently it's also because parent company GE's shareholders — that is, people primarily concerned with making money off a sprawling multinational corporation and with no expertise in running media operations — were unhappy with the network's convention coverage. Report the MSNBC haters at the Post:

The Post officially endorsed John McCain today, not surprisingly. Slightly more surprising: its description of Sarah Palin as "rock-solid." [NYP]

You know how doctors and elementary school principals all through the land are canceling their subscriptions to Us Weekly in the aftermath of the jihadist pinko rag's biased coverage of Sarah Palin? Well today we learned there may be a "silent majority" of folks who would be doing the exact same thing with the New York Post, right here in New York, but no one hears from them because they don't consume a few metric tons of gas just getting to work every day and are thus subjected to the presence of these innovative small businesses known as "newsstands" on a regular basis, and it is at these operations that liberal-leaning media consumers are casting their votes. "If I had a nickel for every friend of mine who told me they stopped buying the Post every time an election cycle hit," a Post employee told a Gawker operative today…well he'd probably be able to afford a copy of Italian Vogue! The point is, we know the Post's coverage of this Palin crap has been hard on all of you. Some of you may have quit reading it altogether! If so, here is some stuff you've missed. I scanned it in so we wouldn't have to link!

MSNBC's Rachel "Maddow tried to replace all the staffers who work on the 9 p.m. time slot, which she takes over on Monday, but management refused... 'She is Olbermann's protégé and is behaving like he does.'" [Post]

Dick Morris's political career ended when a British tabloid busted him sucking the toes of a prostitute and allowing her to listen in on his calls with then-President Bill Clinton. That was 12 years ago and would be of little consequence now except that Morris has reportedly just taken a job writing a weekly column called "Political Animal" for Playboy.com. One would expect a salacious gossip section like the Post's Page Six would make a fun little jab over the new gig and the way it recalls Morris' racy past. But then one would remember that Morris leans conservative, appears regularly on Post corporate sibling Fox News Channel and writes a weekly column for the Post itself. Then the tabloid's tame little item about the job makes perfect sense.

"Olbermann 'announced that his bosses [had] better find a more secure location for him to broadcast from at the Republican National Convention or he's not going,' one insider said. 'He thinks someone will assassinate him.'" [Post]

Post dining impresario Steve Cuozzo's list of everything he hates about new restaurants includes (but is not limited to!) consulting chefs, sushi in non-Japanese restaurants, poorly-cooked octopus, overly talkative waiters, overly quiet waiters, and overly expensive burgers. Someone needs a long weekend! [NYP]

Fantastic news: Jumping into a public fountain to collect spare change is not, in fact, illegal. Enjoy, kids! [NY Post]

I never thought the day would come when I might feel sympathy for Jared Paul Stern. When he was busted for trying to extort hundreds of thousands of dollars from Ron "I'm a billionaire, baby" Burkle back in '06, I wrote a dismissive piece about how Stern was such a scumbag in a scumbag industry that nobody should really be surprised. I would sum up my appraisal of him at the time with this word: "Scumbag." But times change! Stern's dogged pursuit of doomed lawsuits against the chuckling billionaire and a painful sex scandal have softened my heart. I may have been too harsh on poor JPS, after all. Consider the man's history. Starting out as nothing more than a dude with a ridiculous hat, he worked his way up through the gossip muck to the top ranks of the New York Post. He had his own column called "Nightcrawler" for a time, and was a regular contributor to Page Six. He was living the life that the young man who first put on the stupid hat dreamed of living. Then, of course, he tried to extort Burkle, and got publicly scandalized and tossed aside by the Post. He's quietly made his way back into the media with various projects, but nothing as high-profile since. And then last week some random guy decided to publicly release a (purported) tape of him having sex with JPS' wife. Damn. People can bounce back from most scandals. In time, even the "Payola Six" affair-sensational though it was-would have receded into history. But JPS has never been able to bounce back, because his ongoing lawsuits and, now, alleged cuckolding cause the original damage to his reputation to keep getting rehashed. So here's our gentle advice, JPS: the sympathy of the world has now, excruciatingly, returned to your side. Use it. Drop all of your various lawsuits against everyone involved in the Burkle mess-they'll ultimately do nothing but drain your bank account. Hold your head high, admit some wrongdoing in the past, and forge ahead. Disgrace is almost a foreign concept in the gossip world; schadenfreude does not run deep enough for people to say you deserved all of this. With an extended moment of grotesquely poor judgment and a run of very, very bad luck, most anyone in the New York media could be in your shoes right now. So get out there and make it, JPS-for all of us!

We were told Ted Kennedy, who's battling advanced brain cancer, had mere weeks to live. We were told there'd be a macabre video salute to the man in lieu of an actual appearance in Denver. So when he actually showed up on stage at the DNC to deliver a genuinely rousing speech, well, it was an emotional moment. So emotional that the major tabloids of both New York and Boston could not come up with original headlines. The Post raves!

New York Post sportswriter George King just can't get enough spanking! A tipster with plenty of time on his hands went back through King's baseball coverage and found that he takes every available opportunity to relate how the Yankees or Mets were "spanked." It's his favorite word! Just today King wrote about the "14-3 spanking administered by the Blue Jays." But that's just the beginning of his spankfest:

So hey, John McCain wants to hold "question time." Have you seen it? It's this thing they do in the UK where the Prime Minister is forced to actually take questions from Parliament, and answer them, and everyone's all abusive and mean and basically hilarious (illustrated in the attached clip). You know, McCain is good at speaking extemporaneously, so he could maybe pull this off. Except that he'd resort to very unPresidential insults and probably cursing when it got too heated (although—with this Senate?—it would not get heated). If it did work, and became tradition, we'd be thrilled! Oh, and the New York Post has another talking-related idea for saving America. Their opinion page today takes a nostalgic look at the legendary Lincoln/Douglas debates of 1858. And they bemoan the current state of political discourse and all that. The scheduled Obama/McCain debates, they lament, will not "even approach the unforgettable exchange of ideas that took place when Lincoln and Douglas shared the stage." The Post, arguing for reasoned, logical exchanges of ideas on The Important Topics!

When extremely important news breaks at any hour of the day or night, we here at Gawker receive a BREAKING NEWS ALERT from the web liaison at the New York Post. They are a paper packed with pavement-pounding journalists that never sleep, and they want to ensure that we, the internet nerds, are able to communicate important news items to you, the other internet nerds, in a timely fashion. So we have to apologize for any loss in civic informed-ness that you may incur because of our lateness in bringing you this story, which the Post urgently emailed to us just as it was filed late last night. But better late than never, we're excited to tell you: "GYM MACHINE HURLS LARGE WOMAN." Three (3) Post reporters managed to track the down the details of this occurence:

We'll leave it up to you to decide if Alex Gardega is any good as a painter, but you have to give him props for his media savvy. The fledgling artist was the subject of a story today in the Post about bartering. (Apparently, he's been trading his work for alcohol, gas, and MRI brain scans, among other things.) If the name rings a bell, though, that might be because he's the same guy who made the paper for his $10 sketches at the Spotted Pig and for painting Bill O'Reilly into The Last Supper a few months later. If getting your name out there is a half the battle for a struggling artist, then Alex Gardega has already won! [NYP]

The official investigation into Eliot Spitzer's efforts to discredit Joe Bruno has landed four former administration officials in legal hot water. More amusing are some of Spitzer's emails, many of which show that while Spitzer may have been a stickler when it came to what to wear in bed, he wasn't all that anal when it came to the English language: "Referring to a meeting that Mr. Spitzer apparently had with Rupert Murdoch, the Post's owner, and the paper's editor, Col Allan, the governor wrote, "Col allen essebntially said they uswe trheir paper as a club. Subtlety is not their world view. At end, who cares. Substance trumps." [NYT]

We got tipped on this an hour ago and happily it still hasn't been corrected. The New York Post's review of Mamma Mia comes with bracketed editor's notes asking the reviewer to clarify vague passages! At no extra charge! Anyone want to check the print version for us? In case they fix it, click to see the screengrabs. [NYP]

The Wall Street Journal's new managing editor Robert Thomson took another step toward remaking the paper in the image of his former employer the Financial Times, hiking the cover price 50 cents to match the FT at $2 per copy. But another directive, reported by Jeff Bercovici at Portfolio, seems to have been borrowed from the Journal's News Corp. sister, the Post: