Gregg Birnbaum was the well-liked political editor of the New York Post, a 17-year veteran of the paper. Until yesterday, when he left abruptly. The reason, we hear: he got sick of NYP chief Col Allan's obnoxious behavior.

Two unexpected things happened on tonight's Factor. The first: Ann Coulter and Bill O'Reilly disagreed about something. Heatedly! The second: the thing they disagreed about was Carl Paladino. Bonus: Coulter thinks that Paladino's homophobic outburst actually helped him. Video inside.

This is just plain odd. Here's a clip from Joaquin Phoenix's I'm Still Here, featuring Phoenix visiting Sean "Diddy" Combs to discuss a record project. Friendly introductory chatter quickly turns to contentious, profanity-filled awkwardness as Combs lectures Phoenix about money.

In a segment more befitting his daytime talk show than a primetime cable news one (actually, they're pretty much the same), Jerry Springer squared off with Sean Hannity tonight on President Obama, the economy, health care, and more! Video inside.

Project Prevention is a US group that aims, according to their website, "to reduce the number of substance exposed births to zero." Three of its members stopped a woman in Scotland and offered her cash if she'd get sterilized.

Last Friday, professional media beef-starter Michael Wolff called Newsweek's Jonathan Alter "the most pompous man in American journalism." Today, Wolff's column dismissively cited Alter's new book about Barack Obama. This confluence of Wolff-isms sent Jonathan Alter over the edge.

Have you ever been in such a heated argument you just had to throw something? Like your own person? Against a solid wall?

Last night a bunch of people who work in mainstream media arbitrarily divided themselves in half in order to argue over the vague, meaningless proposition, "Good Riddance to Mainstream Media." It was great fun to watch. Fake issue, real animosity!

Oh boy, now that Caroline Kennedy will officially not be New York's senator, the real fun begins: time for Gov. David Paterson's people to trash her anonymously! He never liked that bitch anyhow, sources say:

"Chris, you can call me Joan, I've had dinner at your house." This is an amazing, squirmy exchange between drunk contrarian Christopher Hitchens and liberal Salon lady Joan Walsh. They are arguing about Hillary Clinton and Marc Rich and stuff, but they are actually arguing about what a prick Chris Hitchens is, especially to ladies. Joan calls Chris "ridiculous" a good half-dozen times. Please enjoy. And don't mention the child. [Vid credit: Intern Daniel Caron]

The Fake New York Times that blanketed America last month was an impressive stunt. A vast coalition of liberal groups and assorted artistic types came together, worked for months, and managed to pull off the writing, production, and distribution of a faux newspaper without word leaking out beforehand. The general public was impressed. So how to put the cap on this classic work? With some good old-fashioned public ideological squabbling by those involved. It's just like the 1970s! Is Greater Than has an interview with Anne Elizabeth Moore, who was involved in the paper's production but bailed out prior to distribution day due to ideological differences. It's interesting! It also includes the following complaints:

Charlie Rose is just showing off. Back in June, he had all the Emanuels on! No one has done that, before, and no one will probably do it again for some time, so Charlie replayed the episode to rub it in, that he had new Obama Chief of Staff Rahm "Rahmbo" Emanuel, Hollywood super-agent Ari Emanuel, and the mysterious other one, Dr. Ezekiel "Zeke" Emanuel, the medical ethicist, all in his weird featureless void of a studio, all at once. Watch this clip and join us in the alarming conclusion that Rahm, the intense political hatchet-man, is actually the calmest Emanuel. How did Charlie Rose manage to book all the Emanuels on one show? So many have tried, but this is the only time we've ever seen it. The secret, we're told, is start with the doctor. Once Zeke, the eldest, is on board, Ari and Rahm are obligated to follow suit. And, man, family dinners with the Emanuels are clearly terrible. You never get a word in edgewise and they'll all be brawling by the end of it. Still, you ladies seem to like this Rahm, so here he is, enjoy.

Robert Fisk is a legendary Middle East reporter for The Independent and has been called "the most famous foreign correspondent in Britain." But he has that unfortunate angry-old-man attitude about the internet. At a recent lecture, "He recalled being challenged about a quote of his that had been published on a website - although he had never said it. 'But I read it on the internet,' was the response, to which Mr Fisk simply hung up." Reasonable! But what would you expect from a guy who has an entire method of online rhetorical smacking-down named after him?

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:

The Wall Street Journal has a piece today in which it attempts to scientifically determine the best overall male athlete in the world, by submitting a long list of famous athletes to a panel of exercise physiologists who rank them on this and that. This is the newspaper equivalent of Rolling Stone's "100 greatest albums" list—pointless, and meant to generate argument. But they do settle the issue of who is not the world's greatest male athlete: WSJ reporter Reed Albergotti, who goes up against a top decathlete to prove that reporters are, as suspected, goofy, unathletic white guys. God, what a 'Nilla. Video of Albergotti's good-natured crusade of unathleticism is below.

The Sex and the City backlash is in full swing! Isn't it just awful, with its squawking, sideways attacks on feminism, its materialistic hedonism, its Brooklyn-bashing, and its general New York-ruining? Recent articles in the Post and in Time Out New York certainly seem to think so. Though, with two weeks remaining until the big movie sashays into theaters, we suspect that the backlash will earn its own backlash. What will people say? And who's right, the pros or the cons? After the jump find five of the biggest arguments against Sex and the City, how its fans might respond, and who we think is right (and fabulous).

Bizarre racial thinker and conservative columnist John McWhorter today muses over his run-ins with the smug, misguided intellectuals who infest American higher education with their "radical leftist perspective." It's a standard-issue argument against political correctness, which ignores the salient point that conservatives are just as convinced of their own righteousness as liberals, they just don't have the numbers to assert their will on most campuses. Also, a tip for McWhorter: if you don't want to get argued with, you shouldn't have worked at freaking Berkeley. He says that the documentary "Indoctrinate U," out now, will help strike a blow against closed leftist minds. We agree that liberal political correctness is terribly annoying—almost as annoying as Republicans who use it as a canard to distract the world from their happy march towards fascism. Hey, this post is like a bad Poli-Sci class! The trailer for the film that will save beleaguered Ivy League ROTC students, after the jump.

Stanley Fish, the author, law professor, columnist, and one of the Times' innumerable bloggers, thinks it would be helpful if readers know exactly what his motivation is with all this highbrow writing he does. "Given a choice between being trivial and being ethical in any direction whatsoever, I'll take trivial (although I might want to debate the judgment), because ethics is not something I'm doing in these columns," he explains in his latest entry. How about superfluous, then? Would you consider being pompous and superfluous, Mr. Fish? Sure you would!

When angry British drunk Christopher Hitchens wrote his seminal "Why Women Aren't Funny" article in Vanity Fair last year, lots of people got upset. Mostly girls. Milking the manufactured outrage like the publishing geniuses they are, the magazine has finally had a woman take a full shot at refuting the thesis [VF]. Unfortunately, they picked Alessandra Stanley, who proves (not for the first time) that she has not one single drop of humor diluting the estrogen and errors that flow through her veins. So on the second day of the cooing and hubbub over the new Girl Power piece (it took us an extra day just to get through it, ha), it's worth pointing out the unspoken truth in all this catfighting: women will never be as funny as men to men. And men run everything.

AngryJournalist.com, the rant-based site that is the most accurate window into the journalism profession, now has some competition: HappyJournalist.com! The happy site has been up and running for less than a week, but so far the results are not encouraging; it has 14 total posts, compared to more than 1,300 at its angry brother. A helpful point-counterpoint comparison of the two sites' content reveals that, hey, you can both be right: