It appears that Sarah Palin's post-campaign career activities will consist exclusively of bitching about the media. In a new interview she takes on Katie Couric, Tina Fey, Caroline Kennedy, and all you jerks watching at home:

After all the "banning" bullshit, NBC had Ann Coulter on the Today show this morning. She is that person you didn't want to invite to the party, but did, and then wished you hadn't.

American queen Sarah Palin spent her New Year's Eve in the traditional Wasilla way: placing angry phone calls to media outlets insisting her teen (mom) daughter and her man aren't high school dropouts.

A political pundit who sometimes acts, Sean Penn won widespread admiration for finally appearing likable on-screen in the Oscar-buzzed Milk. Now, though, some are calling his political associations anti-gay.

Larry Mendte was the first male host of Access Hollywood before becoming a news anchor in Philadelphia, where he worked with Alycia Lane, a fellow anchor who punched an undercover cop and sent bikini photos of herself to the wife of a sports TV personality, all of which somehow made Mendte jealous, causing him to hack into Lane's email and forward the most salacious bits to gossip journalists, which ended up getting her fired, though his activities eventually came out and got him fired, and then got him sued by her as well as charged in a criminal case. Got that? Well now Mendte has been sentenced: He got six months of house arrest and three years of probation. At his sentencing he apologized, and said this:

Fallen former newspaper mogul Conrad Black—Baron Black of Crossharbour, to you—is currently serving out a 78 month sentence in a Florida prison for fraud and obstruction of justice, related to his looting of his own company's funds for his personal use. Or so the government claims. The martyred Lord used to write editorials decrying the injustice of his convictions in the New York Sun, but they folded. Now he's writing the same damn thing in the Times of London. And the man who was once the world's third-biggest newspaper magnate sounds like the second coming of Eldridge Cleaver:

Now that we have a glorious, hopey new president, it's time for the assholes to come out. Idiot L.E.S. designer Apollo Braun—famous for being the idiot who makes sweatshirts saying "Who Killed Obama?"— has issued a mumbly press release declaring that he will not stop making his idiot sweatshirts, despite alleged pressure from the FBI, which may or may not be a likely fabrication like the rest of the idiot's stories. He also gives an appropriately amusing quote!:

High profile press fight! People magazine editor Larry Hackett just sent out an internal memo blasting the page one New York Times story today about People's alleged shady dealings with Angelina Jolie. Specifically, the Times cited two anonymous sources "with knowledge of the bidding" for the photos of Jolie and Brad Pitt's most recent newborns—which cost People $14 million—who said that there was an formal agreement that "obliged" the magazine to offer only positive coverage. Of course, as Hackett acknowledges, their coverage was positive; but he strongly asserts that the magazine would never "purposely slant coverage as condition for acquiring pictures." And indeed, the Times may have oversold that angle in their story. There's certainly a difference between what Jolie asks for, and what a magazine would explicitly "promise" to do. Read his full memo below:

Yesterday we noted that Prozac Nation author and now Yale Law School grad Elizabeth Wurtzel didn't pass the bar exam, which she took back in July. Some commenters were very mad! that we! would point this out! And others seemed a little more meh about it. Actually, maybe the most meh about it was Wurtzel herself who, when told about the post by the New York Observer, didn't really seem to give a shit:

Remember that column in the Murfreesboro (Tennessee) Post last week, in which the columnist rewrote the Jeffersons theme song for the Obama election? If you're a true music fan, you may recall the killer lyric, "Well we’re movin’ on up, To Washington, D.C. To a deee-luxe pimp pad, Painted whiiiite." Yes. Well that columnist is also, fittingly, a principal at one of the town's fine schools. And he's very sorry:

Haven't we warned you people that Twitter and all of its attendant microtrends are nothing but trouble? That also goes for "the internet" and "bloggers," and especially for "mom bloggers," a particularly virulent and dangerous subset. Corporate America has now learned this lesson the hard way. The outrage of Twitter moms has forced the big bad Motrin corporation to pull its totally innocent ad campaign for aspirin. Power to the people! Detect the horrible offense here for yourself:

The atheist War on Christmas looks to be hotter than ever this season! Emboldened by the victory of Barack Obama—a self-proclaimed Christian, but not the type who looks like he would handle serpents recreationally—nonbelievers are running ad campaigns all over the place telling everyone about god, and how he doesn't exist. The heathens have already plastered ads all over our nation's capital. They even have some semi-celebrities on their side. But the forces of Jesus are fighting back! It's an all-out battle for the soul of America's billboards:

You may recall that knife-wielding madman Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama's new Chief of Staff, has a dad named Benjamin who used to be an Israeli terrorist! Back in the 1940s Benjamin was in a militant Zionist group that massacred some Arabs and did various other freedom-promoting actions. These things can be a little sensitive, so uh, hey Rahm, whatever you do, don't let your dad go giving racist quotes about Arabs to Israeli newspapers. Okay? Oh hell, it's too late: So Benjamin, will Rahm influence the White House to more pro-Israel?

The annual War Against Christmas is starting again! This is the time of year when secular humanists and other assorted anti-American forces do various things to undermine Jesus, such as asking for the term "Holiday party" to be substituted for "Christmas party," and requesting that Jews, Muslims, and members of other blasphemous religions be "included" in things. But this year it's even worse, because some atheists have started a public ad campaign designed to destroy God! Fox News is taking this threat very seriously:

Oh Fox News PR machine, how we've missed your vicious personal attacks on anyone speaking ill of the Mothership! It's been literally months since one of Roger Ailes' specially trained attack flacks unloaded against a reporter or a PR person or anybody else for the crime of calling Fox News a den of writhing right-wing pus-sucking leeches, or words to that effect. Well now they're up against 6'6, 250-pound man who specializes in snatching balls. Finally, a fair fight: NBA Hall-of-Famer, erstwhile (former) Alabama Republican and free-speaking man Charles Barkley pointed out the obvious:

Oh professional media beef-starter Michael Wolff, is there any power to which you will not speak the truth, or at least some tough-sounding simulacrum thereof? No, there is not. News Corp. mogul Rupert Murdoch preemptively slammed Vanity Fair writer Wolff's upcoming biography of him, in a tone of indeterminate sincerity. Now Wolff has responded, telling the Observer that Rupert's just "a little embarrassed" about what he let slip, and what he calls are errors are really just "an internal political thing." That's much nicer than what he had to say about former New Yorker editor Tina Brown's new Daily Beast:

Oh America, when will your bothersome Puritanism stop infringing on The Weinstein Co.'s movie marketing efforts? First the MPAA banned the poster for the upcoming Kevin Smith flick Zack and Miri Make a Porno, on the grounds that it was too blowjob-y. So they changed the poster to one featuring simple stick figures. Sorry, whores of Hollywood Babylon, that's not enough to protect our children!: Ads for the movie are being rejected across the nation! Boston ads drew complaints. Philly banned them altogether. And in Los Angeles, the dastardly marketing scheme is preventing children from understanding a baseball strategy in which a runner on third base breaks for home as the pitch is thrown and the batter simultaneously bunts, which can pay off in a run unless the batter misses the bunt, in which case it's almost surely an out at the plate:

Gay website The Sword slammed gay website Radar Online yesterday for running an ad for ProtectMarriage.com—a site supporting an anti-gay marriage initiative in California—right above a Radar story slamming McDonald's for caving to "radical anti-gay extremists." A third gay website (this one) checked with Radar, which said the ad was automatically placed on the page by Google, not sold directly by the gay magazine. (The ad has also reportedly popped up on gay website Towleroad). Well this is why "Adventures in Contextual Advertising" was invented—because Google is a soulless hate machine! The innocent victims here: the gays. And the straights. [via The Sword]

Consider Peter Shankman: skydiving flack, taser lover, and the founder of Help A Reporter Out (HARO), the free (!) service that connects reporters with a world of flacks dying to appear in their stories. HARO is a lot like Profnet, except Profnet costs flacks thousands of dollars a year. We wondered why Shankman went to all the trouble of running HARO, and now we know: $800,000 a year! Is this oversharing man the future of flackery? Adweek takes an in-depth look at the HARO phenomenon, and does a little calculating to figure out that Shankman makes more than $3K every day selling ads on his two daily HARO emails, that go out to more than 30,000 flacks and other wannabe media sources. For an hour and a half of work. Okay, that's kind of slick. But you know who thinks HARO sucks? The people at Profnet! HARO's deficiencies:

Wow, this is a proud mark of the global influence of the financially puny New York Times: a story it did in June has prompted one of the world's richest men to sue his own brother for more than $2 billion. Awesome! Anil Ambani says that his brother Mukesh (they each inherited half of the massive Indian conglomerate Reliance) smeared his good name in the Times, so he had no choice but to sue him, the Times, and two Indian papers for 100 billion rupees. Here's the offending passage that set him off: