The most telling economic indicator about Sunday's New York Times Magazine investigation into Advanced Obamanomics is how it is not very economical with the words! There are 58 incidences of the word "but" alone. (Plus 10 "yet"s, 6 "however"s and 2 "on the other hand"s.) See, he is at heart a radical Marxist, but also a Clintonian sellout! A lover of markets, but also regulation! Etc. etc…1. He wants to cut taxes BUT he also wants to raise them! Barack Obama actually wants to cut taxes by an average of $900 a year for the average household, which is wayyyy more than John McCain. BUT, for the average household in the .01% of households, he wants to raise taxes by an average of $800,000 a year! This is radical socialism yes BUT we agree with former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin who maintains that studies show it is not sufficient to "stifle innovation" especially with regards to how rich people do their taxes. 2. He thinks Ronald Reagan did some good things for the economy BUT he also thinks Bill Clinton did some good things for the economy. Put another way, he is from Chicago BUT he is also from the Chicago School. As we all know, Barack Obama was a community organizer in Chicago. That job led him to think welfare reform was not a good idea, probably because he worked with people on welfare. But at the same time he also taught a constitutional law class at the very "Chicago School" that is the hotbed of all those people who think despite all evidence to the contrary that markets solve everything. By some form of "osmosis" Barack Obama is said to have absorbed the realization that markets do actually solve some things and now he wants to apply them to solving pollution or something. 3. He likes Bob Reich BUT he also likes Bob Rubin! So did Bill Clinton, you say? True enough BUT! Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs moneylover Bob Rubin ultimately prevailed in the "Battle of the Bobs" with Labor Secretary Bob Reich over Bill Clinton's economic policy. BUT! It is not 1993 anymore! Fifteen years have passed! Bob Rubin got Bill to cut the budget deficit, which was good for interest rates, which was in turn good for rich people, and also deregulate the fuck out of everything, which was really good for rich people, but guess what he just told the Times? He said: "The distributional issues are obviously more serious now." A few weeks ago Obama even tried to broker a little peace agreement with the Bobs over dinner!

Times are hard for celebrities: Rocafella Records co-founder and former Jay-Z sidekick Damon Dash (pictured, with Maybach) can't pay his mortgage! His bank has started foreclosure proceedings on his two apartments after the mini-mogul failed to pay his combined $78,500-per-month mortgage. Times are also hard for celebrity coverage: as you can see, it's been reduced to finding ways to tie in the mortgage crisis with celebrity lifestyles. The media's already expanded the definition of "celebrity" to include politicians and athletes, so playing off real estate trends is a logical next step. There's a massive news hole to fill. First Ed McMahon was foreclosed on, now this! When will it stop? We can't wait to find out! [Newsday. Pic via NYM]

One sad milestone in a business' decline is when they come to find that the real estate they hold-once incidental-has become more valuable than the actual business conducted on the real estate. Wall Street firms collapse and sell their towering headquarters for liquidity. Nobody wants to eat at Ruby Tuesdays any more, but they sure have lots of parcels of land! And...cue segue to the newspaper industry. Gnomish tightwad and Tribune Co. chief Sam Zell wants to sell the Chicago Tribune's headquarters for condos. They're more lucrative than newspapers these days: First people thought Zell would just sell the Tribune's tower, then lease it back and keep the paper there. But no!:

Right in sync with the meltdown of America's subsidized mortgage giants comes still more evidence the nation's vaunted free market is broken: Fox News Channel chief Roger Ailes just took home a $4.5 million performance bonus, bringing his total annual compensation to $20 million. It's true, as Silicon Alley Insider points out, that Fox News retains a wide overall lead over CNN, with 1.5 million viewers per day. But annual bonuses are supposed to reflect performance over the past year, and by that measure this one is a bizarre waste of money.

How does Boston Market offer such cheap meals to its sad customers, aside from through atrociously poor food quality? By skimping on TV commercials! Agency Spy caught the fast food chain overdubbing the advertisement at left, in which one guy's voice says "five new meal-size deals for $4.99" but his lips betray the original boom-time price of $5.99. Because, hey, who wants to pay for another take?? Whatever, just keep the stuff cheap. Subprime mortgage holders, ex Bear Stearns traders and eventually everyone will thank Boston Market for its frugality when the still-unfolding economic depression turns us into hobos.

Last month the New York Times announced it would be raising its cover price from $1.25 to $1.50, and there were several alarmed articles full of ominous grumbling. But the increase didn't actually come into effect until today, and there appears to be not even a peep of outrage online from readers who are short a quarter. Have we all grown 20% more appreciative of the Times in the last month? Or-more likely-is it just that no one who owns a computer has bought a copy of a newspaper today?

Cox Enterprises announced today that the Austin American-Statesman is up for sale, along with 28 smaller papers across several states. This comes just after the Daytona Beach News-Journal was put up for sale, and the NJ Star-Ledger and Trenton Times have been threatened to be sold, and Dow Jones couldn't even sell the Ottaway chain of papers, though Tribune managed to unload Newsday, and not a second too soon. So who's the magical buyer that's going to step up and buy all these papers? Probably not would-be news mogul Sam Zell: Tribune Company's value has fallen by $20 million per day under his reign. Free Dunkin Donuts coffee with every newspaper business sold?

McClatchy, the struggling newspaper chain that made an ill-fated purchase of Knight Ridder in 2006, has just sent out a memo announcing that it is freezing employee wages across the entire company for the next year. The message that is increasingly going out to newspaper employees: accept wage freezes (or cuts), buyouts, and layoffs, or face total extinction. The full McClatchy memo is after the jump:

No one will shed tears for Dany Levy. The Daily Candy founder made close to $25 million, by our calculations, on the sale of her email shopping newsletter to Comcast. But former AOL honcho Bob Pittman's Pilot Group took the lion's share of the $125 million windfall, after paying Levy and her family investors just $3.5 million for the privilege five years ago. Pittman's incredible return on investment has helped rehabilitate his tarnished image. But, despite her cheery public pronouncements, Levy must lose some sleep wondering whether she could have driven a harder bargain in the dark post-dot-com days of 2003. Perhaps, one tipster wonders, her thoughts turn to Andy Russell, Pittman's junior partner at Pilot Group, and the "close family friend of Dany since childhood" who is said to have advised her on the $3.5 million valuation.

The New York Times has 32 reporters covering the Olympics in Beijing. Thirty-two! That's quite an investment from a company in the newspaper industry. Any big cash outlay is risky these days. Without relying on the crutch of "official budget numbers," we combined our sophisticated economic estimation skills with a patented "Media Value" formula to determine: Is this Olympics coverage worth the cost? Read on!

Daily Candy, the email newsletter for women who like to buy things, was improbably successful. Former journalist Dany Levy founded it in 2000; it quickly became profitable, and she sold a controlling stake in the business to the private investment firm Pilot Group in 2003 for $3.5 million. Pilot Group sold the newsletter to Comcast last week for (an unbelievable) $125 million. But Levy, we hear, retained about a 20% interest in Daily Candy-which would mean that she walked away from the sale with $25 million. That would make her the undisputed internet cash queen of New York media. Take that, Laurel Touby!

You know those handy online calculators that purport to tell you exactly how much any website is worth, were it for sale? They're the type of thing that bloggers use so they can brag that their blog is "worth" many thousands of dollars in a parallel universe. All these things are pretty blunt instruments, but Mental Floss found one called WebsiteOutlook.com that is very bad. Don't like our assessment? Why don't you just buy this entire website for $1.1 million, then? In reality, that won't even cover the value of a single Montauk Monster post. But oh, it gets even more ridiculous:

Guileless grownups and equally guileless children both seem to respond well to straightforward ad jingles with a catchy tune. But members of the disaffected 20-something creative underclass need a dash of ironic humor with our jingles, to makes us feel like we're not giving in so easily to corporate mind control. That's why the ads for FreeCreditReport.com are so popular-they show a 20-something guy (just like your friends!) singing a funny little song about how hard it is to work crappy jobs, and how happy he is that he can get a free credit report. Turns out the ads are misleading and the reports aren't free at all! How could you do this to us, guitar-strumming advertising guy? FreeCreditReport.com is run by Experian, and it actually signs you up for a $14.95 per month fee when it gives you your report. Making this even worse is the fact that we're all legally entitled to a free credit report from the company every year, via AnnualCreditReport.com. But Experian's site is incredibly successful, because we are all suckers for a catchy ad tune.

The economy is tanking and everybody is foraging for grubs rather than spending their hoarded nickels eating out at casual dining establishments. Poor Bennigan's just went under. Ruby Tuesday is vowing not to suffer the same fate! So the Bennigan's-like chain, which is hanging on by a thread (deep fried thread, Ranch on the side), has come up with a smart new plan to revive itself: blow up one of its stores! With explosives. This is sure to work. The detonation will be broadcast live on the company's website. The message of this stunt? "Our company sucks."

Money is such a fleeting pleasure. Wouldn't you rather work somewhere where you were rewarded with something "more valuable than cash": appreciation? Sure you would! So apply now at Chicago's Empower PR, which boasts high-powered clients ranging from "the nation's leading sex therapist" to "Space Command's 'Stress Doctor.'" And bosses, take note: "After implementing an 'appreciation beanbag toss' every week in his office (in which [the CEO] and his employees would toss a beanbag to each other and share meaningful appreciations), his clients tripled in number and his bottom line increased dramatically." See, paying with "appreciation" equals big savings! The full press release touting this revolutionary compensation plan, after the jump:

Page Six today brings news of a faaabulous bash in St. Tropez on the yacht of Denise Rich, the Clinton pal and wife of disgraced financier Marc Rich. And to help her bring out the real stars to her party, Denise has teamed up with Erik Wachtmeister, who runs A Small World, the much-hyped "Myspace for Millionaires" social networking site for the rich. How symbolic! Two years ago, fading mogul Harvey Weinstein invested in ASW, which got a bunch of press casting both of them as the vanguard of the Next Big Thing. Now, they're more like a coalition of the washed-up.

Gnomish, Harley-riding media Methuselah and Tribune Co. boss Sam Zell inspires a bit of resentment amongst his minions, mainly for doing things like laying them all off while cussing them out. But his ex-Tribune employees are now striking back-on a blog! Prepare to be hoisted on the new media petard of broke, grizzled newsmen, Mr. Zell the multimillionaire!

It's a well-known fact that the monkeys have been plotting against us since the days of yore. But their terrible plans will get sped up quite horribly once they've mastered the skill of banking. That's right. Someone's been teaching the little hellions how to use money! "[O]ne can get some clues as to how evolution prepared us for money from the burgeoning research that seeks to present animals with economic choices. To gain perspective on human financial decisions, one may ask, what would monkeys do?Keith Chen and Marc Hauser at Yale University taught monkeys about resources that bear a strong resemblance to money. Monkeys don't care about money, per se, but they do care about marshmallows."

Angelo Mozilo was the grossly overpaid CEO of disastrous mortgage lending company Countrywide, who became the human face of the subprime crisis while simultaneously finding his customers' pleas for help "disgusting." But scratch that, because his own sister says he's nice. And she's a liberal! [HuffPo]

The economy these days is terrible and scary! Uh, notwithstanding yesterday's biggest gain in financial stocks in two decades. The important thing is, business figures must look terrified for the future of us all. So the WSJ had to redo some of its overly happy portraits (like Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit's, pictured). Below, a larger version of Pandit, and before and after shots of Hank Paulson, courtesy of CJR. Their furrowed brows will solve the credit crisis: