There's a blissful, View-free weekend coming up (well, except for Floridians), but until then, we leave you with this clip of an undaunted Elisabeth Hasselbeck locking horns with Whoopi Goldberg on today's show. The conservative co-host challenged Goldberg about the folly of negotiating with terrorists (a position we're sure she came to after the unilateral talks between her and Joy Behar collapsed spectacularly backstage). Instead, Hasselbeck embraced a brand of conflict resolution no doubt passed on by benevolent dictator Barbara Walters: no negotiations (or hugs), just a simple cold shoulder, a passive-aggressive remark, and a threatening, late-night phone call from someone who sounds a whole lot like Henry Kissinger.

When NBC Universal poached executive producers from TV fashion competition Project Runway in May, we wrote the move would "enable [NBC's] Bravo to create something very similar to Runway," which producer Harvey Weinstein was in the midst of moving to Lifetime. That seems to be precisely what has happened, per a Bravo casting call on Craigslist for "talented designers where the winner will win a large cash prize." The likes of Weinstein are none too happy that NBC is moving ahead with a copycat show while the Weinstein Company is enjoined by court order from doing anything with Runway. Poor Harvey is going to get clobbered! Says Page Six:

It was only a matter of time before the alleged psychotic gay bridezilla that is George Takei fired back at his one-time TV captain William Shatner, whose claims that Takei invited every living Star Trek alumnus but him to his wedding met stiff, Suluian resistance in an interview airing this evening on Entertainment Tonight. After the jump, hear all the honors, weddings, funerals and other events Shatner has shined on in apparently forsaking his chums from the Final Frontier. "We keep reaching out and reaching out," Takei says, "but he takes that and twists it and crumples it and turns it into something that's rather... ugly." Damn it, Jim! So can the relationship ever be mended? Yes, nods Takei, laying down terms we hope find the actors setting aside their differences at last — for the gays' sake, if not Shatner's own. (Be warned, their video is set to autoplay. It's psychotic, too!)Click to view

It's a bad time to be backstage at ABC: not even twenty-four hours after word broke about behind-the-scenes in-fighting at The View, the Chicago Sun-Times is reporting similar agita over at Dancing with the Stars, where the tyrannical Cloris Leachman has proven impossible to send home. It appears the producers and fellow dancers are firmly on Team Florence Henderson, as they're tired of the 82-year-old Leachman evading the ax simply by hamming it up for the cameras. "She has a Quentin Tarantino role to get to," they cry! "Does she need anything else?"

When Elisabeth Hasselbeck wore a John McCain-boosting T-shirt on Tuesday's installment of The View, little did she know it would set off a 24-hour, Defamer-consuming chain reaction that would lead to booing, a now-notorious backstage conflict, and a through-the-looking-glass emergence of this humble blogspot as one of the show's Hot Topics (also, it introduced us to Sheetzucacapoopoo — thanks, Elisabeth!). Now, as Hasselbeck prepares to introduce vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin at two Florida rallies this weekend, one of our agents at The View informs us that the problematic T-shirt was the subject of a contentious ABC conference call today:

After Regis confronted Whoopi Goldberg today about the inter-host fighting on The View, we had a feeling that our exclusive report about backstage tensions between Joy Behar and Elisabeth Hasselbeck might be addressed on today's installment, and that both Behar and Hasselbeck would summarily dismiss the conflict as a load of Sheetzucacapoopoo. What we didn't expect was the weird, elusive way the hosts attempted to talk around the issue.Sure, Hasselbeck denied the story, but Goldberg then assured folks that the View co-hosts would never have personal fights in front of the audience, neatly skipping the fact that the blowup in question was said to happen backstage. Also less than forthcoming? A major Behar/Hasselbeck reconciliation. The closest the two came was when Behar tactfully said, "If she doesn't say the crazy things she says, how can I say the crazy things I say?" Then, after deriding the gossip about their feuding, Goldberg launched into gossip about other celebrities feuding. Nice segue, Sister Act!

To your left, witness Elisabeth Hasselbeck and Joy Behar in happier times at the 2006 launch party for Behar's book, which was for some reason entitled Sheetzucacapoopoo: My Kind of Dog. Sadly, peaceful scenes like that may be few and far between now, thanks to constant on-screen warring and, most especially, backstage battle royales. Yesterday, we brought you word from a Defamer operative about a behind-the-scenes fight between Behar and Hasselbeck that went down after cameras for The View stopped rolling. Now, another tipster has written in to corroborate the account, as well as add new details:

You can take the Whoopi out of the girlfight at The View, but you can't necessarily take the girlfight out of Whoopi. That seems to be the lesson learned this morning on Live with Regis and Kelly, where Ms. Goldberg — who was out sick for Wednesday's particularly violent drama — played dumb, then defensive, then philosophical about the onscreen battles (not to mention the fantastic backstage bloodbaths) plaguing her show's panel. "What is the problem with those women?" asks Regis, his furrowed brow projecting the sincere concern of a man who knows a thing or two about handling high-strung co-hosts. If there is peace to be found in this literal no-man's-land, surely Reeg will mediate it — assuming, that is, no one burns Elisabeth Hasselbeck down before then. [Live with Regis and Kelly]

As we briefly mentioned earlier, poor formerly-drug-addled actress Lindsay Lohan has seen her role on hit-ish ABC dramedy Ugly Betty cut from six episodes to four. And, in fact, E! reports that Lohan will also be cut out of the episodes she's already filmed, as "she was not so interested in creating a character." Yikes. Word is, she was an unpleasant, chain-smoking, diva on set, especially toward the show's star, America Ferrera. Lindsay was pissy and lazy and demanding and the two butted heads, all culminating when it came time to film a big pantsing scence. Yes, pantsing. Reports Page Six:

We mentioned Michael Wolff's distaste for Tina Brown last week, but today he goes on the offensive. "I think it's preposterous," he starts off when Leon Neyfakh asks him to comment on Brown's new site, The Daily Beast, which competes (to some degree) with Wolff's own Newser.com. "I don't even think it's a rehash of Talk—I think it's a rehash of [CNBC's] Topic A." It gets better! "She's just an old magazine hack... It's like she's been on ice for ten years and suddenly she's been thawed out again." Now we can all look forward to watching Tina strike back in a few books when the Beast reviews Wolff's new book on Rupert Murdoch. [NYO, previously]

Imagine you have $800 million due to various banks in two months, and your chief holdings are a couple of billion dollars in rapidly-declining CBS and Viacom stock. You've opened some delicate negotiations with the bankers into how you'll, uh, pay them. What do you do? If you're Sumner Redstone, you immediately take the obvious option — sell some more shares! — off the table, and then proclaim you don't know how all this happened because you don't really run your company (National Amusements). Then in the future, presumably, you can tell your mouthy daughter you were "forced" to sell her movie theater chain because it was the only option left, ha ha. That'll teach her to try and be your successor! That's just how Sumner rolls, said the Wall Street Journal:

Official websites give celebrities a powerful way to fighti rumors or promote new projects, free of the pesky filter of the entertainment media. But it's becoming clear vanity sites can backfire. Beatles drummer Ringo Starr recently pissed off fans by admonishing them, via his website, to stop sending him mail. And now William Shatner has taped a long diatribe against his Star Trek co-star George Takei, who allegedly did not invite Shatner to his recent gay wedding. It can't be long before Shatner yanks his YouTube video on Takei's "sickness" and "psychosis" over who got more camera time forty years ago, particularly now that Takei has told AP that Shatner was, in fact, invited to the wedding. And if Shatner really meant to attack "Takei's decision to come out of the closet later in life," as AP has it, he'll probably be getting left off many more invite lists in the future. Click the video icon to watch the highlights.

While it wasn't hard to see some of today's blowups coming, we were unprepared for the latest feud to hit Hollywood: Brady Bunch materfamilias Florence Henderson versus resurgent Dancing with the Stars hoofer Cloris Leachman! The 82-year-old Leachman has paso dobled her way into America's hearts over the past few weeks with her patented brand of cussing and cleavage, but to fellow Dancing vet Henderson, that simply isn't how its done! She spilled on her anti-Cloris crusade to Life & Style:

A lot of fighting happened in front of the cameras on today's heated installment of The View, but according to a tip we just received from a Defamer operative, it was nothing compared to what went on after the show was over. Our tipster says that Elisabeth Hasselbeck was upset that Joy Behar has been using The View to tout Behar's upcoming stand-up performance, and the conservative co-host demanded equal time in a confrontation that got ugly:

Here's a preview of John McCain on Late Show tonight. He told host David Letterman, "I screwed up," then laughed and did a little "gee whiz" shrug, and made an awkward joke about being tortured in Vietnam. "What can I say?!" the Republican presidential nominee asked. Um, maybe give a reason why you lied about having to fly back to DC when you bailed on Letterman's show last time? Apparently that wasn't in the cards. Letterman later hit McCain for paling around with Watergate burglar and would-be firebomber G. Gordon Liddy, even though McCain has slammed Barack Obama for an arguably more distant relationship with 1960s radical William Ayers. By the end of the segment McCain appeared to be in full retreat on the Ayers issue. Witness McCain statement at the end of the clip after the jump (along with more bizarre face-pulls).

Tina Brown launched The Daily Beast last Monday, a fact you're undoubtedly aware of by now thanks to Tina's unrivaled talent for drumming up media attention. The Barry Diller-backed site is a news aggregator—or as Brown prefers to describe it, a site that "sifts, sorts and curates" the web—a concept that isn't all that original considering there are half a dozen sites that do precisely the same thing, most notably Arianna Huffington's Huffington Post, which was widely described as Tina's primary competitor last week. But it isn't Huffington who is most concerned with Brown's arrival on the new media scene. That distinction goes to Michael Wolff, the Vanity Fair contributing editor and author who founded the buzz-less aggregation site called Newser.com a year ago.

We swear we didn't mean to throw a bucket of gas on the smoldering crash site where Werner Herzog collided a while back with Abel Ferrara, leaving the legendary auteurs fighting for their lives over Herzog's plans to remake Ferraras's 1992 masterpiece Bad Lieutenant with Nicolas Cage. But thanks in part to our revealing audience with Herzog last summer, the fire is back to uncontained levels today as Ferrara picks off his Bavarian contemporary one vicious shot at a time in Filmmaker Magazine:

New York magazine's daily online chats about the election are usually just mildly interesting, since the journalists involved tend to be overly polite to one another, because who knows who you're going to be sending a job application to someday? Even Gawker Media veterans and that Daily Kos maniac act all pleasant. But Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi has never been one for such fraternal niceties, and when nymag.com threw him a sparring partner from National Review, the predictably caustic lefty went to work with his fangs, at one point typing, "tell me you're not ashamed." It was awesome and just really uncomfortable at the same time. Highlights:

As a 14-year-old transitioning to more grown-up roles, child star Dakota Fanning has an important choice to make: Does she want to be a Jodie Foster or a Lindsay Lohan? (Also, lesbian leanings in former child actresses: discuss) We've always pulled for the precocious Fanning, so you can imagine how we felt yesterday when we discovered that Rowan Woods, the director of Dakota's upcoming Winged Creatures, had called out the actress as a tantrum-throwing "diva" whose performance in the film turned out to be a "disaster" that necessitated some judicious editing. Today, Woods got in touch with us to present his side of the story:

Though it's been reported that Kendra Wilkinson is on her way out of Hugh Hefner's harem, there's one person that isn't getting into the Playboy Mansion under her watch, and that's footballer Tom Brady. One last night's episode of The Girls Next Door, Wilkinson was told that she'd have to wear the New England Patriot's jersey for a special charity flag football game, and the look of utter revulsion that passed across her face was impressive for a woman regularly tasked with resuscitating the 82-year-old Hefner's nether regions.It seems that San Diego native Wilkinson still hasn't forgiven Brady for beating her beloved Chargers in the AFC championship, and she'd rather go naked (a simple proposition!) then wear the number of the noted Gisele diddler. Lucky for Wilkinson, then, that the Chargers won't be playing the Philadelphia Eagles, where her rumored secret fiance Hank Baskett is a wide receiver. Meanwhile, we await the sports affiliations of brand-new Girls Next Door Karissa and Kristina Shannon, though we do hear that the twins are no strangers to "unnecessary roughness." [E!]