The White House has issued not one but two press releases accusing the New York Times of "gross negligence" in blaming George W. Bush's policies for the housing bubble.

Oh, hey, look, it's Barack Obama, being elitist and hating America, during a depression. Prepare to see this photo of the president-elect playing golf throughout the right-wing media, and probably everywhere.

Things are bad when even an admitted gangster is furiously distancing himself from you. Bob Abbinanti may have admitted to running mob gambling rackets, but don't you accuse him of knowing Rod Blagojevich!

Grandly coiffed activist Al Sharpton spoke today at the offices of 5WPR, the agency led by that other noted civil rights activist, Ronn [sic] Torossian. Ronn's keeping busy, but we hear his firm has issues...

Fox News is famous for its pathologically agressive flackery—hiring the meanest flacks in the business, and smearing reporters, detractors, and competitors. But rival CNBC is learning to be just as bitchy as Fox itself!

With this "holiday" card, Fox is again on the wrong side of the "War On Christmas" it's so worried about. And apparently this is supposed to totally make up for smearing all those reporters:

We heard Time's Washington Bureau chief Jay Carney was leaving the magazine, but now we hear the stunning reason: to be VP Joe Biden's communications director. Carney was in the tank all along!

Hahaha: Incompetent, litigious superflack Ronn [sic] Torossian is suing a rival for $20 million for calling him a douchebag, on the internet! Hahahaha! This is my favorite story of the holiday season:

The Rod Blagojevich scandal has dominated several news cycles, so the Obama team seems to have decided the time is right to distance, distance, distance itself from the corrupt Illinois governor.

The Post had a fun time this morning with two Fashion Institute students who giggled about being arrested for dealing coke. Now the school assures everyone: there are no drugs on campus any more:

Dear readers: you may have heard that Sam Zell's Tribune Company recently filed for bankruptcy. Do not be alarmed! Just because the company is drowning in $12 billion in debt with few prospects for a revival of its fortunes is no reason to believe that it's anything but "business as usual" at the trusty Tribune. When Zell bought the company last year, employees were assured, "Going forward, employees participating in the [Employee Stock Ownership Plan] will be invested alongside Sam Zell, one of today’s most successful investors." Awesome! And the company has already assured everyone that there's no need to get upset by today's unfortunate, catastrophic turn of events:

Hey, why all the layoffs this week? Please don't say "It's the economy, stupid." That's really annoying. Of course it is the economy, but this week has been bad even by the standards of the last three months. Because it has special qualities! Qualities that, unfortunately, conspired to screw thousands of people out of employment. After the jump, we'll have a little review of the most recent bad news, and explain why everybody got executed just after they finished their last Thanksgiving leftovers.

With so many layoffs going down today, it's a good time to take a look at how, exactly, a layoff memo should be written. Actually, any time you're critiquing a flood of layoff memos is by definition a bad time. But we'll disregard that for the moment. People need to be let down in the proper way, lest they get justifiably angry enough to put managers up against the wall. After the jump, we analyze five elements of today's memos that illustrate everything you corporate flacks need to know about firing people like us:

A nasty little internet troll may recently have sent you an email with the subject line, " 'Jews Have Ruined Our Country.'" But the message didn't come from an anti-semite; it came from the Anti-Defamation League, which is trying to prevent Jews from being blamed for the financial crisis, by spreading blame for the financial crisis to Jews. The idea, of course, is to drum up preemptive outrage among recipients of the mass email by quoting some bigots. Trouble is, the inflammatory subject line is pretty much all they got.

President-elect Obama—allegedly a 'man of the people'—is allegedly buying a fancy $30,000 ring for his fancy wife, allegedly! It was in the trusty Daily Mail, and now it's the top story on Drudge, meaning it is the single most important news story in all the world. Elitist Obama drops 30K on bling for his wife during a recession—and this bling will be made out of rhodium, the world's most expensive metal! This story is almost certainly bullshit, and we will tell you exactly why. [Updates below—we were right]:

In April, the Times published a 7,600-word story on how major news networks presented as their own military "analysts" former officers who were on the payroll of major defense contractors and who had received talking points in special Pentagon briefings. The networks declined to cover the story and the scandal never caught fire. The newspaper's solution? Recast the story to focus on a single villain, retired General Barry McCaffrey, who NBC News' Brian Williams defended as a "passionate patriot" the last time around.

Did you happen to catch Barack Obama's weekly camboy YouTube this Thanksgiving? Earnest and adorable as ever, the Office of the President Elect was unsubtle in its marketing; the word "new" appeared seven times in its 600-word speech on the economy, including two prominent instances of what appears to be the Obama administration's new catchphrase: "New Beginning." It looks like we have the much-awaited replacement term for "stimulus," "bailout" and "recovery package," all of which are despised by voters.

Former MSNBC host Dan Abrams is a popular guy, because it's been rumored that he has jobs to give out. Abrams, you'll recall, is starting a ridiculous, conflict-of-interest-riddled PR firm that will distinguish itself by selling corporate clients (or just moguls) the advice of current journalists, bloggers, and other media types. The Observer spoke to Abrams, and he says he's gotten 650 applications already—"the bulk of whom are freelance journalists, people who are writing books and individuals who have recently been laid off or walked away from jobs in the media industry." Are we missing something here? The whole reason that people got upset about Abrams' business plan in the first place is that he says he's going to offer the consulting services of current, not former, media people. Former journalists work for damn near every PR firm in America. That's nothing new. Here's Abrams' offended quote today:

Some poor flack from money-burning "insurance" company AIG tried to send Wonkette editor Ken Layne—a known terrorist!—several long, dry emails correcting him on some minor point of fact, until a pissed Layne vowed "I am going to post all of these, for hilarity," and now AIG looks thoroughly incompetent in media relations as well as the insurance business. Why must it take a dangerous patriot like Ken Layne to teach AIG about jokes? [Wonkette]

General Motors caught a leeetle bit of flack this week for flying its executives to Washington on a private jet in order to beg for a taxpayer bailout. "Hey," said politicians, the media, and the general public, "you have less than zero money. Should you really have spent thousands on a private jet?" We would also add, "Shouldn't you have driven a car?" Later GM and its fellow broke automakers left Washington with no money, making this one of the colossal PR fuckups of 2008, and possibly of the preceding decade as well. But everything is different now, because GM is going to have somewhat fewer private jets. So please give them some multiple of billions of dollars okay? They did have five company planes. Now they're cutting down to just three. Tightening the belt!