In London today, Amy Winehouse's family is holding her funeral. Here an America, Amy Winehouse is being decried by flacks.

Here's how all those "spotted" items get in gossip columns: celebrities eat at restaurants, restaurants tell their PR people, PR people call gossip columnists, and—voila!—"Celebrity A was spotted at Restaurant B last night." But what if the restaurant is a shitty chain eatery, and the "celebrity" is a 13-year-old girl whose father decided to get into politics and who has never taken an affirmative step toward establishing her own notoriety? Same thing.

Completely powerless to keep his client from rambling on radio shows, Good Morning America, and TMZ, Charlie Sheen's publicist Stan Rosenfield quit. We gotta hand it to him, he survived a long time in the worst job in the world.

Robert Gibbs, the nation's highest-paid kindergarten teacher, will resign in February, the New York Times reports. He says he'll continue to advise Obama and intends to get working on his 2012 re-election campaign.

We reported this morning that Harold Ford had never filed a New York tax return because that's precisely what his spokeswoman Tammy Sun told us. Now she's trying to backpedal, and, we hear, lying to other reporters about our story.

After Clinton flack Howard Wolfson helped sink Hillary's presidential campaign, he was rewarded with a Fox News gig, a New Republic blog, and a high-paying job with Mike Bloomberg's reelection campaign. Now Mike's taking him on full time!

PR Week, a trade journal for and about flacks, has come to the defense of the New York Times after we published a batch of emails showing how deferential some Times reporters were to flacks. Imagine that!

The New York Times broke the story of Eliot Spitzer's hooker habit last year, launching a PR shitstorm of epic proportions. But according to e-mail traffic we've obtained, the Times showed Spitzer's flacks extraordinary deference as the scandal unfolded.

Glenn Beck's public image as a grandiose paranoid ex-drunk is so unshakable that now he's hoping his publicist Matthew Hiltzik's good reputation will rub off on him: He's got such a nice flack, he can't really be a monster, right?

Does trying to convince people unsure about the shaky economy and plunging home values to sign mortgages seem like a good idea, right now? Pollster Grifter Mark Penn thinks so!

Oh. Damn. Microtrend-spotting evil flack Mark Penn has struck upon the way to get rich. And he reveals it today, in his microtrend column! Totally. Ironclad. Moneymaking. This is why he's much wealthier than you:

Brian Tierney was a bulldog Philadelphia PR man much hated by Philadelphia journalists before he led a group that bought the Philadelphia Inquirer and Daily News in 2006. Let's review how that's worked out:

Professional loser Mark Penn—the strategist who can tell you exactly how to become disliked by each individual microsegment of the population—has a new book ad WSJ column. Let's talk about how stupid it is:

Be-sweatered fool and Clinton flack Howard Wolfson may follow his former boss to the State Department, where some sources speculate he may act as State Department Spokesman. That is, if he can get over his fear of flying, and the fact that no one in the press corps has any respect for him! [HuffPo]

Have you heard the one about the Disney Channel star in a nude-photo scandal? No, not that one. Or that one. But rather Adrienne Bailon, the co-star of Disney's series Cheetah Girls and, before last weekend, among the network's last remaining female talent not to have half-naked pictures of herself circulating online. Good thing she has a friend in the crisis-publicity racket, right? Alas, she has neither a crisis nor a friend if her mercenary flack-turned-famewhore gossip Jonathan Jaxson's stunningly dumb TV mea culpa is any indication.We'll get to the details in a bit, but we know what you're probably thinking: Who? But even if Bailon's name escapes you, Jonathan Jaxson is likely enough of a gossip-culture parasite to leave a mark: The 25-year-old former publicist for the Backstreet Boys is the same freak who last year solicited Perez Hilton's aid in boosting the profile of his upstart blog, JJ's Dirt. And by "solicited," we mean "offered to whore himself out for a private Perez sex tape in exchange for interviews and other [ahem] resources." When both the sex tape and Perez's help failed to materialize, Jaxson fed their IM chats to Page Six and eventually published the blogger's phone number on JJ's Dirt.

PRWeek got predictions about the election from 30 flacks around the country. One (1) of them predicted a McCain victory. So be sure to hire Nick Kalm of Chicago's Reputation Partners for strategic counsel on how to horribly embarrass yourself in any large, public group! "Regardless of who wins, however, the level of partisan rancor will be so high, it will make people long for the 'good old days' of Bush's second term," he says. Okay, just for that we will print his entire god damn answer below:

Sometimes you have to make an effort to reinstate communications with (or in our case, about) old friends who you haven't spoken to in a while. We used to write regularly about the travails of Jonathan Cheban: party boy flack, designer, and former Access Hollywood correspondent and Lizzie Grubman partner. But we've said barely a word about him since February, when he supposedly registered at Barney's for his own birthday party. Jonathan is simply too crucial a character in the celebutard publicity machine to go unnoticed. We hear he still leads a very eclectic social life. What do you hear? Anyone with important Cheban information, please email us.

Dan Klores is the smartest man in PR. That's because he's not in PR any more. He founded his eponymous agency, which made (and still makes) him a ton of money, and then decided, "You know what? Fuck this shit. I'm gonna make movies." Now he spends all his time making (actually good!) documentaries and hosting soirees for various power brokers, without ever having to deal with the actual PR industry much. And he's about to move further up the entertainment industry food chain, because HBO has signed him to direct a movie version of his Believe-it-or-not psycho documentary Crazy Love. This, I will watch.

OK! is the celebrity magazine that is the most willingly manipulated by celebrity flacks, which is really saying something. So it's perfectly appropriate that the magazine just promoted sleazy former celebrity uberflack Rob Shuter to its executive editor position. That's because Shuter is skilled at doing the two things that OK! is most famous for: lying on behalf of celebrities, and losing other people's money. Even he, the great fabulist, couldn't write a more sickening script than this.

Obama's newest flack is former journalist! It's cute when journos move to politicians' press offices and pretend they'll still give a shit about The People's Right To Know. "The thing that really made me feel at peace with the decision is this conversation we had about telling the truth," Linda Douglass says. (Obama's DIFFERENT he cares about CHANGE and TRUTHS.) And so, it begins. [WP]