Before Devil Wears Prada was filmed, before Project Runway made its reality television debut, before fashion grew beyond even the prominent role she had envisioned for it, Anna Wintour was compared in the Times to George W. Bush. It was one of Maureen Dowd's absurdly tortured analogies, but one of the rare ones that today sounds less ridiculous: If Page Six's source is to be believed, the Vogue editor is, like Bush, about to step away from the monster she's created, leaving to a more glamorous successor the job of revival. There is plenty to be done:

Arianna Huffington is guest-hosting Rachel Maddow's show on MSNBC tonight, and the lineup looks impressively ambitious: Google CEO Eric Schmidt, HBO talk-show host Bill Maher, stat-whiz Nate Silver and Cory Booker, the Newark mayor to whom the internet publisher was once rumored romantically linked (absurdly, her staff thought). The high-profile lefty gig is an appropriate laurel for an ambitious woman whose left-leaning site produced landmark coverage and gangbusters traffic amid the 2008 election. But as former Huffington Post staff can attest (and have), television appearances also mean a frenzy of last-minute research for editors like Roy Sekoff or Colin Sterling who prepare Huffington's talking points. With an entire, hourlong show to host, rather than a brief guest appearance, it would be reasonable for staff to fear another of the screaming, teary emotional breakdowns described to us by several former HuffPo staffers.

Ad Age ran the numbers and found magazines eliminated 3,200 jobs between June and the end of September. And that was before the Great Magazine Die-Off! Here's what to do before your severance checks run out, former magazine people: Don't put off looking for a job; call up those contacts you thoughtfully cultivated before you were laid off and be an insane, annoying optimist. Do so and you just might be among the lucky few to snag one of the jobs on the following list, which depressingly represents the sum total of what Ad Age found to be still available, sometimes:

Just because Treasury Dept. Bailout wonderboy Neel Kashkari gets to play with $750 billion in taxpayer money doesn't mean he actually has a good job. He came in looking peppy enough to bore holes in a taxpayer's forehead with only the power of his laser eyebeams; now, he's haggard. His eyes are dazed, plaintive even, and he's putting on classic stress-related weight under his chin. Congressmen yell at him. Old high school teachers talk shit about him. Internet jerks mock his awesome senior yearbook page. And he's really just a front man, taking all the heat for Hank Paulson's decisions and the mistakes of a million greedy Wall Street traders before him. We feel more sympathy for him than any other Ferrari-loving overconfident Republican ski bum Wharton grad in America. Keep on truckin, Neel.

In the last two days, we told you about layoffs at Forbes.com, Essence, Entertainment Weekly, and National Geographic, with a bonus false alert at Nylon thrown in for good measure. And the sad fact is that these are just the ones we could get around to doing. All these media layoffs are like a band-aid being pulled off verrrrryyyy slowly, and—unfortunately for the laid-off—each progressive wave of cuts makes us want to tune out the pain even more. This is the saddest thing of all. When good people get laid off they deserve to elicit some shock; they deserve to be remembered, and talked about, and reminisced upon. They deserve for the people who cover their demise to go into detail about who they were, and what they've done in their careers, and the big stories they broke, and how they changed things, and who they knew, and where they might go from here. They deserve commenters to bemoan their departure and joke about their good lines and reassure them that they'll be missed. But we have to face reality here: it ain't gonna happen. The media now is like a city with a high murder rate, where people get shot dead with such mind-numbing regularity that it gets harder and harder to summon the appropriate amount of outrage for their doom. We all still imagine that when our time comes, there will be a collective pause amongst our peers, and everyone will silently cross themselves and wonder how it could happen to such a talented person. But realistically, we'll be just another number. The best you can do now is say your little blanket agnostic prayer at night for all these assorted victims, then keep your head down and hope that you can ride out the downturn until good days come back again. On that note, here's some more layoff news we didn't get to today:

Wow, here's a clip that doesn't make you envy Neel Kashkari. The hawk-eyed Ferrari lover who's been assigned to run the government bailout of our dead financial system took a little trip up to Capitol Hill today to speak to Congress about how all that money is being used. Rep. Elijah Cummings did not appreciate Neel's tone! "Let me tell YOU something," he hollered at Neel, whose eyes went wide. He recovered well though. Neel, you are one unlucky sacrificial lamb, buddy. Watch the rage of Cummings below:

Sarah Lacy, the Silicon Valley author, BusinessWeek reporter and notorious interviewer, worked a bit of grave-dancing into her blog "tribute" to Valleywag, the site gutted by Gawker Media Wednesday. Gawker Media chief Nick Denton was the "best" Valleywag editor, and his posts were "sexy, fun... and important." The site's current editor, Owen Thomas, has had far more time to dutifully torture Valley fixture Lacy and, what do you know, she writes that Valleywag "just stopped being a daily, must-read for" her under his tenure. Perhaps Lacy imagines she could have run the site better, had she taken Denton up on his offer to take the reins a couple of years ago, before Thomas came on the scene.

If you're gunning for a high-ranking job in the Obama administration, hope you've kept a record of everything you've done over the past decade or so. Potential cabinet members and other top officials in the administration have been asked to fill out this list of 63 questions. You'll be happy to hear, though, that traffic tickets under $50 need not be reported. [NYT]

Interested in serving in the president-elect's cabinet, or some other high-ranking capacity? Obama has 63 questions he'd like you to answer, quite possibly the most extensive vetting process in White House history. In addition to listing everything embarrassing or controversial that's ever happened to you, which must be pretty standard from administration to administration, or whether anyone in your family owns a gun, there are all sorts of exciting internet-related inquiries. Has anything been written about you, online, ever? You basically have to send all your Google results. Obama's team will also need anything you've ever written online, including fake names (see excerpt above). More exciting demands after the jump!

Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson is continuing to reshape the post-Murdoch version of the paper in his own image. In the wake of an early October reshuffling of editors, Thomson sent another top editor to lead the London bureau a few weeks ago, in a clear push to try to expand the paper's international prestige. And today Thomson told the staff that Gerard Baker is the new Deputy Editor-In-Chief of the WSJ and Dow Jones—and, like Thomson himself, Baker is veteran of the Times of London and the FT. Taste the international flavor. The full memo introducing Baker to the staff is below:

Chin up, unemployed journalists! Though media companies seem to accelerate their layoffs every day — Time Inc. Europe, People and CondeNet were on deck Tuesday — the optimist looks for opportunity in the panicked horror. One might, for example, sell one's soul to the horrid zombie Web corpse of a long-dead print magazine. Or beg, probably in vain, for a job at Starbucks. And if none of that works, you can always write, for free, for PumpsMag.com, an "Exotic Dancing Industry" publication where editors "equate ourselves with Forbes, Esquire, and/or Cosmopolitan magazines in our demographic and content." You know it's a classy gig because it says so right in the ad! Details after the jump.

Current, the bizarre TV channel co-founded by Al Gore, laid off 60 staff last night. Supposedly the hippies in the San Francisco headquarters office are being shoved aside in favor of the bloodsuckers in Los Angeles. But even the survivors better watch their backs, because a company statement makes it sound like they might eventually be replaced by the robots and RSS feeds that fueled Current's awful, awful election-night coverage:

It's just a brief item, reporting that NBC chief Jeff Zucker was spotted with "old pal Katie Couric huddling over dinner at Elio's." But Page Six's sighting of the CBS Evening News anchor with her old Today boss will inevitably stoke further speculation about the possibility she might take over for Tim Russert at NBC's Meet The Press. The alleged dinner comes barely a week after the Times reported NBC executives were bandying Couric's name as a possible anchor for the Sunday-morning interview show. Gossip aside, let's move on to speculation: Wouldn't the gig just be an awful reprise of the CBS Evening News disaster?

We hear that Neel Shah—former Gawker intern-turned prolific (and recently laid-off) Radar writer and occasional magical berry salesman—is joining the staff of ever-grinding gossip machine Page Six next week. Thus marks the completion of Neel's whirlwind full circuit through all of the stages of the gossip-based media, leaving spinning social vortexes in his wake that scientists assure us will not create universe-eating black holes. Upon reaching P6 he will receive a banana, a bottle of water, a blanket, a winner's ribbon, and the last media paycheck in New York.

The Times has new details about Eric Schurenberg's departure from Time Inc.'s Money: It is supposedly related to "talk within the company of a new editorial direction" for the 2 million-circulation title. Yes, the collapse of Western capitalism would seem to pose some, uh, new and unique challenges to a personal finance magazine, and it sounds like Money has already found more than its share of efficiencies on the business side, sharing an ad staff and website with other company brands. Who will be the Neel Kashkari of Money's editorial rescue plan? We hear the new editor might be Ellen McGirt, a former Money columnist and editor-at-large who later wrote for Fortune and Fast Company. (UPDATE: Not her, she says.) You may have seen her on the teevee!

Earlier today, we were sent a link to Change.gov, the amusingly named official government website of President-elect Obama's transition team. The site is a wholesale transfer of Obama's Apple-inspired fancy millennial Brand to an official White House website, which is still jarring and a bit, uh, hard to believe. The site links to Obama's acceptance speech, a blog, and, tantalizingly, jobs. Obama administration jobs!! Everyone in America needs jobs, right now, so of course now Change.gov has crashed, and it returns only an error message when you try to visit. Breaking promises already, Senator Hopey! Click for the screenshot of the New America that was too good to be true, while you endlessly refresh the page and fine-tune your resume.

We challenge you to come up with a more badass job to have than Somali Pirate. You cannot come up with one! Except for the fact of living in a war-torn penniless country and taking your life in your hands on the high seas with no guarantee of success or mercy, it is just about the awesomest line of work ever. A million dollars in a single day? Piracy is the I-banking of a new generation! Easy money!

New York City's been hit hard by the economic turmoil of the last few weeks. An estimated 25,000 jobs have disappeared on Wall Street alone since mid-September, and some are predicting that as many as 165,000 banking jobs will vanish over the next two years. But it isn't limited to finance, of course. Law firms, media companies, retail: Everyone is jumping on the pink slip bandwagon. In fact, if you run a company and you aren't firing people at the moment, you're liable to look naive and unprepared. After the jump, a rundown of the layoffs that have been announced in the last few weeks in media, finance and technology in the New York City area. Just so you don't waste your time emailing your resume if you happen to be job hunting.

As every magazine known to man begins to die, you, dear writers, may soon find yourselves without employ. Well you're in luck because that glowing thing that makes the word typies actually, with the help of your phone line, hosts a whole series of online "publications." Like this website or the new and improved Radar or! The website for crazy former supermodel Tyra Banks' talk show! Yes indeed, they are looking for both woman and man bloggers to "blog about their ideals" (curse you, candy commercial) and talk about dating and stuff. So not only do you get to work for a megalomaniac like Banks, but you also get to do it for free. But the really sad thing about this? A tipster tells us the listing was posted on a J-School jobs board. :( Read the posting after the jump, then apply!!

"They don't appreciate me." [Observer]