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Woman Buys Ruth Madoff a Present at Auction of Her Stuff

Tally Wiener, a lawyer who worked on the liquidation of Madoff feeder fund Fairfield Greenwich, spent $30,000 at this weekend's auction of Madoff memorabilia because, she said, she wanted to help victims of the fraud — including Ruth Madoff. Among Weiner's purchases was Bernie and Ruth's king-size bed, which she bought for $2,250 — and plans to return to the Ponzi schemer's wife, “if she wants it.” [Bloomberg]

Facebook Surpasses EBay With Estimated Value of $41 Billion

Hours before Facebook is set to announce its Gmail killer, Bloomberg says the social network's latest valuation, based on the selling price of shares on SecondMarket, an exchange for privately held companies, makes it the country's third-largest online business after Google ($192.9 billion) and Amazon ($74.4 billion). Since Facebook has yet to go public, its forecasted revenue and worth in the public market is all still theoretical. Facebook, which expects sales of at least $1.4 billion this year, has called the figure "fundamentally speculative." But, hey, investors, don't let that stop you from playing pretend. [Bloomberg]

Deli Worker: My Best Four Loko Customers are High-School Kids

By Chris Rovzar

"Sometimes kids come in before school," Alex Janeder, a worker at his family's deli in Crown Heights, tells the Daily News. "They buy them like crazy." "Them" meaning cans of Four Loko, the controversial caffeine-and-alcohol beverage that will be banned in New York starting December 10. Janeder himself is 19, which perhaps explains not only why he's willing to sell an alcoholic beverage to kids he knows are underage, but also why he feels comfortable telling a newspaper about it. Janeder is one of many convenience-store workers who are psyched to see the drinks go. (Apparently high-school students should just stick to Olde English and Colt 45, like God intended.) But one bodega employee, Larissa Castro, predicted a dark result of the state ban: the Black Market. "They'll start selling it out on the street!" she warned the News. Of course they will! Because when kids go to that scary-looking guy on the corner to buy something that gives them a rush of energy and makes them do crazy things, they're definitely looking to buy a fruity beverage.

NY bodega owners happy to see potent Four Loko brew ban put into effect [NYDN]

Republicans Plan Defeat of Successful Stimulus Plan

By Jessica Pressler

This week, a group of right-leaning economists who serve as advisors to Republican lawmakers plan to launch a campaign calling for Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke to drop his $600 billion quantitative-easing plan. Why do they hate it?

"The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed's objective of promoting employment," they say in an open letter to be published as ads this week in The Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

The other reason might be that the plan is already showing signs of being successful.

Fresh Attack on Fed Move [WSJ]
Options Showing Quantitative Easing Working Before It Begins [Bloomberg]

A Sophisticated Fembot Is Not Making the Subway Announcements

That's the job of Carolyn Hopkins, a nice 62-year-old lady who lives in Maine. [City Room/NYT]

Passive-Aggressive Notes From the Online Staff at ‘Newsweek’

By Nitasha Tiku

Newsweek.com staffers were none too happy after reading this weekend's article about the NewsBeast merger in the New York Times. In the piece, which tells the saga of the Daily Beast–Newsweek merger in romantic comedy terms, IAC's Barry Diller makes it clear that his primary motivation in accepting Newsweek owner Sidney Harman's advances was the size of the man's printing press. The website's award-winning online staff, however, who managed to attract more readers than the magazine, even as their ranks dwindled, get nary a mention. Considering that Newsweek.com gets 5 million unique visitors per month — more than double the Daily Beast's fast-growing 2 million — this line, from the hybrid publication's new CEO, Stephen Colvin, had to sting: "Newsweek.com will cease to exist after the merger. Readers who type that URL into their browser will be redirected to TheDailyBeast.com." And so, in what has become Newsweek.com's protest platform of choice, the website's remaining eighteen staffers took to Tumblr to, rather compellingly, state their case. NewsBeast management, ya burnt!

"It’s always nice to wake up and find out in the Times that your job is doomed." ยป

AIG CEO: ‘This Ship Ain’t Going to Sink’

By Jessica Pressler

Tough-talking AIG CEO Robert Benmosche has a few words for the haters in today's Wall Street Journal: "Many people were saying we're a ward of the state, that there's no way we could pay back the taxpayers. But if you do an analysis, this is at least a $70 billion company and we will have about 1.8 billion shares," he says. "If we hit another perfect storm, this ship ain't going to sink." And the company will pay back its multibillion-dollar loan. Even if the CEO, who was recently diagnosed with cancer, has to work until the day he dies. Literally.

If I thought I would die in three weeks, I would have said to Steve [Robert S. "Steve" Miller, AIG's chairman]: Look, I need to be out of here in three weeks.

That's dedication.

Benmosche's Many Battles [WSJ]

Charlie Rangel Ethics Trial Probably Going to Be Something of a Mess

By Dan Amira

As Congress returns to Washington today to begin its exciting lame-duck session — which should be about as productive as the name implies — Charlie Rangel's long-delayed ethics trial will finally get under way. Each side will have an opportunity to present evidence and question witnesses before a bipartisan eight-member House ethics subcommittee, which will then vote individually on each of the thirteen ethics charges levied against Rangel. Ethics-committee lawyers will be acting as the prosecutors, while Rangel, who parted ways with his legal team a few weeks ago, will represent himself. Expect lots of long-winded, emotional soliloquies, and perhaps some in-trial Googling of legal tactics, since Rangel hasn't practiced law in 40 years. "It has lots of potential to be pathetic for Rangel and the committee," predicts Melanie Sloan, executive director of the ethics watchdog group CREW.

Charles Rangel ethics trial set to begin [Politico]

U.S. Prepares Plan to Get ‘Out’ of Afghanistan by 2014

By Avi Zenilman

The Obama administration is planning to release a plan at a NATO summit in Lisbon this week that would call for withdrawals to start in 18 to 24 months. (Administration officials had recently been openly hinting that Obama's promise of getting out soon was dead in the water.) The removal of 264,000 troops will occur in a piecemeal fashion, one region at a time. In the end, however, just like in Iraq, tens of thousands of American troops will likely have to stay behind in order to train and monitor the Afghan security forces. “Iraq is a pretty decent blueprint for how to transition in Afghanistan,” one official said.

U.S. Plan Offers Path to Ending Afghan Combat [NyYT]

11/14/10

Government Speeds Up Review of Comcast-NBC Merger

As Comcast prepares to announce its reorganization of NBC this week (Jeff Zucker who?), word is leaking out that the feds — the FCC and the Justice Department — are planning to finish their review of the merger within weeks. No one expects the antitrust cops to stop the deal, but they may "impose significant conditions to prevent Comcast from withholding, or threatening to withhold, NBC Universal's programming from competitor." [WSJ]

CEOs Are Making More Money Than Before

By Avi Zenilman

The Wall Street Journal surveyed the pre-tax earnings of the CEOs of the 456 biggest American companies and discovered that, as corporate profits have once again increased, they've made 3 percent more money overall. That doesn't sound like much, but there's an upward trend: The CEOs of the 65 companies whose fiscal year ended more recently and covered more of the recovery saw their pay increase by almost 15 percent.

The best-paid exec in the country is Liberty Media's Gregory Maffei, who made $87.1 million. Ralph Lauren came in at No. 9, making $27 million. The story also comes with an interactive graphic decoding the jargon that companies use on financial statements to justify paying so much.

The Year's Top Ten Highest Paid CEOs
How To Read A Proxy Statement [WSJ]
Paychecks for CEOs climb [WSJ]

Senate Republicans Promise to Keep ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ Alive

Texas senator John Cornyn and Arizona senator John McCain (the one with the wife) assured Sunday talk-show hosts that any attempt by Senate Democrats to heed the wishes of the secretary of Defense and repeal the ban on gays in the military would be stopped. “I don’t think there’s a lot of time and a lot of appetite to jam things through,” Cornyn said. Thank you, filibuster! [NJ]

Brian Williams to America: DVR My Show!

By Avi Zenilman

Secretly the funniest man on television.

The NBC Nightly News seems to be serious about expanding its audience base beyond retirees, recently airing an ad in which Brian Williams tells people to record his show if they can't watch it live. The idea is that young people use DVR, or, maybe, that old people want to have their cake and watch Diane Sawyer, too.

“A growing number of viewers tell me they time-shift the news,” Williams wrote in an e-mail to the Times. “Loyal viewers used to say ‘we watch you every night.’ These days, an increasing number make a point of saying ‘We RECORD you every night.’”

By explicitly promoting the use of DVR, NBC is sending another signal to advertisers that regular Nielsen ratings don't capture the real size of an audience.

NBC Ad Urges Recording News [Media Decoder/NYT]

For President Barack Obama, It’s Back to the Grind

By Mike Vilensky

Back at home.Photo: Getty Images

After the midterm election results rolled in, President Obama took off to India, a country that welcomed him with open arms. Over East, Obama talked about rebuilding the economy. There was dancing. There were the world leaders semi-excited to see him at the G20 conference. And today, on his last day abroad, Obama visited the Great Buddha in Japan's small coastal city of Kamakura, where, as a 6-year-old boy, his mother once took him for green-tea ice cream, a day he remembers fondly.

Meanwhile, left to her own devices, Nancy Pelosi was keeping busy. ยป

Georgina Bloomberg Has the Last Laugh

"The guy I was totally in love with decided now would be an appropriate time to break up with me. I'm really surprised anyone would be so insensitive as to do it while I am down and out. It was pretty shocking, because I thought he was a nice guy. The timing of the break-up makes it harder, because I can't do anything but sit here, and I was already feeling sorry for myself. He thought I had trust issues, or that I wasn't a very nice person, and that we weren't a good match. At the end of the day, I don't want to be with someone who doesn't want to be with me." —Georgina Bloomberg, who suffered a concussion and a fractured spine last week when she tumbled from her horse during a show-jumping competition, mysteriously decides now is a good time to grant interviews to the New York Post, and ends up discussing Joey Cheek, a senior at Princeton University who recently dumped her, at length. [NYP via Runnin' Scared/VV]

Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey Are Both Engaged

Last week, singer Nick Lachey and famous person Vanessa Minnillo announced their engagement. Today Lachey's ex-wife, singer Jessica Simpson, and professional football player Eric Johnson announced theirs. This is probably a coincidence, we guess, but that's not stopping anyone from writing pieces like, "Are Nick and Jessica Meant to Be?" [Us]

New Yorkers Have Approximately One More Month to Get Drunk on Four Loko

By Mike Vilensky

Makers of the "blackout in a can" have agreed to stop shipping it to New York by November 19, and the state's biggest beer distributors agreed to stop delivering the drink, and other caffeinated alcoholic beverages, to New York retailers by December 10. After that, shop owners found selling Four Loko without proof it was ordered by the deadline will be fined, so it'll only be available in very sketchy underground markets. Senator Chuck Schumer, who called for the action, said he favored an outright ban but called the move "a giant step forward in keeping our kids safe from these dangerous brews." That's only about four more weeks, guys, so let the Four Loko parties begin.

Beer distributors, Four Loko manufacturer, will halt shipping of caffeinated, alcoholic drink to NY [NYDN]

Fourteen-Year-Old Michigan Student Awesomely Stands Up for Suspended, Gay-Defending Teacher

By Mike Vilensky
Watch Video

Jay McDowell, a teacher in Howell, Michigan, was temporarily suspended without pay earlier this month after telling a student wearing a Confederate flag and a student making anti-gay remarks to get out of his class. At a school-board meeting on Friday, openly gay 14-year-old high-school student Graeme Taylor came to McDowell's defense, thanking the teacher for doing "an amazing thing" in a town home to the KKK, and urging the school board to give McDowell his pay and reverse the disciplinary actions. The inspiring video has made its way around the Internet, because how cool is this kid?

Check out the video. ยป

Ruth Madoff’s Engagement Ring Sold to a Stranger for $550,000

By Mike Vilensky

Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff's stuff was auctioned off online yesterday as part of an effort to recoup cash for schemed victims, and this time all the intimates were on the block: underwear, socks, engagement rings. And people really wanted them. One Long Island man dropped $1,700 on a collection of monogrammed boxers and hundreds of "gently-used" socks to give to friends and family as awesome holiday novelty gifts. "I don't really know about the boxers," he said sheepishly, after spending over one thousand dollars on them. "I just bought it for the socks." Another Long Island man, 81-year-old real-estate investor John Rodger, bought Madoff's1917 Steinway grand piano for $42,000. "It's a conversation piece," he said, adding that he probably overpaid for it by $7,000, but he didn't even care because, hello, it's Bernie Madoff's piano. The auction raised around $2 million total.

And as for the diamond engament ring Bernie bought Ruth when he promised to spend the rest of his life with her ... ยป

11/13/10

Extremely Religious Elderly Man Does Not Care for the Internets

"A large number of young people ... establish forms of communication that do not increase humaneness but instead risk increasing a sense of solitude and disorientation," Pope Benedict XVI said today, at a Vatican conference on culture. He also said that young people were being "numbed" by the Internet, adding that the technology was creating an "educational emergency — a challenge that we can and must respond to with creative intelligence," and that the Internet was "blurring the boundary between truth and illusion." Whereas Catholicism makes those boundaries clear. [AP via Gawker]

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