Tabber takes aim (Getty Images)

Updated after the jump

Last week, The New York Post came out with an incendiary item about the high-flying socialite (and New York Observer Gatsbaby) Tabber Benedict, who had allegedly thrown himself a "going-away" party at Number 8 on the night before he was actually due to be sentenced in court for his 2011 DUI.

But according to the gossip site Scallywag & Vagabond, the attack might have been more personal than just a good tip from Justin Ross Lee...and that the Post's author, Tara Palmeri, had it out for Mr. Benedict for another reason.

From S&V:

According to Benedict, he first met Palmeri when she was seated in his chair at Blue Horizon’s June 2012 Charity Gala. Benedict, who was a committee member for the charity, asked Palmeri to kindly get out of his seat, as cocktail hour concluded and dinner was about to be served – unaware that this request sent Palmeri running out of the gala, distraught and embarrassed.

It seems Palmeri had crashed the benefit (?) and sat in an empty chair, not realizing it was assigned to Benedict. Justin Ross Lee, a friend to both Benedict and Palmeri, later told Benedict that he had upset Palmeri. (Interestingly, Lee is the only person other than the victim who is quoted in Palmeri’s NY Post article. Is he the anonymous source mouthing off that Benedict was off to Europe for a long holiday? )

The sourcing for this pro-Benedict story is obviously the jailed attorney himself, who even gave up an old email where he apologized to Palmeri for taking his seat. (Which in itself smacks of incestuous obligations: Why else would a socialite bother with a long apology to a New York Post writer, if the writer was obviously in the wrong?)

Mr. Lee, who has never met a publication he wouldn't like to give a quote to, is accused of colluding with Ms. Palmeri for her hit piece on Benedict. He openly admitted his intentions on bringing his former friend down to Scalleywag:

Anonymous: “Did you quote that to the Post?”

Justin: “Did he tip them off last year to my Chapter 7 filing… He was a snake to me. You bet your ass that’s my quote.”

Anonymous: “I didn’t know that.”

Justin: “Nor did I until about 3 weeks ago. What he did was unspeakable. The ultimate betrayal after I confided in him. He should thank me for being so kind when they asked for my comment.”

Anonymous: “How did you know he said it? The Post told you? It’s public record when you file.”

Justin: “I’m well aware it’s public…a little birdy told me.”

Benedict also insinuated that Lee wasn't even at the party, by letting it slip that he had black-listed his former buddy from the door list. But even if Benedict could prove that Palmeri and Lee worked together to besmirch his good name, there's still the tiny matter of the story itself--where Benedict held a party on the night before he went to court--being true. Of course, Benedict/Scallywag claim that the anonymous quotes from the Post article are all fake or were made up by Lee, and point to the fact that Palmeri messed up the name of the nightclub and called in Bungalow 8 instead of Number 8 to prove that the party in question never existed. (Which, to be fair, we've also confused several times.) The party in question, according to Mr. Benedict, was a benefit his friend had previously asked him to lend his good name for.

What are we to take away from this story? Well, not much, except that Benedict must have a pretty nice setup at Suffolk County Correctional Facility...one with a pretty incredible WiFi situation and a lot of free time to peruse old emails about seating arrangements.

Update: Justin Ross Lee responded to The Observer regarding the Scallywag post, saying, "A blogger’s a journalist like Tabber’s a motorist. Those quotes were blogged by a disgruntled felon blogging longhand from a felon from a jail cell to clear whatever’s left of his tarnished name."

"Tabber’s action reflect poorly on the pride of the few remaining Gatsbabies," Mr. Lee said. "He should stop worrying about playing publicist and start reflecting on why he’s in prison."

The plan would basically cut out the four independent Democrats who have indicated their support for the Republicans. According to Mr. Dicker’s report, the GOP believes that by the time the two new Democrats are seated—giving Democrats a majority—it will be too late to overthrow Mr. Skelos.

All of this sounds like Albany politics as usual. Instead of scheming, the Republicans should welcome the support of independent Democrats—and point out to voters that they are more than happy to cross party lines to get the state back on track.

Republicans have a chance to make a point about bipartisanship. They should take advantage.

Subway suspect arguing with the victim. (Screengrab)

The N.Y.P.D. may have a person of interest in the tragic subway homicide that occurred at the 49th Street N/Q/R Midtown station Monday afternoon.

Queens resident Ki-Suck Han died Monday when witnesses say another man pushed him onto the subway tracks after a confrontation. Mr. Han attempted to climb back on the platform but couldn't make it and died from injuries suffered after he was struck by the Q train.

Just before the incident, a bystander captured what appeared to be a confrontation between Mr. Han and a dreadlocked man in his twenties. A New York Post photographer snapped chilling and controversial photos of Mr. Han as he struggled to get out of the train's way.

Witness reports indicate the attacker was a medium-height black male with a medium build in his twenties. He may have been talking to himself before the confrontation.

On Tuesday the Wall Street Journal posted the brief video (below) of the encounter between the suspect and Mr. Han. The younger man appears agitated and angry.

CBS New York reports there is a $12,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in this case.

Mr. Johnson will join The Daily's editor-in-chief Jesse Angelo at the tabloid. Mr. Angelo has been named the Post's publisher. "Technology and other assets from The Daily, including some staff, will be folded into The Post," said the News Corp. press release. Presumably, there will be other Daily refugees returning to the Post fold.

Mr. Johnson announced his return on his Facebook page hours after News Corp. announced that The Daily was folding.

"The Daily, the newspaper for the iPad we launched nearly two years ago, will stop publishing Dec. 15. I am now working for the New York Post," Mr. Johnson posted earlier today. No word yet on whether Mr. Johnson will return to Page Six, although a spokesperson said the scribe would remain in L.A.

Lara Spencer apologizes for any confusion about reality of magical elf

Good Morning America isn't the first news program that has had to apologize for a factual story and replace it with some implausible copy, but last week proved that they might be the silliest. During Lara Spencer's segment on this season's hot new toy, Elf on the Shelf, she inadvertently let it slip that although it is not supposed to be touched by children after they "adopt him" (because giving him a Christian name infuses him with magical powers that are taken away if he is played with), he doesn't actually go to the North Pole and visit Santa Claus. Rather, her film crew showed parents moving the doll, and in one instance, Spencer actually picked up the toy herself.

Of course, this is the biggest scandal since the Killian Documents, as far as The New York Post is concerned.

"GMA Kills Christmas Magic After Elf on the Shelf Segment" read the skybox on the top of the Post's page this morning, which pointed to several Facebook wall rants that angry, illiterate adults posted on GMA's page. Stuff like "“THANKS A LOT U MORONS!!!!,” and "My kid ran upstairs this morning saying the elf on the shelf isn’t real and that parents hide it in the middle of the night!!! I’M PISSED!"

Which, fair enough, but maybe you shouldn't let your kids watch the news first thing in the morning if you're still not comfortable with bursting the bubble on Santa? What about when they accidentally catch George Stephanopoulos and Brian Ross reporting on the Colorado movie shootings or develop a phobia of Bouncy Castles or Sea World? Would you call the show "U MORONS!!" for reporting on the news? Something tells us you'll have a lot more explaining to do, and maybe just sit around with your kid if you plan to watch programs that involve journalism as well as pie-baking tips?

(And this is a minor quibble, but there are definitely more entertaining shows to plop your toddler in front of in the mornings...okay, maybe not Sesame Street right now, but how about some Nick Jr.?)

In any case, the next day Ms. Spencer went back on air and apologized for the misunderstanding, explaining that since she hadn't named her Elf during the first segment, it hadn't been given its magical powers yet and could therefore be manhandled with abandon.

http://youtu.be/AmHmxUMYCVU

Next year, we assume GMA will just stick to their regularly scheduled programming of reporting on "Hunky Santa."

Guys, you good?

Hey, New York Post, how are you doing? Everything going okay? You feeling alright? No, no ... we're just calling to check in. Your friends are, well, we're a little worried about you the last couple days. Do you need to talk to someone?

God doesn't hate you, Post. I know it can sometimes feel that way, but that's just it: they are feelings. We aren't out to delegitimize some very real things you are going through, but let us assure you that this is not the reality of the situation, which is that there is no God.

Yes, we know that you seemed to be in a better mood yesterday than you were the night before. But still ... we have the number here for a really great therapist who helped out a friend of ours, and we'd really like it if you'd just give him a call.

Just do it for us, okay?

"I mean, we’re not talking a quick hop to Cleveland. Forget crosstown and the Lincoln Tunnel at rush hour. Think: Flying to LA, collecting your luggage, hauling it by hand onto an airport bus, wrangling your way across LAX to some condemned section of the terminal that is further than Tahiti..."

Despite the length of the trip, Ms. Adams thoroughly enjoyed her accommodations in Virgin Australia, with "full-length flat-out bed with quilts and pajamas" and "beautiful friendly stewardesses."

And though the city is quite expensive, it's also quite chic, with Ms. Adams checking out an "orange suede and leather suit" more expensive than her airfare.

Rather than her usual "Only in New York" kicker, Ms. Adams ends with "Come... hope on a plane... spend a weekend in Sydney." Wish we'd thought to do that!

New York Post reporter Doug Auer allegedly became the target of police ire after he wrote a scandalous story about an illicit Labor Day BBQ on the roof of police headquarters. Apparently, nothing is as sacred to New York’s Finest as roasted meat, fire code be damned.

According to Mr. Auer, current and retired cops responded on an unofficial NYPD message board with jeers, threats and personal details (including the reporter’s home address and personal photos from his Facebook page), Gothamist reported at the time.

Mr. Auer, who said he took down his Facebook page in response, is back–and now he’s commenting on his private Facebook page. He's also threatening “atomic wedgies” to those who come after him.

“So, I had to take my account down for a while because, as a journalist, I wrote a controversial story that upset some retired NYPD cops who, in turn, issued threats against me and my family,” Mr. Auer wrote on his newly reactivated Facebook page.

“There may be more hard roads ahead, but we’ll tackle the obstacles with courage and dignity. And to those who come after us, we will mete out justice . . . with wedgies. Atomic wedgies!”

Or at least your kids are ... (NY Post)

When we shamefully tell our grandchildren that yes, we were the generation that gave legitimate attention to arguments over "legitimate rape" (which is when a woman's body fights the attacker's sperm with its laser ovaries), at least we'll be able to say that we were there when Rupert Murdoch's conservative New York Post finally gave up the ghost and tepidly supported birth control and Plan B for high school students who forgot to put the aspirin between their legs.

It's a small victory, but a victory nonetheless.

Sure, the headline of yesterday's piece has all the signs of the usual fear-mongering--"NYC schools give out morning-after pills to students — without telling parents"--but it's already missing that exclamation point that separates the story from a shocked scandal to something resembling objectivity, if you squint hard enough.

Well, except for the fact that the Department of Education did send out letters alerting parents whose children were enrolled in the 14 schools where the new CATCH (Connecting Adolescents To Comprehensive Health) program had been implemented over the past year, and gave those parents the right to opt their under-18 child out of the program. (Only 1 to 2 percent of them did, according to The New York Times.) But still! Baby steps!

And then the article itself was fairly straightforward and factual, explaining how CATCH is addressing the "citywide attack against the epidemic of teen pregnancy, which spurs many girls--most of them poor--to drop out of school." That sounds ... almost positive!

And while it's certainly unconventional (to say the least) that the DOH didn't really alert anyone outside of the school that they were handing out Depo-Provera shots, birth control and Plan B to students, or that (pregnancy test administered by a counselor aside) they were doing so without any sort of physical or gynecological checkup as a precautionary measure, we're not complaining. That's the Post's job! Instead, this is all they could muster up in terms of an offensive:

But sophomore Annette Palacios, 15, outside the school with her mom, said parents should give consent in case their children are “allergic” to the drugs.

“Girls shouldn’t be sexually active at that age,” she added.

Her mom, Pania, complained that she got no opt-out letter — and does not want Annette to secretly get Plan B or birth-control pills from the nurse.

“Parents should know if their daughter is pregnant,” she said.

Gah! What? That's not even a legitimate argument, since if your daughter gets emergency contraceptive in time, you won't need to know she's pregnant. Because she won't be. (Probably. There's still that .001 percent chance, we guess.) It's not like birth control's function is to hide pregnancy until your water breaks.

At the very end, the Post manages to slip in the singularly well-argued point against secret birth control programs in inner city schools:

“We can’t give out a Tylenol without a doctor’ s order,” said a school staffer. “Why should we give out hormonal preparations with far more serious possible side effects, such as blood clots and hypertension?”

There we go! That's more like it! Now if maybe you could couple that with a headline like:

Teachers Talk Teens Into Terminating Tots!

City Officials Implement Top-Secret Early Abortion Programs ... Using YOUR Students as Guinea Pigs!

Much better!

Mandy Stadtmiller (Patrick McMullan)

On August 6, Mandy Stadtmiller started as a deputy editor at Jane Pratt’s women’s-interest site xoJane—the date was marked “Job Starts” in her iCal—but that wasn’t the biggest thing that happened to her that day. XoJane had just lost one of its main attractions in beauty bloggger trainwreck Cat Marnell, but happily Ms. Stadtmiller was able to generate considerable attention of her own. In the morning, she published a piece entitled “I Inspired a ‘Bad’ Version of Myself on Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom.” The SEO-enabled headline was no joke; the piece detailed Ms. Stadtmiller’s brief romantic relationship with Mr. Sorkin. The movie and television writer had written into the show a hard-charging gossip reporter character he told Ms. Stadtmiller he was calling “Bad Mandy.”

The emails between the pair are included in the piece—Ms. Stadtmiller published screenshots. “It was a choice that changed that relationship forever,” she told Off the Record over calamari and Diet Cokes at a steakhouse near xoJane’s NoMad offices. “And it was the right choice to make ... I obviously recognized that he’s not going to like it. But I chose to crucify myself and paint him as kindly as possible.”

“I heard from him two times after the piece,” she went on. “The first time, he was very nice. The second time, he was very pissed.”

The former New York Post scribe knows how to play a story for all it’s worth—especially when it’s about her own experience. She published stories at the tabloid about a night with America’s first legal male prostitute and undergoing the New York Jets cheerleaders’ training regimen, as well as a dating column, “About Last Night” (“We kiss a little, but it’s the holding that sends shivers down my spine.”).

This first-person, self-as-news approach is perfect for xoJane: the site’s exclusives are derived from the fact that they happened to the staff. With her first-day story of ending up on the small screen thanks to an Oscar-winning cad of an ex, Ms. Stadtmiller fit in immediately; she’s since written about masturbating to Paul Ryan and worrying that all her friendships are “transactional.”

Ms. Stadtmiller’s tenure at the Post began in 2005 and ended this February, when the writer chose to leave and announced plans to publish a roman á clef, entitled News Whore, which she works on over the weekends. She insisted that she will not burn any bridges—“I do not enjoy ruining lives ... If I’m writing about doing a line of blow at my desk with a Fox News reporter, not naming him is a classier way to do it!” Even the title, News Whore, isn’t meant to be taken at face value. “I’m positioning it the way the Post would position it. ‘Slutty, Crazy Girl Tells All!’”

The Post was ultimately not for her, due to its reliance on the sort of easily digested narrative that makes the morning commute pass quickly. “It’s this black-white, hero-villain, News Corp. storyline.” Those looking for dirt on Rupert Murdoch may be disappointed: Ms. Stadtmiller never tapped a phone or anything of the sort. The misdeeds here are subtler. “Did I feel like I had to crucify people just to have an angle? I did.” (On that note, she counts The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm among her favorite books.)

As a character in the xoJane cast, Ms. Stadtmiller may soon get the chance to appear on television; Ms. Pratt is mulling the possibility of an xoJane reality show. The editor published a screenshot of her inbox depicting an email from an executive assistant with the truncated headline “Context for Tomorrow’s Reality Sh ...”

“There’s been a lot of different interest, explained Ms. Stadtmiller, “and there’s a likelihood that it’ll happen. For Jane, if it was done the right way, it’s clear that it would make a fun reality show. It’s in progress, and it’s been fun to come on board with that in the works.”

As Jane Pratt told Buzzfeed’s Amy Odell, she’d been taking meetings and saw her newsroom as a good fit. “In hiring, I did feel like I was casting a soap opera or reality show.”

Ms. Stadtmiller, who read Ms. Pratt’s Sassy as a young woman, showed us a text on her own phone. It was from a childhood friend from San Diego, about working with the provocative editor: “I can’t believe you are living our dream.”