This week, former MSNBC executive Dan Abrams unveiled his new company, Abrams Research, which puts working and ex-journalists in touch with companies so that they can, among other things, provide "advice" on things such as PR strategies, for a fee. For instance if, as his Website puts it, "a Fortune 500 business believes the financial media has focused unfairly on a small change in accounting practices rather than significant increases in revenues," Abrams will bring together "top financial journalists to advise that business on how to best convey its message." We and others thought this was maybe a little bit totally unethical. So we asked Abrams and his quasi-partner-in-crime Rachel Sklar to explain it. They tried. But we were not convinced. And we thought we'd check with a couple of news organizations to see if they would allow their "top" journalists to moonlight for Abrams Research.

What’s left to protest now that we’re entering the sure-to-be halcyon Obama era? At Sarah Lawrence College, in Bronxville, the new enemy is blood donation, or at least the FDA's policy regarding it. FDA regulations bar blood donations from gay men, and four years ago Sarah Lawrence quietly banned bloodmobiles from the campus, arguing the policy violates the school’s nondiscrimination policy. A committee revisited the policy this year when a professor raised concern about dwindling blood supplies, and many students for the first time learned of the underlying issue.

The ban will stay in place, but the school will offer shuttle vans to donation centers. "I envision this van not as a donation van, but as an anti-current-policy van," says Bobby Phillips, a sophomore on the committee, who says students can use the van to donate or to protest. "We can advertise it in a way that people will get angry," he says. A Blood Center spokeswoman doesn’t foresee a mass uprising. "We do not have record of any other colleges that have done this," she says.

Until this week, we'd never even dared to imagine Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson loosening the tie and kicking up the old wingtips for a little Project Runway viewage. But the image came alive in an interview Paulson gave to the Washington Post Wednesday, wherein he used Runway mentor Tim Gunn's signature directive, "Make it work," twice, once when lecturing his former Wall Street comrades about regulation — "You should not be thinking about how to fight it but how to make it work" — and later, when recalling a conversation he'd had with Barclays on purchasing Lehman: "I said, let me try to figure out how to make it work.'" We checked in with Gunn to see how he felt about his mantra being co-opted by The Man. "I love it," he said. "'Make it work' is the perfect phrase for him to use in his situation. It says 'you're not getting any extra resources. You're not getting any special treatment, you're not getting any more funds. Be creative with what you have and make it work.'" Alas, Treasury spokeswoman Brooke Li had someone on the trail with Paulson check in with him about the phrase, and reported to Daily Intel that it was not Runway-inspired. "He's not watching a lot of TV these days," she said. Riiight. Brooke is officially awesome for discussing this with us, but we're not buying it. For instance: If he wasn't a fan of Gunn's, then why did he buy the same glasses?

But look, we get it. It's cool, Mr. Paulson. There are some things a man just needs to keep sacred.

Andrea Mitchell at NBC is reporting that Obama is going to roll out his economic team on Monday, and his pick for Treasury secretary will be Tim Geithner, the president of the New York Federal Reserve and the protégé of Former Treasury secretary Larry Summers, who was also in line for the job. Which, if it's true, we guess means the famously self-deprecating Geithner didn't demur, as some suspected he might. There are a few reasons why Geithner might be a better pick than Summers: He's more popular, for one, since a lot of people can't quite seem to forget that whole women-can't-do-math imbroglio; he's been a key player in the current economic crisis; and at 47, he's a fresher face than, you know, some people in a Cabinet that's starting to look a little Clinton-era. Also, and obviously doesn't matter (but it doesn't hurt either) — he is kind of easy on the eyes.

GEITHNER LIKELY TO BE TREASURY SECRETARY [MSNBC]
Geithner Tapped for Treasury Secretary [WSJ]

Blake Lively and Penn Badgley were about an hour and 45 minutes late to the Gucci/UNICEF dinner honoring Rihanna at the Plaza the other night, but Lively had a good excuse, she swears! "She's filming," a publicist murmured. "She always says that!" shrieked one cold, cranky photographer. In fact, Lively had suffered a tragic wardrobe malfunction: Her shirt kept popping open and she was getting her outfit altered upstairs. "I don't usually get emotional, but velvet was everywhere!" Lively pouted later as a handler applied her lip gloss and pulled down her skirt. Then she refused to talk to us. Seriously? Does our devotion mean nothing to her? We thought we could hug it out when we were seated next to her and Badgley — our shoulders were thisclose! — but we were barely able to take a bite of our appetizer before the same handler told us to move.

But our Dan-chasing wasn't over yet.

Yesterday on Max Kellerman’s ESPN Radio show, a discussion of Mike Mussina and his twenty-win season on a subpar 2008 Yankees team morphed into a discussion of whether a baseball player should be penalized for being on a bad team when it comes to things like the annual awards voting. Kellerman argued that one shouldn’t be, since a baseball player can't carry a team at all times the way a basketball player can. And boy did he feel strongly about it. He called out what he described as “retarded monkey sportswriters” whose arguing against him constitutes “the definition of mental retardation.” (We checked, just to be sure, and the DSM IV disagrees with his definition.)

Name: Chazz Palminteri
Occupation: Actor, writer, and director. His film The Dukes opens wide in theaters today.
Age: 56
Neighborhood: Palminteri was born and raised in the Bronx. Remember A Bronx Tale?

Who's your favorite New Yorker, living or dead, real or fictional?
Bob De Niro … he single-handedly put Tribeca on the map as a neighborhood and as a powerful film festival.

What's the best meal you've eaten in New York?
Truffle Risotto at Roberto in the Bronx. Any time I go there, Roberto always makes me something special that I can't get anywhere else.

In one sentence, what do you actually do all day in your job?
Read — whether it be plays, scripts, books, or projects. Who knew that the kid who hated homework spends his life doing homework?

Today is very uncomfortable for Vikram Pandit. After a brief rally this morning due to reports of a possible merger, shares of Citigroup are on another downward slide and have actually, horrifyingly fallen below the $4 mark as of around 11 a.m. “Investors right now aren’t convinced that we’re done seeing dead bodies on the Citigroup balance sheet,” one equity analyst told Bloomberg News today. The Journal was way harsher, calling the slide "an illustration of what happens when the market loses all confidence in a company’s ability to do, well, anything."

The big news today is that the appointment of Hillary Clinton to secretary of State is basically a done deal. Obama is ready to offer, Hillary is ready to accept, Bill's vetting apparently hasn't revealed any associations with anyone disqualifyingly shady, and the offer should be finalized just after Thanksgiving. So is the un-Obama-like drama of the past week — the leaks, the political maneuvering, the anonymous sniping — over? Actually, no — if Clinton really is to join the administration, many believe it's just beginning. But the collapse of Obama's formerly tight-lipped operation isn't all on her shoulders, either.

Announcing her deal to write a motivational book, Ivanka Trump actually had the blinding gall to say, "My father always impressed upon me the idea that America is a meritocracy and that you must work for everything you get." Which could only be topped by Mike Bloomberg's 25-year-old daughter Georgina, who owns nine horses and a BMW, saying, "I'm not rich, my father's rich. When I go shopping, that's my own money." In less gasket-blowingly deluded news, Cuddle-Guv Paterson, Hillary (in a headband!), and Chuck Schumer ended up doing a Borscht-Belt routine involving the TelePrompTer the other night at an RFK Center gala. A 9-year-old boy on the set of 30 Rock playing a little thug who mugs Tina Fey (ha-ha-ha!) was nearly killed when a cab mowed down the shoot. Herbert Hoover great-granddaughter and Fox News regular Margaret Hoover will marry former Giuliani speechwriter and Post op-ed contributor John Avlon. Ann Coulter will officiate in the splendid setting of the Cato Institute. (Some facts fabricated.)

As Albany falls further into its state-budget-crisis shame spiral, it's nice to know that at least one man is able to get up out of bed every morning and live like Cribs might drop by at any minute: Governor Paterson. Actually, more like his interior decorator, or whoever it specifically was who dropped the New York State AmEx (do we even qualify for a Black card?) and used taxpayer funds to purchase $37,741 in Turkish rugs for the Executive Mansion. Two of the five Turkish throws are antiques worth more than $20,000 — those beauties were purchased on July 29, which was the day that the guv announced that lawmakers would have to cut short their vacations for an emergency budget-cutting session. Two more of the rugs were purchased from UES rug dealer Stark Carpets (favored by Spitzer and the Reagan White House!); the carpet company coincidentally donated over $8,000 to Paterson and Spitzer's campaigns. But before you get really pissed, keep this in mind: The Stark Carpets rugs were "assembled from scraps of antique Turkish rugs in a factory in New York." See? They're locally produced and recycled.

Jennifer Aniston must feel so vindicated today. The Times, which only recently published a lengthy, loving story about how Angelina Jolie, humanitarian and actress, manages to rise above her tabloid image, threw itself into an investigation of how the man-stealing actress controls her publicity, and in a Page One story concluded that she is basically a self-obsessed manipulative freak. And it. is. awesome. We learn that:

• "The actress does not employ a publicist or an agent. The keys to her public image belong to her alone." Sinister.
• People is totally a slave to her: When she sold the photos of her and Brad Pitt with their daughter, Shiloh, to the magazine, she dictated the terms of not only the story that went with it but insisted on an "editorial plan" for further coverage of her, including a stipulation that they not ever use the term "Brangelina," which she hates. We hate it too, but this just makes us want to say it all the time. Brangelina. Brangelina. Brangelina. Okay, we'll stop now. People denies this, but who are they kidding?