• After Blairgate and Judygate (and with Wen Ho Leegate and Stephen Hatfillgate pending) Times cancels J.T. LeRoy piece for T after New York convinces them he may or may not exist. [WWD]
• Is People the new Us Weekly? Keith Kelly seems to think so, saying that Time Inc. celeb title is up while its competitors are down. [NYP]
• Bill and Cathie at ASME: Buckley and Hearst's Black to receive lifetime-achievement awards from the mag group. [AdAge]
• Tokion sold, as if that makes any difference to your life. [Folio:]
• Taking a cue from his pals' pal Judy, Bush, too, should take a severance and a letter to the editor and just retire already, says Greg Mitchell. [E&P]
• It seems the kids like the blogs. [News.com]

Dueling self-justifications on TV last night.

We missed Judith Miller on Morning Edition this morning, because, well, we never listen to NPR. (Every now and again, we like to play against demographic type.) Thankfully, though, several of you have filled us in on what we missed:

She just couldn't handle all that love being sent her way.

The terms of the contest were simple: Give us your prediction of when news would break that Judy Miller was leaving the Times, and you'd win. There were all sorts of rules and regulations surrounding that basic challenge — closest without going over, time to be determined by the timestamp on the first Romenesko post, tie to be broken by participant with most other correct details — but the challenge itself was straightforward. And so, as it turns out, was picking the winner.

She said that in the few hours since her departure had been made public, she had received several offers "of all kinds" for future employment, which she declined to specify.

Judith Miller, you've just been humiliated by and forced to retire from the newspaper where you've worked for 28 years! Where are you going?

But, boy, is there a lot of shouting.

We sort of hate ourselves for not attending Tuesday night's Accessories Council Excellence awards, held at Cipriani's 42nd Street lair. The event was, it seems, the place to be if your attention is sharply focused on the movements of Jessica Simpson and the twitches of the twins Olsen — but, you know, we were feeling gassy and According to Jim was on, so we just stayed in.

Times vet Kit Seelye, who has been in the unenviable position of covering Millerpalooza for the paper, does a characteristically nice job of reporting what one hopes is its final chapter. Her comprehensive article on the "retirement," posted just minutes after its announcement, via Keller's staff memo — it's almost as though she had an inside track or something! — contains this money bit:

And, lo, it is written:

Oh, thank you, Gabriel Sherman, for finally bringing us some new Judy Miller news: She's leaving again! So what if it's a double-reverse of what you told us last week — at least it's something. (And, in fairness, you nicely explain away last week's she's-sticking-around story, reporting that the don't-go plan was a hopeful, quixotic trial balloon from Sulzberger, floated to see if maybe — just maybe — they could all be friends again. They can't.)

Here's all we got, sent in late yesterday afternoon: "Just saw Judith Miller sitting in Eileen's Cheesecake over on Kenmare Street. I did a double-take, as I thought she was Anna Wintour in her Vogue-worthy seafoam pants suit and bobbed coif. She was talking seriously to a blonde female companion and was gesturing intensely. I wonder what she could be upset about...."

Because we know you're dying of curiosity, here's what slutty sister Wonkette learned yesterday about why Maureen Dowd apparently gets so much ass:

Here's an idea for why Judy Miller had to go away — and why she's still away, and why no conclusion can be reached. She hasn't been in Sag Harbor at all, goes the theory — that claim is as invented as her "security clearance." Clearly, as a vigilant, and, apparently, televisually polylingual, reader has discovered, Miller has been off working on an Italian telenovela, Provaci ancora Prof. (In English, that's Prof Still Tries to Us. Or at least so says Babelfish. Of which we're becoming increasingly skeptical.)

• Never mind Judy Miller; everything about working at the Times sucks right now. [WP]
• Of course, the entire newspaper business sucks right now, at least judging from the new circ numbers. [E&P]
• In a bid to create the most conservative editorial page in the history of the planet, Rupert Murdoch wants to buy the Journal, although he knows it's not for sale. [WSJ]
• Microsoft leads the crowded pack of companies interested in buying AOL. [NYT]
• The problem, however, is that AOL sucks ass. [AdAge]
• Anderson Cooper is termed a "boyish metrosexual," in which five of the seven syllables are accurate. [Boston Globe]
• New MSNBC show will be like dinner at the Chung-Povitch's. Just what we've always wanted. [NYT]
• Libby trial might be toughest on reporters — Miller, Cooper, and Russert. [WSJ]
• Glamour editor discovers gender imbalance in top mags' bylines. Glamour, on the other hand, we're sure has a masthead that, to use Clinton's term, "looks like America." [NYT]

The media's collective recent obsession with Maureen Dowd, that vixenish redheaded flame-thrower at the Times, continued unabated this weekend, with further fluffery in The Washington Post and the inevitable (and entirely reasonably) blowback in The Boston Globe. (There was also a reader Q&A with The Dowd published on the Times site Friday — TimesSelect membership, apparently, allows you, too, to become part of her book-launch blitz.)

Tumbleweed, more or less.

We prefer to leave the Supreme Court nomination clusterfuck to our brainy sister (those black robes are so unattractive, we can hardly feign interest), opting instead for the intellectual vanguard of the Times Sunday Styles. So you can imagine our horror when, upon our ovary-mandated perusal of the Vows section, we were confronted with the union of Begum Bengu and William Taft V:

This much we know: Generalissimo Judith Miller is still not dead.