This week the National Bureau of Economic Research announced that America is officially in a recession, which is a little like being told your dog died after watching it get hit by a truck. The V.F. 100 felt the pain.

↓ H. Lee Scott’s (No. 19) Wal-Mart [WMT] proves itself to be the lone surviving cockroach in the economy’s nuclear war. The retailer reported a 3.4 percent increase in its same-store November sales, beating its own forecast by 1 to 2 percent. In a mad rush to secure the bargains that are driving up sales, frenzied Wal-Mart shoppers trampled a temporary worker on Black Friday.

↓ Sumner Redstone’s (No. 32) Viacom [VIA] spreads holiday cheer by cutting 850 jobs, freezing salary increases.

↓ Jeff Zucker’s (No. 68) NBC Universal succumbs to recession pressure by dumping 500 employees, or 3 percent of its staff.

↓ Robert Iger (No. 35) fends off overtures by Paris Hilton, whose latest infantilizing desire is to play Tinkerbell in a live action Disney [DIS] movie. As you may recall, (woefully, no doubt) Tinkerbell is also the namesake of her accessory Chihuahua.

↑ Anna Wintour (No. 64) brushes off pesky rumors of her imminent retirement, telling The New York Observer she has “no plans to leave” Vogue.

↑ Arianna Huffington (No. 90) secures $25 million for the Huffington Post in her latest round of financing, giving her spot-on imitator, Michaela Hawkins, a new reason to visit Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” desk.

(To see “Arianna’s” original SNL appearance, click through to the jump.)

Raise your hand if you don’t know someone who has been laid off in the past three months.

Hell, raise your hand if you don’t know someone who has been laid off in the past week.

The jobless numbers that just came out (533,000 jobs lost in November alone) are being described as “almost indescribably terrible” by Ian Shepherdson of High Frequency Economics.

True, as David Leonhardt points out in his Economix blog, the vast majority of Americans are still employed. But for how long?

It’s clear that the federal government is paralyzed until January. What I want to know now is where are all the hedge-fund guys? Where are all the C.E.O.’s? Where are the people who pocketed tens or hundreds of millions of dollars during the boom?

Big Three executives are headed to the House of Representatives today after hearings in the Senate yesterday in hopes of securing more than $38 billion in federal loans. The Senate hearings were dismal, with many leery lawmakers arguing that the proposed loans would not halt the inevitable (and potentially imminent) demise of the American automotive industry.

GM chairman Richard Wagoner has warned the government that, without federal loans, the company may go under before January 1. Ford is the best off of the three. And Republican senator Robert Bennett of Utah asked if GM and Chrysler would merge to be better poised  to make good on government loans—a proposed “shotgun wedding.”

According to an item on Politico, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, both owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., have quietly begun swapping editorial content. Don’t say we didn’t warn you … Check out this posting from VanityFair.com, last June, “Headless Company in Topless Bid.”

The Renaissance Center, General Motors' world headquarters in Detroit.

An editorial on the front page of the Detroit Free Press brings up a good point that is often overlooked in our current financial crisis: the automotive companies are looking for a LOAN. And it takes a Detroit paper to tell us this? America is so concerned about what blighted Detroit has done wrong in the past three decades that they look over the language the Big Three is using. For example, on the front page of the Washington Post this morning:

“General Motors, an icon of American manufacturing and the world’s largest automaker, yesterday threw itself at the mercy of Congress, saying it needed $4 billion to avert a cash crisis by the end of the month and as much as $18 billion in federal loans over the next year.”

READ MORE:
• Q&A with Ford’s CEO Alan Mulally
• A slideshow of electric cars by Rob Levine
• Michael Shnayerson on Elon Musk and the Tesla Motors electric roadster
• Stick Shift, the gay car blog

Illustration by Piotr Lesniak, based on a photo by Harry Benson.

“In the aftermath of 9/11 the concern was about a tyrant accused of enormous human rights abuses,” but who also possessed weapons of mass destruction, Rove said last night at a debate about Bush’s legacy. “Absent [the evidence of W.M.D.], I suspect that the administration’s course of action would have been to work to find more creative ways to constrain him like in the 90s.”

The problem with what Rove and Bush are saying, as a colleague of mine here pointed out yesterday (he mentioned this excellent comment by Greg Sargent at Talking Points Memo), is that Bush and his administration actively promoted questionable intelligence that supported their goal of war while suppressing credible intelligence that contradicted their claims. They intentionally distorted the facts and misled the public. But if Bush was not quite willing to say that he would not have gone to war given the chance to have a “do-over,” Rove and others are now doing it for him, completing the neat line of reasoning that the president is not culpable because he was misled. It’s akin to saying, Look, we kind of admit this was an unnecessary war, but it would be poor form for the president to come out and say that. So we’ll say it for him, but the main point is that we’re not responsible—the bad intelligence is what led to the war, not our longstanding, a priori desire to launch it.

After Ford announced that its president and C.E.O., Alan Mulally, would be driving the 10 hours from Dearborn to Washington for another Congressional sit-down next week, VF Daily decided to get in touch with the company about the ride.

Over email, I asked Jennifer Moore, corporate news manager for Ford Motor Company Communications, what Mr. Mulally would be listening to along the way. Most drivers listen to something—music, NPR, Rachel Maddow, Limbaugh, maybe even a book on tape. Well, bailouts are important stuff, especially when you’re asking for a whopping $9 billion, so our playlist request was dismissed as overly frivolous. But by his picture, I can tell you that Mr. Mulally probably listens to Springsteen, Paul McCartney, or perhaps Katy Perry.

Jennifer was more responsive to my next question. “I have no idea if he ever received a speeding ticket,” she wrote. To determine whether Mr. Mulally is a good driver, I Googled him and discovered that he plays golf and tennis, so he must be steady with his hands. But will he actually be driving? “Yes,” Jennifer replied. “He will spend some of the time personally driving, some of the time doing media interviews.” (Note to self: Call for media interview the day of the big drive.)

General Motors corporation chairman and C.E.O. Rick Wagoner is cutting his annual salary from $2.2 million to one measly dollar, the Detroit News reported this morning. On top of that, “a more-than-30-page plan being sent to Congress” suggests that the Big Three are going to do exactly what all the op-eds have demanded in the past weeks: restructuring their businesses and cutting executive pay in a notoriously top-heavy industry.

GM plans to sell Hummer and may sell Saab, Saturn, and Pontiac as well . The auto giant is also closing its operations at Detroit Metro Airport on January 1 and jettisoning its fleet of airplanes.

Democratic Senatorial candidate Jim Martin is hoping to unseat Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss in a runoff vote in Georgia. A win by Martin would bring the Democrats one seat closer to a 60-vote, filibuster-proof “super majority” in the 100-member chamber. The candidates (and former University of Georgia Sigma Chi fraternity brothers) brought out the celebrities yesterday for the last day of campaigning. Former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin showed up on the trail with Martin yesterday, riling up plenty of “racially non-progressive” Southerners. But Martin pulled out all the stops at the state capitol in Atlanta: he was flanked by rappers Ludacris, T.I., and Young Jeezy. Luda had some choice words for Chambliss: “He’s just about politics and not about helping the American people.”

No parental advisory needed for Ludacris’s support of Martin. Check out a remix of Bill O’Reilly hating on Luda after the jump. What a thug.

Heads are rolling in India as politicians take the fall for missing warnings of an impending terrorism attack on Mumbai.

Several top Indian officials have resigned after the attacks that claimed at least 172 lives and injured more than 300. Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of Maharashtra state, yesterday became the latest official to offer his resignation over alleged warnings about terrorist activities that were not acted upon.

His deputy, RR Patil, also submitted his resignation after being quoted as downplaying the seriousness of the attacks. Their offers to go followed the resignation of the home minister on Sunday and came amid Indian media reports of a string of intelligence blunders, all of which are adding to an atmosphere that the government and state apparatus cannot cope with the scale and complexity of the security threat facing the country.

Boy, this reminds me of all those U.S. officials who took responsibility and stepped down after the 9/11 attacks.

Oh, wait …

[Guardian]