Halloween isn't even over yet and marketers are already worried about Christmas. As well they should be: If the past three months have been any indication, things are going to get progressively worse before they (hopefully!) get any better. And that means families having to scrimp and save this holiday season, which means no more lavish tree, no more unending gallons of eggnog, and most importantly, no more $800 video game consoles for every little boy and girl.

And with companies already feeling the pinch in their ad department, how will Christmas be sold this year, on the saddest, most commercial-free celebration of Christ's birth in recent memory?

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Oh goodness. Bono was hired as the newest Op-Ed contributor to The New York Times starting in 2009, despite the fact that Irish gent will be paid zero for his services. Which, technically, is all they are worth, since Bono will inevitably use the columns to preach the same old, same old stuff he usually does: Africa, poverty, blah blah blah.

Times and the times are changing Bono! If you want to see poverty, go down to the old offices of the New York Sun. Op-Ed editor Andrew Rosenthal made the pick, most likely hoping that if any more suspicious white packages come in the mail, he can just forward them to the U2 front man.

At any rate, he can't be worse than Bill Kristol.

Vanity Fair's July 2007 Africa issue, guest-edited by Bono, was Graydon Carter's best-selling issue last year. Why so successful? Our money's on the twenty different covers Annie Leibovitz shot for the issue, letting customers scoop up at least a few of the covers to display on their Design Within Reach coffee tables. [min]

U2 frontman Bono started Product (RED) some 18 months ago, with Bobby Shriver, to ramp up donations to the Global Fund by enlisting companies to deliver a percentage of profits to the charity, in exchange for buying some good will by associating themselves with the organization. (For a fee, of course.)

Since its beginnings, RED had scrounged up $59 million dollars from corporations like Apple, Motorola, Dell, Gap, and American Express. As RED, and it's PR firm at Sunshine & Sachs, will helpfully remind you, the AIDS-happy Global Fund, started in 2002, received a paltry $5 million over five years in donations from private companies and individuals. But since RED got involved, that sum jumped to $59 million, with "$22.3 million has gone to Rwanda, $14.1 million to Swaziland and $10.5 million to Ghana, leaving $12 million to be disbursed," according to a letter sent to Jossip by Dr. Christoph Benn, the fund's director of external relations.

How, then, is Rush & Molloy able to report this morning – just one week after Dr. Benn issued us that statement – that RED is responsible not for $59 million in donations, but a full $100 million?

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We own a Product (RED) iPod Nano. It is shiny, and the red goes really well with a Nike Dri-FIT tee we wear to the gym a lot. We bought the RED iPod out of pure vanity, not to support HIV-positive children in Africa. Hopefully that pisses off Bono, because that was our secondary goal. He's just so smug about his philanthropy.

The U2 fontman's Product RED, which has enlisted corporate support from the likes of Dell, Motorola, Apple, and Armani, is, like any charity, deserving of accolades. Up to a point.

As with all philanthropic endeavors, many of the dollars coming in – in this case, from the sale of consumer goods – goes to overhead, and whatever is left over might wind up in the hands of the needy.

So despites the tens of thousands of RED products sold, a grand total of "just" $22 million $59 million has found its way to Africa so far. Okay, not exactly small change: In Rwanda, reports the NYT, contributions of $22 million have helped fund "33 testing and treatment centers, supplied medicine for more than 6,000 women to keep them from transmitting H.I.V. to their babies, and financed counseling and testing for thousands more patients."

But in March '07, AdAge reported RED companies spent $100 million in advertising, which yielded only $18 million for the charity. (RED countered by saying it spent $50 million on advertising, generating $25 million for the charity. Critics have called AdAge's report based mostly on conjecture, and we might have to agree with them.)

So how does all this money change hands? And is all the effort even worth it?

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At last, the end result of what we'll simply call "a stab at multimedia content": It's Vanity Fair's holiday card, popping up in the unprepared mailboxes of Vanity friendlies across town, starring Graydon Carter as Santa Claus. And Bono as … a leather daddy elf. Naturally, Annie Leibovitz is responsible for this.

Last year, Bono decided saving the world wasn’t enough of a fruitless venture and got involved in publishing. With Elevation Partners, Bono bought into the Forbes family empire last year.

It turns out, Bono is a shrewd investor. Elevation Partners has been cutting expenses at Forbes, like getting rid of its Greenwich Village HQ, selling its helicopters and downgrading its yachts. It’s likely that Bono and Elevation will cash out in a few years after raising Forbes’s value.

One insider said that Steve Forbes financed his 1996 and 2000 runs for the Republican nomination with money he took out of Forbes. Even Bono could have told him that a narcissistic presidential run would have been a bad investment.

There's nothing sexy about Rodale, the Emmaus, Pa.-based publisher that keeps Dave Zinczenko button-down shirt supply in good order. That South Beach Diet franchise didn't help. But they're trying, we'll give them that. So much so that they're hoping JP Morgan will find the debt-free publisher a "strategic partner" to help them expand. Only criteria? Lots of cash, which is why U2 singer Bono's Elevation Partners is said to be an option. Bono already bought a huge chunk of Forbes; why not make a old-people-niche move and pick up Prevention?

You know how the argument has been made that celebrity coverage has invaded hard news, like, way too much? We're pretty sure CNN has even covered it, but here they are, on their homepage yesterday, in their Top Stories section, with this headline:

Really? This is news? That Bono ripped off his glasses because he was so upset? So angry, that he tore off his obnoxious eyewear that insists on wearing outdoors and in?

The outrage! The furor! The … ridiculousness of the video that accompanied the headline.

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Leave it to David Granger at Hearst's Esquire to rib Graydon Carter at Conde Nast's Vanity Fair. Or, at least, rib Bono, who's "guest editing" VF and producing some 20 different editions in a game of "cover telephone." But what, wonders Granger's team, would happen if Bono took his do-gooding to magazines aimed at children and folks stuck on airplanes?

• Vanity Fair's 20-cover Darfur extravaganza has arrived! Our favorite is the extremely odd pairing of a pissed-off looking Bono with a hungover Condoleezza Rice.

• Ohhhh, apparently the covers were supposed to look like "a game of Telephone." Annie Leibovitz is so retro!

• Negligibly cute FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is still not happy about yesterday's federal appeals court decision.

• British TV Station rejects common decency, requests asking them not to air "Diana death pictures."

• Dow Jones union looking for an alternative bidder. Insiders say their criteria includes "anyone but Murdoch."

• Meanwhile, retired anchor Bernard Shaw is pained deeply by the impact Fox had on CNN's dynasty.

• New York Times copies Jossip, gets credit for taking blogging trend into mainstream.

• Bono and Nicholas Cage have never looked so…heavenly!

&bul; Ewan McGregor needs lots of jock support.

• Steven Spielberg and Peter Jackson to join forces on overbudgeted Hollywood extravaganza.

• For Vanessa Minnillo, hanging out with boyfriend Nick Lachey is no day at the beach.

• David Hasselhoff is really sorry that he got drunk and lost custody of his daughter devoured a hamburger without pausing to grab utensils.

On Wednesday night, celebrity activists braved the cold weather to discuss, um, global warming at the Natural Resources Defense Council gala, and took the time to roast the evening's honoree, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter.

And while our invitation was evidently lost in the mail, thankfully our friends over at the Daily News were there to give us the highlights:

CNN's Anderson Cooper…delivered a "Breaking News" update on that recent evening when an enraged Carter dismantled the scaffolding some noisy workmen had installed near Carter's Waverly Inn restaurant. Cooper reported that Carter was seen later, "at approximately 4 a.m., urinating on the door of Nobu."

"Staffers at Vanity Fair were baffled," intoned Cooper. "One said, 'I haven't seen him at the office in more than two years.'"

And as unlikely amusing as that mental picture is, that wasn't even the best part!

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• The good news: Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston put aside their differences to celebrate their daughter's birthday. The bad news: Bobby got shit-faced and Whitney screamed at the birthday girl to 'shut up.'

• K-Fed wants $25K for exclusive rights to his bday bash; Life & Style responds, "25K? Screw you, we're buying a Saturn."

• When Brandon Davis made fun of Paula Abdul for being Middle Eastern, perhaps he simply forgot that his father is a Turkish-American wine importer whose last name is Zarif.

• Alright, so maybe Bono's red campaign actually made $25 million. Which sounds pretty impressive until you consider that's only 1,000 times what K-Fed's will likely bank for his birthday extravaganza.

• How does Lindsay Lohan even have time for drinking when she's busy getting 6-hour haircuts?

• Rumor has it there might be a Forrest Gump sequel on the way. Sort of I Love the 90's meets Radio.

Yesterday, AdAge struggled to make sense of Bono's stint as guest-editor at Vanity Fair> by taking a look back at some of his other pet projects, namely the (Product) Red campaign.