The current economic climate has all but put the kabash on big time media deals, but that hasn't kept Time Warner chief Jeff Bewkes from fantasizing about them. In Bewkes' dream world, there is a peacock running around on a farm, and the farmhands know the peacock is special, but it's eating up too much food without shedding enough magical peacock feathers, and Bewkes comes along to visit the farm's owners and ends up stuffing the peacock in a burlap sack and running away with it all the way to headquarters. Ya follow?

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"Time Warner (TWX) CEO Jeff Bewkes spent a good 45 minutes talking about weighty issues about digital media, social networking, the future of AOL, etc, at the D conference today. The first question from the audience: 'Lou Dobbs is a hateful xenophobe. Why are you employing him?'

"That's our paraphrase of Consumer Electronics Association head Gary Shapiro's query. Our paraphrase of Bewkes' response: I don't really like him, either. But hey, what are you gonna do?" [SIA]

If Time Inc. chief Ann Moore wanted to keep secret her plans to continue trimming the publisher's portoflio, perhaps she should have removed the "Trim Portfolio" slide from her PowerPoint presentation. With new CEO Jeff Bewkes leading a company-wide consolidation effort, the publishing unit is expected to see some fallout, with shelter titles in the most jeopardy. Sorry, both This Old House subscribers, but you might have to rely on the TV show alone.

THE GLASS IS HALF FULL Time Warner is going to lay off 75 people tomorrow, one of new CEO Jeffrey L. Bewkes’s first moves of effective leadership. On bright side, it was originally going to be 200. [AdAge]

VOTE OF CONFIDENCE "We are not convinced that Mr. Bewkes will immediately ‘unlock value’ through an asset divestiture" is analyst speak for, "It's Jeff Bewkes first day on the CEO job at Time Warner, and we're going to preemptively bash his plans to sell off AOL or Time Inc." [DB]

Breaking: In completely surprising news, CNBC has announced that Time Warner's "No. 1" (outgoing CEO Dick Parsons) will be replaced by…Time Warner's No. 2, Jeff Bewkes.

By sheer coincidence, the revelation—which has been common industry knowledge for the past two years—comes only days before the release of the media conglomerate's undoubtedly dismal third-quarter earnings.

In completely unrelated news, Bewkes has also long been an "outspoken critic" of the AOL-Time Warner merger that everyone hates. And according to inside sources, Bewkes is said to be considering various strategies for rebuilding the company (whose stock is currently dropped 18% since last year, and counting).

Among the most popular? Ditching AOL completely, buying an internet company (i.e. Yahoo) that doesn't suck and making Google CEO Eric Schmidt "disappear."

• Let's stop and consider: what would Jesus blog? [NYP]

• You know you've made it media when college kids name drinking games after you. [Denver Westword]

• Aha! We wondered who was responsible for this insanity: you can now blame Jeff Jarvis for teaching James Wolcott how to blog. [Buzz Machine]

• We know someone who is defnitely keeping their Per Se reservation: Jeff Bewkes, the newly named president and COO of Time Warner. [Media Week]

• We're taking Bill O'Reilly out of D.C. for entertainment purposes. [Wonkette, Sepiamutiny]