After opening his mouth and expelling a noxious cloud of racist words about heroin dealers named “D Money” who are constantly knocking up Maine’s white women, Gov. Paul LePage today explained he only said those things because of his “slow” brain. Sure!

At some point in their lives, most young women have to decide whether to become an internationally renowned women's rights activist or star in their own primetime sitcom. Unless they look sufficiently ethnic-y, that is, in which case they're free to take credit for both. That's the lesson Mindy Kaling learned earlier this month at the New Yorker Festival, where "a tipsy man in his 80s" mistook the comedian for Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai.

If her column today is any indication, ancient op-ed mariner Maureen Dowd is not overly familiar with black people. Sure, living in Washington D.C., a city with a high concentration of African-Americans, she has noted the occasional "cute black mailman," but generally, this week was the first time she had ever seen whites and blacks speaking to one another. If this is the kind of analysis Dowd will be delivering twice a week in the Obama era, there may be no need for any other president-elect related comedy to exist.Maureen's pre-election columns were generally ghastly enough. Not to be outdone by rival condescending op-edders, she breaks out the big guns today with a column that begins, "I grew up in the nation’s capital, but I’ve never seen blacks and whites here intermingling as they have this week." It gets better:

Meet Chris Renfro. Last month, in a case that went wholly unnoticed in the company's unending news flow of highly credible sexual harassment accusations and that lost chihuahua story, he sued American Apparel for race discrimination. (I know, like you put it past them.) We just took a look at his complaint and wondered if it might hold some deeper meaning for hipsterkind. Renfro contends that, while working on the "industrial design and construction" of an American Apparel store (context: said job pays $11.25 an hour) he was called the N-word incessantly by a co-worker named Sean Alonzo who allegedly said they "could use more" N-words at American Apparel (ha ha ha ha) and then proceeded to neg him by bringing a friend he described as "really racist," — along with said friend's vicious dog! — to a store they were opening. Reading the complaint, I remembered how there once was a time when this Vice magazine hipster racism thing used to shock me. Now it just seems sad! And it looks like Renfro agrees, judging from a Malthusian MySpace post he wrote the day before the suit was filed maintaining his hipster tormenters need to develop actual skills. After all, "what is graphic design going to do for you when you're starving?"

So, there was a huge (which is to say, tiny!) dust-up over a Washington Post story that ran on November 29. The story was about Barack HUSSEIN Obama and his "Muslim tie rumors" which are totally just that and so this journalism professor was like "Okay this story sucks!" (It kinda did! Mostly due to bad editing.) Then Romenesko linked to it. Everyone got upset and defended the reporter! Times reporter Ad Nags wrote a really nice note. But WaPo executive editor Len Downie wrote a really bitchy letter! The Times wrote about it. Trevor Butterworth at HuffPo went to town on "Bacongate"! CJR then criticized Downie's bitchy note! But inside this crazy-fest, at least two people were having a not-at-all explicit coded conversation!

When a murder suspect taking the stand at his trial adopts a "farcical Asian accent," it's important to transcribe all of his comments phonetically, as the Post does today. "Rast name, Sakai." And: "He referred to me as his rittle brother." And: "During this trial, I've had to sit there and listen to rie after rie." And: "The rast time I went overseas was in 2006." Then why not toss a couple of your own wacky Charlie Chan-isms in there? "He didn't 'kirr' anybody"—hilarious. [NYP]

EXTENDED BASEBALL METAPHOR EXPLAINS EVERYTHING TERRIBLE ABOUT RUDY GIULIANI! "For most of Giuliani's life, the Yankees have been the richest, most powerful, and usually winningest team in baseball. Yet the ultimate fan of baseball's biggest overdog thinks he's a brave, oppressed partisan of an underdog. Giuliani won back the city from the mongrel hordes—the descendants of Brooklyn Dodgers fans—and now he's proposing to win back the world for America." [NYM]

Blogger Addy Fox, who is dating a Googler, took advantage of her beef's two allotted monthly visitor passes and checked up on the accuracy of our assessment of the Googleplex, which we'd found shockingly crappy. She discovered that we were wrong about some things—for instance, the cafeteria is on the 8th floor, not the 16th (I'm bad with numbers!). But we were right when we assumed that the cold chicken wings and tragicomic sushi weren't representative of usual Google fare: "They have an actual sushi chef in one of the cafeterias who made me a truly delicious spicy tuna roll ... then, as we took our trays out onto the terrace, we were greeted by a buffet of tasty 'Mexican Street Food,' complete with mango and tutifruiti soda." Yum yum. But you know what's not so delicious? RACISM.

Glaring Omissions reproduces tips received from readers in the last week that weren't covered on Gawker, either by accident (it happens!) or by design (it happens more often). N.B. What an amazing week of glare! Keep those cards and letters coming!

You know, we were all set to write off the A-Rod affair as a harmless bit of ballplayer adultery until we realized—thanks to illustrator Robert Grossman in today's Observer—that the dude is black. A black guy nailing our busty blond strippers? Unthinkable! To arms, people.

It's our favorite time of year—the time that barricades and fences line Fifth Avenue up by Central Park, when Upper East Side shopkeepers board their windows. It's the Puerto Rican Day Parade this coming Sunday! (And it's too bad Arthur Carter no longer owns the Observer—his editorials about what he could actually see from his Fifth Ave. apartment windows were priceless; enjoy "Puerto Rican Day Parade: Filth and Garbage.") This year, says a recent park-goer, the fences have been up for weeks along the park side, conveniently in place since the AIDS walk. According to what he heard a Central Park Conservancy staff member saying to a dog-walker, they'd actually put the fences up to make sure all those scary Ricans can't blast their boomboxes and litter their tostones in the sacred fields of ultimate frisbee. Well good for them!

Last weekend, on the bucolic Quad at Harvard University—typically, the site of a casual game of Ultimate, or perhaps an afternoon reading of some Shakespearean sonnets before English class—an unusual and, to some, frightening scene was played out. There were people throwing things! And running! And jumping! And most scary of all, every single one of them was black. So the Harvard students watching from their dormitory windows, growing increasingly agitated at the sights below, did what any normal, white Harvard student would do when they saw a large, seemingly unruly group of black people: They called the cops!

Turns out that guineas all over the country are mobbing up to donate to the campaign of America's Cousinfucker, Rudy Giuliani. That's right: This morning's Post reports that Eye-ties across the nation are so excited by the prospect that someone with a vowel on the end of his name might be president (yes, yes, Millard Fillmore, give us a break) that they're taking time away from their busy schedule of wifebeating and "sanitation" work to drop money into the Giuliani coffers. Still, we found the Post's lead—"Rudy Giuliani for president. That's amore!"—to be lacking in whatever the wop version of je ne sais quoi is. Herewith our suggestions; probably you can do better.

We would like to blame some combination of Sex and the City, Stephanie Klein, and Sister 2 Sister for this party taking place at West Village boutique Elizabeth Charles tonight.

The other evening, the sisters of Columbia's Sigma Delta Tau sorority gathered to hear a speaker who could figure very prominently in their futures: matchmaker Janis Spindel, of Janis Spindel Serious Matchmaking and 365 Proven Ways to Find Love in Less Than a Year. Why, did the lovely ladies need some help learning how to attract the fine male specimens of Columbia University? Yes, it turns out!

So a bunch of angry Irish folks have put down their pints of Powers Gold Label long enough to feel aggrieved by something, which, let's face it, is their favorite thing to do after getting plastered and blowing up cars in heavily-populated areas anyway. This time Seamus and Co. are upset about "a St. Patrick's Day liquor ban on New York's commuter railroads, calling the move a gross act of stereotyping and discrimination."

For once, we're not calling out NY Sun columnist Alicia Colon for her casual (or come to think of it, not so casual) racism. Today's example comes instead from the pen of columnist John McWhorter for today's piece about dying languages: