And now…make-up sex: After 140 years of sleeping on the couch in Black America, the House of Representatives has issued a formal apology for “the institution of slavery, and the subsequent Jim Crow laws that for years discriminated against blacks as second-class citizens in American society,” NPR reports.  As the Washington Post points out, though, this comes after apologies were issued to Native and Japanese Americans.  They even drafted a bill to classify the Ottoman Turk cleansing of Armenians during WWI as genocide (it failed).  Not that that any xenophobic or racist act is less severe than another, but say what? It took us this long to get around to making formal amends with the African American community?  ”Such efforts were always bogged down by concerns that the apology would prompt a greater call for reparations for slavery,” says the Post article.  In a word: weaksauce.  We all know that Tron would win it all in a dice game anyways.

That’s hot: The McCain campaign, bolstered by the same, Steve Schmidt-led team that helped G-Dub edge out the ketchup dude in 2004, is launching an all out assault to “define Mr. Obama as arrogant, out of touch and unprepared for the presidency,” according to the New York Times.  This from the 71-year-old who called himself completely computer illiterate.  Apparently the first step is to equate him with Britney Spears and Paris Hilton in the minds of voters with a new TV spot.  The Obama campaign fired back, claiming this isn’t the John McCain that lamented personal attacks and vowed to take the high road.  I say they’re both coming off like a bunch of whiners right now.  Can we get to the debates already?

Nobody’s a hipster: If you thought TMZ.com getting more hits than all of the major newspapers sites combined signaled the end of society as we know it, you were wrong!  It’s actually hipsterdom, that vast cultural black hole, leeching all that is sacred and cool from all past counter-culture movements, according to Douglas Haddow over at AdBusters.  There are too many hyperbolic gems in this piece to relay here, but “the dance floor at a hipster party looks like it should be surrounded by quotation marks” should give you a feel for the tone.  The social constructs of the word “hipster,” and the seeming phobia of the word by all who outwardly identify themselves as one are dissected in the piece.  Last I checked AdBusters was a pretty hipsterish (gasp!) site, though.  Pot?  Kettle?  Chicken?  Egg?  Who cares, it’s a fun read.

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