The Times finally found space to publish a nice, chummy editorial bemoaning the death of the "lively.... handsome... muckraking" New York Sun. The loss of the neoconservative broadsheet is especially sad, the Times added, because internet journalism is very confusing and hard to navigate and just generally terrifying, unlike the Sun, which again is quite pretty and edited by a swell guy called Seth Lipsky. Glossed over was Lipsky's utter shortsightedness as both a civic observer and a businessman. And though the Times editorial board has long fancied itself a staunch defender of the First Amendment, it failed completey to note the Sun's revolting 2003 editorial calling anti-war protestors treasonous and saying they should be muzzled, spied upon and perhaps thrown in jail. Slate accurately labeled it "fascist" at the time, and a tipster this week reminded us of its existence. Some highlights:

When we remember the New York Sun, we'll try to remember the great local reporting and the fantastic sports page and the serious and smart arts coverage. Not so much the ideological inanity and loud constant taking of the precisely wrong side of every important issue of this miserable era. In trying to remember them that way, of course, one is best advised to skip most of their farewell edition. The goodbyes are not self-pitying, at least, but they reveal a newspaper that imagines it had some small role in the destruction of this country while turning a blind eye to the many myriad ways they could've continued on their crusade if they hadn't been so utterly out of touch. The opening of the farewell editorial sets the scene:

G Spa—the tiny, dank club in the basement of the Meatpacking District's Hotel Gansevoort—is closing on Saturday. It was a celeb-magnet and a dreadful place. It will not be missed. (We voted it the Worst of Nightlife back in 2006—"You'd just be drinking $15 cocktails in a sauna, crammed into an incredibly tiny space, and trying not to pass out from the smell of chlorine.") The entire Gansevoort Hotel is vulgar and gross, but G Spa actively insulted our intelligence, arrogantly testing clubgoers' patience by making them feel like they should want to party in a humid spa. As Down By the Hipster put it, the club "holds an important place in the history of the Meatpacking district, in that it proved that for a time, no matter what you opened there, people would come." Hopefully those days are waning. Check out the magic you missed out on:See you in hell.

As you stumble home drunkenly this evening, trundling down Stuart St. in Boston, or off of some semi-major highway in the greater Chicagoland area, don't plan on getting your faux-Irish crapbag food fix the way you've gotten it for years. Tonight, everything goes away. After three hundred and twenty-two devoted years of deep frying sandwiches (seriously, one bite and you died... in a good way) Bennigan's Grill & Tavern, known to some as Not-Applebee's, is shuttering most of its locations. Though, if your local family feedbag is one of the independently owned franchises, it might stay open. (Especially in Indiana!) So enjoy that special Jameson barbecue menu for as long as you can. It might not be long, though. Because I remember? When the Ground Round went out of business? There was one near me that stayed open? But then it totally closed, like, only a few months later. Let's take a moment of fried silence.

Hillary Clinton's race for the presidency is OVER. It's DONE. The primaries are finished! The Associated Press has just crowned Barack Obama the official Democratic nominee for President. The wire story is an amusing 'fuck you' to the Clinton campaign, which spent the morning crowing about how the AP got their earlier story wrong. Also it's long and they've clearly been saving it for when they could finalize the math. Like an obituary. Which it effectively is. [AP]

The influence of Maureen Dowd, formerly important New York Times opinion columnist, is dead, at the age of 13. The Pulitzer-winning columnist is still blamed, in some circles, for killing Al Gore's shot at the presidency with her relentless, belittling, emasculating, and most importantly media consensus-shaping columns. She used to be inescapable—on the Times home page, on Sunday morning politics shows, in every political blog on Earth—but now it's hard to gin up outrage about her scrubbing negative quotes from columns or mistaking black women for other black women. In 2004, those stories would've been all Atrios talked about for days. (Maybe they still are, does anyone read Atrios anymore either?) In 2000, they wouldn't have been outrages at all, because everything she said was immediate conventional wisdom. So what happened?

Avenue A's grimiest coffeehouse will soon reopen as "Hopscotch, a caf tailored to the needs of children and families," according to a press release we received today. Though its ownership will remain the same (two new co-owners will step in), we're still sad. And we're not even sure why! It's not like Alt was particularly good for anything. The coffee is totally meh. The place reeks of cigs and B.O., even though no one has (legally) smoked there for years. The seating is crowded, broke-down and uncomfortable! The unlockable bathroom is one of the grossest non-Turnpike ones ever! The WIFI IS NOT EVEN FREE! Still, we mourn a bit. Maybe it's because it's just weird to have lived someplace for less than a decade and yet to have seen almost everything cheap and weird about it get systematically obliterated. On the bright side, though, we will totally look forward to rolling our Peg Perego into Hopscotch in some years!