The Washington Post grumbles today about male actors kissing each other in movies. Not that they think that it's wrong, just that in every fucking press interview ever the only question anyone really wants the unfortunate straight actor to answer is "so was it gross and weird to make out with another dude?" It's a tiring line of questioning that can start to feel really offensive and gross—in that way that it indicates some sort of insidious bedrock masculine patriarchy in our society, and other bullshit college phrases—though some actors, like Milk star James Franco, handle the questioning maturely enough. Really what the whole Issue tells us is something pretty simple. We need more openly gay actors.

Now that Obama has been elected, a tipster inside a PR firm tells us, clients are demanding "an increased number of African Americans added to the guest list" at their holiday parties. In the spirit of hope! The email can't really be "verified," but appears genuine and is just too important not to share. This firm has even assembled an official internal "Diversified Holiday Guest List," in which they rank the top 10 acceptable black socialite attendees, in order of desirability. Uh... yes we can? After the jump, meet the fashion world's ten favorite African-Americans for Obama-era parties. Jesus christ:

I find myself at a bit of a loss this morning to describe the Sturm und Drang that was last night's half-season-ender episode of Gossip Girl. O, Stephanie Savage. You giver of hopes, you taker awayer of those same hopes. What began as something that felt almost, almost like the sweepy melodrama this show should regularly be going for, eventually just yawed sideways and no one seemed to know what was up and what was down. So we were left with Aaron Rose and Serena's grandma getting more airtime than a lot of the principals. Ah well! We'll sift through the wreckage after the jump. Let's see what treasures we find!

You want your Chicago-style politics? They don't come much more Chicago-style than this: Democratic Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was just arrested, along with his chief of staff, by FBI agents. How many corrupt things can one Governor do before a new ethics law takes effect at the beginning of next year? Blagojevich was apparently trying to set some sort of record. And Rezko's involved! And Tribune Co! Let's start with Rod's charming decision to sell the Senate seat vacated by squeaky clean president-elect Barack Obama!

A frequent viewer of The Hills once explained it to us as "Professional wrestling, but for women. You know it's fake, but you want to keep up with the storylines anyway." Perhaps that's why MTV continues to ignore the actual, tabloid-documented reality of what has happened to its successful stars in favor of an increasingly more laughable alternate universe where all four women are still struggling 9-to-5ers. Today brought two more examples of their tomfoolery:

Our long national nightmare of not seeing justice done in one high-profile crime is over! OJ Simpson was just sentenced, and now journalists across the nation are trying to figure out all the fancy law talk to see just how much time OJ will spend in jail. The judge was very disappointed in the Juice, even though he was very very sorry, and OJ will be in jail for 5 6 years before he can make parole. The full sentence is 15, we think, though hopefully the AP or someone will let us correct that soon (oh hey). This means the world will finally get closure on a 14-year-old circus. We finally get to see OJ in prison! We never thought we'd see the day!

Sarah Palin is a lot like that Simpsons Halloween episode where the advertising characters terrorize Springfield: if we stop paying attention to her, she can't hurt us. But no one's able to let her go. Neither the liberals who are alternately amused by and horrified of her and the conservatives split between idolizing and reviling her can let her just go back to Alaska in peace. The Times is still looking into the clothes thing. Olbermann still replays every public statement she makes every night while demanding to know why people still pay her mind. And guess who's still obsessed with her magical pregnancy?

All subversive things in our culture must eventually be co-opted by the very things that they subvert. It's the American way. The American Apparel ad spoofer—who had a months-long run of fame for creating super-porny ripoffs of AA ad posters (which eventually turned out to be Photoshop fakes by the people at Stereohell)—has now become the subject of an actual American Apparel ad. In Vice magazine, naturally! Click through for photos of Dov Charney's victory over artistic mockery:

Sometimes the mere existence of a rumor is as interesting as the rumor itself, and the recent surge of people breathlessly telling us that Wendi Deng Murdoch is cuckolding News Corp. Rupert Murdoch certainly falls into that category. In the last couple weeks, three separate people have come forward to tell us Deng is having an affair with Chris DeWolfe, a MySpace founder who now works for Rupert after News Corp. purchased the social network three years ago for $580 million. It's pretty clear there is a campaign underway to get this story out. And whoever it is has finally found an outlet to bite. There's certainly no shortage of people who might have an ax to grind against Murdoch, Deng or even DeWolfe. If you have any idea who's behind it, please email me.

Sean Avery has long relished his role as the National Hockey League's miscreant-in-chief, but the Dallas Stars forward's internship at Vogue seems to have sharpened his instincts for provocation to razor precision. Avery was just suspended indefinitely by the NHL for talking smack about two ex-girlfriends, actress Elisha Cuthbert and model Rachel Hunter, who ended up in the arms of other players. His own team said it would have suspended him had the league not done likewise. The truly insane part of the whole incident is that Avery sought out TV cameras so he could broadcast his self-destructive diss. (UPDATE: Video after the jump.)

Though Elisabeth Hasselbeck has offended many during her tenure on The View, she's never quite had what could be called, in the show parlance, a "Ching Chong" moment. So named for Rosie O'Donnell's Asian language impression in which she shrieked, "Ching Chong Ching Chong!" and stopped just shy of declaring, "That was me, Rosie, playing an Oriental!" the gaffe is the type that incurs the wrath of an entire race, and Hasselbeck may have had her own in this morning's episode.

Another lawsuit has been filed against pervy American Apparel CEO Dov Charney, alleging he sexually harasses women and inflates his company's profits, as usual. But! AA has now filed its own suit saying that Nikky Yang (the ex-employee who's filed this new suit) is disgruntled and stole money while she was at AA and was always hitting Dov Charney up for money even after she left. (Yang is represented by Keith Fink, the attorney already in an ongoing feud with AA). And AA's suit includes many amusing emails from Yang to Dov, including this one from 2004 promising him a nice hot massage girl!:

Nobody died last night! I don't mean in the world, of course people, too many people, died in the world last night. I mean, more importantly, on Gossip Girl. Two long weeks ago, the "on the next..." clip made it seem like old Barty Crouch Bass would be saying hoof to that bucket and bending it like BeckHamm (the super soccer robot made from parts of David and Mia). And maybe he did, far off in the Chekhovian outlands of unseen action, but we didn't get any confirmation one way or another. Just late-breaking word of "the accident." So, ah well, I guess we'll have to wait til next week. For now, other stuff happened! Come read about it with me, won't you?

President-elect Obama—allegedly a 'man of the people'—is allegedly buying a fancy $30,000 ring for his fancy wife, allegedly! It was in the trusty Daily Mail, and now it's the top story on Drudge, meaning it is the single most important news story in all the world. Elitist Obama drops 30K on bling for his wife during a recession—and this bling will be made out of rhodium, the world's most expensive metal! This story is almost certainly bullshit, and we will tell you exactly why. [Updates below—we were right]:

The Waverly Inn was crawling with Condé Nast insiders earlier tonight, some of whom had been waiting as long as 20 years for the appetizer: The hot, delicious rumor that Si Newhouse was meeting in Paris with Carine Roitfeld to work out the final details of the French Vogue editor's move to New York, where she is expected to take over flagship Vogue from Anna Wintour immediately after New Year's. It did not go unnoticed when Condé Nast overlord Newhouse departed early for his annual three-week December vacation in Vienna; it turns out he needed time for his meeting with uptight Wintour's chic Parisian counterpart.

Sure, Barack Obama appointed a number of women to prominent positions in his national security team, but he is still a patent misogynistic. How else to explain the terrible set-up of the podium at his press conference this morning? All the women had to readjust the microphones, which still looked like they were coming out of their heads. It's too much work to get a little milk crate for Hillary and Janet and Susan? We know Obama's a master of stagecraft and political spectacle, so we can only imagine that this was totally 100% intentional, appointing all these short women who you can barely see. After all, Robert Reich didn't have to speak at the economic team press conference, did he? Click for our video compilation of mic-adjusting humiliation!

Men: is your hair clean enough to get you laid? While you've been working out to get ripped abs, has your unstyled, sweat-soaked hair been holding you back from sexing the women of your dreams? No, obviously not. Your lack of money has been holding you back. But Axe, maker of horrifying adolescent body spray and even more horrifying publicity stunts, is going to convince you otherwise! Because that's what Axe does: steadily erode any semblance of dignity the American male may possess. In the grand emasculating tradition of fancy men's underwear, get ready for Axe male hair care products—the new thing that you must have in order to get chicks, bro!

Can hipster clothing conglomerate American Apparel and its balls-out CEO Dov Charney never have a normal, peaceful, lawsuit, which is settled quietly and forgotten about? Most recently, the company was fighting back against a lawsuit by ex-employee Roberto Hernandez by trotting out his ex-lovers and leaking documents showing that Hernandez himself recently defended Charney from the very charges he's now being sued for. And now AA is playing more legal hardball! The company is trying to prove to the world that Keith Fink, the lawyer for another ex-employee suing Dov for sexual harassment, is in fact an extortionate scumbag himself. Leaked internal emails below:

At left is a picture the Times is running on A1 this morning, the day before Thanksgiving. It depicts a Florida mom showing off all the useless crap she was able to scrounge for daughter McKenna (!), like a fake plastic kitchen, thanks to a "noble sacrifice" this year: The mom will bravely go without this season's new designer jeans, according to the accompanying story. Notice that she seems to be nicely up-to-date with last season's pricey denim; that she is standing in a garage larger than many apartments; that it seems to be furnished with an operative extra refrigerator; and that discarded toys (from prior Christmases?) are plainly visible in plastic boxes in the background. This typifies sacrifice in America today? The coming depression is so going to eat the nation alive, and the world will laugh, because we deserve it.

The odd mini-profile on Prince that ran in the most recent New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" section made a big splash, mostly because of Prince's religious pronouncements of going door-to-door as a Jehovah's witness and remarks concluding that being gay was wrong. However, his flack went to Perez Hilton and said that Prince had been "grossly misquoted" and accused the writer of the piece, Claire Hoffman, of not using a tape recorder. ("How unprofessional!" Perez squealed.) The New Yorker stood by their story in a confirmation to Wired. But turns out there was a very good reason the interview wasn't recorded: Hoffman explains in an interview that Prince "wouldn’t let me use a tape recorder or my notepad."The quote that got Prince in trouble was, in response to a question about gay marriage and abortion, “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out." So, how did Hoffman get that? She explains, "I walked out and sat in my car and wrote for an hour. I don’t have long chunks of dialogue, but I was able to remember stuff." Forbidding a writer of making any record of an interview is a pretty canny move for a celebrity—he can claim to be "misquoted" on anything he didn't like. It's her recollection against his. And given that the Prince version (via Perez) — "What His Purpleness actually did was gesture to the Bible and said he follows what it teaches, referring mainly to the parts about loving everyone and refraining from judgment." — sounds like P.R. puffery, we're going with Hoffman here and Prince is, as usual, DOING IT RONG. [Via Emdashes]