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Earlier this month former editor Sandra Guzman sued the New York Post for being an alleged hellhole of racism and sexism. Today, a recently fired reporter filed a lawsuit claiming he was “banned” from the newsroom for being black.

Austin Fenner, a 20-year veteran reporter, was fired on November 9th, the same day as Guzman. And—if Fenner’s claims are true—for the same reason: complaining about the Post publishing that infamous cartoon depicting officers shooting a chimpanzee meant to be Barack Obama. (Was it worth it, New York Post?)

The Huffington Post reports Fenner filed a 27-page complaint in court today which specifically signals out metropolitan editor Michelle Gotthelf and assignment editor Daniel Greenfield as the racists-in-chief. The lawsuit outlines a number of claims that fall just short of the sheer crazy-terribleness of Guzman’s, but it’s still a model example of (alleged!) racism.

Here are the worst/best parts:

The main thrust of the complaint is that minority Post staffers are subjected to “pervasive discrimination and harassment… based on their race and/or color” at the hands of their nearly all-white colleagues.

This discrimination manifested itself most blatantly in Fenner’s claim that, after he criticized the chimpanzee cartoon in the blog Journal-ism, Greenfield and Gotthelf told him he couldn’t enter the “Whites Only” newsroom without their permission for the five months before he was ultimately fired:

During the cartoon row, Fenner claims he also witnessed racism directed at New York Governor David Patterson, when editors refused to interview him about the cartoon:

And after Fenner publicly complained about the chimpanzee cartoon he said editors started to get sweary—and not even in a creative, hard-boiled-newspaper-editor-type way:

All this led to that fateful Nov. 9 day, when Fenner was called from an assignment in Brooklyn, ordered to give his notes to a white reporter, and fired.

The Post told the Huffington Post that Fenner’s claims were “totally false and the claims of discrimination completely baseless.” OK, you convinced us! Forget paywalls: The Post should charging for seminars on how to deny accusations that your organization is a seething pit of racism.

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Congrats to Rush Limbaugh! We hear he’s finally set a date get married for a fourth time—appropriately enough, it is the Fourth of July!

The lucky lady: Kathryn “Kate” Rogers. We’re not sure where the wedding is taking place, yet, but Rush reads the site, so maybe he’ll let us know!

Rush loves the holidays: his last wedding was on Memorial Day, 1994. Prior to that, his second wife left him on Christmas.

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You think that the animated holiday specials we all grew up with were just teaching you about Santa and presents and winter wonderlands? You’re wrong! They were sending you hidden signals both excellent and devious. Here is the ugly truth.

Christmas specials were feeding you messages to accept gays, love women, embrace Jesus, and do lots and lots of LSD. Yes, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeeris on CBS tomorrow night, and watching it can be like playing a Judy Garland record backward looking for Satanic messages. This is our early present to all of you out there. Free your minds from the traps set up by network executives and watch with your eyes wide open for the first time. These are our thoughts on five classics, but in the seasonal spirit of giving, please share the subtext of other more obscure specials in the comments. We know some of you out there speak the truth.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
The Story: A reindeer that is born different casts himself out of normal society, until everyone realizes what makes him different also makes him strong, and he and the other “misfits” must save Christmas.
The Subtext: Rudolph’s nose should shine with fabulous, because this is a tale of gay empowerment. Aside from Rudolph, his fey elf friend Hermey is also a big old queen and the Island of Misfit Toys looks like the craziest gay bar this side of the Ramrod.
Favorite Example: Yukon Cornelius was the first bear ever in an animated television special.
Nice List: Babygays, PFLAG moms, tom boys, anyone who might be a little bit odd, Levi Johnston.
Naughty List: School bullies, Fred Phelps, girlie girls, people who voted for Prop 8, Sarah Palin.

Frosty the Snowman
The Story: After being brought to life by a magic hat, Frosty has to flee the hot city or else he’ll melt. An evil magician traps him in a greenhouse, where he melts, but Santa brings him back to life.
The Subtext: Global warming is a figment of your imagination, and praying to Jesus will save the environment and return the ice caps to their former glory.
Favorite Example: Seriously, Santa magically undoes all the damage from “greenhouse gases” with a flick of his wrist.
Nice List: People who think evolution is a joke, monkeys, your mother’s pastor, Sarah Palin.
Naughty List: Scientists, thinking people, your rabbi, Al Gore.

The Grinch Who Stole Christmas
The Story: A furry green thing hates a bunch of strange insect-like creatures so much that he steals all their bizarre looking holiday accoutrement so that they can’t celebrate. Then they sing in an alien language.
The Subtext: Do a shitload of drugs. The Grinch is Timothy Leary geeked out on acid and tripping so hard that he thinks that hoo-hinkers are real. By the end of the program, he sobers up and gives everything back.
Favorite Example: The hoo-roast beast is really the kid that the babysitter put in the microwave instead of the turkey.
Nice List: Stoners, Dead heads, ravers, Marion Barry.
Naughty List: Frat boys, Celine Dion fans, addiction counselors, Sarah Palin.

A Charlie Brown Christmas
The Story: Charlie Brown is sad because Christmas has become about fake trees and commercialism. He finds salvation in Jesus.
The Subtext: Do we have to spell it out for you? This cartoon special has converted more people than death row and foxholes put together.
Favorite Example: Linus lisping the message about three wise men coming to visit baby Jesus.
Nice List: Fundamentalists, Kirk Cameron, anti-consumerists, Marcie, Sarah Palin.
Naughty List: Scientologists, Alan Thicke, Wal-Mart, Peppermint Patty, Barney Frank.

The Year Without a Santa Claus
The Story: Santa is sick and wants to take a year off. Mrs. Claus gets two elves to go to Earth to get someone to convince Santa to get off his lazy ass and work. The humans will only do it if the elves can make it snow in the warm south. They have to go to Cold Miser and Heat Miser and convince them to let it snow where it should be sweltering. The two squabbling brothers won’t do it, so Mrs. Claus goes to Mother Nature, who makes it happen and saves Christmas.
The Subtext: Fuck the patriarchy, women rule! With all the inept, lazy, fighting, macho men bumbling about, it’s the ladies who get everything done.
Favorite Example: Mrs. Claus dresses up as Santa and says she could do the job if she really wanted to.
Nice List: Naomi Wolfe, diva worshipers, third-wave feminists, your mom, Hillary Clinton.
Naughty List: Dr. Ruth, misogynists, Girls Gone Wild, dear old dad, Sarah Palin.

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Dragon Age: Origins has taken the terribly awkward genre of videogame dialog and melded it with gay romance and, also gay sex scenes. Who, in these United States, could possibly object to foisting this content on teenaged boys?

Oh, right, like half the population. Here’s right-wing panic site World Net Daily’s aghast summary of the game, via Wonkette:

The elf reveals he specializes in assassination, and the other character replies, “I bet you’re good at a lot of things.”

The elf responds, “Mmmm, that’s quite an offer, especially coming from another man – if we are both speaking of the same thing.”

If the player selects the response, “I suspect we are,” the elf agrees to have homosexual sex with the character.

WND then quotes selectively from gay blogs (”Gay geeks rejoice, all your gaming fantasies have come true”) and YouTube comments (”We’re a bisexual nation living in denial”) and provides a list of retailers (like Wal Mart!) presumably for boycotting. Because, you know, if there’s one way to make gay sex look hot and appealing, it’s by showcasing it with stilted dialog, jerky body movements and elf ears, in a role playing videogame like Dragon Age. Hottt.

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Even the best television shows run out of creative juice if they stay on the air long enough. But, when is the right time to give up hope a show will improve and abandon it forever? Finally, a handy calculation!

We have a tendency to remain faithful to our favorite shows for far too long. When they start to take a turn for the worse, we hold out hope that they will get smart and return to their former glory. We wait and we wait and no improvement comes, and then we feel like we have to see it to the end, now that we’ve invested so much time in waiting for it to get good, we don’t want to leave and have it return to form without us.

We were seized with this dilemma last night while watching Desperate Housewives. And before you start joking, Housewives in it’s first season was awesome. It was fresh, funny, campy, and full of unexpected joy. It took a turn for the worse in seasons two and three, but rebounded in seasons four and five. Now we’re well into the show’s sixth year, and while it is still highly rated, it isn’t what it used to be creatively. There are tons of peripheral characters that we barely care about, Teri Hatcher’s Susan is even more unlikable than ever, Felicity Huffman’s Lynette is pregnant again, and the writers even managed to make Eva Longoria Parker’s reliably hilarious Gaby a snooze while seriously underusing the fantastic Dana Delany and Drea de Matteo. The show has gotten so bad, in fact, that we no longer enjoy making jokes about what a shitty mother Susan is or how annoying we find her daughter, Julie.

That is when it struck us—there is actually a formula that we can use to figure out when to quit watching a show, and it looks something like this:

We estimate that each season is worth 8 months, and that “joy” is measured on a sliding scale of 0-5, with zero being no jokes at all and 5 being Gossip Girl levels of hilarity at its badness (really, “Serena is a skank” jokes never get stale). So, if you plug the numbers in for Desperate Housewives here is what happens:

120 - 56 / 0 = 0

That means no more time should be afforded Desperate Housewives. Fine by us! Consider your season pass deleted from our TiVo.

This also works for deciding what to do about a new show. Here is our calculation for V, which we still find moderately amusing because of the aliens wearing human skin concept, but is starting to wear on us. Since it’s a newer show, we calculated in weeks rather than months:

4 - 2 / 1 = 2 episodes.

Alright, V, you have two episodes to prove yourself when you return in March. If you can impress us in that window, then we’ll keep you around until you start smelling worse than an giant alien ship without a sewage disposal and we have to bust out our formula again to calculate your life span.

But, like most formulas, there is a variable, and that is what else is on at the same time. Right now, there isn’t much in terms of television greatness on Sunday nights until Big Love returns January 10, which means Housewives may get a stay of execution until then. But as soon as it does, mathematics has determined that the ax will fall. And we won’t even feel guilty about it, now that we have our patented Television Doomsday Clock and good old algebra on our side.

[Image via EssG's Flickr]

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Thanks to all of our lovely, scarred, dysfunctional, boozy, bad-cooking readers, we were more full of Thanksgiving Horror Stories than a Macy’s parade balloon is full of helium. We selected the best (or is it worst?) and crowned a winner.

If you want to see all the stories, visit the comments section of the original post. All of the stories tend to fall into certain genres—cooking nightmares, drunken exploits, family drama, death, illness, and general destruction—so we’ve picked out some of our favorites so that you don’t have to read all 500 or so horror stories like some of us had to. Here are our runners up. The titles are ours, but these stories are all yours:

• Most Inspirational: Babygay’s Escape to the Big City by BettyCrocker.
• Grossest Cooking Mishap: One Seriously Nasty Salad by MomOf3WildKids.
• Saddest Passing: Mom’s Dream House of Death by Saelmar.
• Most Delinquent Family Member: Stripper Sister-In-Law on the Run from the Law by Lysergic Asset.
• Cooking Experiment Gone Wild: The Proof Is in the Pesto by ThatGirlInNewYork.
• Best Bad Turkey Disposal/Funniest Punchline: Bird on the Lawn by RollsRoyceRevenge.
• Stupidest Family Fight: Patch Adams Rules by Allyzay.
• Worst Plumbing Accident: Shit Hits the Fan by Scairborn.
• Best Drinking Contest: Grandma and Grandpa Go Shot for Shot by Meredith.Terry.
• The Scariest Night Out on the Town: A Real Life Episode of Cheaters by WickedlySane.
• Most Destructive: Burning Down the House by Willow150.
• Self-Referential Award for Excellence: Thanks for Giving Me Something to Put on Gawker by TheExperience.
• The PETA Award for Animal Cruelty: Gobble on This by Kimrod.
• The Overly Dramatic Oscar: My Mother the Drag Queen by RabbityThings.

And the Ultimate Award for Thanksgiving Horror and the $50 prize for a bottle of Wild Turkey goes to DrunkExpatWriter, for his two-fold tale of his family behaving badly. The full story is reprinted below for everyone to enjoy and so that we can all laugh at his pain to make our pain a little bit more bearable.

Here’s the winning tale:

Ok. I have two stories for you. Roughly 13 years ago my family got together at my parent’s house for Thanksgiving. My step mom and her brother have always had a “tumultuous” relationship. After dinner they got into an argument over who loved their long dead mother more. Shit was thrown around, plates broken, the usual. My dad tried to calm them down to no avail. So, he decided he had to distract them. He’d just gotten a Dodge conversion van, so he went out and fired it up and started ramming it at the cars of all our relatives - totaling roughly 10 cars until my step mom and uncle noticed and stopped fighting with each other in order to yell at him.

Now, second story. The next year, my dad decided that having people over to the house for Thanksgiving was a bad idea. So he booked us all into this super fancy restaurant and paid to put all the relatives in a swank hotel next door - on the assumption that people would be more well behaved in public.

Everything went well during the meal, until the check arrived. The waiter then put the check near my uncle rather than my step mom (who insists on handling all the financial shit for her and my dad.)

Her brother then said “See, you can talk about liberation all you want, but classy people know a man is supposed to pay.”

My step mom then upended the table and grabbed the carving knife and tried to stab her brother to death. He took me, my dad and my brother to literally hurl her off of him.

In a matter of minutes the cops arrived (small New Jersey town.)

While my step mom and my uncle were trying to tell the cops they didn’t want to press charges against each other, my dad walked up to one of the cop cars, unzipped and pissed on the cop car’s tires.

Flash forward two hours later to me, my then-wife and various cousins pooling our money to bail all three of them out of jail.

Congratulations go to DrunkExpatWriter for giving us reason to believe our family isn’t so bad. You can either pick up your booze at Gawker HQ (the lawyers say mailing it’s dicey) or email Gabriel to tell him where to send a $50 check to spend on the libation of your choice.

Feel free to continue to add stories to the official compendium of misery in the original post, and in the comments, tells us what a crappy job we did picking the winner and provide links to your favorite tales (you can get a permalink to the comments by clicking on the date below the commenter’s name).

And while we’re glad that we didn’t have to live through any of these tales of terror, we would like to thank you all for the memories. Christmas is going to be a doozy!

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Climate change is real and man-made. Period, end of story. But recently, some emails have leaked that conclusively prove that climate scientists… are really pissed off that a well-funded industry exists that subverts and denies their work.

A “hacker” obtained a bunch of emails from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia and posted them to some website, and for some reason Matt Drudge and the right-wing media have decided that these emails are proof of a massive conspiracy to make up global warming, for fun. The emails are mostly scientists complaining about political pressures and people they dislike and things that make their job—and their job is attempting to reconstruct climates of hundreds or millions of years ago based on fucking ice floes and tree rings—harder.

There are precisely two emails that even sound scandalous: one in which a scientist refers to borrowing another scientist’s “trick”—which skeptics interpret as falsifying data and which actual legitimate scientists say means “a clever way of doing something”—to “hide the decline,” which is a poor way of saying he is attempting to correct for the fact that tree rings don’t reflect modern warming trends that are well-documented by actual thermometers.

The other email that is terribly scandalous is even better. As George Monbiot explains:

One of the most damaging emails was sent by the head of the climatic research unit, Phil Jones. He wrote “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”

One of these papers which was published in the journal Climate Research turned out to be so badly flawed that the scandal resulted in the resignation of the editor-in-chief.

So the scandal is that a researcher thought a paper was flawed and said he would do anything to keep it from being published, not because it said something dangerous that he is trying to keep hidden, but because he thought it was bad science. And then it turned out to be bad science.

Ahem:

Half of the journal’s editorial board, including editor-in-chief Hans von Storch, resigned from the journal’s editorial board because they felt that publication of the paper in question represented a breakdown in the peer-review process. The publisher had refused to allow von Storch to publish an editorial on the topic, but later the president of the journal’s parent company stated that the paper’s major findings could not “be concluded convincingly from the evidence provided in the paper. [Climate Research] should have requested appropriate revisions of the manuscript prior to publication.”

So. The scandal, again, for those keeping score at home, is that academics are bitching to each other about papers they think are bad, written by people they dislike, that are being published in journals they dislike.

Also the scandal is that someone made Andrea Peyser’s child sing a song about global warming!

The Post’s resident sex goddess and outrage factory reports from the front lines of the Obama/Soros/Polar Bear Indoctrination Campaign:

My daughter came home from school recently with a spring in her step and a song on her lips. With no foreshadowing — or time to call an exorcist — out came this chilling refrain:

“…You can hear the warning — GLOBAL WARMING… “

By the time her father and I removed our jaws from the floor, we had learned that:

A) All the kids had been coerced into singing this catchy ditty, which we called “The Warming Song,” at a concert for parents.

B) Further song lyrics scolded selfish adults (that would be us) for polluting our planet and causing a warming scourge that would, in no short order, kill all the polar bears and threaten the birds and bees.

C) There was no deprogramming session on the menu. And no arguing allowed.

Well, we’re sorry you weren’t allowed to “argue” with a school assembly, Andrea. That must’ve been hard for you! Also we’re sorry that someone is scolding grown-ups for polluting the planet, but, you know, it really can’t be argued that that is anyone else’s fault.

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Every political reporter in the nation was so consumed by one ridiculous non-story over the holiday weekend that they missed the biggest ridiculous non-story of the month: Chelsea Clinton is engaged!

Clinton was supposed to get married in Martha’s Vineyard this summer, but that didn’t happen, obviously. Maybe because she wasn’t actually engaged yet to her dynastic boyfriend Marc “son of two former congress members” Mezinsky?

Jake Tapper broke the news on his blog, because that is basically how this news was destined to be broken. Chelsea and Marc sent out an email the morning after Thanksgiving, ensuring that no one would report on it until Monday:

“We’re sorry for the mass email but we wanted to wish everyone a belated Happy Thanksgiving! We also wanted to share that we are engaged! We didn’t get married this past summer despite the stories to the contrary, but we are looking toward next summer and hope you all will be there to celebrate with us. Happy Holidays! Chelsea & Marc.”

Congrats, Chelsea. May your reception be free of aspiring reality show characters, and here’s hoping Marc doesn’t mind the title “First Dude.”

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While you were busy watching football, eating dry turkey, and flashing tense, frozen smiles at your annoying relatives, Tiger Woods was getting beaten senseless by his wife. Here’s a round-up of what we know in case you were otherwise engaged.

At 2:25 a.m. on Friday morning—in other words, late on Thanksgiving night—one of Woods’ neighbors in Windermere, Fla., called 911 to report that Woods had crashed into a tree in front of his house and was lying on the ground outside his Cadillac Escalade. He was taken to a local hospital in “serious condition” with facial lacerations and released later that day. The Florida Highway Patrol didn’t release details about the accident until Friday afternoon, twelve hours after it happened, and the initial report from Windermere police officers was that Woods was drifting in and out of consciousness when they arrived on the scene. Windermere’s police chief told the Orlando Sentinel that Woods’ wife Elin had heroically used a golf club to break out the rear windows of Woods’ SUV and rescued him from the vehicle; when they arrived, the Sentinel reported, she was “hovering” over her husband, “frantic and upset.”

Within hours of the story breaking on Friday, the truth began to emerge: According to TMZ and RadarOnline, Tiger and Elin had been arguing before the crash, and she scratched his face up before he attempted to flee in his car, telling her, “You’ve ruined our Thanksgiving! Are you happy now?” Elin chased after him swinging a golf club, and managed to bash out the SUV’s back windows as he drove away. Woods “got distracted” by the attack and ran into a fire hydrant and then a tree, hitting them at less than 33 mph, to judge by the fact that the car’s airbags didn’t activate. There was no blood on the steering wheel, TMZ reported, making it unlikely that Woods’ injuries were sustained during the crash. According to TMZ, Woods told a friend that he wasn’t drunk at the time, but had been taking painkillers.

So why would Elgin attack her husband on Thanksgiving night? Probably because last week, the National Enquirer reported that Woods had been having an affair with Rachel Uchitel, a New York City nightclub promoter and self-described celebrity-dater. The Enquirer story claimed that Uchitel had told a friend, “I don’t care about his wife! We’re in love,” and that the pair were “constantly sexting.” TMZ says Tiger had told a friend on Friday, before the accident, that Elin had “gone ghetto” over the allegations, and that he had to “run to Zales to get a ‘Kobe Special‘”—a diamond ring—to mollify her. It apparently didn’t work.

For her part, Uchitel has denied the Enquirer’s allegations, telling the New York Post, “this is nothing to do with me. We have never had an affair, and the claims we did are completely false.” She’s reportedly retained celebrity lawyer and horrible person Gloria Allred and is considering a defamation claim against the Enquirer.

What does Tiger say about all this? Not much. In a statement released yesterday, he said,

This is a private matter and I want to keep it that way. Although I understand there is curiosity, the many false, unfounded and malicious rumors that are currently circulating about my family and me are irresponsible.

The only person responsible for the accident is me. My wife, Elin, acted courageously when she saw I was hurt and in trouble. She was the first person to help me. Any other assertion is absolutely false.

The Florida Highway Patrol has attempted to interview Tiger and his wife about the accident three times, and been turned away each time. And Tiger’s lawyer is now saying that, under Florida law, they don’t have to talk to the cops, and won’t:

We have been informed by the Florida Highway Patrol that further discussion with them is both voluntary and optional. Although Tiger realizes that there is a great deal of public curiosity, it has been conveyed to FHP that he simply has nothing more to add and wishes to protect the privacy of his family.

But that’s not going to cut it: According to TMZ, the Florida Highway Patrol is seeking a warrant to gain access to medical records from Tiger’s hospitalization to find out if his injuries are consistent with a car accident or assault. If it’s the latter, the next step could be charging Elin with domestic violence. TMZ also says the Woods home is equipped with security cameras, and Florida authorities want to see what’s on the tapes.

Long story short, the Woodses spent their Thanksgiving like most families do: Trapped in a sickeningly familiar cycle of recrimination, betrayal, lies, and poor decision-making. We can’t wait for Christmas.

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According to a trusted source who’s seen it with their own eyes, the Google Phone “is a certainty.”

And by “Google Phone” we don’t simply mean another Android handset. We’re talking about Google-branded hardware running a version of Android we haven’t yet seen.

Over the next few weeks, Google Phones (most probably in early, prototype form) will flood the Mountain View campus. They’ll don large LCDs while running a new version of Android—either Flan or the version of Android beyond it—which our source spotted running on Google’s handset as well as a laptop. (Whatever the software was, it most certainly wasn’t Chrome OS, we were assured.)

But maybe the most intriguing bit is what someone said to our source offhandedly, that the current Android, the we all know and love, is not the “real” Android. So what makes for a “real” version of Android?

Our best guess is an Android OS with Google Voice at its heart.

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