New York Times Can't Bring Itself To Say 'Girlfriend'

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   In America in 2010, nobody gets married. Nobody! This is because like six years ago in one little despised U.S. state, dudes started marrying other dudes and chicks started marrying chicks, so everyone else was all like "Ew, what's the point." (Either that or there have been fundamental shifts in ideas about sexual propriety and lifelong fidelity. Opinions differ!) Anyway, despite everyone's failure to marry, people still find people to hump more or less exclusively and form economically beneficial cohabitation arrangements with and sometimes even fall in love with, and generally when they do this they call each other "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" like they did in high school. This is an order of magnitude too casual for the New York Times, though! Wait, what does this have to do with the politics, and Mayor Bloomberg?Just that Bloomberg's girlfriend Diana Taylor seems smart and savvy and might want to run for some office as a Republican someday, maybe soon, who knows! She was maybe thinking of running against Kristen Gillibrand but then decided not to, but the Times already had this article mostly written about her, so they decided to publish it anyway. Despite Bloomberg being quoted as calling her his girlfriend in the story, the Times will only snootily call her his "companion," as if Mayor Bloomberg and his special lady were gay men in the '70s. [ NYT ]

• In other New York news, Andrew Cuomo is trying to make the "Working Families Party" endorse some non-Cuomo person until after the primaries, at which point they will abandon said person and endorse Cuomo. This is reminding everyone why they hate New York state politics in general, and Andrew Cuomo in particular. [ NYT ]

• Jim Webb heard a rumor that Burma is trying to build a nuclear bomb, so he cancelled a trip there, so the Burmese couldn't steal all the nuke-building information that he keeps hidden in his brain, at all times. [ BBC ]

• SpaceX, a private company that wants to launch spaceships, is probably test-launching its new space rocket today! President Obama stopped by to nod meaningfully at the spacebound phallus, as it is key to his plan to stop giving money to NASA. [ AFP ]

 Photo courtesy of the International Women's Health Coalition , on the Flickr!