The XX Factor: What women really think.

Bring Back Rev. Pfleger!

E.J., I gotta say, thank you for going through all the stages of grief re: Rick Warren so I didn't have to. Here's the thing: Really, who cares. It "sends a message"—nah, don't care. As Peggy Noonan said of Jeremiah Wright, I'm finding it hard to be truly upset about this one. Maybe just distracted by my upsetness over the questionable future regulators who will be "sending a policy" in the form of "trillions of dollars."

So the guy is a huge homophobe: Meh, sorry Barney, still don't care. As you yourself have so often observed—and I'm "addressing" Barney Frank here, for the record—"the average American is less homophobic than he thinks he's supposed to be and more racist than he's willing to admit." Why is this? Well, statistically, the average American knows at least a handful of gay people. The average American knows a handful of women who've had abortions. The average American does not think people in either camp are evil for what they have "done." The average American probably even empathizes with the pain involved in belonging to said camp in an America whose moral culture is dominated by guys like Rick Warren. But wait, let's talk about that for a sec: Rick Warren's book is called The Purpose-Driven Life. It is not called The Perverts and Babykillers Bringing the Country to Ruin. I am sure he has said a lot of ridiculous things, but has he ever likened Gay Pride parades to Murderer's Pride Parades a la Ted Haggard?

I'd like to hear the Rev. Michael Pfleger on this one. One of my favorite things about being raised in such an old and big and totally screwed-up religion is all the deviant and/or dissident clerics the Catholic Church has produced over the years, exposing on a grand and tragic and awesome scale the fallibility of humanity and the consciousness that instills in us the sense that there must be something bigger and more beyond just our own petty civilization, and we can glean what that bigger thing wants from us. My favorite at the moment is the late Father Bob Drinan, the anti-war Jesuit priest Frank replaced in Congress upon the request of a new Pope uneasy at the thought of a representative in the world's most important legislature who said of abortion "I think abortion is a terrible thing … except for women."

At some point I expect science will allow mothers to test prenatally for homosexuality, and some sort of epic crisis of conscience will force Christendom to see humanity in a more nuanced light, in part because we'll all have much more pressing matters to confront by that point, like the economic apocalypse and so on.

Tim Geithner: Just Another Chauvinistic Wall Street S.O.B.?

Not to, like, stereotype of course!

The media is instructing feminists to direct our feminist outrage at Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell over a wholly innocuous especially for Rendell comment he made in support of a female potential cabinet member. Normally I would file this under the category of never-clicked headlines I call "Media Doesn't Matters" in reference to the lefty media watchdog organization that kept such tiresomely relentless tabs on Chris Matthews' venal sins of sexism during the Democratic primaries as to render the cable news blowhard a viable candidate for Senate in Rendell's state. But today I worry something more insidious is at work, because the Rendell gaffe successfully diverted attention away from a far more serious charge of chauvinism in government that could have potentially deleterious consqeuences for the economy: incoming Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's attempts to oust FDIC chairman Sheila Bair, a Republican whose sterling reputation on both sides of the aisle conservatives feared she might be appointed to Geithner's job, thus fulfilling Obama's pledge to put Republicans in his cabinet with the most liberal GOP member not to have actively campaigned for Obama. Geithner reportedly accuses Bair of not being a "team player" -- which of course also begs the question as to what the hell team Geithner is playing for, as Barney Frank points out to Bloomberg:

“I think part of the problem now, to be honest, is Sheila Bair has annoyed the ‘old boys’ club,’” Frank said today. “To some extent, bank regulation and mortgage foreclosure have made a situation where we have several regulators up in the tree house with a ‘no girls allowed’ sign -- and it’s aimed at Sheila Bair - - who’s been really good.”

Sheila Bair was the American Prospect's pick for Treasury Secretary. Sheila Bair is Barney Frank's favorite regulator.  Sheila Bair even seems to command the respect of the generally reflexively pro-Wall Street commenter population over at the blog Dealbreaker. Because Sheila Bair has been working tirelessly for years to get failed mortgage lenders and homeowners to negotiate more workable terms to save the system from the massive financial and social costs of foreclosure contagions. Her results have been mixed, which is only about 1000% better than we can say for the results of Hank and "Government Sachs" to leverage the power of Big Numbers to save the financial system from the systemic risk of the panic wreaked by the sudden system-wide acknowledgement of the Big Numbers it had squandered in the systemic risk binge of the past five or seven or ten or so years.

Tim Geithner is notable for…looking young for 47, swearing a lot, and snowboarding. Early reports added "skateboarding" to the list of pastimes, but Fed spokesmen played them down, offering that he was not an active skateboarder.

 I wanted to like Geithner. Despite the extreme sports and Kissinger/Council of Foreign Relations/elitist plutocrat cred  he does not appear to totally fit the jet-setting obnoxiously well-roundedly overachieving handbag designer marrying Type Freaking A Clinton guy mold. Like Obama (and also me) he spent formative years in Asia, and the college sweetheart he married 23 years ago is not easily findable on society party pages or anywhere that might suggest that Geithner, like Bob Rubin and Rahm Emanuel, is at heart himself not much different from the financiers whose fortunes swelled so large over the country's three decade orgy of oversightlessness he helped accelarate during his years in the department. But this is just the sort of episode I feared when the market went so irrationally exuberant over (see #5) the appointment of another straight white guy from Wall Street to make right the multitrillion dollar disaster that is Wall Street. He's one of them. That doesn't make him bad. It just means he has been a party to a lot of incredibly bad decisions made using a lot of incredibly flawed assumptions that lined the pockets of a lot of already incredibly rich people. One of them is Hank Paulson, who at least seems somewhat humbled by the catastrophe. I guess Geithner has another few decades before he has to learn what humility is.