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A week and some change after President Barack Obama's widely praised
speech to Congress on health care reform, Michelle Obama is making it a
double feature. By overtly bringing the first lady into the contentious
policy debate, the White House is upping the ante—but with a smart bet.
The FLOTUS, as a former administrator at the University of Chicago
hospitals, knows her way around the U.S. health care delivery system
just as well her Democratic predecessor, Hillary Clinton. The strategy, as told to Politico's Nia Hederson, is to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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I read Liza’s summary of Mimi Swarz’s take on mature women in the most powerful workplace in the world with some interest. After all, I’d previously written on the preponderance of single women in the Obama White House,
lamenting the fact that a bold-face name like Melody Barnes put off
marriage for years, in order to run policy in an administration poised
to overhaul health care, energy action, and the economy ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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I have a strange fascination with Eliot Spitzer. There, I said it.
It's true. I suppose that's in part due to the fact that when
Spitzergate roared its way into the headlines, I was running a project
in which I was (for reasons that now escape me) collecting e-mails from men who had paid for sex
about why they had paid for sex. Spitzer was one of those guys. I mean,
he didn't send me an e-mail (not that I'm aware of, anyway), but he was
one more john who had paid for sex, and the only difference was that A)
he had gotten caught and B) he was famous.
Since, I've followed the guy's fall from grace and heady reascent to Slate columnist. Most recently, the kids over at Vanity Fair took him out to lunch,
and John Heilpern succeeds in getting the former governor to open up
over hotdogs. These days, Spitzer works for his father, a real estate
tycoon. He's worked doggedly to rehabilitate his reputation, but ... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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A post from Double X writer Vanessa M. Gezari:
If the Daily Telegraph is right that the unreleased detainee-abuse photos include graphic images of rape, Obama must have been lying when he said
the photos are “not particularly sensational, especially when compared
to the painful images that we remember from Abu Ghraib.” For all the
pain of those earlier images, what they depicted were not generally
criminal acts in the same way that rape is. They showed violation,
humiliation, the horrific power differential between prisoners and
their jailors—war crimes, to be sure—but they tended to document the
effects and aftermath of violence more than its... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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The Daily Telegraph reports unreleased Abu Ghraib photographs
include sexual torture and "rape." Does that have any bearing on the
debate over whether we should be allowed to see the photographs?
According to the story, the pictures include an American soldier raping
a female prisoner and a "male translator raping a male detainee." Other
photos include prisoners being sexually violated with a "truncheon,
wire and a phosphorescent tube"... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Meghan McCain was on The Colbert Report last night and despite some giggles and a hideous, huge, Bedazzled ring,
she acquitted herself admirably. When is someone going to give this
self-identified "24-year-old, pro-sex woman" and Republican her own
television show? Young and Republican In America, hosted by Meghan McCain, running on one of the cable news networks twice a week? I'd watch.
Colbert tries his best to throw his guests off their talking points, but McCain could recite hers in a coma. She was not to be derailed. While defending her core position... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)
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Politico just ran a pretty intriguing story speculating on why there are so few women in the Republican party, and it definitely rang true for me. A few weeks ago, I went to a GOP lunch at the National Press Club sponsored by the RNC.
The main speaker? A fiftysomething white guy in a suit. Who proceeded to talk nonstop for the next 30 minutes about his impressive political connections (yawn—does he think we know who these people are?), the dire need for volunteers that weekend for a tight race in Pennsylvania (dude, we live in D.C.), and the strange predicament of...(To read the rest of this post, visit our new website at DoubleX.com!)
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What struck me most, Kerry, about Elizabeth Edwards interview with Oprah was her repeated insistence John's possible child with Rielle Hunter is irrelevant. She told Oprah that she doesn't know if the baby is John's (She also said John didn't know if the baby was John's, which reminds me of Emily's post wondering why, if Elizabeth Edwards has such an infallible bullshit detector, she's married to this dissembler in the first place) and that it doesn't matter. Here's a quote of her talking about the child, always an "it", at length:
"It doesn't make any difference to me [if Hunter's son is John's]. If I have to analyze why that should make a difference to me [it would only be because] I care about something completely extraneous to my life. That is not my life. And if we were to discover it was, that would be part of John's life, but it is not part of mine. And I cant see any upside to making it part of my life. It doesn't change anything. It doesn't change anything. It's not going to change my life in any way. I could try to make it change my life and could keep myself up about if I thought he was trying to start a family with this woman. That would be one thing, but I do I not think that's true. I do not by any stretch of the imagination think that's true. And therefore, it doesn't have any effect on me. Part of resilience is deciding to make yourself miserable about something that matters, or deciding to make yourself miserable over something that doesn't matter."
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And her children's possible half sibling is something that doesn't matter? And can something, a something that's really a son, be "part" of John's life without being a part of hers? Does saying something won't change anything over and over make it true?
I found this exchange even more blinkered in the context of the entire interview, during which Edwards seemed, as she usually does, remarkably open, likeable, thoughtful, and authentic—as Hanna pointed out, her key trait. (In an age of disappearing privacy, it's worth remembering that we're not all equally equipped to kill our private lives. Some people, Edwards and Oprah among them, are better able to totally explode the distinction between their public and private lives by virtue of being more natural, comfortable, and open at television and publicity than the rest of us).
But on this subject, her husband's probable kid, Edwards seems willfully unthoughtful, as if she has artificially cordoned off one of the more painful aspects of her husband's philandering and decided that her ability not to think or feel about it means it doesn't warrant thoughts of feelings. I wonder if there will be another book that comes after Resilience, like Acceptance (or maybe Divorce).
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Willa, Hanna, isn't there a problem in writing a tell-all if you avoid telling about the most important thing? According to reports Elizabeth Edwards acknowledges that John confessed to her about his affair—although his confession was a lie in that he made it sound like a one-time slip instead of an on-going thing—but she does not mention at all the baby that has resulted. The fact that she doesn't is a kind of back-handed confirmation that baby is Edwards' since a tell-all book would be a good place to assert he wasn't the father if that was actually the case. I can understand Elizabeth wanting to tell her story. Hanna, as you point out, she feels comforted by being open. Because she is so ill, the criticism of her decision to do so, and of her choice to participate in Edwards' doomed presidential race will be muted. But why subject herself, and her family, to more public rehashing of what a creep her husband is? Hanna, he may have tried to create the appearance of sincerity, but he was always so disturbingly artificial. That actually may be the most authentic thing about him—how utterly insincere he is.
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Hanna, speaking of marriages that make you feel uncomfortable, the Edwardses are back in the spotlight today. The Daily News got its hands on a copy of Elizabeth Edwards' forthcoming memoir, Resilience, and have predictably highlighted the salacious stuff. (John Edwards told his wife Elizabeth about his affair with Rielle Hunter, whose name Elizabeth never uses in print, just days after he announced his candidacy. Upon finding out Elizabeth writes that she "cried and screamed, I went to the bathroom and threw up.")
The excerpts seem—and not having read the book yet, big emphasis on the seem— to be a kind of correction to the Stepford, "stand by your man" approach so often taken by political wives (and Elizabeth Edwards did, at least, refuse to physically stand next to her man while he made his confession and apology)—but only kind of. Edwards tells her side of the story and publicly chastises her husband ("He should not have run," she writes) but he's still her husband. Her critique has a narrow outer limit. Is writing about this better than keeping mum? Or, in a way, is it exactly the same? Is telling us all the true, clichéd things about why a person might decide to stand by her jerk that different from, or that much more informative than, silently standing by said jerk?
The News does pull out one genuinely heartbreaking quote from the book: "I lie in bed, circles under my eyes, my sparse hair sticking in too many directions, and he looks at me as if I am the most beautiful woman he has ever seen. It matters." And I'm sure it does matter, and yet, I can't help but wonder if the look she's describing resembles the supposedly earnest, empathetic stare Edwards utilized on the campaign trail, which some people, myself included, always found to be so disingenuous (and that turned out to be, to the extent that Edwards' ambition did trump his judgment, truly disingenuous). And then I wish I could un-think that thought, because it would be nicer to believe Elizabeth Edwards' version of things.
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"Why Democracy" is an organization that produces documentaries intended to "start a global conversation about democracy." One gets the impression, reading their website, that the filmmakers want to steer the conversation in a particular direction. As a foundation for art, this does not sound promising. But last night I watched and loved Why Democracy's Please Vote for Me, a film that follows three Chinese eight-year-olds in their quest to be elected class monitor. It's an unassuming, fascinating little documentary about the profound stress of being an eight-year-old. Along the way it makes the worst possible case for democratic reform in China or anywhere else.
The film starts with a change of school rules; instead of selecting the class monitor, as teachers have always done at this elementary school in Wuhan, the teachers will select three nominees and let the class elect its favorite. The process will involve a talent show, speeches, and debates. The nominees—two boys and a girl—are revealed. All hell breaks loose. Nice kids turn into scheming rivals, bullying their classmates into shouting down the other nominees. The children go home to parents who write their speeches, force them to stay up late rehearsing debate tactics, insult the other kids, and, in one case, bribe their classmates. Most painful to watch is how the process forces the overt expression of once-subtle social norms. The boys are vicious; the girl retreats into passivity and bursts into tears during her speech. The boys' parents tell them to attack the faults of their competitors and catch their fellow students in lies; the girl's mother reminds her of her own shortcomings, suggesting she work on her "communication skills."
I won't be giving anything away when I point out that this particular experiment in democracy ends in tears and tantrums. The shocking conclusion: Eight-year-olds are unfit for self-governance. No ideological points have been scored, nothing useful argued. But given the tendency of activism to quash inquisitiveness (see Tyler Cowen's take on The End of Poverty here), it's nice to see some filmmakers ask a question with some degree of sincerity, in the spirit of discovery and with genuine curiosity about what they might uncover.
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Sometimes in politics a sudden spewing of bile means that the target of the nastiness is doing something right—at least that’s how the negative attention recently directed Harriet Harman, the deputy leader of Britain’s Labor Party feels to me. Last Friday, a Daily Telegraph columnist referred to “the monument to absurdity that is Harriet Harman.”
Harman has been an MP since 1982, serving in a number of Cabinet positions since Labor took power in 1997. She has always come in for scorn: She’s a serious person whose earnest demeanor doesn’t win her points in the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the House of Commons. A civil rights lawyer before she went into Parliament, she’s done a lot of work on social-justice issues that, outside the writings of Dahlia Lithwick, rarely lend themselves to laughs.
In the last month or so, though, the anti-Harman murmurs have become a clamor. With Gordon Brown traveling the world, she twice substituted for him at Prime Minister’s Question Time and was mocked and bullied both times. Of course, mockery and bullying are the prevailing tone of PMQ, largely because of the old boy’s club atmosphere of the Houses of Parliament. In his (not terribly kind to Harman) Guardian review of her March 4 PMQ appearance, Simon Hoggart described the Tory opposition acting like “playground bullies [who] had caught the whiff of [Harman’s] victimhood.”
Harman is certainly not blameless—she made some unwise populist comments about banker Sir Fred Goodwin, whose remarkably generous pension plan is more or less the British equivalent of the AIG bonuses—but I suspect the negativity has more to do with Gordon Brown’s sinking popularity. The bookies have Harman as the favorite to succeed him, so, for the ambitious members of her party she is now a serious rival. Apparently, she tends not to brief against her parliamentary colleagues, which means she’s no favorite of political journalists.
But take a look at the video of the March 4 PMQ. When William Hague, her main opponent for the day, brought up Harman’s political ambitions, the Guardian’s Hoggart described her zinger-less response to Hague’s taunting as being made “in the tone of a girl reprimanding her little brother for saying ‘poo.’ ” It’s true that after sitting stone-faced while her fellow MPs indulge in shoulder-shaking laughter at her expense, she simply stands up and launches into a rather dull description of the government’s ideas about “mortgage support.” But these days, isn’t helping people stay in their homes more important to most people than political infighting? When ordinary voters see videos like this, I suspect they’ll relate more closely to earnest Harman than to an entertaining bully like Hague.
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Just when you thought it was safe to channel surf, it turns out HBO is making a movie out of the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal of yesteryear. The title? The Special Relationship. Special, indeed. The casting is just plain odd. Dennis Quaid is Wild Bill. Hillary Clinton? Julianne Moore. Apparently, the film focuses less on Slick Willy's hijinks and more on the president's relationship with Tony Blair (played by Michael Sheen), which devolved purportedly due to the sex scandal. Peter Morgan, who scored with Frost/Nixon, wrote the screenplay and is set to direct. Supposedly, Quaid beat out some actual A-listers for the role—Russell Crowe, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alec Baldwin, Tim Robbins. I wonder if he truly eclipsed them or if the actors were steered away from taking the part of a man tasked with running the country who couldn't keep his hands off the help. Who'll play Lewinsky? Mia Kirshner? Megan Fox? Jessica Simpson? Nope. "Morgan has decided to use only archive footage of her culled from TV news bulletins and video of her closed-door testimony to Congress." Well, maybe the real Lewinsky will sell a few handbags out of it.
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The Fairfield Weekly has an interesting piece on the public's enduring fascination with Sarah Palin: "The Porn Identity." It opens in a strip club where adult film star Lisa Ann, who played Palin in Hustler's XXX-homage to the once aspiring VP, "Who's Nailin' Paylin: Adventures of a Hockey MILF," takes the stage dressed as Palin to perform a striptease. Acccording to Hustler Video, "Who's Nailin' Paylin" is one of their all-time best-sellers, proving so popular they're producing a follow-up this spring, "Hollywood's Nailin' Paylin," which "will parody Palin's imagined new career as book author and talk-show host and, of course, put her in bed with a bunch of spoofed celebrities." Hustler says there's just something about Sarah:
"There aren't many franchises in the adult world. It's a one-trick pony," [Hustler Director of Operations Jeff] Thill says. "It's really different with her. She's not really in the news right now and yet we can't keep the title in stock. Assuming the second one goes well, we'll continue on forever if we can get away with it."
In an interview, the Weekly asked her impersonator about Palin's sexual mystique. The woman who's walked a mile in stripper shoes as Palin responded: "It's a distraction from politics. I hope people wouldn't be swayed either way by sex appeal. People vote for all the wrong reasons anyway, but if we throw sex appeal into the mix we'll have [a disaster]." But is she right? Months after Palin's disastrous run, we're still intrigued. She's the anti-Hillary who won't go away, and judging by her stickiness, I can't help but wonder if Palin has some strange hope in her rumored possible run for the presidency in 2012. Maybe Palin's sublimated-yet-paraded brand of sexuality is the key to her success—and the farthest thing from a disaster.
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Seriously, I write about sex, so I know I'm not the best one to ask. But it seems like ever since—well, I want to say ever since the Obamas got elected, it's all sex all the time. At least in the media. Usually, there are periods of time when you'll see more sex-related stories than others. In the spring. If there's a political sex scandal. If another low-ranking celebrity spawns another low-budget sex tape. After election night, I noticed there was a slow but discernible increase in the number of sex-related "news" stories. Sure, there were the obvious ones—the "aren't the Obamas sexy" ones (click here for the latest from the meme that wouldn't die)—and then there were the recession ones—call girls are dropping their rates! housewives are selling sex toys to make extra money! recession sex: here's how to have it!—but I expected at some point for all the sex stories to stop. But they haven't. They keep, well, coming. So, did the Obamas spawn this mini-sex revolution—or was it all that hope—or is it just me?
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Thanks, Jessica, for the YouTube clip of Meghan McCain on Maddow's show last night. Now can I have my IQ points back? From start to finish, it's a profile in Republican idiocy, from mini McCain offering herself up as some type of towheaded neo-poster girl for the right to her faltering faux-platform that consists solely of her picking a fight with Ann Coulter. That's like picking a fight with Hitler. I mean: What? Are we supposed to be impressed she doesn't like the She-Devil? McCain takes Republicans to task for being too extreme and offers her idea of an alternative: "Be more moderate and reach out to people." That's. So. Deep. What's delightful is to see her paired with such a brilliant interviewer. Every word that comes out of Maddow's mouth only serves to make the New Poster Child of the Republican Party appear even stupider. What's a tougher call is that McCain and her commentaries are so insipid, her presence begs for the question: Who's worse? Meghan McCain or Ann Coulter? Tough call, in my opinion. At least Coulter has a brain. What she does with it is the problem.
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I thought Bristol Palin came off as astonishingly dim and mind-bogglingly vapid. She reminded me of the random young women that show up on MTV's True Life documentary series, saddled at too young of an age with children they are neither psychologically nor financially able to take care of. I agree with Jessica that the interview seemed more like a f-you to her mother than anything else. When Sarah Palin showed up at one point, it looked as if she could barely contain her desire to climb across the table and throttle Bristol for having agreed to this ... interview? While watching "news" as substantive as cotton candy that made me wonder if it induced IQ point loss, I was most embarrassed for (by? on behalf of?) Greta Van Susteren, an obviously intelligent woman who for reasons beyond my comprehension has lowered herself to political coverage that has more in common with an E! Miley Cyrus profile than whatever this was supposed to be. My favorite Bristol sound bite: "Everyone should be abstinent or whatever." Whatever, indeed.
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At last, a new book reveals the secret identity of Sarah Palin's personal idol. Apparently, a People editor has churned what I'm sure is a very winning biography of Palin: Trailblazer: An Intimate Biography of Sarah Palin. (Intimate? What's that all about? Do we get to rifle through her underwear drawer?) Along with exposing various other creepy Palin factoids—including that she hid her Trig pregnancy until one of her daughters found the ultrasound scan and concealed his medical condition from her other children until he was born—the book discloses who Palin's girl-crush is.
Palin, who became an overnight sensation once John McCain tapped her to become his running mate, can fall victim to being star-struck. She once told husband Todd she was going shopping at Costco in Anchorage but detoured to J.C. Penney's to meet Ivana Trump—in town to promote a cosmetics line.
Ivana Trump. Ivana Trump! This explains so much. A woman best known for doing little more than marrying well, her stiff retro-hairdos, and her meticulous makeup, Ivana was the woman Palin aspired to be politically: a vapid statue with a hollow inside waiting to be toppled.
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Yesterday, Eve pointed out that Dan Quayle speechwriter turned National Review blogger Lisa Schiffren took a swipe at the XX Factor bloggers -- something about the audacity of our dislike of Sarah Palin and love for Michelle Obama. (Je stands accused!) Was it a coincidence that I took a swipe at Schiffren the day previous? Methinks not. Either way, such slandering prompted some digging into Schiffren's backlog of neocrank opinion, and it seems we're in good company.
According to Schiffren, our new President is a communist.
Obama and I are roughly the same age. I grew up in liberal circles in
New York City — a place to which people who wished to rebel against
their upbringings had gravitated for generations. And yet, all of my
mixed race, black/white classmates throughout my youth, some of whom I
am still in contact with, were the product of very culturally specific
unions. They were always the offspring of a white mother, (in my
circles, she was usually Jewish, but elsewhere not necessarily) and
usually a highly educated black father. And how had these two come
together at a time when it was neither natural nor easy for such
relationships to flourish? Always through politics. No, not the young
Republicans. Usually the Communist Youth League.
Oh, and don't get her started on gay marriage. From "Gay Marriage, an Oxymoron," a 1996 New York Times Op-Ed (not available online):
[O]ne may feel the same affection for one's homosexual friends and relatives as for any other, and be genuinely pleased for the happiness they derive from relationships, while opposing gay marriage for principled reasons.
"Same-sex marriage" is inherently incompatible with our culture's understanding of the institution. Marriage is essentially a lifelong compact between a man and woman committed to sexual exclusivity and the creation and nurture of offspring. For most Americans, the marital union -- as distinguished from other sexual relationships and legal and economic partnerships -- is imbued with an aspect of holiness. Though many of us are uncomfortable using religious language to discuss social and political issues, Judeo-Christian morality informs our view of family life.
So, does this mean Schiffren's not going to come to my unholy gay communist slumber party?
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In a blatant, desperate, and misguided bid for page-views and newsstand sales, More (More? Does anyone read More? I don't know if I've ever even seen a copy in my doctor's office) asked three women writers to weigh in on Sarah Palin. Days, weeks, months later, Palin still "sells." Their responses are a heady mix of maddening, confused, and inane.
Lisa Schiffren writes: "Knowing that conservative, evangelical Christian women want their daughters to see such a role model [as Palin] tells us that feminism, in its best sense, has won its central battle." Eh? What? I can't even figure out what that means. According to Schiffren, Hillary is a bombastic careerist, but Palin is all right because she's more "Sam's Club than Yale Club." When Sam's Club becomes your selling point, I remain unsold. Ergo, Palin is the Wal-Mart of politics. If you get what you pay for, I am glad I passed on her in the vice presidents aisle.
Next up, Kellyanne Conway wonders: "Is Sarah Palin a Plus for Women?" My vote? No. Unless by "plus" you mean "minus." If that, then yes. Conway takes issue with all the "unsavory talk" that arose around Palin. (Full disclosure: I wrote about the Sarah Palin inflatable love doll, which, I assure you, was most unsavory of me.) What did the Palin experience teach the women of America? "If you dare to seek standing in any powerful institution, attacks on your husbands, hairdos, handbags, and haute couture will be just the beginning." God help us when they come for our intellects. The fallout from this "so-called sisterhoods" (that's you, feminists) "Palin impaling"? "At a minimum, we'll see a chilling effect on women venturing outside their usual realms, speaking in anything but broadcaster English, and wearing anything but a safe, neutral uniform." When we're all wearing beige, we'll know who to blame. The feminists.
Finally, we hear from Cathy Young. Young's bite-sized take on America's hate-hate relationship with Palin is that liberal women were wanting Hillary in the White House, Palin came along and messed that up, but everything worked out fine in the end because we have a new face of feminism, and that face is attached to Sarah Palin's head. "If nothing else, she has given feminism a new face, with profound appeal to women of different ages and walks of life." No regrets for those who got Palin tattoos, then.
What is going on here? Is this feminism? Neo-conservatism with a vagina? Insanity? If Palin is the new face of feminism, I'd like to request a post-feminist president, please.