Obtained by Dealbreaker, the letter concerns McGee's son, John Edward, who attends Houston's Kinkaid School and wanted to wear cheerleader costumes with his football friends in a pep rally skit, but was barred from performing due to "negative gender stereotyping."

Entitled "The Tipping Point," McGee's letter begins with a single violin playing the world's saddest melody, Ballad of the Rich White Guy Who Takes Himself Entirely Too Seriously:

I am writing to you today with a heavy heart but also with a strong sense of obligation. I am sad that things have gotten to the point they have at Kinkaid but feel I must speak up on behalf of the "silent majority" before the situation gets to a point of no return. ... I submit to you that the values, methods, beliefs and actions of the current Administration are not in synch [sic] with those of the majority ... So this letter is about much more than a cancelled [sic] pep rally—it's about taking back control of the Kinkaid School. [emphasis mine]

What follows is a three-part, bullet-pointed explanation of the new white man's burden: getting subversives fired from your kid's prep school. His rationale includes "the parent whisper circuit," "a gay female coach," and the time a "leftist" teacher made his son cry.

In the first section, entitled "The Catalyst (see attachment 1—my email to Don North the afternoon of the pep rally)," McGee lays out the myriad wrongs associated with barring his son from performing a funny dance in a dress in front of the school. The unjust harshing of John Ed's mellow may have been part of an elaborate vendetta perpetrated by student president Andrew Edison, who "had previous issues with football players" and—J'accuse!—once distributed a video of himself in drag, too:

The real instigator, though, is "The Teacher," Ms. Leslie Lovett, who apparently led the anti-skit battle. Lovett "is regularly ranked among the least desired teachers (at least on the parent 'whisper circuit')." Her class is a "leftist invective" of anti-i-banking propaganda. Also, she hates football and doesn't know her place:

Last year, she commented to an 11th grade history class including my son
that somehow both Lehman and Barclays made a bunch of money on the Lehman
bankruptcy, and that all investment bankers were "sleazeballs" and dishonest. With tears in his eyes, John Ed called her out in front of the class and said his dad worked for Lehman Brothers and had been working around the clock trying to save 11,000 jobs and that she had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.

...Last year, Ms. Lovett suggested that Homecoming should be at a girls' field hockey game rather than at a football game. She also complained that there were no women on the football team and poked her nose into the yearbook with nonsense issues that she has no business raising.

Look, Skip: I get that you're sad about Lehman. But when everyone knows you get a 7-figure paycheck every month, maybe don't complain about how emotionally difficult it was for you to steer 11,000 people's job losses, not to mention setting off global economic freefall and bankrupting entire nations. That said, the image of a Lehman exec's teenage son blinking back tears of confused rage, shame, and filial protectiveness makes for a somewhat fascinating tableau on the concept of "inheritance."

In his "Conclusion," McGee expands his disgust with Ms. Lovett to include all teachers who care about "diversity" and are total buzz kills:

What happened to our ability to laugh at ourselves and have fun? What happened to common sense and good judgment? Why is a married, heterosexual coach considered an oddity at Kinkaid? Why is a gay female coach telling high school girls on her team that she was disappointed in them for belonging to the spirit club (SOK) and that by doing so they are just pandering to the football team?

My personal favorite part of the letter is when McGee explains that the case of the party-pooped pep rally is actually the story of America:

The number of parents who have been talking about this particular pep rally is enormous. It is not because they care about football or pep rallies, it is because they have all encountered the same issues in some form or fashion. We have lost our way.

McGee closes by reminding everyone that his eldest daughter Katie "is now a senior at Princeton," so he knows a thing or two about kids and education. Today's battle, though, is not about Katie. Nor is it about John Ed. It's about the future: little Lizzy McGee, a wee eighth grader who walks into the light of tomorrow's daybreak with heavy feet, not because of lefty teachers and the P.C. police all up in her grill—but because her father, Hugh "Skip" McGee III, is really embarrassing

Read Skip's four-page masterpiece at Dealbreaker.
[DealBreaker] [The Daily Beast]

According to Keith Kelly, Lucky publisher Gina Sanders—married to Steven Newhouse, of the formerly declasse newspaper Newhouses—convinced Si of the necessity of hiring Michael Sheehan, who's coached presidents and aided AIG and JP Morgan. Who knows what Sheehan will do, besides pull in a hefty salary.

You know who is probably sadder about the end of the Conde Christmas Lunch than any of the Conde editors? Keith Kelly. No one's ever enjoyed analyzing a seating chart more than Kelly.

This is the second year in a row of no Xmas Lunch. Instead, Si will host a cocktail party, at night, which sounds more fun, to us, but we are not Graydon Carter, so what do we know?

The New York state government took $140 million of the Obama stimulus money, and, along with $35 million from Soros, decided to give it to poor kids. But only poor kids! Sure, they are going to immediately go spend that money on school supplies, because poor families are not traditionally known for saving and investing effectively, and that will "stimulate" the economy and help poor kids, but we all know that giving money to poor kids is pointless and irresponsible.

That is why Drudge highlighted this miserable story of mothers in the Bronx taking the free money to buy uniforms for their kids, this morning. Presumably we're meant to skip to this bit at the end:

Paterson's Republican critics blasted the giveaway, saying he should spend the money to reduce property taxes.

"It is a plan that is ripe for fraud and abuse," said Senate Republican leader Dean Skelos. "This is a totally irresponsible use of federal stimulus money."

Yes, right, lowering property taxes is definitely what should've been done with this $140 million of cash, because that is how stimulus spending works. Actually Paterson should've just given it directly to landlords, probably.

[Photo: Getty]

Before the talent agencies merged into one beast, William Morris Agency paid their assistants a higher rate than their competitor Endeavor. So to level the playing-field of broken dreams the newly formed WME decided to by drop their entry-level wages from around $13.50 to roughly $9.50.

Though there were some rumblings of a walk-out when the salary cuts were first announced, it's doubtful you'll see any Armani-clad assistants hopping up on a chair and singing solidarity forever in protest over the brutal cuts. So here's a cost saving survival guide for the meagerly paid Hollywoodhelpers.

1. Get off the fucking the Tracking Board!
The Tracking Board is a subscription based message board that Hollywood's assistants love to traffic. There they can dish on script specs, casting news, and which boss deserves the most spit in their latte. But access to the Tracking Board costs $49.99 a year! So while it's a great tool of catharsis (and networking!) with the rise of Twitter we're sure you can get your message (PLZ SEND HELP HARVEY HAZ A CATTLE PROD) out on the cheap!

2. Get the Screenwriting App instead Final Draft!
No need to spend a $135 bones on fancy script writing software! Who says you can't a meaningful tome about a uniquely rebellious lighthouse keeper who is in 'the dark' about women on your iPhone!?

3. Screw the movies! Just hoard the screeners!
Who doesn't love plopping down on a plush seat to watch the newest Kathy Heigl vehicle about the 'true nature of love'? But is it worth more than what you make per hour? Probs not! You've got access, you have an Xbox, suffer through that never-touched screener of 17 Again and stay in tonight.

4. Your family's prescription drugs are cheaper than cocktails!
People, if there's anything this recession can teach us is that life is better lived through pharmacology. Your lil' sis in the tunic and the white Jetta is hopped up on 'Lord Knows' What because her Brentwood shrink says she has 'problems focusing'. Use whatever she's popping instead of a Red Bull to plow through your day. Your real estate agent dad is stressed cause he can't flip that condo in Encino? We're sure the man has some Ativan to help you deal with your bosses tantrums!

5. Start a mean blog about the assholes you work with!
Nikki did it and so can you! You guys, $400k/year is knocking, aren't you pissed enough to take it?

If all else fails there might be some Executive Ball-Washer openings in publishing! Best of luck!

Oh, see, what happened is, AIG chairman Edward Liddy was called before a House panel today to be shamed by everyone in congress. Most of them are still wrapping their heads around what happened to break everything, but they are pretty sure it involves BONUSES, and also some of them listened to This American Life and so they know allll about the "Credit Default Swaps."

Then Queens congressman Gary Ackerman said something amusing, but DON'T LAUGH, IT'S NOT FUNNY.

Thanks Mike Byhoff and intern Blair Nelson for compiling these.

Joey Brodish, 26, recently laid off as an editorial assistant for a gossip magazine.....was dressed this afternoon in a glittery top paired with skinny black pants. "Look around. Do you see a recession?"-NYT

OK, so there was a funny Peppermint Patty is a lesbian laff. But other than that, we sat through 22 minutes of jokes about irresponsible spending and borrowing, with images of furniture out on the front lawn, and homeless shelters full of horrible cots and crazy people. This being television, of course the family got their home back in the end—but only after enduring time spent as desperate squatters, evicted renters, and abusers of weird laws involving the elderly. Here's the whole thing if you missed it.

Forget what criticism you might have about the general state of television's Greatest Show of All Time. This particular episode just seemed tacky, cruel, and, most importantly, not funny. The millionaires who make the show haw-hawing at distressed people who suddenly find themselves homeless? Yikes. Or were they not laughing, rather trying to show that they relate? Either way it came across as condescending, poorly-timed and not what we were looking for to pick up the mood after spending an afternoon with the depressing Sunday New York Times.

Speaking of which, the always-deplorable Sunday Styles section has soared to new depths of hardy-har pandering to rich folks. Don't like your nanny? Fire her and blame it on the recession! Only making five hundred grand a year? Oh boo hoo for you! Lately they've been veering back to something that's less ridiculous but seems to be something of a farm league for the Nation section: this week, there was a profile of that 14-year-old Hannity-in-training and a look at the state of the pro-choice movement. Can we have our enraging entertainment back, please?

And, yes, this very website could be said to often mock the increasingly large pool of downtrodden and bewildered. The esteemed Time magazine finds our posts about the economic evaporation of the media to be "kick[ing] someone that's already dead." Maybe they're right. We'll cop to that.

But a highbrow newspaper section that makes rich people feel sorry for themselves is just boring and useless on its best days. It's pretty offensive on its worst. And a television mining the death of the middle class for humor, then protecting themselves from feeling too bad by putting a pretty bow at the end? Ugh. Sometimes, you just want something funny to watch on a Sunday night.

As we all know, New York Magazine is particularly ill-equipped to navigate this terrible new depression. But the Best of New York must go on! Still, you may notice a bit of a difference in good and services deemed "best". We'll let editor Jon Steinberg explain, in an email he sent earlier today:

Think about the most fun you've had this year and where you had it. Think about the hardware delivery service that brought you a coaxial cable in the middle of the night when you were hooking up your new flat-screen. Think about the people and services who saved you a ton of money on your apartment/car/birthday party/speaker system/vacation. It's okay to have some expensive stuff in the mix, but it has to be proven as amortizable; ie, that $3,000 mattress that is not only super-comfortable but will last you at least 30 years. Be creative!

Yes, and nothing says "creative" like spinning a $3,000 mattress as somehow economical in any way! What sort of amortizable purchases should you submit?

• $1,000 hoodie with two front pockets for storing coupons.
• $500 haircut that you could photograph and ask a cheaper stylist to recreate, in the future.
• Expensive baby crap you could use on a second child maybe?
• $300 chair that you could burn for heat, should it come to that.

Get your suggestions in by next Wednesday, freelancers!

The fact that we're all unemployed and poor is a big fat joke to the reporters who still have jobs, which is why they keep us up to date on how cheap and wonderful garbage food like raccoon and squirrel is. It's amusing, isn't it? Of course eating "varmints" is still done more for the wacky fun of it (or out of noble tradition of course) but the implication—ha ha you may be reduced to eating diseased rodents!—is inescapable.

What's next? Probably hilarious novelty cannibalism.

"No one I know has a job anymore," Tina says. Oddly she is not talking about the idle rich. She has discovered that this recession thing has hurt people with formerly cushy media jobs! She has coined a kicky new term for this terrible new situation of "working harder for less" that everyone else in the nation has been dealing with for a generation: The Gig Economy. It's also called "freelancing," if you don't like kicky new terms.

Of course she knows that poor people have been dealing with this since before she invented color photos of celebrites in high-brow magazines—Mrs. Sir Harold Evans is not out of touch with the little people!

"To people I know in the bottom income brackets [ha ha ha! -ed], living paycheck to paycheck, the Gig Economy has been old news for years."

AND

As noted above, the folks at the bottom of the greasy pole have been living with the anxieties, uncertainties, and indignities of Gigwork (it used to be called piecework) for a long time. Now that people nearer the top are learning firsthand about the wonders of “individual initiative” and “self-reliance,” a little more sympathy—maybe even solidarity—with those the meritocracy dismissed as losers may be in order. Maybe having to trade that first-class cabin for a smaller one without a porthole will alert some of the erstwhile winners to the fact that everyone's in the same boat.

Yes, and she commissioned a poll to study the dimensions of this boat. She commissioned the poll from Mark Penn! So she probably paid a trillion dollars for it, and now we'll all get emails from Michelle Obama asking us to please donate to poor Tina Brown. The poll shows a hot new demographic group of people with educations who weren't handed cushy jobs along with their diplomas.

In short, this recession is different from all the others because it is truly hurting the well-off the hardest, which is also the subtext of the fucking Bernie Madoff story. People making and saving enough to have million-dollar retirement funds bilked out of their imaginary profits! Tina Brown freelancing! Soon we'll all have to move out of our brownstones and penthouses and into the Thunderdome.

The current contraction was a year old before we even figured out it was happening, which makes it longer than the average postwar recession. Here's why it could be exceptional.

In the middle of this decade, then-revered Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan believed that information technology had transformed the very nature of recession. Just-in-time inventory, supply-chain dashboards, and an army of permalancers made adapting to changing business conditions so easy, so quick, that old-school recessions, defined by two consecutive quarters of economic shrinkage, would be a thing of the past. Instead, we would experience a series of microrecessions — a down month here or there, followed by upticks — all happening so quickly we barely felt the prick.

Ah, for the good old days of microrecessions.

What's happened now is something akin to the introduction of automated trading on Wall Street. What made 1987's Black Monday stock-market crash so devastating was the unforeseen triggering of an avalanche of selling by computer. After that, the market installed circuit breakers to prevent a recurrence.

What Wall Street had two decades ago, we now have business at large. Idiocracy, the hilariously dystopian Mike Judge movie, has a scene where the clueless CEO of a giant corporation complains that the computers laid everyone off when the stock dropped. That's something close to what happened in the Panic of '08. As bad news cascaded through the system, they triggered layoffs and cutbacks, which then prompted consumers to cut spending, causing yet more danger bells to ring.

And all of this unfolded amidst a global economy already in recession. China and India, once seen as engines of growth for the world, are in parlous states. Most frighteningly, China's imports, which have propped up old-world economies like Germany, dropped 18 percent from a year ago. India, already running a large budget deficit, has little room to stimulate its economy. Dropping oil prices, meanwhile, have taken the wind out of petroeconomies like Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia.

That's why I think the recession could be far longer than the 18 months most economists predict. Where, exactly, is growth supposed to come from? U.S. consumers and businesses are reeling from debt. The rest of the world is hardly better off. The expectation that government spending will lift us out of this mess seems akin to expecting that President Change will deliver us all a new bicycle.

The Pollyanna response is that the same information technology which helped the recession unfold so quickly will help businesses spot opportunities for growth, making the recovery all the quicker. I doubt it. Human psychology teaches us that we are far more motivated by fear of loss than the promise of gain. (Greed, it turns out, is good — because it's so much scarcer than we imagine.) Singed by the suddenness of panic, we will be much less likely to respond to glimmers of hope. 18 months? We should be so lucky. Try three years — or longer.

Let's just think of it like spring cleaning or an enema. Sure it's unpleasant in its way, but you'll also feel relieved and unburdened when it's over. Frankly, though it will pain me at first, I think I'll learn to live a better life without my beloved Cottage Living magazine, so you should learn to live without Survivor 43: The One Where They Finally Eat Poop. There's been talk of this phenomenon going down on Broadway—that a good purge will revitalize the medium—and maybe the same will be true of television. Look, good scripted TV shows like 30 Rock and Gossip Girl (OK, "good" is sort a of relative term there) are up! in the ratings.

So, I know it must seem catastrophic now, but it'll all work out in the end. Sometimes, things just have to burn. It's nature's way.

Augustine Garcia's mother couldn't afford to pay off her house, so she asked her daughter and her daughter's husband Donald to move in. Now in their mid-thirties, they're the ones who need all the help, and Mom is just really annoyed with the kids:

Augustine lost her $60,000-a-year job as a manager at a hardware store. Garcia, trained as an electrician's assistant, could find no such work following the collapse of the housing market, so he started driving a tow truck. Now he and Augustine, he says, owe money to her mother because they haven't been able to help much with household expenses. "It's hard because I've been living on my own since I was 17," Garcia says. "We went in like roommates — we wouldn't be in her business, and she wouldn't be in ours. She lived here alone for the last six years, and to have her son-in-law and daughter back — I'm sure it's been hard on her not having her own privacy."

"People were told and encouraged to put all their emotional investment into the marital relationship," historian Stephanie Coontz says in the scintillating article. Mistake! Now is the moment to push this trend piece to its inevitable conclusion — retirees moving in with their parents in hospice care. Is the hospice the new hospital? I'm sure the LAT will be happy to let us know.

"Fallout Shelter" [LAT]

The Minnesota factory is working seven days a week to churn out the product that even someone unemployed can afford and enjoy:

"People are realizing it’s not that bad a product," said Dan Johnson, 55, who operates a 70-foot-high Spam oven. ...Because it is vacuum-sealed in a can and does not require refrigeration, Spam can last for years. Hormel says "it’s like meat with a pause button."

The benefits aren't limited to Hormel employees — the Times is more than willing to patronize the people who buy it. We'll guess that the fact-checker didn't exactly call a Wal-Mart in Cleveland to check this detail:

A rising segment of the public, it seems, does have a taste for Spam, which is available in several varieties, including Spam Low Sodium, Spam with Cheese and Spam Hot & Spicy. James Bate, a 48-year-old sausage maker, was buying it at Wal-Mart in Cleveland recently. Not only was it cheap, but he said it brought back fond memories of his grandfather’s making him Spam sandwiches. "You can mix it with tomatoes and onions and make a good meal out of it,” he said. "A little bit of this stuff goes a long way."

Although at $3.20 a pound, Spam isn't that cheap, but it lasts forever and requires substantially less preparation than anything short of popcorn. And since there's no waste, you can save the money to buy that $65 Spam costume you've always wanted.

The nav market is a tough one, and with the added economic difficulties, Dash feels it can do better work by focusing on their open-source OS, which they will then sell business-to-business. More important than the OS, which is fine but not fantastic, is the back end traffic mesh system. A Dash-powered mid-range Garmin nav sounds like a pretty appealing propect, and will help bring a Dash-like system to more people for less dough. New CEO Rob Currie also notes that the Dash's GPRS chip and 400MHz ARM processor are quickly being outpaced by even low-end mobiles, so a move toward adding Dash functionality to GPS-equipped smartphones sounds like a plan to me.

Dash is going to keep the Express back end running for existing owners, but no word on for how long; because these devices hold almost zero local data, once the service goes you will have yourself a nav that can't do much more than direct address routing. Dash friends, care to let us know how long we have? [GigaOM]