The Palin-Beck drama began when the former governor of Alaska told Newsmax she considers Beck "a hoot" and would be open to running with him. She repeated the coy "we'll see..." wink-nudge invite on Fox and Friends, prompting the king of televised weeping to dismiss Palin as frivolous, strident, and exceedingly female. First he asks her to stop using the word "hoot":

BECK: I don't think things are hoots. I don't. I don't think it's a hoot. I would never use the word hoot, and I respectfully ask that every time my name is brought up she would stop using the word "hoot."

And then he puts her in her place, the kitchen. He adds a note of self-irony about "evil conservative stereotypes," but does that actually redeem it?

BECK: I'm just saying, Beck-Palin, I'll consider. But Palin-Beck—can you imagine, can you imagine what an administration with the two of us would be like? What? Come on! She'd be yapping or something, and I'd say, "I'm sorry, why am I hearing your voice? I'm not in the kitchen." I mean, you'd have to live up to the evil conservative stereotypes, you'd have no choice, you'd have to. Look, I talked to the woman about it, I don't even know what she was saying.

Listen here:

Palin has a hair-trigger reaction to sexist slights—see Newsweek Cover Melodrama, The—so I would predict a wingnut feud, but in this case, Lady Alaska's martyr complex is going to conflict with her effusive love of right-wing media. Also, Beck's producers will likely pressure him to make nice. She's way too valuable to them.

Then again, if this most schadenfreude-rich year has taught us anything, it's that the only predictable thing about the Thrilla from Wasilla is her ability to hold grudges, so I'm going to call a 50-50 split on whether she flies into attack mode or sits back, arches an eyebrow, and quietly snubs him, instead. Hooray, now we have something to look forward to for after the holiday!

Beck's Sexist Reason For Ruling Out Palin-Beck Ticket: She'd Always Be ‘Yapping' Like We're ‘In The Kitchen' [Think Progress]

Correction: An early version of this post said Beck's Palin-slamming broadcast occurred today, but in fact it was yesterday.

Palin thinks Newsweek's use of a photo commissioned by Runner's World, for which she posed, is out-of-context on the cover of a newsmagazine and therefore "sexist." It's not clear what possible context the Newsweek cover could ever fit in. Yes, it was shot for Runner's World, but it's her showing off her legs, standing inside an office, holding two Blackberries, while leaning against an American flag. She says this was supposed to illustrate a story about "health and fitness—a subject to which I am devoted and which is critically important to this nation." But when the editors of Runner's World selected a photo (see below, via Mediaite), they picked an image of her actually — or at least plausibly — engaged in the "health and fitness" activity she was dressed for.

When this nonsensical image of the leggy lady who never wanders far from her Blackberries, flag or running shorts is used to illustrate a story about the creation of the image of Sarah Palin, on the other hand—a subject to which Sarah Palin devotes herself —its meaning is transformed into something...mean! Which, well, it was supposed to be. To Christopher Hitchens, whose story the cover illustrates, Palin is an ideologically empty phenomenon who, if she ever attained actual political power again, would quickly betray the people (white ragers) who are most devoted to her:

The Palin problem, then, might be that she cynically incites a crowd that she has no real intention of pleasing. If she were ever to get herself to the nation's capital, the teabaggers would be just as much on the outside as they are now, and would simply have been the instruments that helped get her elected.

And there's this:

The task and duty of a serious politician, as Edmund Burke emphasized so well, is to reason with such people and not to act as their megaphone or ventriloquist. Sarah Palin appears to have no testable core conviction except the belief (which none of her defenders denies that she holds, or at least has held and not yet repudiated) that the end of days and the Second Coming will occur in her lifetime. This completes the already strong case for allowing her to pass the rest of her natural life span as a private citizen.

No, Hitchens (and most likely Newsweek too) does not take her very seriously. And that must be enraging to her. So her corner replies: They were making fun of her, because she's a girl who has legs! One idiot on MSNBC just proclaimed that he went back through 60 Newsweek covers—that would take him back to October 2008—and couldn't find an identical photograph, which he held up as evidence of a sexist leftist media double standard.

Aside from the fact that, according to a Newsweek insider we talked to, it was two female staffers who found the Runner's World picture and presented it to editor Jon Meacham as a cover candidate, the problem here is that, yes, the photo was taken out of the context in which it was taken. It was taken in the context of a content-free lark over which Sarah Palin had control and was engineered to make her look good by showing off the fact that she looks good.

It was recontextualized by Newsweek into the real world, a world in which a staged photo of the woman who hijacked the 2008 presidential election beaming goofily into the camera and holding her two Blackberries and American flag like random iconography thrown in to justify the fact that she's modeling her legs is frightening and laughable. The reason Palin posed for the Runner's World photo is that she wanted people to see her legs and think of her as youthful, vibrant, fit, and in control, and she thought that a good way to do it was to just throw any old American flag around and let those gams loose. The reason Newsweek chose it for the cover was to communicate that this is how Sarah Palin sees herself. Sarah Palin likes the imagery, and her adherents like the imagery; the problem emerges when people who don't reflexively and unthinkingly love Sarah Palin encounter the imagery. Then it's sexist.

It was also sexist when Newsweek ran an unretouched photo of her in closeup where you could make out her facial hair. And it will be sexist next year when they run another photo that references the fact Palin is a human being with a body, and it will be sexist so long as Newsweek, or anyone else who dares gaze at Miss Sarah, isn't sufficiently deferential to her image of herself. She wants to be the hot mom, and she wants to be the emerging political power center. She wants those two identities to reinforce one another, but she doesn't want anyone to screw with the messaging.

You'd think that a former beauty pageant contestant would have long ago come to terms with her body issues. And she seemed awful comfortable with her body in this clip from yesterday's Oprah appearance, when a camera crew followed her on a workout in Alaska, when she was so keen on making sure the camera got a shot of those legs that she wore shorts, in November, in fucking Alaska.

As Horace Mann is a famous "prep" school, the students are now "preparing" for heated and ridiculous political correctness fights they will have at college.

Apparently, "former SBP and current comedian Scott Rogowsky '03" got a laugh at the assembly by saying the word "bazongas." Which led, naturally, to a wonderful op-ed in The Horace Mann Record by student and Assembly Committee member Leah Byland about how this reveals a misogynist double-standard. We quote: "If I were to bring up 'bazonga' cancer in my biology class, I'd probably be sent out of the room." Yes, well, that's a facile analogy because any rational person would agree that certain expressions are more or less appropriate based on context and audience and also HA HA HA HA "'BAZONGA' CANCER."

In the following issue, well, jeez. There was "Editor's Take: On 'Bazongas'" And then "Editor's Take: On the Editorial." And then a letter to the editor from a member of the English department praising Leah's "inspired outrage" and damning the anonymous editors who dared defend "bazongas." There is also a news story on the whole outrage. It is delightful. From a distance. A great distance.

Hello, editor Nick Gerad:

Moreover, the speech as a whole was deliberately written to be absurd. A large portion of it was dedicated to describing a Freemason-esque secret society of former SBPs that controls major worldwide corporations. Rogowsky spent a significant portion of his stage time describing massive, to-the-death street melees between students and sewer monsters called "grawl dogs."

What? Also, why won't anyone tell us if Charles Stam was involved?

In an email to potential donors (below) first discussed by The Frisky's Jessica Wakeman, Fiorina's campaign manager touts a video (above) of her opponent Sen. Barbara Boxer talking to a general during congressional testimony. The brief conversation seems to have offended no one who was actually involved in it, but Fiorina's campaign calls the video "shocking" and said Boxer "disrespectfully demanded" to be called "senator." Her exact words:

Do me a favor, could you say 'senator' instead of 'm'aam?' It's just a thing. (Laughter.) I worked so hard to get that title. Thank you.

This "shocking" moment of terrible rudeness is obviously the most important issue in California right now. It's a good thing voters have a tough businesswoman like Fiorina to help them identify women who espouse feminist ideals only when it advances their own ego and political interests.

Following Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's deadly Fort Hood shooting spree, and ensuing media chaos and misinformation melee (final stats: 12 dead, 31 wounded, one shooter, at least two guns), Lt. Gen. Robert Cone's press conference delivered several surprises: Though Hasan was gunned down on the scene, he was not, as previously reported, dead. Nor was the person who shot him. Both were in stable condition in the hospital—and one of them was a woman.

Reporters clamored for details about her, stammering breathless questions about the "hero," who she was, and why she was there. All we know so far is that she is not in the military; that she was a "first responder" (maybe a cop); that bullets from her gun were what stopped Hasan's massacre; that she was shot; that she nearly died; and that, had she enlisted to fight in the front lines of the Army, she would have been turned down. Combat units are male-only.

The tale of Fort Hood massacre will have many morals-of-the-story, complicated stuff about workplace harassment, medical licenses, Muslims in the military, and the twisted state of mental health in the Armed Forces. This, the case for letting women risk life and limb more often, is one of the happier ones.

There are plenty of reasons why dozens of soldiers (77 percent of whom were probably dudes) on the scene couldn't stop the shooter. (The most obvious of which is that even trained-to-kill soldiers don't wander around with loaded weapons at all times, especially when they're at the doctor getting a check-up, which is what Hasan's victims were doing. Which, by the way, only brings him that much closer to stealing Dr. Mengele's title as "shittiest doctor of all time.") But if a woman can storm into that place and save all those people, shouldn't she be allowed serve alongside them in a war zone, too? Yeah, sexual tension has a tendency to spook the Army (which is why there are no gays in the military, not even one!) and, oh, it'd be such a drag to deal with girl toilets and tampons in the barracks. But, guys, a chick just saved all your asses. Figure it out, already.

UPDATE: The female police officer's identity is now known. Meet Kimberly Munley, a "tough woman" with a 3-year-old daughter and military husband.

Certain, that is, if you judge from recent history. Here's a roundup of tech chauvinism flare-ups from just the last couple of months:

• "Booth babes" were explicitly discouraged at the TechCrunch 50; some people still hired the attractive spokesgirls.
  
• On stage at the same event, Penn Jilette promoted his iPhone magic app by explaining how it helped a stripper increase her tips. Oy, said Twitter
  
• When the fit, female co-founder of the startup TotalTrainer gave a presentation at VentureBeat's Demo conference, some male geeks in the audience got snarky about her body on Twitter, provoking a backlash against their "sexist tweets."
  
• Attendees at TechCrunch had to be warned not to mock the accents of speakers from foreign countries, according to co-organizer Jason Calacanis.

What's more, the girls who danced on stage at this year's Yahoo Hack Day were merely a sequel to the gyrating women who appeared on stage last year, notes Kara Swisher at All Things D. That's despite the fact that an all-woman team won the top prize at Yahoo's first Hack Day, in 2006, and that Yahoo has a tough-as-nails female CEO.

Chalk it up as evidence that, whether a woman calls the shots or not, the tech world remains heavily male dominated. It goes beyond that, though: Human relationships, across the gender divide or not, get severely twisted in Silicon Valley's intense startup culture, where they're all too often pushed aside to make way for technical achievements (think marathon coding sessions) or business success. The Hack Day incident is as much about interpersonal awkwardness as sexism (does this guy look like he's enjoying himself?).

Images from this year's event are below, via simonwillison.net and CocaChou on Flickr. It's a well-stocked gallery, purely so you can fully appreciate how, uh, deplorable this whole scene was.

via CocaChou on Flickr

via CocaChou on Flickr

via CocaChou on Flickr

via CocaChou on Flickr

Brazilian newspaper O Globo: What is it even talking about? The paper says "It's war!" because the New Yorker published an article this week about Rio's hellacious favela violence—right when the city's trying to get the Olympics. Conspiracy, clearly! Hey O Globo, the whole "It's war!" thing is what they were talking about. Duh.


We missed this yesterday: Mediabistro millionairess Laurel Touby's exit interview. "Exit" meaning, "She's taking a grand worldwide vacation for a few months, whatever, she's already rich." Laurel sez, "People are constantly asking me for personal advice or one-on-one help, and I've thought for a long time that if I just write it in a book it will be very helpful for entrepreneurs." Just don't take advice about email from her.


Yesterday was the NYT's annual "State of the Times" thing where the big execs stand up and tell the staff what the hell's going on and answer some questions. We hear it was boring. No final decisions yet on how the paper will go forward with its inevitable paid online content move. But Pinch Sulzberger did, allegedly, get off one funny line. Yea, video or it didn't happen.



Rachel Sklar is all mad because stupid Capitol File magazine headlined a story about Diane Sawyer, "Woman on Top."
Women. Geez.

Reveling in over-concentration of males in Silicon Valley tech companies, TechCrunch's startup conference kicked off earlier this month with talk about strippers. Penn Jilette regaled the crowd with the story about how one made a ton of money off his magic app, and is set to publish a "Stripper's Guide" to the software, which helped her increase her tips. Twitter groaned. Then came the booth babes, despite organizers' advice against using the scantily-clad female models as a promotional gimmick.

Conference co-host Jason Calacanis also has to admonish attendees not to mock the accents of some presenters, whom he makes a point of culling from around the world. In response to our email, he wrote,

I've asked folks to be tolerant about language issues for three years because 15-year olds in chat rooms can say so horrible things about folks outside of our country. It's frankly embarrassing that I have to do that. When I speak in China, France or Japan they don't give me a hard time and I'm not even attempting to speak their language.

Over at VentureBeat's Demo conference, which ran the week following TechCrunch 50, some male participants freaked out about a presentation from a female fitness entrepreneur with well-toned arms and visible muscles (pictured left, via VentureBeat). "Whoa, presenter on stage has bigger deltoids and biceps than me, and she's wearing a red dress," wrote one participant. "The TotalTrainer presenters scare me," tweeted another. "Those muscles don't belng at Demo." VentureBeat's Kim-Mai Cutler blasted back in a post entitled, Internet spreads sexist tweets faster than ever: "You guys need to shut up."

Demo also featured complains about foreign accents; one columnist, CNET's Rafe Needleman, went so far as to suggest people with "a noticeably weak command of English shouldn't be allowed on stage," a native-language requirement that would see American entrepreneurs like Calacanis, along with their translators, banned from many global stages.

Calacanis said there's only so much an organizer can do about any of these issues:

I love these idiots who blame conference producers for social issues. In related news, terrorism is driven by action films! ...Sexism exists, sure, but a conference producer can't change the statistical conundrum that most of the CEOs in our industry are male (like 90%+ I would guess).

Of course, an organizer can at least set the tone, for example by imploring tolerance of accents, as Calacanis has done, or by avoiding inviting women reporters to serve as "cocktail waitress"es at their poker games, as Calacanis has apparently not done (he insists men get the same treatment and often have to serve drinks to join his games). And Valley geeks can use the tools they've invented, like Twitter, to shame the worst offenders. It would appear that process is, if not in full gear, at least underway.

Even by New York Post standards—which is saying quite a bit!—making this the lede of your story is an indication of some seething, rapey anger:

That's one dirty girl we'd just love to get tackled by!

Erin Andrews, they mean! She is in a sexxxy GQ photo spread (actually not that sexy? And she posed for it months before her nude video incident. No matter!) and the Post finds that this is a great opportunity to clarify to you, the readers: Erin Andrews is one dirty, sexxxy broad:

After GQ's photos hit newsstands and GQ.com this week, Andrews admirers will have to hold their breath for two weeks before getting a fresh gander at her — and her lovely gams.

"Gams," they said. "Gams."
[Pic: GQ]

This sexualization of mass-produced, tongue-pleasing food will continue forever, because selling the myth of easy sex to men and the myth of being able to eat fast food while maintaining a model-esque body to women in one fell swoop is just too damn effective—especially when paired with cheap food products designed to activate our mouth's pleasure centers—because people are basically dumb animals. That burger looks gross though.
[via Adrants]

She lists off some recent stories from the site's "Entertainment" section to give you some flavor.

This one-sided liberal hate site has one fatal weakness-boobs. Let's check out some recent stories from the Huffington Post's entertainment section:

• Here are some photos of Natalie Portman's nipple.
• Here are some photos of Beyonce's nipple, complete with HuffPo-provided "NSFW zoom."
• Here are some photos of Pamela Anderson's nipple (hardly news, but a boob's a boob).
• Here is an entire page devoted to recently naked women (and Barack Obama).
• Here is a collection of zoomed-in photos of 23 celebrities' breasts, made into a fun game called "Guess the Celebrity Breast Implants?"

Pretty standard entertainment-section blog fare here-though HuffPo does go above and beyond with the "NSFW zoom." You don't see a Beyonce nipple that close just anywhere.

While Amanda's examples aren't all from the same day, it's a rare day that some coverage of a salacious story about an attractive woman doesn't make HuffPo's "Top Stories." An example, from today:
So, there's an auto-erotic asphyxiation story and Heather Graham opining about her love of Tantric sex. Gotcha. And on the day after Sarah Palin told Sean Hannity that she'd like to tell Obama voters, "I told you so," about America becoming a Socialist nation yet not being permitted to speak to a Republican audience, their front page story about her isn't atypical.
Not atypical, if one is running a gossip site.

Amanda acknowledges that the nip slip/hot chick page views are part of Huffington Post's business model, regardless of its politics. But she notes that the entertainment coverage often does have a liberal bent — it's just not often sensitive to women.

But look past the nipples, if you can, and you will find a clear liberal bent in HuffPo's non-boob Entertainment stories. Yesterday, the top three links on the Entertainment page could be considered GLBT interest stories: "Adam Lambert Confirms Rolling Stone To Address His Sexuality"; "WATCH: Neil Patrick Harris' FANTASTIC Tonys Closing Song"; "Gordon Ramsay Shocks Audience With ‘Lesbian' Rant About Journalist." Also on the page yesterday was blogger Jackson Katz's post directly addressing the objectification of women in entertainment, titled "Eminem, Misogyny and the Sounds of Silence."

Notably, most of HuffPo's bloggers aren't paid — and their coverage isn't highlighted with splash page retail space in the same way that the stories about sex and nipples are.

And while some people might call looking at nip slips a little mindless fun to drive in the viewers HuffPo desires to influence politically, Amanda isn't having it.

The problem is that people really do care about nipples. They care so much about nipples that the Huffington Post devotes pages and pages of photographs to them when women accidentally (or, you know, against their will) reveal them to the public. In that way, there's no difference between the religious conservative who is scandalized by a bare breast popping up in the middle of his football game and a liberal Web site which devotes its resources to naked chicks. A woman's body part is a priority. Real women's issues, not so much.

Somehow, "Come for the nipples, stay for the feminism" doesn't seem quite right to us either.

Huffington Post: Liberal Politics, Sexist Entertainment [Washington City Paper]

Ha, don't worry guys, Sharon Levy is an awesome chick. Very manly!

"She's got as much testosterone as any guy I know," said Doug Herzog, the president of MTV Networks Entertainment Group.

She invented Deadliest Warrior, the show that finally settles the debates you had when you were 12 about who would win, a samurai or a knight? Plus she's teaching dudes more about chicks!

"We have been trying to figure out how to do a show with women in it that is sexy and not misogynist," Ms. Levy said.

Good luck with that one, lady!

"This is going to be a very broad show," she said.

She says "broad" too! As a Spike TV viewer, I like this broad already! Plus she's a lapsed Jew who likes to eat pork! And look, male daredevil Jesse James just wants to emphasize, once again, for you guys: this chick is totally masculine.

"She's like that cool chick in college that you drink with and go out and party with. She has her girly moments, but not too often."

She's totally cool with Spike TV, as long as she exhibits no feminine traits. Except having breasts, yea!
[NYT]

It all started when Jeffrey Rosen, who is smart (he writes for The New Republic!), reported that although he knew nothing about her and hadn't read any of her opinions, he was pretty sure that Sonia Sotomayor was pretty dumb, because some anonymous guys he talked to said so. They also said she was a total bitch! She was always talking so much and she was mean to lawyers! And that is fine, if you are smart, like cuddly teddybear Antonin Scalia, but not if you're dumb, like poor Latina Sonia Sotomayor.

And she is so dumb, and poor, that Greg Mankiw's dead grandmother is better at saving money than she is! She is as dumb as that dumb woman Bush tried to appoint! (To be fair, that woman really did seem pretty dumb.)

And now, today, the New York Times weighs in: Adam Liptak says she is totally diligent and competent, which means she works very, very hard despite her tragic dumbness. He tried to read her opinions but they were sooooooo boring!

But they reveal no larger vision, seldom appeal to history and consistently avoid quotable language. Judge Sotomayor's decisions are, instead, almost always technical, incremental and exhaustive, considering all of the relevant precedents and supporting even completely uncontroversial propositions with elaborate footnotes.

UGH. Way to be a judge and not a brilliant, witty raconteur like Scalia, again, dumb lady! You will be the worst Supreme Court Justice ever!

Barack Obama's press secretary was supposed to introduce a new era of inclusiveness and feminism maybe because Barack Obama is a liberal and he would end the "old boy's club" atmosphere of Washington. So in order to explain how sexist and anti-woman all of Robert Gibbs' baseball talk is BBC correspondent Katty Kay explains in The Daily Beast that even though she's managed to wrap her silly little female head around complicated things like "politics" she can't handle the occasional off-hand reference to "innings."

I can talk politics with the best of them. I can even make reasonable sense of toxic mortgage assets. Give me Paris, Moscow, or Tokyo and I can usually muster an intelligent observation. But when the talk turns to innings, dunks and touchdowns, sorry, I've nothing remotely sensible to add.

To be fair, sports metaphors in politics are really stupid, Robert Gibbs is clearly kind of a dick, and there is a pervasive chauvinism in the beltway press (it goes hand-in-hand with the blinkered elitism and self-importance). But come on, Katty, you really don't have any clue what Gibbs is saying here?

"Bottom of the fifth [inning], the sausage race is [at] the beginning of the next inning, so stay tuned, and the starting pitcher is in there, still throwing nice curveballs and [he's] still got a lot of heat on the fastball," was how the new White House press secretary described the progress of the economic stimulus bill at a recent briefing....

Slow down, Robert! There are girls here! In order to demonstrate how not-sexist this administration is you'd better reframe the issue in terms of shopping for shoes! (Or, as Katty says, "It's as if Dana Perino had compared getting out of Iraq to extracting yourself from pigeon pose, or tracking Osama to finding vintage Pucci on eBay." Because Dana Perino is a girl, see, and those are things girls know about. Also for fuckssake we'd still be able to follow those metaphors, even though we're boys. Because they're stupidly easy to comprehend even if you have a penis.)

The real problem is that author Katty Kay is British. If Robert Gibbs used cricket metaphors she'd be fine! Or maybe he should just have the lady members of the press corps chase him around the briefing room at high speed while a zany sax theme plays? That's the sort of stuff you Brits get, right?

Bush's little story, about an abortion-rights protester, won him Wonkette's fiercely-contested "Pig of the Day" award, a selection we wholeheartedly endorse. But the old guy isn't running for anything, and seems to have given up on any other Bush being president, ever again, so what does he care?

Bill Clinton then said, "could you imagine what would happen if I told that joke up here?" It's kind of a joke about Clinton's horndog image, but really a slap at Bush for being a terrible sexist. In other words, about as far as he can go and still keep the peace at those awkward all-president events.

Video at top via YouTube.

First, Campbell Brown, who's really pushing her likability with this irritating "NO BULLSHIT" thing (is she a Mamet character, CNN?) delievered a special comment full of rhetorical questions that all danced around the simple point that Rendell, though well-meaning, would not have made the same comment about a man of any familial persuasion. (Brown is married to Republican strategist and frequent cable news guest Dan Senor.)

Then secret best Times opinion columnist Gail Collins got involved! She damns Rendell with genial, light-hearted ribbing, as is her wont. She points out that Rendell was engaging in the back-handed justifications of someone who got passed over for a plum job. ("'For that job, you have to be able to drink those salesmen under the table and Ted’s an absolute lush.'") She called him for comment and allowed him to dig his hole deeper by contradicting his first statement in his defense of it (Rendell, too, is a workaholic, despite having a family). And then she called an expert in people who discriminate against single people, or something, which also allows her to get a couple digs against Chris Matthews in. (Gail Collins is married to CBS News senior producer Dan Collins.)

We still haven't heard from confirmed bachelor Napolitano herself, but presumably she's very upset with this mildly sexist remark from a loudmouthed old white guy. But we feel she's perfect for the job too, because she's probably a cloesteded lesbian, and they're very industrious.

Watch Palin talk about her inevitable future political rival/running mate, and sexism, in the video above. Below, the Alaska governor talks about how she interpreted Katie Couric's questions about what newspapers and magazines she reads, and makes another dubious claim about why Alaska is a hotbed of international activity.