[Berlin, December 3. Image via Getty]

Greenpeace activists unfurl a giant portrait of German Chancellor Angela Merkel as part of a Save the Climate campaign on Berlin's main railway station (hauptbahnhof) in Berlin December 3, 2009, ahead of the Copenhagen Climate Summit starting 07 December 2009. AFP PHOTO JOHN MACDOUGALL (Photo credit should read JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/Getty Images)

The new Forbes list is actually called "World's Most Powerful Women," but it puts the cards on the table in the first two paragraphs:

Forbes' Power Women list isn't about celebrity or popularity; it's about influence. Queen Rania of Jordan (No. 75), for instance, is perhaps the most listened-to woman in the Middle East; her Twitter feed has 600,000 followers.

In assembling the list, Forbes looked for women who run countries, big companies or influential nonprofits. Their rankings are a combination of two scores: visibility—by press mentions—and the size of the organization or country these women lead.

Interesting. In almost every other list, power is measured in dollars and cents. Yet, when it comes to women, the financial component is glossed over entirely.

The women selected are certainly interesting - Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, heads the list for the fourth consecutive year, and Queen Raina of Jordan (above) was given special acknowledgment for her social media savvy. Other high profile women like Sonia Sotomayor and Michelle Obama are also given nods on the list. And certainly, there are things in this world more important than someone's financial status. But Forbes exists to disclose numbers, so the omission nagged at me the entire article.

Joan Smith, writing for the Guardian's Comment is Free, argues that the list still places money as the top indicator of success:

Indeed, what's striking about the Forbes top ten is its reverence for money. Ten women holding the title of prime minister, chancellor or president make it into the top 100, but Merkel is the sole politician in the top ten. The list has been published only for the last six years, so it's impossible to know what it would have looked like 25 years ago, but it's hard to imagine Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi being overlooked in favour of Irene Rosenfeld, chief executive of Kraft Foods. I'm sure Rosenfeld is a big player in the business world, but is she really the sixth most powerful woman in the world? More influential, better-known and more of a role model than J K Rowling? [...]

At first sight, the Forbes list looks like bad news for women who aspire to other forms of power: cultural, social and political. But what it really tells us isn't about powerful women but how power itself is perceived in a country where commerce trumps everything else. Despite the recession, and whether you're male or female, the US remains a country where money talks louder than anything else.

But I disagree. What is striking to me about the list is how the amount of wealth or assets controlled was not counted with the women on the list - and that reveals more about the wage and wealth gaps between men and women than Forbes may care to admit.

What would it look like if the headlines about the Forbes list blared something like "World's Wealthiest Women is Six Billion Dollars Short of Last Ranked Wealthiest Man?" instead of focusing on who was ranked?

And I don't think my theory is too far off. Take another feature on the Forbes site, "The Top Earning Jobs for Women." I started browsing the slide show, and noticed and interesting little statistic bundled in with the standard job facts: percentage of men's earnings.

As explained in the article:

An unlikely No. 1 emerged. Much to our surprise, pharmacy topped the list, where women pharmacists earn a median wage of $1,647 per week or about $86,000 a year. Women currently account for slightly less than half of all pharmacists in the U.S. and earn about 85% as much as their male colleagues. It's a much smaller pay gap than that of medical doctors, however, where women make 59% as much as men. And pharmacy requires less education.

Ouch.

And female executives illustrate the classic percentage of the wage gap:

The only job where women were compensated on par with men is Speech-language Pathologists.

So it should come as no surprise that the wage gap costs women anywhere from $700,000 to $2 million over the course of their working life.

So how do we start fighting the wage gap? Perhaps we can begin by asking Forbes and other publications marketing sections aimed at women in the workplace to write articles about this issue, and to stop filling their sections with ladymag knockoff articles like these:

Lists [Forbes]
The World's Billionaires [Forbes]
Top Earning CEO's [Forbes]
Top-Earning Dead Celebrities [Forbes]
World's Most Powerful Women [Forbes]
What Forbes reveals about women and power [Guardian]
Top-Paying Jobs For Women [Forbes]
Fighting the Wage Gap [Women Work]

[Berlin, June 25. Image via Getty]

Activists dressed as Wonder Merkel (L) and Super Obama (R) pose for photographers during a stunt by environmental group Avaaz (voice) in front of Berlin's Brandenburg Gate on June 25, 2009. The activists called on German Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Barack Obama to renew their efforts to combat global warming during their upcoming talks in Washington. AFP PHOTO/ JOHN MACDOUGALL (Photo credit should read JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP/Getty Images)

[Dresden, Germany; June 5. Image via Getty]

German Chancellor Angela Merkel autographs a sigh held by a young girl welcoming US President Barack Obama to the eastern German city of Dresden on June 5, 2009. After policy talks and a news conference in Dresden, Obama and Merkel are due to travel to Buchenwald, the former Nazi concentration camp where more than 56,000 prisoners died in horrendous conditions. Obama today swaps the political heat of the Middle East for a solemn two-day mission of World War II remembrance, and a fresh round of transatlantic diplomacy. AFP PHOTO DDP / MICHAEL GOTTSCHALK GERMANY OUT (Photo credit should read MICHAEL GOTTSCHALK/AFP/Getty Images)

• Barack Obama, after his meeting with Angela Merkel, will visit the ruins of the Buchenwald concentration camp. He will likely not compare our re-purposing of Abu Ghraib to the Russian's post-war re-purposing of Buchenwald for political prisoners. [UPI, Huffington Post]

• Obama is heading to France after that, where he's meeting Michelle and the girls. [MSNBC]
• Perhaps he's going in order to help him forget about the crazy guy from Utah trying to assassinate him. [Huffington Post]
• Or the fact that his Attorney General is having to release a bunch more Alaska Republicans convicted of corruption because the prosecution by Bush's Justice Department was even more corrupt than the politicians. [NY Times]
• One of the other corrupt Republicans prosecuted by Alberto Gonzales' Justice Department, Bob Ney, now has a radio show and wants to see Alberto Gonzales waterboarded...to prove it's not really torture, of course. [ThinkProgress]
• During a week when corrupt former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich has his wife eating spiders in Costa Rica with Speidi to pay the bills he once fulfilled through bribery, waterboarding Alberto Gonzales doesn't seem that extreme. [Politico]
• My definition of "extreme" may have been altered by reading this recap and review of Glenn Beck's "comedy" tour. [NY Times]
• Judge Sonia Sotomayor's supporting documentation has been delivered to the Senate early, which won't stop Republicans from claiming they don't have enough time to read it before their summer vacations. [MSNBC]
• Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter, having locked up the support of most senior Democrats and killed most primary challenges, now says he doesn't know if he'll vote for Sotomayor. Seriously, dude's starting to seem a little crazy, right? [Politico]
• But, with unemployment in America at nearly 10 percent, the one thing Arlen Specter won't do is quit his job. [NY Times]

[London, April 1. Image via Getty.]

• Last Monday, China implemented an internet ban on YouTube. Although China has the technology to block only certain URLs, the entire site has been blocked from use. • In order to lure in the desirable baby-boomer demographic, The Hallmark Channel is playing up their status as a "soothing, predictable" network. At least they know their strengths. • The Statue of Liberty is set to re-open for the public on July 4th, 2009. Lady Liberty's crown has been closed since 9/11. • This is kind of a downer: America's eight most downsized cities. The "Rust Belt" list includes Youngstown, Ohio at number one and Detroit at number three. • Sled dogs are among the most energy efficient animals on earth, and scientists hope that their "fat-burning prowess" could be used to discover new ways to treat diabetes and obesity. • Delta Air Lines is resurrecting vintage uniforms for flight attendants from now-defunct carriers like Pan American World Airways to promote their pending merger with Northwest Airlines. • Forbes has some advice for those of us who suck with money: 7 steps to fix your retirement. •  Nickelodeon has asked kids to unplug their games and gadgets on April 22nd in honor of Earth Day. • Funny lady Janeane Garofalo is also in on the action, and in this video, she advocates for the "huge turn off" on Earth Day with some serious armpit hair. •  Sociological Images has pictures of the new Angela Merkel Barbie. She looks... classy? •  To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Woodstock, organizer Michael Lane plans to throw together a free, green, outdoor music festival. He is currently looking for sponsors and scouting venues in New York City. •  A unique community of killer whales has failed to recover from the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. Experts say that the pod is slowly dying out, and with it, their distinctive song-dialect. • 

STEVE: Shalom and here we go. It won't be the first time I've talked about something I didn't actually see.

MEGAN: Well, you saw it but in true Jezebel fashion, you saw it intoxicated. This is the first one I actually watched stone-cold sober because I couldn't stop typing long enough to drink the bottle of wine I opened.

STEVE: My insights are admittedly influenced by the haze of a nice, Australian Cabernet-Shiraz blend. Yes, "that one."

MEGAN: So you do remember some things! But, basically, Obama won and nobody asked anything that wasn't pre-screened because they didn't want to get yelled at by Tom Brokaw like he kept yelling at Obama and McCain.

STEVE: Yes, I remember mostly the focus group that Katie Couric did after, and the undecidededs didn't like "that one" very well. Maybe, as Maureen posited this morning, it was a cross between "the one" and "that woman," but it seemed dismissive and odd.

MEGAN: I mean, it's actually something you say to, like, your kids, isn't it? I thought it was very infantilizing.

STEVE: I wouldn't know about kids, but my friend Suzanne is here and says she'd never really talk to her kids like that. I would, however, sometimes talk to a boyfriend like that. And that's not a good sign.

MEGAN: Wait! Wasn't it you that sent me that magazine cover of them kissing?

STEVE: YES I DID and you didn't pick it up. I thought it was going to be a big deal. But maybe the progressives won't get mad at The Progressive?

MEGAN: It was just a little too... something.

STEVE: I'm not even sure what that was supposed to mean. But I can say, without a doubt, that I wouldn't kiss any man who pointed at me and called me "that one" in public.

MEGAN: You know, I did kiss a dude who later called me "that one" in public in what he thought was a jocular way. I accused him of using his brother's terminal illness as a way to get pussy, so I guess I didn't appreciate it.

STEVE: Speaking of our rights to kiss anyone we want, I thought it was a little odd, and disappointing, that not a word was said about the Supreme Court last night, two days into the new term and with at least two judges barely holding on.

MEGAN: Well, but Sarah Palin covered that, right? [I crack myself up some times]

STEVE: Every swing state voter I know - and I recently met a mom in Ohio who WANTS to vote GOP, but is really being persuaded by the high court argument.

MEGAN: Because of Roe? That's interesting. On the other hand, if the Democratic Party can win the Presidency on the economy and the Republican can't gin people up on social issues like abortion and gay marriage because independent voters have realized that it's craven and whatever, that's not a bad thing, right?

STEVE: I really think the court issue is ALMOST as persuasive as the "Jesus the stock market crashed 500 points again" issue. You know, Bill Maher said on Friday, and I agree, that it almost always requires a national catastrophe to get progressives elected. BUT DO AMERICANS NOT GET THAT THE SUPREME COURT COULD BE A NATIONAL CATASTROPHE TOO?

MEGAN: Well, 54 percent of the country thinks abortion should stay legal and the more they put the crazies on TV, the more people go, um, those people are cray-cray. Like, they should give that crazy anti-gay guy from Kansas more press.

STEVE: I bet Fred Phelps votes based on the Supreme Court!

MEGAN: Totally! But everyone hates him. Harley riders hate him. He's the antithesis of everything the anti-gay movement is trying to pretend to be, which is faux-tolerant. You know, like Sarah Palin. It's okay if you, like, have to be gay, but the government shouldn't do anything special for your heathen, social-norm defying self. That would be giving you "special" rights. Because the right to, say, marry or to have equal protection under the law is "special."

STEVE: Sarah says she "tolerates" the gays. Does that make us feel better?

MEGAN: Like, she doesn't want to gas them or anything! It doesn't make me feel better. What is there about gay people to "tolerate"? It's not like gayness is something that might rub off or something.

STEVE: OK and so if they spent 60 minutes on the economy last night, we should spend a few minutes on it here. Angela Merkel is on the front of the NYT business section today, looking very stressed.

MEGAN: Well, I think I know why.

STEVE: And as someone who was raised by a single mother and appreciates the (much better) grasp that women have on pocket book issues than men, I get worried when they look panicked. I mean, a friend emailed last night to tell me that he and his boyfriend decided not to buy expensive, designer jeans after the 500 drop yesterday. And when the gay men stop pumping money into the economy for lavish, unessential items like Italian jeans, we have problems.

MEGAN: Well, that alone explains the 500 point drop in the Dow yesterday. I have no doubt that Angela Merkel doesn't want to be presiding over an economic crisis brought on by the financial crisis and credit crunch by her personal masseur.

STEVE: I mean, when $2 trillion of retirement money is gone . . . and gay men can't buy jeans . . . is our salvation really going to be found in cutting a $3 million overhead projector for a planetarium? And, like, if they did buy the projector for the planetarium, and Sarah could see Jupiter from her seat, could we make her an astronaut and send her to the moon or something?

MEGAN: Okay, first off, I really like planetariums. I'm just sayin'. Fuck McCain for hating on planetariums. Second off, he's also going to personally renegotiate everyone's mortgages. Except mine. And yours if you had one. I mean, not really "everyone" as much as people whose houses lost value because they bought stuff for absurdist prices. And took out absurdly high mortgages. And only if they're old, to make up for the massive cuts in Medicare spending he's planning.

STEVE: And McCain's mortgage plan is totally borrowed from Hillary, which was borrowed from her history lessons on the Great Depression.

MEGAN: Also, did you get the sense that they made that up on the bus on the way there? Sort of like how McCain's all, I know how to kill bin Laden! I do! Just watch! I will go into some place I won't name and kill bin Laden quietly, because generally invading a sovereign nation goes over way better if you just hope they don't notice.

STEVE: But if you pronounce Pakistan as Pah-kee-stahn, the whole things has an air of credibility.

MEGAN: Just like "new-cue-lerr" makes it sound less scary?

STEVE: You betcha!

MEGAN: Such as!

STEVE: So Olbermann says Palin is the one palling around with terrorists — the Alaska Independence Party.

MEGAN: Well, you know, just because they advocated potentially violent secession, we sponsored by Iran and hate Our Freedoms doesn't makes them terrorists... Oh, wait, let's just call Olbermann and pinko Commie in the tank for Obama.

STEVE: The AIP founder, Olbermann says, said that, "The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government, and I won't be buried under their damn flag"

MEGAN: Why doesn't he just go to Canada? It's, like, right the fuck there.

STEVE: Don't ruin Canada for the rest of us! I hear Montreal is quite a party.
But where is this tank everyone keeps talking about? It must be pretty crowded in there by now.

MEGAN: And kind of sexy. I mean, Olbermann's in it with Rachel Maddow and Bill Keller of the NY Times, who I saw on Saturday and is kind of silver foxy.

STEVE: Is Rachel Maddow DRIVING the tank? Margaret Cho says you gotta have a lesbian to read the map.

MEGAN: Well, I'll bet Rachel is driving and Suze Orman is navigating through the minefields.

STEVE: Are we going to end up with Suze or Warren Buffet as treasury secretary anyway? Can't Warren Buffet just bail us out of this . . . maybe with a little help from Bill Gates?

MEGAN: I know, Warren Buffet as Treasury Secretary? I was like, dude, McCain, seriously, you had a whole series of commercials about how stupid celebrity is and now you're nominating the only financier people will recognize by name as Treasury Secretary? I mean, you know he wanted to be honest and say "Phil Gramm," because McCain, too, thinks we're a nation of whiners and this is just a mental depression.

STEVE: I mean, I bank at Wachovia, or Citibank, or Wells Fargo OR WHATEVER IT IS THIS MORNING and I'd feel much more secure banking at Warren Buffet's house.

MEGAN: I'd feel more secure banking from under my mattress at this stage.
If anyone is going to fuck over my money, it really should be me.

But in this unfortunate economic climate, that 15% is still hurting, as Forbes points out that many top women in business, like beleaguered former Morgan Stanley exec Zoe Cruz, have lost their jobs this year. There are, of course, still many impressive business bitches holding it down, including #8 Ho Ching, the head of Singaporean sovereign wealth fund Temasek, #18 Mary Sammons, the CEO of Rite Aid, #19 Andrea Jung, the CEO of Avon, and #60 Judy McGrath, the CEO of MTV.

Angela Merkel is also in good company, with stateswomen like Argentinean President #13 Cristina Fernandez and deposed Myanmar Prime Minister/ Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, not to mention our girl Hillary Clinton at #28.

The list isn't all politicians and businesswomen: Meredith Vieira (#61) edges out Katie Couric (62), Barbara Walters (63), Diane Sawyer (65), and Christine Amanpour (#91) to be the most powerful woman in news, and architect Zaha Hadid comes in at #69. Whatever their professions, however, these women are much more impressive feminist icons than Candace Bushnell or Jenna Jameson.

100 Most Powerful Women [Forbes]

Earlier: German Titocracy
the Why Do We Know Lauren Conrad & Not Indra Nooyi?
Zoe Cruz Told Mortgage Traders To "Cut Losses," But They Thought She Was Just High On Crack

• A new study shows that most female child molesters were victims of sexual abuse themselves. • Jordan has charged a man who allegedly killed his sister for having an extramarital affair. • Stephanie Pearl-McPhee calls herself the "yarn harlot" and keeps an eponymous blog about knitting. • Some conservative British politicians want to bar lesbians from receiving IVF treatment unless the potential child would have a "male role model" involved. • In the U.S., paid maternity leave is a luxury, not a right. "The United States provides the fewest maternity leave benefits in both length of leave and paid time off," when compared to nineteen equally rich countries, according to Time. • Overheard at the gay rodeo: "This is an all-American sport, and we are all-American people." • Queen Elizabeth tops the list of Live Science's 10 Most Powerful Modern Women Leaders. Also included: Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Angela Merkel, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf.

MOE: Okay so what's going on. I'm feeling especially incompetent today.
MEGAN: Oh, people are voting in West Virginia. Some polls have her ahead by, like 40 points
MEGAN: Wait, I take that back, like, they all have her ahead like that.
MOE: How many delegates? Is this all part of her verisimilitude strategy?
MOE: Logically her candidacy is dead but on a visceral level it seems so obviously winning?
MEGAN: Twenty-eight pledged delegates at stake.
MEGAN: I think that she wants to go out on a high note.

MOE: Okay here's another thing: we just dropped charges against a supposed "20th hijacker" named Mohammed Al-Qahtani whose coerced confession turned out to be less real than Hillary's chances of winning the nom. But I thought Zacarias Moussaoui was the discredited "20th hijacker".... What's the deal with this guy?

MEGAN: I know, I read that and I was totally like, wasn't that the crazy French guy? I love how we convicted that guy when some other prosecutor knew he was just, like, a poseur.
MEGAN: Which is basically was, he's, like, the more attractive, less effective shoe bomber. I recall it coming out that al Qaeda had records where the leaders all laughed at what an idiot he was.
MOE: I love how this new guy has been in Guantanamo for six and a half years! Did he have 20th hijacker overlap with Moussaoui? Moussaoui is still in prison right? He was nuts. And crazy. But not much of a terrorist!
MOE: Oh fuck check this 20th hijacker is just a metaphor
MEGAN: Yeah, good old Zed will be in prison forever.
MEGAN: No, it's not a metaphor, it's a way to keep charging various terrorist guys when we don't have any evidence of what they're really done in order to evoke the American boogeyman and keep American sentiment on the side of continued tribunals. I don't think that's a metaphor by definition.
MOE: I know I always thought that too but look that's what WIKIPEDIA SAYS.
MOE:

The term is somewhat misleading, as there is no evidence that al-Qaeda ever planned to have exactly 20 hijackers. There were many variations of the 9/11 plot, with the number of terrorists fluctuating with available resources and changing circumstances. In the end, there were 19 hijackers: three of the planes were taken over by five members each and the fourth was hijacked by only four people. One plane, United Airlines Flight 93, had fewer hijackers than the rest, thus the idea of a 20th hijacker came to be widely discussed.

The 9/11 Commission concluded that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed intended to have as many as 25 or 26 hijackers for the plot. It was also reported that 14 members of al-Qaeda, in addition to the 19 known hijackers, attempted to enter the United States to participate in the attacks.

MEGAN: But, hey, speaking of terrorists, someone asked Obama about Hamas and Israel. He likes Israel, doesn't like Hamas and has told the Palestinians that waiting to get a President that will be on their side about their damn olive trees is pretty dumb.
MOE: Earthquake update: more than 18,000 people are buried in the city of Mianyang, which is near the city of Jiangou, neither of which I'd ever heard of before. China has a lot of cities though. Looking through the Xinhua pictures yesterday I found a lot of orderly pictures of relief preparedness but none, I don't think, from Mianyang. I also love how CNN gets this eyewitness account from an expatriate "business consultant" in Beijing. He said he was at a hotel and he'd never felt anything like it. Tell that to the city of Mianyang, asshole! 30 seismic tremors seems a bit gratuitous.
MOE: The man, he is a fucking genius:

You know, when I think about the Zionist idea, I think about how my feelings about Israel were shaped as a young man — as a child, in fact. I had a camp counselor when I was in sixth grade who was Jewish-American but who had spent time in Israel, and during the course of this two-week camp he shared with me the idea of returning to a homeland and what that meant for people who had suffered from the Holocaust, and he talked about the idea of preserving a culture when a people had been uprooted with the view of eventually returning home. There was something so powerful and compelling for me, maybe because I was a kid who never entirely felt like he was rooted. That was part of my upbringing, to be traveling and always having a sense of values and culture but wanting a place. So that is my first memory of thinking about Israel.

JG: Go to the kishke question, the gut question: the idea that if Jews know that you love them, then you can say whatever you want about Israel, but if we don't know you — Jim Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski — then everything is suspect. There seems to be in some quarters, in Florida and other places, a sense that you don't feel Jewish worry the way a senator from New York would feel it.

Sometimes I'm attacked in the press for maybe being too deliberative. My staff teases me sometimes about anguishing over moral questions. I think I learned that partly from Jewish thought, that your actions have consequences and that they matter and that we have moral imperatives.

I want to solve the problem, and so my job in being a friend to Israel is partly to hold up a mirror and tell the truth and say if Israel is building settlements without any regard to the effects that this has on the peace process, then we're going to be stuck in the same status quo that we've been stuck in for decades now, and that won't lift that existential dread that David Grossman described in your article.

I want to make sure that the people of Israel, when they kiss their kids and put them on that bus, feel at least no more existential dread than any parent does whenever their kids leave their sight.

So that then becomes the question: is settlement policy conducive to relieving that over the long term, or is it just making the situation worse?

MEGAN: I think, like Angela, we're ignoring his significance to the region. Think he'll call us out, too?
MEGAN: I speak German, I must be a descendant of Hitler, too. And you're Slavic and stuff, I'll bet you're descended from bad people, too. Chavez alone is clean of bad historical associations and speaks for all the peoples in all the countries in Latin America.
MOE: That is just the thing, I'm always concerned my life isn't masochistic enough for how it will eventually be, but when I am as miserable as I intend to be later on in life after the revolution and the famine and the war and the ice caps etc. etc. come I will be too cold and unmotivated to go ahead with the suicide. I should actually just move to Israel right now I think. The weather is so nice.
MOE: No, Chavez is one of us. Look, he too anticipates the consequences of his actions. Like the Jews!

"Maybe I'll say something to her and she'll get mad and say 'why don't you shut up?"' he said, referencing Spanish King Juan Carlos' 2007 admonition of the loquacious Chavez that touched off a bilateral dispute with Spain.

MEGAN: The king? Oh, yeah, it was sort of awesome.
MOE: I thought it had touched off a ringtone.
MEGAN: The techno remixes, though? Even fucking better.
MOE: Did it ever occur to you we could blog all day about the news and NEVER RUN OUT OF NEW LINKS and update it CONSTANTLY AND CONTINUOUSLY and some people would ACTUALLY READ IT but at the end of the day none of it would matter???
MEGAN: Aren't I the one that just said that life is a suicidal act?
MOE: Speaking in that realm Obama leads the non-race to amass unsolicited campaign songs!
MOE: Dude I want to hear the "Jamaican reggae tribute"

MEGAN: Um, I'm not sure you do.
MOE: And also in the realm of unsolicited Obama tributes is this thing a Time Inc. creation? Oh, or does Hillary have a superhero too because duh it is an easy pun?
MEGAN: At this point, wouldn't she be, like, a villain? Spoiler, etc?
MOE: Oh man this is so fucking cheesy.
MEGAN: Yes, I hereby apologizing for assaulting the ears of anyone who clicked through.
MOE: Readers: Porque no te callas is a much better audio accompaniment.
MEGAN: Or Barack O'Bollywood.

MEGAN: Good morning! I'm caffeinated this morning!
MEGAN: There will be a lot of exclamation points!

MOE: I'm...HUNGOVER! And it's kind of late. Did you have sex or something? Wait don't answer that in public!
MEGAN: Oh, wait, I'm sorry, I didn't hear what you just said. Oh, well. Wanna talk about the news?
MEGAN: I feel like being a rapist, accomplice or apologist is practically a checkbox you have to have before going to Iraq for KBR these days.
MOE: Okay China is saying it broke up a terrorist plot to kidnap Olympians.
MOE: And yeah, we don't want the Crappy Hour to get too rapey
MEGAN: Yeah, I was listening to that this morning.

MEGAN: This terrorist plot to supposedly kidnap athletes and foreign journos is probably why China shouldn't have censored the movie Munich. I mean, other than the hottness of Eric Bana and Daniel Craig and that French guy from Amelie, that is.
MOE: Dude, I never saw that movie, dammit. I wonder if it's OnDemand. Fuck New York and all its deleterious outdoor social obligating. Here's the thing about the Olympic protests: they really did seem to come from nowhere, right? Even the Dalai Lama seems surprised.

"Right from the beginning, we supported the Olympic Games." Speaking of pro-Tibetan protesters, he said nobody "has the right to tell them to shut up.

MEGAN: The Golden Gate bridge people should be in the Olympics. That was some epic shit.
MOE: Uh-oh, the wheelchair girl was interviewed by the Chinese press. I can't figure out whether that's good or bad.
MEGAN: I mean, it seems like a lot of the torch runners are Asian, so maybe it's designed to highlight the Chinese diaspora? Is there such a thing?

MOE: And then in London you had the horrible Chinese thugs issue..
MOE:

Miss Huq, one of 80 torchbearers said: "The men in blue perplexed everyone. Nobody seemed to know who they were officially or what their title was. They were very robotic, very full on, and I noticed them having skirmishes with our own police and the Olympic authorities before our leg of the relay, which was confusing.
"They were barking orders at me, like 'Run! Stop!' and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, who are these people?'
"They kept pushing my hand up higher when I was holding the torch, so they were...interesting."
Miss Huq was nearly knocked to the ground by a protester as thousands of campaigners disrupted the procession to demonstrate against China's human rights abuses and brutality in Tibet.
It was reported the men have been recruited from Chinese special forces brigades. Some came from the feared Flying Dragons and rthe Sword of Flying Dragons counter-terror units.

MOE: Obama joined the boycott bandwagon. Angela Merkel isn't showing up, incidentally.
MEGAN: Or Gordon Brown.
MOE: Yeah, but he's attending the closing ceremony? I guess since London gets the Olympics next there's probably some important torch duty to attend to there. Anyway, meanwhile in China executive compensation is stoking outrage!
MEGAN: Hahaha. So much for "Communism" suckers. Faux meritocracy FTW! You'll get your own mortgage crisis just as soon as the government lets the peons own property!

MOE: Well, um, the government lets the peons own property, they just get backsies if someone wealthier wants to build there. What's interesting is that these "multimillion yuan" salaries are inciting such a huge outcry from Chinese citizens. Do they have any idea of the magnitude of the pay packages of the Western executives who created all that shareholder value outsourcing all their operations to China? I wonder how, or if, the Chinese press covers American corporate culture/excesses/etc.
MEGAN: I have to think they cover it to some degree, right? I mean, the Russians propagandized the hell out of that shit.
MOE: Yeah, but it wasn't an iconic Soviet autocrat who said "To get rich is glorious."
MEGAN: Oh, sure, but not to to people he was oppressing, I think. It's all lifting every boat and shit, work for your comrades, blah blah blah while the people at the top of the hierarchy convince you and themselves that they "deserve" to live better lives because their work is, like, harder and stuff. Just like here!
MOE: And speaking of, the dollar dipped below seven yuan. This is big news because the central bank sets exchange rates.

MEGAN: Wait, so they're actually letting their currency appreciate! Tell the unions! Shout to the steel lobbyists! Inform Congress immediately that there's no need to pass legislation to impose sanctions China for its exchange rate policy, not that it will have any effect on anything whatsoever because it's all about perception in Washington rather than actuality.
MOE: Well yeah and it's not like their policy changed, per se.
MEGAN: Yeah, it's just this thing in DC that has annoyed me for years as though China's the only country on the face of the Earth that doesn't manipulate its exchange rate. I mean, we don't but we sort of do, but the VAST majority of countries in the world don't float their currency.
MEGAN: It just gets shouted about in Washington because it's something to hang a political hat on because no one knows anything about exchange rates and you can make it sound really unique and unfair when it comes to China and the same people shouting about it have no idea of the downstream consequences to our own economy.
MEGAN: [/rant] Caffeine!
MOE: China has kept theirs artificially low, which for us, has been sort of like a reverse mortgage.
MEGAN: Right.
MEGAN: Just another way we in effect financed the universal right to a flat screen. Made in Korea.
MOE: Here's a decent piece on the Olympics and China and what it all means. Although by decent I do not mean "universe altering." Anyway, can anyone tell me, getting back to San Francisco, who were those guys?
MEGAN: They were members of Students for a Free Tibet. All but one of them was over 30.

MOE: Holy shit:

Reached by cell phone as he dangled from the bridge, Sutherlin said he was worried that the torch's planned route through Tibet would lead to more arrests and that Chinese officials

kind of. she should be, but she's sort of hamstrung by her coalition (imagine the republicans and democrats running a coalition government in a parliamentary system ... ok not quite that bad, but almost)..

but if things continue like they are in germany, and she can in the next elections get a coalition that does not include the socialist party (the other big party), then, yes. also, if she were less shy and more willing to come to the US often and crack heads and say crazy shit like sarkozy then she'd be a lot more powerful.

although, i dunno.. what woman would be more powerful? who is no. 2 on the list? oprah?

The World's Most Powerful Women [Forbes]